induced innovation in american agiculture a reconsideration this paper investigates the role of induced innovation in the development of american agriculture from 1880 to 1980 the induced innovation hypothesis most closely associated with the work of hayami and ruttan argues that successful economies develop technologies in accordance with market price signals to loosen constraints on growth imposed by factor scarcities our analysis employing new state and regional level data fails to find support for hayami and ruttan s hypothesis this paper suggests that many of the fundamental generalizations about american agricultural development need to be reconsidered and redirects attention to the role of settlement changing crop patterns and biological investments in explaining changes in factor utilization in american agriculture

evolution of population resource dynamics models abstract this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of brander and taylor s 1998 model and its descendants from the following perspectives population growth substitutability innovation capital accumulation property rights and institutional designs and modeling approach this survey aims to contribute to a better understanding of population and resource dynamics models in general and facilitate further application of the model framework to relevant circumstances although often treated as exogenous in optimal growth models making population growth an endogenous function allows us to analyze broader effects of economic activities on population the issues of substitutability innovation and capital accumulation are intertwined allowing a model to address the effect of an endogenous technological change on substitutability between natural and man made capital facilitates our analyses of sustainability issues to address internalizing inter generational externalities in resource use incorporating property right changes and institutional designs to this type of model is a useful exercise but careful attention is needed for the consistency between such an arrangement and the mathematical representation of the depicted economy finally although the common criticism regarding convenient mathematical assumptions applies to the existing bt type models the use of computer simulation can relax such assumptions to better represent the intended relationships between the relevant variables

bargaining games with a random sequence of who makes the offers abstract this note relaxes the rigid assumption in recent bargaining theory of a strictly alternating sequence of offers and instead considers the opposite extreme at each bargaining round a random event determines who gets to make an offer irrespective of who made the previous offer the equilibrium of this game is practically identical to the equilibrium of the alternating offers game if the horizon is infinite with a finite horizon the properties of the equilibrium are more satisfying than the properties of the equilibrium of the alternating offers game

green revolution land reform and household income distribution in the philippines income of agricultural households consists of returns to labor capital and land from farming supplemented mainly by labor earnings from nonfarm sources agricultural technology affects farmers income through its effect on factor demands and factor prices which in turn induce changes in the allocation of farmers own resources to different uses income from farming is also affected by village institutions such as land tenure which governs the distribution of income between landlords and tenants as well as resource allocations

bargaining orders in a multi person bargaining game abstract this paper studies a complete information bargaining game with one buyer and multiple sellers of different sizes or bargaining strengths the bargaining order is determined endogenously with a finite horizon there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome in which the buyer purchases in order of increasing size from the smallest to the largest with an infinite horizon if the sellers have sufficiently different sizes there is a unique equilibrium outcome which has the same bargaining order if the sellers have similar sizes with an infinite horizon there may be multiple equilibrium outcomes with different bargaining orders

an error correction model of induced innovation in uk agriculture cointegration techniques are applied to a model of induced innovation based on the two stage constant elasticity of substitution ces production function this approach results in direct tests of the inducement hypothesis which are applied to agricultural data for the united kingdom from 1953 to 2000 the time series properties of the variables are checked cointegration is established and an error correction model ecm constructed which attempts to separate factor substitution from technological change finally the ecm formulation is subjected to causality tests which show that the factor price ratio for chemicals and land is granger prior to the factor saving bias of technological change however long run relative prices are not causally prior to the machinery labour ratio this results from perturbations in the user cost of machinery caused by oil price shocks thus the induced innovation hypothesis iih may explain long run transformations like the mechanical and fertilizer revolutions that

induced innovations and farm mechanization cal change in agriculture then they come mainly from the public agent of farm technology the agricultural research system the research system should be held responsible for the social consequences of farm mechanization and it should be budgeted and directed accordingly on the other hand if mechanization and exit from farming are caused mostly by external price and wage changes the responsibility of the research system is limited principally to technology improvement in this note we discuss the newly emerging tradition of induced innovation and its relation to the alternative explanations of machine labor substitution in agriculture we first clarify the conceptual basis of the induced innovation hypothesis and the related innovation possibility function second we call into question the validity of some of the empirical applications we argue that an incomplete conceptualization of the induced innovation idea has led to invalid empirical tests and to inappropriate implications on the causes of american farm mechanization

