from shadow to green linking environmental fiscal reforms and the informal economy in the past few decades many papers have analysed in some depth different environmental tax reforms and the double dividend hypothesis i e the possibility of improving not only the environment but also the economy through the reduction of distortions in the tax system recently more stress has been placed on testing empirically what effects a reduction in labour taxes may have on unemployment when accompanied by a carbon or other environmental tax however such studies have not modelled the effects of the presence of a shadow economy even though informal markets account for a significant and growing part of gdp in many developed economies this paper analyses this link using an applied general equilibrium model for the case of spain which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world and one of the biggest informal economies of any wealthy country we conclude that our analysis strengthens the case for an environmental tax reform in spain if revenues from a co2 tax are recycled via a labour tax reduction

equilibrium incentive contracts and efficiency wages we analyze the optimal efficiency wage contract when output is contractible but firms neither observe the workers effort nor their match specific productivity firms offer wage contracts that optimally trade off effort and wage costs as a result employed workers enjoy rents which in turn creates unemployment nonetheless the incentive power of the equilibrium wage contract is constrained efficient in the absence of taxes and unemployment benefits we also show that more high powered incentive contracts tend to be associated with higher equilibrium unemployment rates jel e24 j30 j41

are contributions to public pension programmes a tax on employment many studies describe the potentially adverse impact on employment of the payroll costs of financing public pension programmes conventionally empirical studies treat contributions to public pension programmes as a pure tax in for example calculations of the tax wedge by oecd but this approach ignores any future rights to benefits that are perceived by contributors in fact public pension programmes contain both an actuarial and a redistributive component the former closer to saving the latter a tax the paper constructs indicators of the tax component of pension programmes both between and within generations across a range of oecd countries and time periods it uses these measures in a cross country panel analysis of the determinants of age and gender specific economic activity rates the results reveal robust evidence that when public pension programme contributions are broken down into a tax component and a savings component the tax component of the payroll contribution reduces economic activity rates among women while a higher retirement saving component has the opposite effect there is little evidence that average tax rates however constructed have any adverse impact on the economic activity rates of men richard disney

is unemployment lower if unions bargain over employment would there be more employment if unions bargained over employment and not only over wages most economists seem to answer yes 1

the effects of firm specific taxes and government mandates with an application to the u s unemployment insurance program abstract we examine the common but unexamined case of a tax or government mandate whose cost differs across firms within the same labor market our theoretical model shows that this variation can lead to employment reallocation across firms and dead weight losses even if there is no aggregate employment effect using firm level unemployment insurance tax data we find that while the market level tax is mostly born by the worker individual firms can only pass on a small share of the within market differences thus in some cases differences in taxes across firms can lead to large dead weight losses

budgetary policy and unemployment dynamics in an olg model with collective bargaining we consider a dynamic general equilibrium model with capital accumulation and collective wage bargaining and investigate how unemployment responds to structural shocks under two stylised budgetary policies under balanced budgets tax adjustments lead to higher unemployment on impact but enable a quick recovery of employment by contrast unbalanced budgets mitigate unemployment effects on impact but dynamics are more persistent due to weaker capital accumulation and future fiscal consolidations these results are consistent with empirical evidence on a positive cross country relationship between government borrowing and unemployment persistence this paper starts out from the well known fact that many european countries have suffered from persistently high unemployment over the past two decades there is a large literature which attempts to explain this development as resulting from a combination of structural shocks and mechanisms which make the effects of any such shifts more persistent one prominent branch of this literature stresses that adverse structural shocks tend to induce a slowdown in capital accumulation which reinforces the employment losses and adds to unemployment persistence bean 1989 benassy 1997 blanchard 1997 burda 1988 caballero and hammour 1998 daveri and tabellini 2000 similarly these studies point out that when the shock is over the recovery of employment depends critically on the speed with which investments in capital respond to the new situation the purpose of this paper is to reconsider this capital shortage hypothesis by linking it explicitly to the stance of fiscal policy to see the importance of fiscal policy in this context consider a government which faces an adverse structural shock such as a drop in employment due to a wage setting shock and decides whether it should keep its budget balanced or not this decision will affect the overall structure of assets in the economy i e the mix between capital and government bonds and this mix will in turn be an important determinant of the speed with which the economy can create employment once the shock is over in particular according to the capital shortage hypothesis the recovery in terms of employment is likely to take longer under a policy which temporarily accepts structural budget deficits particularly when crowding out effects have been substantial

