occupational choice and the process of development this paper models economic development as a process of institutional transformation by focusing on the interplay between agents occupational decisions and the distribution of wealth because of capital market imperfections poor agents choose working for a wage over self employment and wealthy agents become entrepreneurs who monitor workers only with sufficient inequality however will there be employment contracts otherwise there is either subsistence or self employment thus in static equilibrium the occupational structure depends on distribution since the latter is itself endogenous we demonstrate the robustness of this result by extending the model dynamically and studying examples in which initial wealth distributions have long run effects in one case the economy develops either widespread cottage industry self employment or factory production employment contracts depending on the initial distribution in the other example it develops into prosperity or stagnation

the ambiguous impact of inequality on local resource management abstract the impact of inequality on the ability of human groups to undertake successful collective action is investigated with special reference to overexploitation of common property resources in voluntary provision problems on the one hand inequality has an ambiguous impact on the feasibility of the efficient outcome even though better endowed agents contribute more to collective action in regulated settings on the other hand inequality tends to reduce the acceptability of available regulatory schemes and therefore to make collective action more difficult

union effects on municipal employment and wages a longitudinal approach this article examines municipal union employment and wage effects in a sample of police fire sanitation streets and highways and finance and control departments from approximately 900 u s cities during 1977 80 cross section results for 1980 suggest positive union contract effects on fire fighter and sanitation employment and wages consistent with demand shifts due to union political influence in municipal bargaining i then model potential omitted variables as nonstationary fixed effects and apply longitudinal models to estimation of employment and wage changes between 1977 and 1980 the longitudinal results provide little support for the demand shift hypothesis

the role of the desire for union status in the decision to enter local government job queues the us evidence following a two stage bivariate probit approach this study estimates local government and union job queues in a simultaneous equations framework by relaxing the restrictive assumption of independence between the worker s queuing and the employer s hiring decisions it overcomes a major limitation of most of the earlier job queue estimates the results indicate that the worker s queuing decision for local government jobs in the united states is determined partly by the desire for unionized employment the converse however is not true seniority with the current employer emerges as a significant determinant of both workers queuing and employers hiring decisions furthermore local governments act as model employers by being more likely to hire minorities and females from the pool of job applicants

federal and union job queues further evidence from the us labour market recent research on union differentials suggests that although the premium to unionization is higher in the private sector it can hardly be ignored in the federal sector consequently the nature and length of the federal queue may differ between union and non union sectors similarly the union queue may not necessarily be homogeneous between federal and private sectors we estimate separate queues for federal union federal non union and private union jobs from the same sample this avoids the problem of simultaneity between the federal queue and the union queue in addition it explores several important differences that exist between these queues

how does parental leave affect fertility and return to work evidence from two natural experiments this paper analyzes the effects of changes in the duration of paid job protected parental leave on mothers higher order fertility and postbirth labor market careers identification is based on a major austrian reform increasing the duration of parental leave from one year to two years for any child born on or after july 1 1990 we find that mothers who give birth to their first child immediately after the reform have more second children than prereform mothers and that extended parental leave significantly reduces return to work employment and earnings also decrease in the short run but not in the long run fertility and work responses vary across the population in ways suggesting that both cash transfers and job protection are relevant increasing parental leave for a future child increases fertility strongly but leaves short run postbirth careers relatively unaffected partially reversing the 1990 extension a second 1996 reform improves employment and earnings while compressing the time between births

does paternity leave reduce fertility abstract we find that the introduction of two weeks of paid paternity leave in spain in 2007 led to delays in subsequent fertility following a regression discontinuity design and using rich administrative data we show that parents who were just entitled to the new paternity leave took longer to have another child compared to just ineligible parents we also show that older eligible couples were less likely to have an additional child within the following six years after the introduction of the reform we provide evidence in support of two potentially complementary channels behind the negative effects on subsequent fertility first fathers increasing involvement in childcare led to higher labor force attachment among mothers this may have raised the opportunity cost of an additional child we also find that men reported lower desired fertility after the reform possibly due to their increased awareness of the costs of childrearing or to a shift in preferences from child quantity to quality

