dynamic corn supply functions a model with explicit optimization both static and dynamic models have been used to estimate aggregate supply elasticities for annual crops the early studies relied on static singleequation models in a few variables assumed static price expectations e g kohls and paarlberg and produced very small estimates of own price supply elasticities e g 0 07 for corn nerlove 1956 1958a and nerlove and addison showed that agricultural supply models incorporating adaptive price expectations and or dynamic resource adjustment produced larger estimates of supply elasticities for corn and other agricultural commodities additionally they showed that supply elasticities obtained from static models need not be bounded by the short run and long run supply elasticities of

regressive sin taxes with an application to the optimal soda tax a common objection to sin taxes corrective taxes on goods that are thought to be overconsumed such as cigarettes alcohol and sugary drinks is that they often fall disproportionately on low income consumers this paper studies the interaction between corrective and redistributive motives in a general optimal taxation framework and delivers empirically implementable formulas for sufficient statistics for the optimal commodity tax the optimal sin tax is increasing in the price elasticity of demand increasing in the degree to which lower income consumers are more biased or more elastic to the tax decreasing in the extent to which consumption is concentrated among the poor and decreasing in income effects because income effects imply that commodity taxes create labor supply distortions contrary to common intuitions stronger preferences for redistribution can increase the optimal sin tax if lower income consumers are more responsive to taxes or are more biased as an application we estimate the optimal nationwide tax on sugar sweetened beverages using nielsen homescan data and a specially designed survey measuring nutrition knowledge and self control holding federal income tax rates constant our estimates imply an optimal federal sugar sweetened beverage tax of 1 to 2 1 cents per ounce although optimal city level taxes could be as much as 60 lower due to cross border shopping

testing for non jointness in oil and gas exploration a variable profit function approach although the assumption of non joint production is made in a number of areas of economics its empirical validity is seldom examined in this paper we investigate the hypothesis of non jointness in the context of a multiple output production process which utilizes both fixed and variable inputs specifically we test the hypothesis of almost non jointness in the input quantities and prices as well as the hypothesis that inputs and outputs are separable using data on oil and natural gas exploration in alberta canada to facilitate global tests of these hypotheses we estimate a generalized linear generalized leontief variable profit function both with and without the restrictions implied by nonjointness and by separability on the basis of likelihood ratio tests we reject the hypothesis of separability but are unable to reject the non jointness hypothesis based on the maximum likelihood estimates obtained in the non joint case we examine some empirical issues concerning oil and gas exploration activity

profit function approximations and duality applications to agriculture monte carlo simulations of profit functions indicate that flexible functional forms may be ranked nearly the same with respect to allen uzawa partial substitution elasticities or price and fixed factor elasticities flexible functional form approximations of output price elasticities are generally worse than approximations of input price or fixed factor elasticities minflex laurent functional forms did not appear to approximate underlying elasticities any better than did their translog and generalized leontief counterparts

central bank independence a critical view from a developing country perspective abstract merely establishing an independent central bank may not bring about its professed benefits in developing countries with shallow financial markets where there is limited scope for a truly independent monetary policy the benefits of an independent central bank may be eroded by conflicts between fiscal and monetary policy and by inherent problems of central bank institutional design so that problems of dynamic inconsistency associated with monetary policy are not solved but merely transformed less developed countries wishing to establish a low inflation path should concentrate on instituting financial policy reforms that bolster opposition to inflation and institutional arrangements that force discipline on fiscal policy directly rather than indirectly through monetary policy

accounting for political opinions power and influence a voting advice application voting advice applications vaas are online decision support systems that try to match voters with political parties or candidates in elections typically based on how each responds to a number of policy issue statements such vaas play a major role in many countries in this paper we describe the development and large scale application of a new innovative matching algorithm for the most widely used vaa in finland we worked closely with the owner of the vaa the largest daily newspaper in finland helsingin sanomat their previous algorithm which one might call a naive approach was improved by including measures of candidate s political power and influence using proxy variables of media visibility and incumbency status the vaa was implemented for the 2015 parliamentary election in finland our matching algorithm was used by 140 000 voters 26 7 of the electorate in the helsinki election district the innovative algorithm generated recommendations that many voters were happy about followed by users incidental comments that this was the first time the vaa recommended candidates they wanted to vote for this showed the importance of catering to different kinds of voters with a model not previously considered by any vaa in any country