can a carbon permit system reduce spanish unemployment this paper analyses the impact of carbon policy on unemployment in spain and whether recycling the public revenues earned from permit auctions can alleviate this problem while spain s deviation from the european union s intermediate emission goals is more serious than most other member countries unemployment in spain is also well above average for the european union we use a computable general equilibrium model that includes unemployment in the markets for unskilled and skilled labour we find that introducing carbon permits does not aggravate spanish unemployment in fact if supplied with revenue recycling schemes unemployment rates may actually fall contrary to other european studies we find that the best option is to reduce payroll taxes on relatively skilled types of labour this reform is successful in both increasing labour demand and dampening the supply response to rising wages however while all of the recycling schemes generate dividends in terms of aggregate welfare none entirely offsets the abatement costs

is incomes policy the answer to unemployment in western europe unemployment has remained obstinately high ever since 1975 what has prevented governments from reducing it the answer is simple if unemployment were reduced by normal methods inflation would rise it follows that the only way to cut the long run level of unemployment is to find some other way of controlling inflation no such device will be costless but if we could find any method that was less costly than unemployment we ought to adopt it maurice chevalier was asked in later life what he thought of old age it s not so bad he replied when you consider the alternative that was a true economist talking and it is also the spirit in which i shall approach the unhappy choices open to us my argument will proceed roughly as follows first imagine that a costless incomes policy is available then most people would probably agree that if inflation was too high a temporary incomes policy would be a good idea in order to get inflation down but what then when it was down we would still be left with far too high an unemployment rate only a permanent incomes policy can substantially reduce the non inflationary level of unemployment however against these benefits have to be set the costs of an incomes policy a conventional incomes policy which permanently suspended collective bargaining would be out of the question in a free society so we have to have an incomes policy that works by incentive rather than by regulation the best thing would be a tax on wage increases levied on employers and proportional to wage increases above a prescribed norm i shall spend some time discussing this tax using various different models of wage setting to explain how it would have its effect and finally i shall try producing a first draft of the operator s manual

wage bargaining and the phillips curve the identification and specification of aggregate wage equations most economists believe that wage setting is very important for understanding macroeconomic behavior but the form of wage equations commonly estimated suffer from problems of identification the aim of this paper is to consider whether these problems are inevitable and if they are not to suggest ways in whi ch one can estimate structural models of wage setting it is argued that if one confines attention to models of wage bargaining t hat are commonly used identification of the parameters of wage setting should not be a problem and that the most appropriate form of an aggregate wage equation should be a phillips curve copyright 1993 by royal economic society

labor market policy evaluation with ace abstract i develop an agent based computational economics ace model with which i evaluate the aggregate impact of labor market policies the findings are that government financed training measures increase the outflow rate from unemployment to employment although the overall effect is positive this effect is achieved by reducing the outflow rate for those who do not receive subsidies furthermore the outflow rate would have been downward biased had one supposed a matching function that is exogenous to policies

tax push inflation in a unionized labour market in this paper the effect of changes in the average rate and in the progressivity of direct taxes on a the level of wages and b the extent to which cost of living increases are transmitted to wages are considered for a unionized labour market these effects are derived theoretically for different union objectives and the models applied to data for italian industry in a form which allows discrimination between these different objectives the empirical estimates for the preferred model are then used to determine the effects of the postulated tax changes

taxation and the structure of labor markets the case of corporatism we propose an explanation for the wide variation in rates of taxation across developed economies based on differences in labor market institutions in corporatist economies which feature centralized labor markets taxes on labor input will be less distortionary than when labor supply is determined individually since the level of labor supply is set by a small group of decision makers these individuals will recognize the linkage between the taxes that workers pay and the benefits that they receive labor tax burdens are indeed higher in more corporatist nations while nonlabor taxes are actually lower there is also some evidence that the distortionary effects of labor taxes are lower in more corporatist economies

