monotone equilibrium in multi unit auctions in two sided multi unit auctions having a variety of payment rules including uniform price and discriminatory auctions a monotone pure strategy equilibrium mpse exists when bidders are risk neutral with independent multi dimensional types and interdependent values in fact all mixed strategy equilibria are ex post allocation and interim expected payment equivalent to mpse thus for standard expected surplus revenue analysis there is no loss restricting attention to monotone strategies

convergence to efficiency in a simple market with incomplete information a model of trade with m buyers and m sellers is considered in which price is set to equate revealed demand and supply in a bayesian nash equilibrium each trader acts not as a price taker but instead misrepresents his true demand supply to influence price in his favor this causes inefficiency we show that in any equilibrium the amount by which a trader misreports is o 1 m and the corresponding inefficiency is o 1 m2 the indeterminacy and the inefficiency that is caused by the traders bargaining behavior in small markets thus rapidly vanishes as the market increases in size

basic health care provision and under 5 mortality a cross national study of developing countries summary in two cross sections of developing countries under 5 mortality is found to be associated strongly with maternal and infant health program effort and with the share of births attended by trained personnel but never with any indicator of health care spending from the standpoint of reducing under 5 mortality then the main challenge in many developing countries may be less to raise overall public health spending or even the share of public health spending devoted to basic services than to assure that a very small absolute amount of revenue is spent effectively to raise access to or improve the quality of maternal and infant health care

poverty reduction during 1990 2013 did millennium development goals adoption and state capacity matter abstract while poverty reduction remains central in the post 2015 agenda its determinants remain debated in the literature especially the role of structural conditions related to governance this paper provides an assessment of two key dimensions the global adoption of mdgs and state capacity we do so by studying whether they facilitated convergence in income poverty measures using cross section and panel methods with data on 89 developing economies for the period 1990 2013 we find that poverty headcount and gap measures tended to decrease faster in countries with initially higher income poverty such convergence accelerated after 2000 suggesting that mdgs adoption was instrumental to poverty reduction however this still leaves unexplained substantial variation in poverty reduction performance across countries such variation is explained by state capacity countries with greater ability to administer their territories in 1990 experienced faster income poverty reduction and were more likely to have achieved the mdg target this result is insensitive to robust regression methods and to a large set of controls initial level of income dependence on natural resources education and health inputs dependence on foreign aid ethnic fractionalization regional effects and a set of governance variables as good governance and effective institutions are included in the sustainable development goals this result provides empirical justification for this move suggesting that more effective states could be crucial to sustain the development progress achieved so far

existence of equilibrium in large double auctions abstract we show the existence of a pure strategy symmetric increasing equilibrium in double auction markets with correlated conditionally independent private values and many participants the equilibrium we find is arbitrarily close to fully revealing as the market size grows our results provide strategic foundations for price taking behavior in large markets

who trusts others community and individual determinants of social capital in a low income country this study presents new evidence on individual and community specific determinants of social trust using data from 96 villages in bangladesh we find perceived institutional trust to be positively correlated with stated inter personal trust at the same time there is significant social distance among various faith groups in our data both hindus and muslims trust their coreligionists more than they trust those from other religions moreover hindus trust christians buddhists and ngo workers more than muslims and are not distrustful of the wider society trust towards non muslims is negatively correlated with islamic school attendance among muslim respondents while religiosity tends not to play any role compared to religion the effects of institutional trust and local economic development are modest these findings are robust to control for a range of individual and community level correlates and enumerator fixed effects

green revolution and labour demand in rice farming the case of central luzon 1966 90 while the adoption of modern rice varieties mvs increased labour requirements for crop care and other activities it might have induced the adoption of labour saving technologies thus whether the net impact of mv adoption on labour demand is significantly positive is still debated in the green revolution literature using farm level survey data collected in central luzon from 1966 to 1990 this study estimated simultaneously the labour saving technology adoption and the labour demand functions we found among other things that mvs increased labour demand significantly without inducing the widespread adoption of labour saving technologies

paths to development is there a bangladesh surprise using aggregate indices of education health demographic and gender equality outcomes we empirically investigate the hypothesis that bangladesh achieved a higher level of social development compared with countries of similar level of per capita income stylized facts and cross country regression results support this hypothesis for a broad range of dimensions further tests show that such achievements do not simply reflect income mediated channels and social expenditure programs we conclude by speculating on the role of bangladesh s development to sustain the process of growth and on the role of governance and institutional quality for the nexus between growth and development