why democracies produce efficient results by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis i argue that democratic markets work as well as economic markets in particular i show that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn incorrect conclusions

coordination and policy moderation at midterm coordination and policy moderation at midterm eligible voters have been coordinating their turnout and vote decisions for the house of representatives in midterm elections coordination is a noncooperative rational expectations equilibrium stochastic choice models estimated using individual level data from nes surveys of years 1978 1998 support the coordinating model and reject a nonstrategic model the coordinating model shows that many voters have incentives to change their votes between presidential year and midterm after learning the outcome of the presidential election but this mechanism alone does not explain the size of midterm cycles the largest source of loss of support for the president s party at midterm is a regular pattern in which the median differences between voters ideal points and the parties policy positions have become less favorable for the president s party than they were at the time of the presidential election nonvoters show the same pattern the interelection changes are not consistent with the theory of surge and decline do americans coordinate their electoral choices in midterm congressional elections we use coordination to describe a situation in which two conditions hold for everyone who is eligible to vote i e every elector each elector combines information that each elector has privately with information that everyone has in common to make the best possible prediction of the election outcome and each elector makes the choice consistent with the elector s prediction that is most likely to produce the best possible result for the elector each elector s prediction takes into account what all electors best strategies would be given the information they have in common a condition described by saying that each elector has rational expectations the choice each elector makes is part of the elector s private information when every elector makes choices according to a strategy that is consistent with the elector s rational expectations and no elector can produce a personally better outcome by using a different strategy then there is a noncooperative equilibrium coordination is defined as the existence of a noncooperative equilibrium that is based on everyone having rational expectations beyond implications for the regularity with which the president s party loses vote share in midterm elections which we discuss below the existence of coordination is important because coordination implies that electors take one another into account in a constitutionally significant way in american elections coordination is based on the separation of powers between the president and congress coordination occurs when electors anticipate how election outcomes will affect bargaining about policy within the legislature and between the legislature and the executive by instituting the constitutional separation of powers madison believed that elected officials pursuit of their selfish interests and ambitions would lead them to act with regard to one another in ways that would prevent governmental tyranny carey 1978 159 160 even electors who did not coordinate might hope with madison that the separation of powers would affect officials in that way but if coordination exists electors shift from being mere observers of consequences the constitutional provisions may produce to being agents who are led to counteract one another by the constitutional incentives coordinating electors are as wary of one another as they are of officials

do pharmacists buy bayer informed shoppers and the brand premium we estimate the effect of information and expertise on consumers willingness to pay for national brands in physically homogeneous product categories in a detailed case study of headache remedies we find that more informed or expert consumers are less likely to pay extra to buy national brands with pharmacists choosing them over store brands only 9 percent of the time compared to 26 percent of the time for the average consumer in a similar case study of pantry staples such as salt and sugar we show that chefs devote 12 percentage points less of their purchases to national brands than demographically similar nonchefs we extend our analysis to cover 50 retail health categories and 241 food and drink categories the results suggest that misinformation and related consumer mistakes explain a sizable share of the brand premium for health products and a much smaller share for most food and drink products we tie our estimates together using a stylized model of demand and pricing

a revenue function approach to the measurement of output substitution possibilities in agriculture the purpose of this article is to calculate hicksian and marshallian estimates of output substitution possibilities in an agricultural industry the hicksian elasticities or net substitution possibilities are measured within a revenue maximizing framework holding input levels constant the marshallian elasticities that encompass both net substitution and expansion effects are measured within a profit maximizing framework allowing both output and input levels to vary the results are empirically reasonable and consistent with the duality theory for revenue and profit maximizing behavior a notable empirical result is that in the very short run or market period with input levels held constant there exists considerable scope for changing the output composition between crops and cattle on cattle farms