the induced innovation hypothesis and u s public agricultural research applicability of the induced innovation hypothesis that a change in relative input prices induces innovation to economize use of the increasingly expensive input hicks 1932 is examined for u s public agricultural research a reduced form test is developed using input prices from the agricultural production sector expenditures from the public research sector aimed at developing new technology to save specific agricultural inputs and variables to control for innovation marginal cost differences and nonhomotheticity unlike recent demand side studies that soundly reject the induced innovation hypothesis for agriculture support for the hypothesis is found for several input pairings through these tests of public agricultural research using state level panel data

efficient informal trade theory and experimental evidence from the cape town taxi market informal sectors in developing countries are often thought of as responses to rigid and cumbersome market regulations in this paper i study informal trade as a first best outcome in the model i propose rigid regulations can be necessary to achieve efficiency even though they are always sidestepped the key assumption is that the regulations define the trading parties fall back position in case the informal bargaining process breaks down i set up a field experiment to test the model s mechanisms in the cape town market for metered taxis consistent with the model i find that sidestepping the regulations increase cost efficiency taxis take the shortest route the price is however unaffected suggesting informal bargaining leads to a pareto improvement

the relevance of p star analysis to uk monetary policy recent articles have attempted to restore the use of a simple measure of the money supply as an indicator of future price levels p star and to reestablish a causal link from money to prices in this paper we argue that the p star approach is flawed it is certainly more complex than traditional monetarist approaches but the fundamental questions of causality are in no way either affected or resolved we argue that the p star relationship does not have a causal link with prices but rather the causality runs from prices to money we also find that there is some causality running from money to real income so that monetary conditions do seem to have some predictive power for future levels of activity copyright 1994 by royal economic society

supply and demand functions for multiproduct u s cash grain farms biases caused by research and other policies this study presents new estimates of supply and demand elasticities for u s multiproduct cash grain farms and estimates of input and output bias effects caused by public and private crop research extension and farmers schooling the study also shows that the social rate of return to public crop research is large about 62 percent

bargaining with an agenda gradual bargaining is represented by an agenda a family of increasing sets of joint utilities parameterized by time a solution for gradual bargaining specifies an agreement at each time we axiomatize an ordinal solution i e one that is covariant with order preserving transformations of utility it can be viewed as the limit of step by step bargaining in which the agreement of the last negotiation becomes the disagreement point for the next the stepwise agreements may follow the nash solution the kalai smorodinsky solution or many others and still yield the ordinal solution in the limit

the importance of the agenda in bargaining abstract this paper discusses a multi issue bargaining game in which the players set up an agenda and negotiate on the issues sequentially according to this agenda we demonstrate that the agenda might play an important role in the bargaining and discuss the relationship between the agenda and the final outcome of the bargaining game assuming that players have conflicting evaluations regarding the importance of the issues under negotiation we identify the type of agenda each player prefers we also show that in such cases the outcome of the bargaining game need not to be efficient by demonstrating the strategic use of the agenda the paper explains the phenomenon of bargaining on the agenda

geographic aggregation and induced innovation in american agriculture the induced innovation hypothesis is tested for the usa and western regions using cointegration procedures an error correction model separates short run and long run effects of relative price changes a significant difference in the elasticities of factor substitution along the isoquant and the innovation possibility curve implies induced innovation the estimated results support the hypothesis for washington the pacific northwest and the western region but not for the nation corroborative tests of weak exogeneity fail to support the hypothesis in any of the geographic units changes in output level and research investment do not significantly bias agricultural technology in the usa

ethnic diversity social sanctions and public goods in kenya abstract this paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western kenya the identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance the theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents we relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries

adult mortality and consumption growth in the age of hiv aids the authors use a 13 year panel of individuals in tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long run consumption growth of surviving household members using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004 they examine consumption growth controlling for a set of initial community household and individual characteristics the effect is identified using the sample of households in 2004 which grew out of baseline households the authors find robust evidence that an affected household will see consumption drop 7 percent within the first five years after the adult death with high growth in the sample over this time period this creates a 19 percentage point growth gap with the average household there is some evidence of persistent effects of these shocks for up to 13 years but these effects are imprecisely estimated and not significantly different from zero the impact of female adult death is found to be particularly severe

agricultural productivity revisited this paper describes production accounts for agriculture output is defined as gross production leaving the farm as opposed to real value added inputs are not limited to capital and labor but include intermediate inputs as well we derive index numbers of gross output capital labor and intermediate inputs these data are used to construct indexes of total factor productivity we then compare the contributions of input growth and productivity growth to economic growth the important role of productivity growth in agriculture becomes immediately apparent

specification of production functions for analyzing technical change and factor inputs in agricultural development abstract this paper focuses on some vital issues involed in specifying the number of variables to be included in agriculture s production function and on the functional form that the agricultural production function should assume in the context of a computable general equilibrium model when land and intermediate inputs seeds and fertilizers as well as capital and labor are included modeling the agricultural sector can best be done in a more disaggregated format than simple cobb douglas or ces specifications after examining the transcendental logarithmic production function the paper proposes to adopt nested ces specifications on the basis of empirically observed elasticities of substitution

capital services in u s agriculture concepts comparisons and the treatment of interest rates this paper begins with a review of the methods and assumptions used to measure capital service flows two data series on capital inputs in u s agriculture are briefly described and compared we show that measures of capital services are sensitive to the treatment of interest rates notably the use of fixed versus variable market rates significantly affects measures of the quantity and productivity of agricultural capital in the united states we conclude that when calculating capital usage in u s agriculture the use of a fixed interest rate generates more plausible estimates than the use of an annual market rate

the structure of u s agricultural technology 1910 78 this paper utilizes 1910 78 time series data and a single product aggregate translog profit function to measure the structure of u s agricultural technology duality relations are used to devise a multifactor measure of biased technical change a measure of nonhomotheticity is introduced which indicates the effects scale change has had on aggregate cost shares the empirical analysis finds that different nonhomothetic technologies characterized the prewar and postwar periods differing technical change biases are consistent with relative price trends during the two periods showing that the long run structure of u s agricultural technology has been consistent with the hayami ruttan induced innovation theory

testing the induced innovation hypothesis an error correction model of south african agriculture abstract this paper applies cointegration techniques to a model of induced innovation based on the two stage constant elasticity of substitution ces production function this approach results in direct tests of the inducement hypothesis which are applied to data for south african commercial agriculture for the period 1947 1991 south african data is used because the policy changes have been substantial enough that the factor and price ratios have turning points rather than being monotonic the time series properties of the variables are checked cointegration is established and an error correction model ecm constructed allowing factor substitution to be separated from technological change finally the ecm formulation is subjected to causality tests which show that both the factor price ratios and r d and extension expenditures are granger prior to the factor saving biases of technological change thus each stage of the analysis corroborates the inducement hypothesis however straightforward price inducement is only part of the explanation of changes in factor ratios policy induced innovation in response to tax concessions and subsidised credit is also present

overconfidence and excess entry an experimental approach psychological studies show that most people are overconfident about their own relative abilities and unreasonably optimistic about their futures e g shelly e taylor and j d brown 1988 neil d weinstein 1980 when assessing their position in a distribution of peers on almost any positive trait like driving ability ola svenson 1981 income prospects or longevity a vast majority of people say they are above the average although of course only half can be if the trait is symmetrically distributed this paper explores whether optimistic biases could plausibly and predictably influence economic behavior in one particular setting entry into competitive games or markets many empirical studies show that most new businesses fail within a few years for example using plant level data from the u s census of manufacturers spanning 1963 1982 timothy dunne et al 1988 estimated that 61 5 percent of all entrants exited within five years and 79 6 percent exited within 10 years most of these exits are failures see also dunne et al 1989a 1989b d shapiro and r s khemani 1987