union organizing costs and benefits this paper examines the costs and benefits to current union members in manufacturing of programs to organize the unorganized the marginal cost of organizing an additional employee in constant dollars is estimated for a sample of unions between 1964 and 1977 the primary benefit of organizing that is quantifiable is the extent to which the maintenance or extension of union coverage permits the maintenance of or increase in the union wage estimates of this benefit are derived from previous econometric research linking the union wage to the percentage of the industry organized this single benefit is found to be larger than the estimated marginal cost of extending union coverage in 19 of 20 manufacturing industries

common property institutions and sustainable governance of resources abstract the literature on common property based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend using three of the more comprehensive such studies and with an extensive review of writings on the commons this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task for a way out the paper examines the relative merits of statistical comparative and case study approaches to studying the commons it ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection construction of causal mechanisms and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single case analyses such steps are necessary for a coherent empirically relevant theory of the commons

reserving time for daddy the consequences of fathers quotas daddy quotas that reserve some parental leave for fathers are increasingly common in developed nations but it is unclear whether fathers respond to the binding constraints or the labeling effect

job queues and the union status of workers this paper develops a model of the determination of the union status of workers that allows for the possibility of queuing for union jobs the empirical results derived using a sample from the university of michigan panel study of income dynamics are supportive of the queuing hypothesis the no queue model can be rejected using a likelihood ratio test this suggests that a simple probit or logit model for union status is misspecified because it is not based on any consistent behavioral theory an important implication of the model is that because most new entrants to the labor market prefer union jobs but cannot get them and because accrual of nonunion seniority makes workers progressively less likely to desire union jobs the union status of workers is largely determined by their success in being selected from the queue early in their working life

the determinants of workers union status evidence from the national longitudinal surveys using data from the 1980 wave of the young men nls sample this paper provides estimates of the queue model developed by farber to explain the process of union status determination the use of nls data largely avoids the censoring problem encountered by farber in estimating his model and permits direct estimation of crucial probabilities associated with the model despite important differences between econometric methodologies and the data sets analyzed the nls results support farber s conclusion that queueing for vacancies in existing union jobs is an important labor market phenomenon in particular supply constraints on the availability of union jobs are found to dominate worker preferences in explaining differences in extent of unionization by occupation and region but not race

will the stork return to europe and japan understanding fertility within developed nations we seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household particularly with regards to child care and home production we observe three distinct phases in women s status generated by the gradual increase in women s workforce opportunities in the earliest phase characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s in the united states women earn low wages relative to men and are expected to shoulder all of the child care at home as a result most women specialize in home production and raising children in an intermediate stage women have improved but not equal labor market opportunities but their household status lags women in this stage are still expected to do the majority of child care and household production increasing access to market work increases the opportunity cost of having children and fertility falls female labor force participation increases working women in this phase of development have the strongest disincentives to having additional children since the entire burden of child care falls on them in the final phase of development women s labor market opportunities begin to equal those of men in addition the increased household bargaining power that comes from more equal wages results in much higher if not gender equal male participation in household production female labor force participation is higher than in the intermediate phase the increased participation of men in the household also reduces the disincentives for women to have additional children and fertility rates rise compared to the intermediate phase the intermediate low fertility phase might describe japan italy and spain in the present day while the scandinavian countries the netherlands and the modern day united states may be entering the final phase after presenting the empirical evidence we predict that high income countries with the lowest fertility rates are likely to see an increase in fertility in the coming decades

government employment and the provision of fringe benefits this study uses individual level data from the united states to examine the influence of government employment on the provision of five major fringe benefits four of the five benefits are more likely to be provided to government workers than to their private sector counterparts unlike wage comparisons which typically find substantial overpayment only for federal workers the findings suggest that past wage differentials underestimate the true compensation advantage enjoyed by government workers