is voter competence good for voters information rationality and democratic performance a long research tradition in behavioral political science evaluates the performance of democracy by examining voter competence this literature got its start arguing that voters lack of information undermines a defense of democracy rooted in electoral accountability a more recent literature deepens the debate with some authors claiming that voters eectively use cues to substitute for information about candidates and policies and other authors claiming that voters are insuciently rational to do so we argue that regardless of its conclusions about voter competence this literature s singleminded focus on voter behavior is misguided we use a sequence of formal models to show that traditional intuitions are incomplete because they ignore the eect that changes in voter behavior have on the equilibrium behavior of politicians when this strategic interaction is taken into account increases in voter information or voter rationality sometimes make democratic performance better and sometimes makes democratic performance worse one simply cannot assess the implications of voter characteristics for democratic performance without also studying how those characteristics aect the

acreage decisions under risk the case of corn and soybeans an acreage supply response model is developed under expected utility maximization the resulting framework is used to specify and estimate a system of risk responsive acreage equations for corn and soybeans in the united states particular attention is given to the truncation effects of government price supports on the distribution of corn and soybean prices also a wealth variable is included in the acreage equations the empirical results indicate that risk and wealth variables play an important role in cornsoybean acreage decisions the analysis also shows that cross commodity risk reduction is important in acreage allocation decisions

social networks and the mass media how do global sources of information such as mass media outlets state propaganda ngos and national party leadership affect aggregate behavior prior work on this question has insufficiently considered the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior by explicitly modeling this interaction i show that social network structure conditions media s impact empirical studies of media effects that fail to consider this risk bias further social network interactions can amplify media bias leading to large swings in aggregate behavior made more severe when individuals can select into media matching their preferences countervailing media outlets and social elites with unified preferences can mitigate the effect of bias however media outlets promulgating antistatus quo bias have an advantage theoretical results such as these generate numerous testable hypotheses i provide guidelines for deriving and testing hypotheses from the model and discuss several such hypotheses

agricultural product supplies and input demands regional comparisons governmental agencies at federal state and local levels in the united states are heavily involved in intervention in agricultural input and output markets to effect desired social goals the most pervasive intervention activities occur at the federal level they are available throughout the nation to most producers of specified commodities how

agricultural productivity of the spanish regions a non parametric malmquist analysis productivity growth for the agricultural sectors of the 17 spanish regions over the period 1977 88 is studied using non parametric programming techniques productivity changes based on conventional inputs are linked to other economic geographic and institutional issues average technical change in the spanish regions grew at an annual rate of 2 9 but with great regional variation this paper presents a clear characterization of areas with greater technical progress and the regions with technical regress

uninformed votes information effects in presidential elections theory recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues information shortcuts and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act individually or collectively as if they were fully informed hypotheses uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave as if they were fully informed failing that individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate producing the same aggregate election outcome as if voters were fully informed methods hypothetical fully informed vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics estimated by probit analysis of data from national election study surveys conducted after the six most recent united states presidential elections results both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed at the individual level the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical fully informed vote probabilities was about ten percentage points in the electorate as a whole these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation but by no means eliminated incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better and democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better than they would have if voters had in fact been fully informed

market based systems for reducing chemical use in agriculture in the united states this study uses a computable general equilibrium cge model of the u s economy to estimate the economic effects of agricultural fertilizer and pesticide input reductions on individual farm sectors and on the economy as a whole the costs of reducing agricultural chemicals using a market based approach and a command and control approach are compared the real cost to society of restrictng fertilizer and pesticide use by 20 percent across all uses is estimated to be 2 3 billion a market based approach that would provide incentives to reduce chemical use in the most cost efficient manner would be about 10 percent less costly

presidential coattails versus the median voter senator selection in us elections abstract we show that senators elected in presidential elections are more ideologically extreme than senators elected in midterm elections this finding is in contrast to the literature suggesting that voters in presidential elections are more ideologically moderate than voters in midterm elections to explain this incongruence we propose a theory of spillover effects in which party labels enable voters to update their beliefs about candidates across contemporaneous races for office unexpected support for a candidate in one race carries marginal candidates from the same party in other races our theory implies that presidential coattails may skew representative government away from the median voter ideal