viewpoint customized competitiveness strategies for horticultural exporters central america focus with lessons from and for other regions abstract this paper presents the idea of customized competitiveness as a strategy necessary for overall competitiveness in particular in globalized horticulture markets and in the second round of globalization that started in the mid late 1990s customized competitiveness is additional and complementary to basic structural competitiveness that is the focus of competitiveness debates today and for the past decade the paper illustrates the need for this new strategy using the example of central america highlighting the severe challenges similar to those facing other developing regions it faces in the second round of globalization of horticulture markets magnified by market liberalization culminating recently in implementation of cafta the paper then illustrates solutions by providing examples of cutting edge programs in various developing countries of de facto customized competitiveness in the form of public private partnerships and the provision of public and semi public goods to help their exporters access and succeed in the new markets we conclude with policy implications for central america and other developing regions

a policy agenda for pro poor agricultural growth abstract sub saharan africa and parts of south asia are likely to hold large numbers of very poor rural people into the foreseeable future although both history and theory suggest a pre eminent role for agricultural growth in poverty reduction in poor agrarian economies such growth today faces new difficulties many of these difficulties are endogenous to today s poor rural areas others result from broader processes of global change but some are due to changes in the dominant policy environment emphasizing liberalization and state withdrawal examination of 20th century green revolutions suggests that active state interventions were important in supporting critical stages of agricultural market development unfortunately such interventions benefits in institutional development are easily overlooked whereas their high costs are much more visible policy implications are discussed

macroeconomic performance and collective bargaining an international perspective this paper critically reviews the research on how collective bargaining systems influence macroeconomic performance in industrialized countries the review considers effects of bargaining level coordination and corporatist institutional arrangements key empirical results turn out to be quite fragile and much of the paper explores issues of measurement and specification that account for the fragility the paper concludes that complementarities between key institutions and between institutions and the economic environment may be more important for macroeconomic performance than the effects of individual institutions and it suggests research strategies

what has been learned about labor supply in the past twenty years the main advance in the study of labor supply in the past 20 years has come in recognizing and interpreting the variety of different labor supply functions that coexist in the empirical literature a crucial theoretical distinction with important empirical payoff is that between labor supply choices at the extensive margin i e labor force participation and employment choices and choices at the intensive margin i e choices about hours of work or weeks of work for workers another important distinction is the one between a descriptive labor supply function and a structural supply function that can be the basis for out of sample policy investigations concerning responses to tax and welfare programs and evaluations of welfare losses a full understanding of the participation hours dichotomy leads to an appreciation of the importance of the problem of selection bias what is the wage to impute to a nonworking person these distinctions are a legacy of the research conducted on labor supply over the past 20 years many important empirical questions have been addressed i how strong are the effects of taxes welfare and transfer programs on labor supply ii how important is intertemporal substitution can life cycle labor supply models explain business cycle labor supply behavior iii has the consensus view of the 1960 s of high labor supply elasticities for married women and low labor supply elasticities for married men held up all of the empirical evidence assembled on labor supply must be called into question in the light of important research on the basic quality of the data conducted by analysts at the university of michigan i discuss this evidence in a concluding section except for my discussion of measurement issues i focus only on the major discoveries about which a general consensus has emerged

estimating labour supply responses using tax reforms the 1980 s tax reforms and the changing dispersion of wages offer one of the best opportunities yet to estimate labor supply effects nevertheless changing sample composition aggregate shocks the changing composition of the tax paying population and discontinuities in the tax system create serious identification and estimation problems we develop grouping estimators that address these issues our results reveal positive and moderately sized wage elasticities we also find negative income effects for women with children

environmental taxation employment and public spending in developing countries this paper investigates the consequences of environmental tax reforms for unemployment and welfare in the case of developing countries with a large informal sector rural urban migration and three different assumptions about public spending 1 as part of a revenue neutral policy 2 fixed and 3 varying endogenously under the indexation of unemployment benefits and informal sector income that give rise to a double dividend a lower level of public spending is associated with a smaller negative impact on the after tax income of households and a higher increase in employment these policies however still lead to a reduction in social welfare even more so in the case of endogenous public spending although it is associated with a higher increase in employment and a smaller reduction in private sector incomes the model implies that complementary policy in terms of lower public spending is unlikely to be socially acceptable and does not support the case for a green tax reforms in developing countries