parental leave a policy evaluation of the swedish daddy month reform abstract many governments are making attempts to increase fathers share of parental leave in order to correct for unequal labor market outcomes using swedish data we ask whether fathers can be encouraged to take more parental leave in order to mitigate the negative consequences of mothers career interruptions the unique data stem from a reform of parental leave resulting in a clean natural experiment data comprise all children born before control group and after treatment group the date of implementation of the reform in cohorts of up to 27 000 newborns mothers and fathers we find strong short term effects of the incentives on male parental leave but no behavioral effects in the household fathers in the treatment group do not take larger shares of the leave taken for care of sick children which is our measure for household work we also investigate a second data set on fathers and mothers long term wages and employment without finding evidence for substantial effects of the reform

accounting for the decline in union membership 1950 1980 this study analyzes the components of the post 1950 trends in the share of the private work force organized by unions which rose from 1950 to 1954 and then fell steadily to 1980 the authors decompose the sources of growth and decline into changes in organizing activity success in certification elections losses from decertification elections and net growth due to economic causes the last a residual measure designed to capture the effect of factors such as plant closings layoffs and new hires they find that all factors except decertifications accounted for a substantial part of the decline since 1954 when the level of aggregate economic activity is held constant loss of membership due to other economic causes shows no downward trend a finding that challenges the view that the decline in the unionized share of the work force has been due primarily to a secular decline in employment in the strongly unionized industries

gender economics an assessment concerns about gender equality have jumped to the forefront of public debate in recent years and gender economics is slowly affirming its place as a major field of study this assessment examines where we are in terms of gender equality it reviews the theoretical foundations that can explain existing inequalities and documents the empirical findings supported by the theories identifying avenues for future research and providing a fruitful framework to think about the effectiveness of policies and interventions targeting gender inequality in doing so i provide the foundations against which the contributions in this issue can be placed

the influence of management consultants on the outcome of union certification elections this study examines the effect of management consultants on the probability of union victory in representation elections an analysis of data on 130 elections in retail grocery outlets shows that c

causal effects of paternity leave on children and parents reserving a share of the parental leave period for fathers is considered necessary in order to induce fathers to take leave and to increase men s participation in child rearing we investigate how a parental leave reform directed towards fathers affected leave taking and in turn children s and parents long term outcomes a paternal leave quota greatly increases the share of men taking paternity leave we find evidence that children s school performance improves as a result particularly in families where the father has higher education than the mother we find no evidence that paternity leave counters the traditional allocation of parents labor supply

union wage differentials in the public and private sectors a simultaneous equations specification the paper attempts to integrate new approaches to estimating union wage effects with the analysis of public private sector wage differentials estimates of the union differential in both public and private sectors allowing for the endogeneity of union status are presented the hypothesis that the recently measured rents to public sector employment primarily reflect the recent increase in unionization in that sector is examined and receives considerable empirical support there was evidence of positive selection into the union sector especially for private sector workers union status appears to be strongly influenced by the expected wage gain from joining the union sector

estimation of the us federal job queue in the presence of an endogenous union queue past research on the federal sector job queue fails to incorporate the important role of unioniz ation we estimate a two stage bivariate probit in which the willingness of a worker to queue for a union job enters the estimation of the federal queue we demonstrate that the failture to implement our approach may lead to the inappropriate conclusion that there does not exist a federal queue in the us labour market we identify the characteristics that lead workers to seek employment in the federal sector and as a byproduct also provide independent confirm ation of the presence of a queue for union jobs ability in bivariate probit models to examine job queues abowd and farber 1982 use poirier s technique and find evidence of a queue of workers waiting for union jobs they estimate separate equations determining which character istics make a worker more likely to enter the queue and which characteristics make a worker more likely to be chosen from the queue indeed farber 1983 leigh 1985 and heywood 1990 have all reaffirmed the existence of a union queue under varying degrees of partial observability recently venti 1987 krueger 1988 and heywood and mohanty 1990 have examined whether or not a queue exists for federal government jobs while this research confirms the existence of a federal queue it fails to incorporate the earlier research indicating the presence of a union queue indeed none of the authors controls for any dimension of unionization in the federal queue esti mates this failure is problematic for several related reasons first heywood and mohanty 1994 demonstrate that statistical confirmation of a federal job queue is highly sensitive to specification particularly the inclusion or exclusion of specific variables 2 second the federal sector is far more heavily unionized than the private sector see freeman 1986 1988 ichniowski 1988 and reder 1988 thus if the earlier research is correct and workers do queue for union