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

measurement of total factor productivity growth and biases in technological change in western australian agriculture this study investigates productivity growth in broad acre agriculture in western australia tornqvist indices of three output groups crops sheep products and other and five input groups livestock materials and services labour capital and land are constructed and discussed indices of total output and total inputs are also derived and used to form an index of total factor productivity that is observed to grow at an average annual rage of 2 7 the input and output indices are also used in the estimation of output supply and input demand equations derived from a flexible profit function the generalized mcfadden functional form is used because it is possible to impose global curvature upon it without loss of flexibility asymptotic chi square tests reject the hypotheses of hicks neutral technical change in inputs and in outputs technical change is observed to be materials and services saving relative to the other input groups and also appears to favour wool and sheepmeat production relative to the other output groups

time scarcity and the market for news abstract we develop a theory of news coverage in environments of information abundance time constrained consumers browse through news items across competing outlets they choose which outlets to access and which stories to read or skip thus indirectly deciding how much time to spend on a given outlet firms decide on rankings of news items that maximize their profits we show that even when readers or television viewers and firms are rational and unbiased they spend more time on the news than they would like and not necessarily on the topics they prefer in particular relevant news items may be crowded out we then study how reader efficient standards can be restored and derive implications on diverse aspects of new and traditional media these include tabloidization and polarization of the news and other aspects relevant for the political economy of the media including political knowledge gaps and voter turnout

dynamic fertilizer nutrient demands for corn a cointegrated and error correcting system past studies of the demand for fertilizer have typically been based on static models which assume that adjustments toward equilibrium are instantaneous this article builds on past studies by developing a dynamic model of nutrient demands of corn unit root and cointegration tests demonstrate that fertilizer demands of corn are dynamic therefore statistically correct estimates can be obtained using a dynamic model a set of error correction models for nitrogen phosphate and potash use in corn production are estimated results provide strong statistical evidence that nutrient demands of corn are price inelastic both in the short and the long run

political ignorance and collective policy preferences in contrast with the expectations of many analysts i find that raw policy specific facts such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid have a significant influence on the public s political judgments using both traditional survey methods and survey based randomized experiments i show that ignorance of policy specific information leads many americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise i also show that the effect of policy specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research finally i show that the effect of policy specific ignorance is greatest for americans with the highest levels of political knowledge rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information general knowledge and the cognitive capacities it reflects appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy specific information into political judgments

argentine agricultural policy in a multiple input multiple output framework argentine agricultural output grew at a rate of about 1 4 per year between 1940 and 1972 cavallo and mundlak p 13 which is a very sluggish growth rate given earlier rates of 1 8 for 1908 20 and 2 2 1920 40 schultz it also is sluggish relative to growth in u s agricultural output of 1 9 during the same period adjusting for factor use total factor productivity in argentine agriculture grew at a rate of only 0 6 during this period compared to 1 2 in the rest of the argentine economy cavallo and mundlak and compared to about 1 9 in u s agriculture usda a number of hypotheses have been offered to

separability testing in production economics the implications of separability in production are examined using duality restrictions on the profit function implied by separability of the production function and vice versa are derived in a simple way these restrictions are then calculated for commonly used classes of functional forms then the method is used to test separability of the profit function using experimental production data the hypothesis that the profit function was separable plant nutrients from spacing unit costs could not be rejected this implies that an aggregate price index for nutrients is appropriate