the incidence of income tax on wages and labour supply in the simple framework of a static model for equilibrium wages and labour supplies we show that the incidence of income tax on equilibrium wages can be measured independently from the individual

unemployment benefits contract length and nominal wage flexibility we show in a union bargaining model that a decrease in the unemployment benefit level increases not only equilibrium employment but also nominal wage flexibility and thus reduces employment varia

equilibrium search unemployment endogenous participation and labor market flows the sustainability of welfare states requires high employment and high participation to raise the tax base to analyze labor supply in a world with market frictions we propose and solve a macro model of the labor market with unemployment and labor force participation as endogenous and distinct states in our world workers decisions of participating are determined by an entry decision and an exit decision a calibration of the model improves the usual representations of labor markets since it quantitatively accounts for the observed flows between employment and nonparticipation the paper investigates also the effect of payroll taxes and unemployment benefits on participation decisions taxes reduce entries and increase exits whereas unemployment benefits at a given job finding rate raise entries and have ambiguous effects on exits jel j2 j6

the real effects of tax based incomes policies 1990 in most countries the citizens desire lower unemployment they also understand that this raises a problem of inflation and are consequently sympathetic to incomes policy however most actual incomes policies have collapsed often after a period of success

contract farming smallholders and rural development in latin america the organization of agroprocessing firms and the scale of outgrower production abstract this paper demonstrates how contract farming functions as an economic institution and explores the causes of the observed variation in the scale of outgrower production in latin america we outline how market imperfections and transaction costs influence the decision of agroprocessing firms to contract out vertically integrate or use spot markets to obtain raw product the paper demonstrates how market conditions are likely to be associated with particular outgrower characteristics under contract farming an analysis of the mexican frozen vegetable industry illustrates determinants of successful and unsuccessful small scale contracting and suggests alternative policies to promote contract farming with smallholders

optimal monetary policy in economies with dual labor markets abstract we present a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge new keynesian model with indivisible labor and a dual labor market a walrasian one where wages are fully flexible and a unionized one characterized by real wage rigidity we show that the negative effect of a productivity shock on inflation and the positive effect of a cost push shock are crucially determined by the proportion of firms that belong to the unionized sector the larger this number the larger are these effects consequently the larger the union coverage the larger should be the optimal response of the nominal interest rate to exogenous productivity and cost push shocks the optimal inflation and output gap volatility increases as the number of the unionized firms in the economy increases

the impact of employment tax cuts on unemployment and wages the role of unemployment benefits and tax structure abstract i model and simulate the effects of employment tax cuts on unemployment and wages in four equilibrium models competitive union bargaining search and efficiency wages i find that if the ratio of unemployment compensation to wages is fixed the effect of the tax cut is mainly on wages but if income out of work is fixed in real terms there are substantial employment effects when wages are determined by bargaining revenueneutral reforms that make the tax more progressive also reduce unemployment thus policy towards unemployment compensation and tax structure are key influences on the effect of taxes on unemployment

labour supply search and taxes abstract classical labour supply theory is one of the most sophisticated parts of labour economics yet there is no compelling theoretical reason to believe in an outcome on a classical labour supply curve and it is unclear whether it is a good empirical description of the way in which labour markets actually work this paper uses the techniques of search theory to analyse the impact of changes in the tax system on incentives to work when individuals do not have flexibility of hours within jobs it is shown how the traditional comparative statics are of some use but are rarely the whole story and some comparative statics results are surprising

optimal income taxation with endogenous participation and search unemployment we characterize optimal redistributive taxation when individuals are heterogeneous in their skills and their values of non market activities search matching frictions on the labor markets create unemployment wages labor demand and participation are endogenous average tax rates are increasing at the optimum this shifts wages below their laissez faire value and distorts labor demand upwards the marginal tax rate is positive at the top of the skill distribution even when the latter is bounded these results are analytically shown under a maximin objective when the elasticity of participation is decreasing in the skill level and are numerically confirmed under a more general objective under the maximin above approximately 20 000 per year our model recommends higher marginal tax rates than a comparable competitive setting