peer effects in program participation the influence of peers could play an important role in the take up of social programs however estimating peer effects has proven challenging given the problems of reflection correlated unobservables and endogenous group membership we overcome these identification issues in the context of paid paternity leave in norway using a regression discontinuity design our approach differs from existing literature which attempts to measure peer effects by exploiting random assignment to peer groups in contrast we study peer effects in naturally occurring peer groups but exploit random variation in the price of a social program for a subset of individuals fathers of children born after april 1 1993 in norway were eligible for one month of governmental paid paternity leave while fathers of children born before this cutoff were not there is a sharp increase in fathers taking paternity leave immediately after the reform with take up rising from 3 to 35 while this quasirandom variation changed the cost of paternity leave for some fathers and not others it did not directly affect the cost for the father s coworkers or brothers therefore any effect on the brother or the coworker can be attributed to the influence of the peer father in their network our key findings on peer effects are four fold first we find strong evidence for substantial peer effects of program participation in both workplace and family networks coworkers and brothers are 11 and 15 percentage points respectively more likely to take paternity leave if their peer father was induced to take up leave by the reform second the most likely mechanism is information transmission about costs and benefits including increased knowledge of how an employer will react third there is essential heterogeneity in the size of the peer effect depending on the strength of ties between peers highlighting the importance of duration intensity and frequency of social interactions fourth the estimated peer effect gets amplified over time with each subsequent birth exhibiting a snowball effect as the original peer father s influence cascades through a firm our findings demonstrate that peer effects can lead to long run equilibrium participation rates which are substantially higher than would otherwise be expected

commons regulation and rent seeking behavior the dilemma of pakistan s guzara forests curred over the past 120 years these forests known locally as guzara forests can be characterized as regulated commons the regulation by placing quantitative restrictions on felling aimed at an orderly exploitation of these forests on the surface the failure of regulation seems to be a simple case of enforcement failure however a closer look reveals a fairly complex picture in which factors such as the delineation of property rights and the rent seeking behavior of those subject to regulation as well as of the regulators themselves have contributed to the problems of these forests the evidence presented in this article shows that the way the regulation was devised gave rise to a discordant structure of property rights involving the government and the local inhabitants despite early signals that it could not be effectively enforced no rectifying change was introduced in the structure of rights which has persisted into the postcolonial era indeed there was a reversal of some potentially beneficial institutional changes that had been introduced toward the end of the colonial period while the process of degradation was set in motion by discordances that arose in the process of delineating property rights it is the theory of rentseeking behavior that provides an adequate explanation of its persistence as well as of the subsequent reversals an effective response to the problem of the guzara forests must take account of two additional features in the regulation of these forests first in addition to the common property externality that leads to the tragedy of the commons these forests also display interjurisdictional externality by virtue of their location second a common

the effects of corporate strategy and workplace innovations on union representation this paper explores the decline of union membership within partially organized firms using data from two conference board surveys of labor relations practices 1977 and 1983 the authors test a series of propositions concerning the effects of corporate industrial relations values and strategies and workplace innovations on union representation and membership the results show that whereas the average firm reduced the number of workers represented by unions by approximately 977 from 1977 to 1983 firms that placed a high priority on union avoidance reduced union representation by an average of 2 647 workers over the same period moreover the typical firm that emphasized union avoidance reduced the probability that its new facilities would be organized from approximately 15 percent to less than 1 percent

high value forests hidden economies and elite capture evidence from forest user groups in nepal s terai abstract this paper argues that the policy on decentralised forest management in nepal informed by experiences from the middle hills overlooks the complexity and conflictual potential of establishing effective and equitable user groups in the terai our case study evidence from west central terai suggests that the combination of high forest value and weak institutional control mechanisms create opportunities for local elites to siphon off substantial shares of the benefits generated by valuable local forests the rents created by autonomous fug policies give rise to stark distributional biases a scramble for control and institutional instability we estimate the extent of elite capture and argue that institutional reform needs are intimately linked to controlling what we call the hidden economy of forest user groups