supply demand and technology in a multiproduct industry texas field crops the purpose of this paper is to examine the structure of agricultural production for six texas field crops cotton grain sorghum wheat corn rice and hay which account for nearly 95 of recent field crop value specific objectives are to a test the structure of technology to determine i if output and input utilization choices for individual products are independent of production decisions about other outputs and ii if products and or inputs can be consistently aggregated b estimate a coherent set of interrelated supply functions for the six commodities and input demand functions for fertilizer and hired labor because the empirical focus of this paper is specific to one state the results will be of limited value for interpreting specific production relationships elsewhere however the problem is of common interest in production agriculture and the techniques used demonstrate an important application of dual modeling

the effects of suburbanization on agriculture this article conceptualizes the effects of suburban population density and land speculation on agricultural production choices prices and profits a dual profit function model and a system of reduced form price equations are used to estimate these effects for new jersey results show that vegetable production is the only subsector to benefit from suburbanization while livestock is the most adversely affected suburbanization reduces responsiveness to agricultural prices and discourages capital and land use the overall impact on profits is positive when capital gains on land are included policy implications for farmland preservation and right to farm legislation are discussed

letting the good times roll a theory of voter inference and experimental evidence this paper examines inference and attribution in a simple and ubiquitous strategic situation a voter is faced with discerning whether a leader worked on his or her behalf after observing an informative but noisy signal about the leader s performance we characterize perfect bayesian equilibria quantal response equilibria qre and provide a simple model of a heuristic based approach referred to as strategic naivete within a wide class of such environments we also discuss experiments conducted to examine human behavior within such an environment while it is clear that the observed behavior is inconsistent with perfect bayesian equilibrium distinguishing between qre and strategic naivete will require further work we conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of probabilistic and or heuristic based attribution processes for electoral politics and political economy

an analysis of u s aggregate output response by farm size abstract past empirical evidence on supply response by size of farm in the u s a provides no clear basis to conclude that supply elasticities vary systematically with farm size in this paper the central hypothesis that no systematic relationship exists between production response to price and size of farm is rejected u s farms are disaggregated into nine economic size categories and own price supply elasticities are measured for per farm and total agricultural output empirical results from this study suggest that supply response does vary systematically by farm size with smaller farms exhibiting greater elasticities than mid sized farms

singularity and autoregressive disturbances in linear logit models the implications of including autoregressive disturbances in linear logit models of demand systems are explored it is argued that the normality assumption of the error terms is more appropriate in the linear logit model than in a share equation model with additive disturbances commonly found in the literature autoregressive disturbances and their implications for model estimation are discussed in that context both theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are presented in favor of the logit specification given the presence of serial correlation

mass media and special interest groups abstract media revenues are an important determinant of media behavior it is generally accepted that news coverage depends not only on the preferences of media consumers but also on the preferences of advertisers or subsidizing groups however existing models reach the opposite conclusions about the relationship between the profitability of advertising and media bias we present a theoretical model that reconciles these results the model shows that the sign of the effect of marginal costs of production or marginal advertising revenues on the level of distortion in news coverage depends on complementarity or substitutability between media bias and audience size for an interest group the existence of a budget constraint for an interest group and media outlets reliance on subscription in addition to advertising revenues

the elasticity of scale and the shape of average costs different concepts of returns to scale the first which is most widely used for defining returns to scale is the relative increase in output as all input quantities are increased proportionally along a ray through the origin the second which is the more relevant concept for micro economic analysis is the increase in output relative to costs for variations along the expansion path where input prices are constant and costs are minimized at every output 2 as it turns out these two concepts yield equal measures for the elasticity of scale3 e at every minimum cost point in the input space however the change in e with output is generally different for the two concepts 4 since expansion paths do not coincide with rays unless the production function is homothetic 5 but it is the change of e along the expansion path and not along the raywhich determines the shape of the average cost curve ac and which is therefore relevant for the analysis of firms and industry behavior under competition 6 these relations are stated and analyzed below it is shown that assumptions made in the literature7 which are related to the behavior of e along rays or to the slope of the technically optimal surface where returns to scale are locally constant are irrelevantbeing neither necessary nor sufficient for implying classical u shaped average cost curves the following definitions and results are used here