low schooling for girls slower growth for all cross country evidence on the effect of gender inequality in education on economic development using cross country and panel regressions this article investigates how gender inequality in education affects long term economic growth such inequality is found to have an effect on economic growth that is robust to changes in specifications and controls for potential endogeneities the results suggest that gender inequality in education directly affects economic growth by lowering the average level of human capital in addition growth is indirectly affected through the impact of gender inequality on investment and population growth some 0 4 0 9 percentage points of differences in annual per capita growth rates between east asia and sub saharan africa south asia and the middle east can be accounted for by differences in gender gaps in education between these regions

on the failure of monotonicity in uniform price auctions except for well studied special cases in which bidders have single unit demand or bidders are risk neutral with independent private values equilibria of uniform price auctions with private values need not possess familiar monotonicity properties in particular equilibria in weakly undominated strategies may exist in which some bidders bid strictly less on some units when they have strictly higher values for every unit

toward a strategic foundation for rational expectations equilibrium a step toward a strategic foundation for rational expectations equilibrium is taken by considering a double auction with n buyers and m sellers with interdependent values and affiliated private information if there are sufficiently many buyers and sellers and their bids are restricted to a sufficiently fine discrete set of prices then generically there is an equilibrium in nondecreasing bidding functions that is arbitrarily close to the unique fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium of the limit market with unrestricted bids and a continuum of agents in particular the large double auction equilibrium is almost efficient and almost fully aggregates the agents information

equilibria existence and characterization in auctions achievements and open questions establishing existence and characterizing equilibria is a fundamental step in the study of auctions theoretical characterizations and empirical predictions are well accepted only to the extent that they are based on equilibria however despite the fact that auctions have been extensively studied there are still many problems regarding equilibrium existence and characterization waiting for resolution in this survey we review the landmark results and highlight open questions in addition we review the standard assumptions underlying these results and discuss the suitability of the nash equilibrium solution concept we focus our review on single object auctions but also review results in multi unit divisible combinatorial and double auctions

a retrospective view of technological and other changes in philippine rice farming 1965 1982 much has been written about the impact of changes brought about through the introduction of semidwarf fertilizer responsive rice and wheat in asia the terms green revolution and miracle varieties suggest the dramatic effect anticipated from the new biological technology by both its supporters and detractors a great volume of literature has been generated describing the impact of these changes much of that literature is speculative some is theoretical and it would be fair to say much is cast in a tone with negative implications for new technology theoretical analyses necessarily balance simplifying assumptions with the richness of detail needed to capture the effects of technical and other changes while empirical analysis often shows what has happened but sheds little light on why it may have happened a recent review of the empirical literature shows that adoption of modern rice varieties in asia results in increased output has occurred quite evenly among farmers of all size groups and has resulted in modest increases in the use of labor per hectare of rice produced some empirical studies contrast areas that have adopted the technology with areas that have not thereby making the often false implicit assumption that all factors other than those specifically studied were similar other empirical studies concentrate on high adoption areas and use recall to infer how the introduction of technology may have changed variables of interest 2 there are a few pioneer studies available that contrast areas before and after the general adoption of specified technologies 3 this paper is a summary of ongoing research that provides data of the latter type researchers at the international rice research institute irri have monitored two sets of philippine rice producers for over 15 years during that period new rice technology was introduced and was

where has all the education gone cross national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker this implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large strongly statistically significant and negative these are on average results derived from imposing a constant coefficient however the development impact of education varied widely across countries and has fallen short of expectations for three possible reasons first the institutional governance environment could have been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational capital lowered economic growth second marginal returns to education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant third educational quality could have been so low that years of schooling created no human capital the extent and mix of these three phenomena vary from country to country in explaining the actual economic impact of education or the lack thereof

effect of modern rice varieties and irrigation on household income distribution in nepalese villages abstract since high yielding modern rice varieties mvs are adopted only in favorable production environments significant regional productivity differentials have emerged in nepal this study explores the distributional consequences of such differential mv adoption based on an intensive survey of favorable and unfavorable villages we found that mv adoption increased returns to land but decreased family labor earnings from rice production as it facilitated the substitution of hired for family labor as a result the differential mv adoption did not significantly worsen the household income distribution according to the results of the counterfactual gini decomposition analysis

the state socialization and private schooling when will governments support alternative producers abstractunderstanding the institutional features that can improve learning outcomes and reduce inequality is a top priority for international and development organisations around the world economists appear to have a good case for support to non governmental alternatives as suppliers of schooling however unlike other policy domains freer international trade or privatisation economists have been remarkably unsuccessful in promoting the adoption of this idea we develop a general positive model of why governments typically produce schooling which introduces the key notion of the lack of verifiability of socialisation and instruction of beliefs which makes third party contracting for socialisation problematic we use the model to explain variations around the world in levels of private schooling we also predict the circumstances in which efforts to promote the different alternatives to government production like charter voucher and scholarship are likely to be successful