the effect of marginal tax rates on taxable income a panel study of the 1986 tax reform act this paper uses a treasury department panel of more than 4 000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates on the basis of a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform the analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply the evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate that is at least one and could be substantially higher the implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed

unemployment responses to skill biased technology shocks the role of labour market policy do skill biased shocks that increase the spread of labour productivities interacting with different policy regimes explain the rise in unemployment in europe relative to the united states in the 1980s and 1990s the hypothesis is an implication of a version of the mortensen and pissarides 1994 model of equilibrium unemployment which allows for worker heterogeneity a calibrated version of the model implies that a similar unemployment increase would have occurred in the united states over this period given changes in relative productivity by education implied by observed wage changes had unemployment compensation and employment protection policies been at european levels

employment effects of payroll taxes an empirical test for germany this study tests to what degree the incidence of payroll taxes in germany is on employment and whether in consequence payroll taxes in particular social insurance contributions are the culprit behind the growing unemployment problem using industry level data for 18 years 1977 1994 a system of five dynamic factor demand equations is estimated various simulations indicate that the employment effects of payroll taxes are minimal

payroll taxes and wage inflation the swedish experiences payroll taxes levied on employers have become an increasingly important part of the swedish tax system these taxes including various collective fees agreed on in central wage negotiations amounted to about 6 of the wage bill of private business in 1950 but had reached 40 in the late 1970s payroll tax increases have been quite dramatic during the last decade with tax rates climbing from 14 to 40 attempts to estimate the extent to which payroll tax increases have been directly shifted back onto labor as lower wages are reported in this paper the basic message of the empirical analysis is that payroll tax increases have produced some backward shifting on wages although the shifting appears to be far from complete a onepercent statutory wage cost increase is associated with an actual wage cost increase of about one half of a percent

the incidence of payroll taxation evidence from chile i provide new evidence on the incidence of payroll taxation by examining the experience of chile before and after the privatization of its social security system this policy change led to a sharp exogenous reduction in the payroll tax burden on chilean firms on average payroll tax rates fell by 25 over 6 years using data from a census of manufacturing firms i estimate that the incidence of payroll taxation is fully on wages with no effect on employment this finding is robust to a variety of empirical approaches to the problem of measurement error in firm level measures of taxes worker

optimal redistributive taxation in a search equilibrium model this paper characterizes optimal non linear income taxation in an economy with a continuum of unobservable productivity levels and endogenous involuntary unemployment due to frictions in the labour markets redistributive taxation distorts labour demand and wages compared to their efficient values gross wages unemployment and participation are lower average tax rates are increasing marginal tax rates are positive even at the top finally numerical simulations suggest that redistribution is much more important in our setting than in a comparable mirrlees type setting

why do small scale producers choose to produce under contract lessons from nontraditional vegetable exports from zimbabwe summary this article explores the motivations behind the decision of small scale producers to grow nontraditional vegetables under contract for export based on a survey of small scale producers in zimbabwe four factors are identified as motivating contracting namely market uncertainty indirect benefits e g knowledge acquisition income benefits and intangible benefits respondents are clustered according to the relative importance of these factors in their contracting decision four clusters are identified and related to the characteristics of these farmers including size of the farm amount of land devoted to export crops access to alternative markets and the proportion of family income derived from export crops the results suggest that there are systematic differences between farmers in their decisions to contract which needs to be recognized in contract design and management 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

earnings determination and taxes evidence from a cohort based payroll tax reform in greece author s saez emmanuel matsaganis manos tsakloglou panos abstract this paper analyzes the response of earnings to payroll tax rates using a cohort based reform in greece all individuals who started working on or after 1993 face permanently a much higher earnings cap for payroll taxes creating a large and permanent discontinuity in marginal payroll tax rates by date of entry in the labor force for upper earnings workers using full population administrative social security data and a regression discontinuity design we estimate the long term incidence and effects of marginal payroll tax rates on earnings standard theory predicts that in the long run new regime workers should bear the entire burden of the payroll tax increase relative to old regime workers in contrast we find that employers compensate new regime workers for the extra employer payroll taxes but not for the extra employee payroll taxes we do not find any evidence of labor supply responses around the discontinuity suggesting low efficiency costs of payroll taxes the non standard incidence results are the same across firms of different sizes tax incidence however is standard for older workers in the new regime as they bear both the employee and employer tax those results combined with a direct small survey of employers can be explained by social norms regarding seniority based pay which create a growing wedge between pay and productivity as workers age