testing for consistent aggregation this paper designs workable empirical procedures for testing or imposing supply demand price aggregators only single equation methods are considered to shift the focus from any particular optimizing paradigm toward the necessities for correctly tabulating firm level supplies demands and aggregate supply demand both macro and micro level tests for consistent aggregation are developed and constructive rules for aggregation based upon empirically observed micro behavior are provided in tabular form empirical tests reveal no support for the aggregate price most commonly reported by usda the constructive rules are then used to develop a new wheat price index consistent with supply aggregation

the swing voter s curse with adversarial preferences abstract we analyze voting behavior in a large electorate in which voters have adversarial state contingent preferences with incomplete information about the state of the world we show that one type of voter can suffer from the swing voter s curse a la feddersen and pesendorfer the swing voter s curse amer econ rev 86 1996 408 424 and go on to characterize the symmetric nash equilibria of this model under different parameter values we prove that unlike settings with nonadversarial preferences there are equilibria in which in one state of the world a minority preferred candidate almost surely wins the election and thus the election may fail to correctly aggregate information indeed we show that the fraction of the electorate dissatisfied with the result can be as large as 66 2 3

food price changes and household welfare what do we learn from two different approaches the use of a marginal approach can significantly distort the predicted effects of large price variations on monetary welfare over the medium to longer term this paper aims at shedding some light

estimation of multicrop production functions this paper considers whether separability or nonjointness is the better approach for attaining tractability for multicrop production function estimation characteristics of agricultural production associated with allocated inputs physical constraints and output determination imply sufficient nonjointness for estimation whereas separability is less plausible the paper also addresses estimation of production functions with allocated inputs where allocations are not observed and demonstrates a proposed approach by way of example

sources of growth in french agriculture since the slowdown in the growth of world agricultural trade in 1980 the united states and the european community ec have engaged in a series of debates over their respective agricultural policies high producer prices and the general absence of production controls in europe have been of particular concern in the united states as world grain stocks have risen and the ec has emerged with substantial subsidies as a net cereals exporter levels of frustration have increased on both sides of the atlantic as the united states has responded with its own export enhancement payments and other costly policies with current positions difficult to sustain the united states and some members of the european community now seek means to limit their conflict and obtain relief from the high costs of their agricultural programs the reduction of grain stocks resulting from the drought affect

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

estimating substitution and expansion effects comment in recent years there has been a proliferation of estimated supply and demand elasticities for the agricultural sector the combination of duality theory flexible functional forms and powerful computing resources have made it easy to estimate complete supply and demand systems with relatively few restrictions on the elasticities as a profession we must sort through these numerous estimates many of which are contradictory and identify the sensible ones a recent article by lopez in this journal illustrates this methodology this comment uses the lopez results to demonstrate how hitherto underutilized theoretical insights can be usefully employed in evaluating published elasticities the first issue involves the expected signs of off diagonal elasticities for uncompensated supplies and demands the analysis of which dates back to hicks work in 1939 he predicted that in the absence of significant fixities we should expect goods to be gross complements in production this concept has been further developed and refined the assumptions necessary to generate this normal case are reviewed in the second section then the relationship between gross and compensated elasticities is examined in both of these sections empirical results from the lopez article are found to contradict predicted outcomes based on economic theory and an attempt is made to analyze these discrepancies

multiple input multiple output production choices and technology in the u s wheat region duality theory motivates a translog expected profit function consistent with multiple products price uncertainty preseason climate constraints acreage control policies and possibly nonhomothetic technology although multiple outputs are allowed enterprise specific data is not necessary instead time series measures of output revenues and expected prices input expenses and prices and fixed input flows are employed appropriate measures of elasticities of choice returns to size and biases in technological change are derived results indicated decreasing returns to size rather limited though complementary responsiveness of choices to price changes and the nature of biases in technological changes

production economics worthwhile investment abstract agricultural production economics research is examined within a broad framework of scientific development and utilization recent findings in selected areas of the subdiscipline are examined and opportunities for further fruitful inquiry are identified a few stylized facts emerge from recent work and suggest the need for much careful hypothesis testing model exploration and empirical sensitivity analysis in the future

does political knowledge increase turnout evidence from the 1997 british general election a number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of political knowledge on turnout both information acquisition and turnout however are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables rendering hard the identification of a causal link in empirical investigations available empirical regularities should therefore be interpreted as mere correlations i address this problem by using an intrumental variables approach where the instruments are represented by various proxies of information supply on mass media using survey data from the 1997 british general election study i show that political knowledge has a sizeable influence on the probability of voting and that mass media play an important role in influencing political participation