the gender and intergenerational consequences of the demographic dividend an assessment of the micro and macrolinkages between the demographic transition and economic development the demographic transition changes the age composition of a population potentially affecting resource allocation at the household level and exerting general equilibrium effects at the aggregate level if age profiles of income consumption and savings were stable and estimable for the entire population they might imply how the demographic transition will affect national savings rates but there is little agreement on the impact of age composition these age profiles differ by gender and are affected by human capital investments whereas an existing micro simulation are estimated from samples of wage earners that are not distinguished by sex or schooling and make no effort to model family labor supply behavior or physical and human capital accumulation considering these shortcomings of assessments of the demographic dividend a case study based on household surveys and long run social experiments may be more informative matlab bangladesh extended a family planning and maternal and child health program to half the villages in the district in 1977 and recorded fertility in the program villages was 15 16 percent lower than in the control villages for two decades households in the program villages realized health and productivity gains that were concentrated among women survival and schooling increased among children and after 19 years household physical assets were 25 percent greater per adult than in the control villages these large gains in the wake of the program induced demographic transition suggest reasons for designing new labor market and microcredit policies to help women during the demographic transition invest in productive skills shift their time more efficiently from child care to home production self employment and wage labor and invest more in the human capital of their children

governance and growth in sub saharan africa real income per head in much of sub saharan africa grew rapidly in the 1960s but faltered following the first opec oil price shock in 1973 74 and then stagnated or fell from the late 1970s to the early 1990s africa also saw a broad wave of authoritarian rule sweep the continent in the 1960s and early 1970s since 1990 however the african political landscape has experienced significant changes many in the direction of greater pluralism and democracy moreover where civil strife has been avoided africa has seen a broad tendency towards rapid growth for several years after 1995 this sequence of events suggests that political economy may offer useful perspectives on africa s growth record over the last several decades we begin with a summary of africa s growth patterns and the evolution of african political regimes we then examine models of authoritarian rule for insights into the conditions under which elites may sacrifice the general interest to extract rents and retain power or in which leaders may find ways of making growth enhancing policy politically acceptable it would be premature to conclude that africa s political reforms of the 1990s have helped to generate economic progress however we do believe that the increase in political pluralism in combination with greater unity among african aid donors bodes well for a continuation of africa s growth recovery

reverse gender gap in schooling in bangladesh insights from urban and rural households this paper documents a reverse gender gap in secondary schooling outcomes in bangladesh drawing upon several rounds of nationally representative household survey data in terms of enrolment status and years of schooling completed boys are found to lag behind girls in the rural as well as in the urban area within the urban sample the gender gap is widest in the non metropolitan area these findings are robust to extensive control for demand and supply side determinants of schooling and remain unchanged even when we use a within household estimator we consider one hypothesis namely gender differentiated response to a conditional cash transfer program to reconcile the findings of this reverse gender gap

differential adoption of modern rice technology and regional wage differential in nepal in nepal which consists of ecologically distinct regions the concentration of the adoption of modern rice varieties in the favourable rice growing areas of the country has raised fears that regional income disparities have widened this study shows that greater demand for hired labour due to the adoption of modern rice varieties has induced permanent and seasonal migration from unfavourable to favourable areas this appears to have largely equalised average wage rates across different production environments thus as far as labour income is concerned benefits from the modern varieties have been widely shared

informed speculation with imperfect competition competitive rational expectations models have the unsatisfactory property dubbed the schizophrenia problem by hellwig that each trader takes the equilibrium price as given despite the fact that he influences that price an examination of information aggregation in a non competitive rational expectations model using a nash equilibrium in demand functions shows that the schizophrenia problem is avoided by having each trader take into account the effect his demand has on the equilibrium price given a distribution of private information across traders prices reveal less information than in the competition equilibrium and prices no longer become fully informative in the limit as noise trading vanishes or as traders become risk neutral with small traders the model may become one of monopolistic competition not perfect competition in contrast to the competitive model a reasonable model of endogenous acquisition of costly private information is obtained even when traders are risk neutral

efficiency of large double auctions we consider large double auctions with private values values need be neither symmetric nor independent multiple units may be owned or desired participation may be stochastic we introduce a very mild notion of a little independence we prove that all nontrivial equilibria of auctions that satisfy this notion are asymptotically efficient for any alpha 0 inefficiency disappears at rate 1 n 2 alpha