inequality and conservation on the local commons a theoretical exercise to analyse the effect of asset inequality on co operation within a group we consider a twoplayer nonco operative model of conservation of a common pool resource overexploitation by one user affects another s payoff by reducing the next period catch we give necessary and sufficient conditions such that conservation is a nash equilibrium and show that increasing inequality does not in general favour full conservation however once inequality is sufficiently great further inequality can raise efficiency thus the relationship between inequality and economic efficiency is u shaped finally we analyse the implications for conservation if players have earning opportunities outside the commons the daily livelihood of vast masses of the rural poor in many countries depends on the success with which common pool resources cprs such as forest resources grazing lands in shore fisheries and irrigation water are managed and on the environmental consequences of their management understanding the factors that lead to success or failure of community management of these resources is thus critical to rural development cpr management is a collective action dilemma a situation in which mutual cooperation is collectively rational for the group as a whole but individual cooperation is not necessarily individually rational for each member one factor that has not always been recognised as critical to the outcome of collective action dilemmas is heterogeneity among the resource users in this paper our attention will be largely restricted to a single but potent kind of heterogeneity inequality in asset ownership olson 1965 hypothesised that inequality might favour the provision of a public good

what is the case for paid maternity leave abstract we assess the case for generous government funded maternity leave focusing on a series of policy reforms in norway that expanded paid leave from 18 to 35 weeks we find the reforms do not crowd out unpaid leave and that mothers spend more time at home without a reduction in family income the increased maternity leave has little effect on children s schooling parental earnings and labor force participation completed fertility marriage or divorce the expansions whose net costs amounted to 0 25 of gdp have negative redistribution properties and imply a considerable increases in taxes at a cost to economic efficiency

are forest incomes sustainable firewood and timber extraction and productivity in community managed forests in nepal summary lack of combined forest productivity and income studies means there is scant evidence for the sustainability of rural household level forest incomes in developing countries this study examines levels and patterns of forest increment wood product extraction and household level incomes in three community managed forests in nepal using data from 240 permanent sample plots and a structured household survey conducted in 2006 and 2009 n 507 and 558 respectively we find that analyses of sustainability need to recognize the complexity of forest stand utilization and that there is considerable scope by altering how existing local forest management rules are implemented for increasing rural household forest incomes while keeping harvesting levels sustainable

a new econometric model of union threat effects the union threat effect is the propensity of non union employers to resist union organization by raising wages this study introduces an empirical model of the non union employer s optimal wage in the presence of threat effects estimates of an equation of a firm s unionization probability provide key variables unlike previous models this specification dervies directly from a theoritical model separstes threat effects from the influence of other union non union spillovers and efficiency wages and includes many factors affecting the probability of unionization wage equation estimates reveal that the predicted threat of unionization did not significantly raise non union wages in the united states in 1980

contraction and expansion the divergence of private sector and public sector unionism in the united states the institutional structure of the american labor market changed remarkably from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1980s in the 50s and 60s trade unions seemed permanently established in the private sector of the economy a third of nonagricultur al wage and salary workers and over half of blue collar workers were union members hundreds of thousands of workers voted annually in national labor relations board nlrb representation elections to join unions most large firms sought stable collective bargaining relations with their unions by contrast in the public sector only 10 12 percent of workers were union members fewer were covered by collective bargaining contracts and most experts regarded public employees as intrinsically nonorganizable according to afl cio president george meany it was impossible to bargain collectively with the government kramer 1962 p 14 the massive contraction of unionism in the private sector and expansion in the public sector in the 1970s and 1980s see exhibit 1 has produced an utterly different situation today in the private sector the proportion of wage and salary workers in unions plummeted to 14 percent in 1986 a level comparable to that in the great depression only a minuscule number of workers joined unions through nlrb elections and national companies openly proclaimed their intent to establish a union free environment by contrast in the public sector over a third of the work force was unionized some 40 percent were covered by collective contracts 1 and 1 estimates of organization in the public sector differ somewhat among sources though all data show greater organization than in the private sector see freeman ichniowski and zax forthcoming for a detailed analysis of the various statistics