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

agricultural production technologies with systematic and stochastic technical change a production system modeling tool is developed that implements recent work on autoregressive and endogenous stochastic production technologies associated with generalized fechner thurstone gft optimizing functions a gft class production system is used to evaluate the empirical support for technology specifications inherent in the neoclassical theoretic structure of an agricultural production region little likelihood support is found for zero serial correlation elimination of systematic technology changers from the production system strict neoclassical production technologies hicks neutral technical change or zero homogenous factor demand functions

long run profit functions for multiproduct firms a long run specification of the multiproduct profit function is developed from the restricted profit function the multiproduct restricted profit function and the envelope condition are used to estimate the optimal long run levels of the quasi fixed factor formulas for long run marshallian elasticities of substitution and transformation economies of scope product specific and overall economies of scale and economic measures of capacity utilization are developed for the translog functional form the methodology is illustrated by a case study of the new england otter trawl industry

transferable quotas enforcement costs and typical firms an empirical application to the norwegian trawler fleet an alternative to traditional regulations of fisheries to avoid rent dissipation is the use of individual transferable quotas itqs where prices in the quota market provide the necessary information to owners of harvest rights to contract with each other however even under such a decentralized regime information on the underlying technology of the fishing vessels is also necessary first since most fisheries consist of many interrelated production processes in order to avoid rent dissipation by discarding wrong output mix etc the structure of production in the multispecies fishery must be known to design a proper quota system second an itq system may create incentives for misreporting by understating the actual catch this may especially be the case where the expected degree of self enforcement is low the paper proposes a way to reduce the information requirements under regulation with asymmetric information by constructing a typical firm and comparing performance for the other vessels to this firm based on the typical firm and if the industry is relatively homogenous the performance and hence catch of any other firm in the industry can be predicted within a certain range further the paper applies this idea to the norwegian trawler fleet to assess the production structure in terms of jointness input output separability and the supply and demand elasticities for the fishing firms this information characterizes the fishery and thus how the quota system may be designed and how to construct a yardstick in order to reduce the enforcement cost under a decentralized regulation of itqs

the relative demand for inputs a decomposition analysis of us agriculatural production 1988 the relative demand for inputs a decomposition analysis of us agriculatural production applied economics vol 20 no 5 pp 665 678

incorporating groups into rational choice explanations of turnout an empirical test this study examines the problem of voter turnout from a rational choice perspective it reviews the paradox of voting and finds one model which incorporates the role of intermediary social groups and leaders to be a promising solution it tests the hypothesis that leader mobilization increases voter turnout using an ecological analysis of turnout in five montreal ethnic communities during three recent elections the 1993 canadian federal the 1994 quebec provincial and the 1994 montreal municipal elections data on mobilization are taken from semi directed interviews with association leaders in each community the results compare predicted and actual rankings of turnout for each community and election the overall results are weak indicating that the model does a poor job of predicting voter turnout

inequality and media capture abstract popular support of redistributive policies depends on information they have about the tax system and efficiency of public projects mass media provides a convenient means for manipulating public opinion even when voters understand that the media can be biased i develop a theory of media capture in which the rich can influence information published in a media outlet at a cost the model shows that higher inequality is associated with lower media freedom this effect is stronger in democratic regimes i find empirical support for the model in both panel data and cross country analysis