a non walrasian labor market in a monetary model of the business cycle abstract this paper investigates to what extent a new keynesian monetary model with the addition of a microfounded non walrasian labor market solely based on union bargaining is able to replicate key aspects of the business cycle the presence of a representative union offers an explanation for two features of the cycle first it generates an endogenous mechanism which produces persistent responses to both supply and demand shocks second labor unionization reduces the elasticity of marginal costs to output this leads to lower inflation volatility model simulations show that the unionized framework can better reproduce european business cycle data than can a model with a competitive labor market

why can collective action fail in local agri food systems a social network analysis of cheese producers in aculco mexico collective trademark and regional product qualification in food processing industries have become a growing challenge for farmers in developing countries this challenge is the target of collective action based programs aiming at framing the cooperation context that would enable a local community to turn inherited resources and know how into new market opportunities literature acknowledges that social capital is a crucial local resource for successful collective actions since it is a source of trust and collective commitment within a community this paper deals with testing the role of this resource in the collective action case of the cheese producers in aculco mexico focusing on the connectedness dimension of social capital we propose an original methodology that relies on the multiplex and structural properties of social networks this allows us to disentangle the opposite and ambivalent effects of social capital on the ability of a community to reach the goals assigned by the collective action program our empirical study shows that these critical properties can work in favor of adherence to collective action but can also create elite capture clannish behaviors and entry barriers thus showing a failure of collective action

farmer organization collective action and market access in meso america abstract farmer organization and collective action are often seen as key factors in enhancing farmers access to markets often too little attention is directed at a the most appropriate types of organization b whether organization makes less or more sense in the case of producers of an undifferentiated commodity or a higher value product c whether the public or private sector is best placed to support farmer organizations and d the conditions necessary for ensuring their economic viability research in mexico and central america explored these issues for commodity maize and high value vegetables respectively the benefits of farmer organization are more evident in the vegetable sector characterized by high transaction costs associated with market access however horticultural farmer organizations in honduras and el salvador include less than 5 of total horticultural producers this is possibly due to farmer organizations limited business skills and non replicable organizational models there is less incentive for maize farmers to organize to access output markets as the transaction costs are relatively low the benefits of maize farmer organization are clearer when it comes to accessing inputs such as credit seed and fertilizer farmer organization is a critical factor in making markets work for the poor but the role and timing of public and private investment in these organizations is poorly understood

35 years of reforms a panel analysis of the incidence of and employee and employer responses to social security contributions in the uk we exploit variation in national insurance contributions nics the uk s system of social security contributions and a large panel dataset to examine the effects of 35 years of employee and employer nics reforms on labour cost gross earnings plus employer nics hours of work and labour cost per hour both immediately 0 6 months after reforms are implemented and in the slightly longer term 12 18 months we consider assumptions under which the estimated coefficients on net of marginal and net of average tax rates in a panel regression can be interpreted as behavioural elasticities or as reflecting incidence we find a compensated elasticity of taxable earnings with respect to the marginal rate of employee nics of about 0 2 0 3 operating largely through hours of work while that with respect to the marginal rate of employer nics is not statistically significantly different from zero we also find that labour cost falls by a much larger amount when the average rate of employer nics is reduced than when the average rate of employee nics is reduced which is consistent with the economic incidence of nics being strongly affected by its formal legal incidence estimates from the hours and hourly labour cost regressions provide further support to this interpretation of the findings and also suggest the presence of substantial income effects though also after 1999 a puzzling effect of average employer nics rates on hours of work each of these results remains true after 12 18 months if anything coefficients on lagged changes in nics rates strengthen these findings implying that any shifting of employer nics changes to the individual employees concerned and vice versa for employee nics does not begin over this time horizon these results are similar to those found by lehmann et al 2013 for france but represent an extension of that work by considering hours as well as labour cost responses and second year as well as immediate effects