induced bias of technical change in agriculture the united states and japan 1880 1980 because of extreme differences in factor endowments and price ratios among factors between the united states and japan both countries have experienced sharply different patterns of factor use and productivity growth in agriculture for the past 100 years of modern economic growth in this study the method of testing the hicksian hypothesis of induced innovation was developed using the two level ces production function the model was applied to the historical data of u s and japanese agricultural development for 1880 1980 the results were consistent with the hypothesis that different patterns of technical change in the two countries were induced by differences in the levels and the movements in relative factor prices

heckle and chide results of a randomized road safety intervention in kenya in economies with weak enforcement of traffic regulations drivers who adopt excessively risky behavior impose externalities on other vehicles and on their own passengers in light of the difficulties of correcting inter vehicle externalities associated with weak third party enforcement this paper evaluates an intervention that aims instead to correct the intra vehicle externality between a driver and his passengers who face a collective action problem when deciding whether to exert social pressure on the driver if their safety is compromised we report the results of a field experiment aimed at solving this collective action problem which empowers passengers to take action evocative messages encouraging passengers to speak up were placed inside a random sample of over 1 000 long distance kenyan minibuses or matatus serving both as a focal point for and to reduce the cost of passenger action independent insurance claims data were collected for the treatment group and a control group before and after the intervention our results indicate that insurance claims fell by a half to two thirds from an annual rate of about 10 percent without the intervention and that claims involving injury or death fell by at least 50 results of a driver survey eight months into the intervention suggest passenger heckling was a contributing factor to the improvement in safety available http www cgdev org files 1421541 file habyarimana jack heckle final pdf

negotiations in multi issue committees abstract we propose a non cooperative bargaining approach to the problem of collective decision making in committees by modelling this process as a sequential bargaining game the main objective of the paper is to discuss the formation of the agenda in multi issue committees and its relation to the importance of the issues we start by asserting that in the case of a single issue the set of all equilibrium outcomes of our game coincides with the set of coalitional stable outcomes we then consider multi issue committees to discuss the problem of forming agendas we argue that from the point of view of efficiency and stability the most important issues should be put first on the agenda we conclude with a sufficient condition on players preferences which guarantees the efficiency and stability of the bargaining outcomes for every possible agenda

induced innovation in u s agriculture time series direct econometric and nonparametric tests the hypothesis of induced innovation is tested for u s agriculture using a high quality state level panel data set and three disparate testing techniques time series direct econometric and nonparametric we find little support for the hypothesis that conclusion is robust across testing techniques however as with all empirical tests of this hypothesis conducted to date ours focus only on the demand side of the hypothesis the hypothesis could have been rejected simply because the marginal cost of developing and implementing input saving technologies for the relatively expensive inputs is greater than for the relatively cheap inputs copyright 2009 oxford university press

an analysis of the source and nature of technical change the case of u s agriculture this paper proposes a methodology to investigate the process of technical change with a focus on the dynamic effects of r d investments on productivity and on the induced innovation hypothesis for both inputs and outputs the approach builds on a nonparametric representation of the underlying technology an application to u s agriculture is presented by distinguishing between private and public r d investments the analysis provides useful insights into the source and the dynamic nature of technical progress

social comparisons status and driving behavior abstract the establishment of desirable social norms is an integral part of a well functioning civil society while recent evidence has demonstrated that social comparison can affect behavior in a variety of contexts it is not clear what type of comparative social information is most effective using a large scale field experiment to study driving practices we sent text messages containing different types of social information to drivers in tsingtao china we find two types of social information to be particularly effective in reducing traffic violations the driving behavior of those similar to oneself and the driving behavior of those with high status cars our results indicate that the combination of descriptive norms with social status is a cost effective yet powerful intervention for establishing better driving behavior in emerging markets

optimizing multi stage negotiations abstract we consider procedures where issues of varying importance and risk are negotiated in stages negotiation at any stage requires an agreement at each previous stage if negotiation terminates players realize the benefits from all earlier agreements we formalize this process by a strategic n stage negotiation game the expected subgame perfect equilibrium outcome is characterized by an intuitive compact formula which aggregates all the structural elements of the multi stage process we describe the optimal negotiation agenda for a given decomposition of the bargaining problem and we derive intuitive prescriptions for an optimal decomposition