input demands and inefficiency in u s agriculture markov chain monte carlo mcmc methods are used to estimate a seemingly unrelated regression sur system of input demand functions for u s agriculture our demand functions have flexible forms and allow for nonrandom technical inefficiency concavity constraints are imposed at individual data points and the distributions of measures of relative technical efficiency are constrained to the unit interval results are evaluated in terms of characteristics of the posterior distributions of parameters measures of relative technical efficiency and other nonlinear functions of the parameters

public regulation and the structure of production in multiproduct industries an application to the new england otter trawl industry this article considers the problem of managing multispecies fishing industries as one of regulating the production of individual multiproduct firms the multispecies new england otter trawl industry is examined within this framework empirical results derived from estimating a multiproduct profitfunction indicate that management consistent with the structures ofmultiproduct production and costs would directly regulate inputs little support is provided for applying the traditional bioeconomic model to the fishery studied

dynamic input demand an application to agriculture a theoretically consistent analytical framework for examining dynamic agricultural input demand is developed and applied results from duality theory on restricted variable profit functions are incorporated into a long run dynamic optimization framework input use is affected by external adjustment costs which permits sluggish factor adjustment

demand for farm output in a complete system of demand functions demand interrelationships for farm outputs that are theoretically consistent with consumer demand and marketing group behavior provide important linkages between retail and farm prices a conceptual model based on reduced form specifications for retail and farm prices is formulated and applied empirically to a set of eight disaggregated food commodities this approach circumvents the need for retail quantities which are frequently unavailable for disaggregated food commodities the results are consistent with theory and generally indicate significant substitution between farm and marketing inputs except for poultry derived demand elasticities are at least 40 larger compared to those derived assuming fixed proportions

estimation of australian wool and lamb production technologies under uncertainty an error components approach a model of producer behavior which explicitly accounts for both output price and production uncertainty is formulated and estimated if the production technology is multiplicatively separable in its deterministic and stochastic components then the expected utility maximization problem implies cost minimization for planned or expected output consequently our empirical model of three lamb and wool producing sectors in australia involves the estimation of a system of input cost share and cost equations whose disturbances have an error components structure the empirical results are evaluated in terms of input demand elasticities and estimates of the stochastic components of production are presented

constrained output maximization and us agriculture this paper presents a framework for estimating an indirect production function and then applies it to aggregate us agriculture issues addressed include tests of standard hypotheses about the underlying technology homotheticity neutral technical change etc as well as examination of consistency in aggregation and the effects of changes in the level of aggregate expenditure on farm output since there already exist several studies empirically describing agricultural production technologies with indirect objective functions one might fairly ask whether this paper really breaks any new ground we feel that it does one reason is that existing studies e g binswanger 1974 lopez 1980 ball and chambers 1982 ray 1982 and weaver 1983 all rely on either profit or cost functions to date there appears to be only one study using an indirect production appelbaum 1979 and it is not in agriculture this seems unfortunate because there are many instances in agriculture for which an indirect productio

the output bias of technological change in postwar japanese agriculture in order to explain the rapid change in the output mix this study tests the hypothesis that technological change in postwar japanese agriculture was biased towards livestock production a multioutput translog cost function was estimated for the 1958 84 period in which results are consistent with the hypothesis furthermore changes in the composition of crop and livestock production had significant impacts on relative factor uses above all expanding livestock production required relatively less labor than expanding crop production implying a positive contribution to the rapid exodus of labor to the nonagricultural sectors

democracy the market and the logic of social choice this article compares the types of knowledge democracy and the market require to rationally allocate resources i argue that high levels of public ignorance and voters inability to compare the effects of different parties policies make it difficult for parties and elections to rationally allocate resources markets mitigate these problems because the simultaneous existence of multiple firms products facilitates comparisons that mimic the conditions of scientific experimentation the economy of knowledge involved in such comparisons indicates there are epistemic advantages to using firms and markets instead of political parties and elections to allocate scarce resources however in contrast to arguments that markets merely provide better information than political decisions i argue markets epistemic advantages are derived from the way they facilitate comparisons that minimize decision makers need for knowledge or understanding