product mixes as objects of choice in non parametric efficiency measurement abstract non radial measures of technical efficiency essentially differ from their radial counterparts in that the product mix of the efficient reference is allowed to be different from the product mix of the evaluated observation whereas existing non radial measures are still based on the product mix of the evaluated i e possibly inefficient observation we change the perspective and propose a measure based on the mix properties of the efficient reference the resulting inverse measure can be considered as complementary to the fare lovell or russell efficiency measure

does cooperative membership improve household welfare evidence from apple farmers in china this paper examines the impact of cooperative membership on farm performance indicators such as apple yields net returns and household income using cross sectional data from a survey of farmers in china an endogenous switching regression model that accounts for selection bias is employed in the analysis the empirical results reveal that cooperative membership exerts a positive and statistically significant impact on apple yields farm net returns and household income a disaggregated analysis also reveals that small scale farms tend to benefit more from cooperatives than medium and large farms

linking smallholder farmers to markets on extensive and intensive margins evidence from nicaragua abstract access to modern commercialization channels is key for smallholder farmers to move away from subsistence farming and overcome poverty however achieving that goal is challenging for smallholders given their lack of appropriate managerial practices production technology and infrastructure this paper examines the association between receiving trainings in two distinct entrepreneurial practices one direct at the individual and farmer association level and another indirect at the community level and commercialization in non local markets at the extensive and intensive margins we exploit a panel dataset of bean producers in nicaragua that participated in an ngo program implemented between 2007 and 2012 we find opposite results for the two market linkage activities especially on the intensive margin or volume of sales while reciving direct training on entrepreneurial practices ep is positively associated with commercialization training on municipality engagement me activities is negatively associated these correlation patterns are mainly observed among entrant farmers as opposed to those already participating in commercial markets prior to the program implementation we also find varying results for me activities by plot size and leadership position additional estimations show that training activities that are positively correlated with bean commercialization are not necessarily correlated with the commercialization of other crops and vice versa

semi radial technical efficiency measurement semi radial efficiency measurement combines technical efficiency as captured by the classical farrell measure with an economically meaningful mix efficiency component the semi radial evaluation we propose proceeds in two steps first we build on the price interpretation of the generally accepted koopmans efficiency notion to characterize appropriate benchmarks next we present both a quantity based distance measure and its dual price based equivalent to evaluate the mix efficiency factor the type of measures we propose may e g be used to provide a price rationale for the zieschang technical efficiency evaluation procedure

mapping research topics and theories in private regulation for sustainability in global value chains the globalization of production and trade has contributed to the rise in complex global value chains where the reach of state regulation is limited as an alternative private regulation developed and administered by companies industry associations and nongovernmental organizations has emerged to safeguard economic environmental and social sustainability in producer countries and along the value chain the academic literature on private regulation in global value chains has grown over the last decade but currently few major reviews of the research have been undertaken this paper examines peer reviewed research in the relevant disciplines published in academic journals up to december 2011 our goal is to identify and classify the topics and theories in the global value chain literature we conclude that the number of articles explicitly examining private regulation in a global value chain context is relatively small when considering the importance and growth of these chains in the world s economy we also conclude that agriculture forestry and apparel manufacturing are the most often studied economic sectors in contrast other sectors such as the information communication and technology with their complex global value chains and often problematic environmental and social conditions are understudied

measures of technical efficiency abstract fare and lovell j econom theory 19 1978 150 162 suggest four properties that a measure of technical efficiency should satisfy the commonly employed debreu farrell measure fails three of them necessary and sufficient conditions for a measure to satisfy the four conditions are provided and recently proposed measures are analyzed in the light of this result also it is argued that the debreu farrell measure has several desirable properties when one takes account of 1 perhaps unknown market prices and the relationship between technical and economic efficiency and 2 its characterization as a measure of economic efficiency using the shadow prices implicit in the production technology

progressive taxation and wage setting some evidence for denmark the proposition that a progressive tax system contributes to wage moderation is studied using danish earnings data disaggregated by occupation gender and earnings level our main conclusions are that income tax progression affects wage setting but whether it moderates or exaggerates wage pressure is income dependent an increase in progressivity reduces the pre tax earnings of middle income workers manual male workers and moderate income earners among both male and female non manual workers the reverse is found for high income earners non manual male workers in that an increase in progressivity tends to raise pre tax earnings finally there is no significant effect of tax progressivity on the wages of low income earners jel classification h3 j3 j5 j6

wage setting and the tax system theory and evidence for the united kingdom abstract this paper analyses the effects of a non linear tax system on wage bargaining the main conclusions are an increase in the marginal income or payroll tax rate reduces the pre tax wage in the isoelastic case an increase in the average tax rate increases the pre tax wage by more than the tax increase and a measure of the progressivity of the tax system residual income progression is a sufficient measure of the effect of the tax system on wage pressure empirical evidence is presented to support these propositions and the predictions of the model regarding the effect of recent changes to the u k tax system on the distribution of earnings discussed

alleviating unemployment the case for green tax reforms abstract it has been argued recently that imposing taxes on pollution produces additional tax revenues which can be used to replace labour taxes and thus reap a double dividend in the form of improving environmental quality and alleviating unemployment this paper analyses the employment effects of revenue neutral green tax reforms by focusing on the revenue recycling effect our model contains three features which are important when looking at the employment effects of green tax reforms first there is unemployment in equilibrium second wages are determined endogenously third various institutional arrangements for taxing unemployment benefits for the price indexation of unemployment benefits and the personal tax exemption are considered it is shown that these institutional arrangements are crucial for the effectiveness of green tax reforms a revenue neutral green tax reform will boost employment if unemployment benefits are nominally fixed and taxed at a lower rate than labour income employment actually falls if unemployment benefits are price indexed and taxed at the same rate a revenue neutral green tax reform which increases the personal tax credit will never increase employment

estimating the natural rate of unemployment in euro area countries with co integrated systems given that for france germany italy and the netherlands the unemployment rates are best classified as i 1 we apply permanent transitory decompositions based on co integrated vector autoregressions var with relevant variables labour productivity wages tax wedges foreign relative prices to estimate the time varying natural unemployment rates in general all variables seem to matter and the results are quite different from published organization for economic co operation and development oecd nairus our implied unemployment gaps are better than the oecd gaps in predicting unemployment changes and inflation gaps but they are except for italy as bad as the oecd gaps for forecasting inflation changes

effort taxation and unemployment abstract the importance of the design of the income tax system for the incentive to supply effort is considered in a situation where firms set wages a tax reform raising marginal taxes at all income levels and increasing decreasing average taxes at high low income levels may lead to higher wages lower employment and higher unemployment

the effects of progressive income taxation on job turnover abstract we examine whether the level of the income tax rate and the convexity of the income tax schedule affect job mobility as measured by moving to a better job while the predicted effect of the level of the tax rate is ambiguous we predict that an increase in the convexity of the tax schedule decreases job search activity by taxing away some of the benefits of a successful job search using data from the panel study of income dynamics we estimate that both higher tax rates and increased tax rate progressivity decrease the probability that a head of household will move to a better job during the coming year our estimates imply that a five percentage point reduction in the marginal tax rate increases the average probability of moving to a better job by 0 79 percentage points a 8 0 increase in the turnover propensity and that a one standard deviation decrease in our measure of tax progressivity would increase this probability by 0 86 percentage points a 8 7 increase in the turnover propensity this estimate is robust to sensitivity analysis examining the importance of different sources of identification and variation in estimated effects across subgroups in the population our estimated importance of tax policy for job turnover suggests a potential role in explaining the responsiveness of taxable income to marginal tax rates

immigration and welfare magnets this article investigates if the location choices made by immigrants when they arrive in the united states are influenced by the interstate dispersion in welfare benefits income maximizing behavior implies that foreign born welfare recipients unlike their native born counterparts may be clustered in the states that offer the highest benefits the empirical analysis indicates that immigrant welfare recipients are indeed more heavily clustered in high benefit states than the immigrants who do not receive welfare or than natives as a result the welfare participation rate of immigrants is much more sensitive to changes in welfare benefits than that of natives