trends in union organizing expenditures 1953 1977 this paper tests the charge by some observers that one reason for the decline in unions share of private sector employment has been a decline in their commitment to growth the author presents several measures of the organizing expenditures of 27 national unions representing about one half of all union members in this country over the 1953 77 period these data show that organizing expenditures rose significantly over that period whether measured in current or constant dollars although they declined slightly as a proportion of total union expenditures

the public finance potential of community forestry in nepal abstract this paper explores the public finance potential of community forestry in nepal on the basis of a comprehensive dataset on forest revenue and expenditures of 41 randomly selected community forest user groups cfug from gorkha district the results show that cfug income distribution is highly skewed the high and low income one third of cfugs in the sample account for 74 3 and 4 1 of the total income respectively cfug income depends on age of the cfug institution cfug membership size and in particular on whether the community forest features the valuable timber species sal shorea robusta c f gaertn and or chir pine pinus roxburghii sarg cfug expenditure pattern is also highly skewed with 85 2 of all public services and infrastructure financed by the one third high income cfugs cfug financing of public services and infrastructure is shaped by income management costs and socio political and contextual factors such as whether the cfug jurisdiction covers several wards and the presence of existing public infrastructure in the community finally results show that the amounts of revenue generated through community forestry are negligible when compared to households private gains from extraction of products from community forests indicating a limited potential for redistribution of benefits under the current taxation system

baby steps the gender division of childcare during the covid 19 pandemic the nature and scale of the shocks to the demand for and the supply of home childcare during the covid 19 pandemic provide a unique opportunity to increase our understanding of the division of home labour and the determinants of specialization within the household we collected real time data on daily lives to document the impact of measures to control covid 19 on uk families with children under the age of 12 we document that these families have been doing the equivalent of a working week in childcare with mothers bearing most of the burden the additional hours of childcare done by women are less sensitive to their employment than they are for men leaving many women juggling work and a lot more childcare with likely adverse effects on their mental health and future careers however some households those in which men have not been working have taken greater steps towards an equal allocation offering the prospect of sharing the burden of childcare more equally in the future

an analysis of public and private sector wages allowing for endogenous choices of both government and union status a general selection model is estimated in which workers select across four labor markets private nonunion private union public nonunion and public union evidence is found of positive selection bias in the private nonunion sector and of negative selection bias in the public union sector union wage differentials in the public and private sectors as well as public private wage differentials are then calculated two different types of wage differentials are contrasted we discuss when it is appropriate to use each type of differential

the rise and fall of unions the public sector and the private as of the late 1980s american unionism as a whole has been in decline for about thirty years this decline has been concentrated in the unions serving workers in the private sector and contrasts sharply with the growth of public sector unions during much of the same period this paper attempts to explain these divergent trends but takes their existence as given by decline or rise of unionism i refer to changes in the percentage relative number of union adherents among a specified group of workers though i believe that movements in the relative number of union adherents have run parallel to broader but more vague movements of union influence the reader must draw such inferences for himself as best he can a union adherent is assumed to be both a dues payer and covered by a collective bargaining contract possible differences between these two concepts of union affiliation are unimportant for this paper individuals are assumed always to act as if they had compared the costs and benefits of union adherence and chosen adherence if the benefits were greater and otherwise if the opposite applied as used here costs and benefits are limited to hourly compensation wages and fringes employment opportunities and working conditions while ideological preferences undoubtedly influence a small minority of workers it is assumed that such individuals are too few to affect the trends analysed 1 the above assumptions obscure important interdependencies among the decisions of individual workers and those of an employee and his employer for example if an 1i do not deny either that changes in attitudes toward the relative desirability of working under union conditions may have occurred from time to time or that such changes might be of interest however i assume that the dominant factors affecting movements in the quantity of union adherents are changes in the benefits and costs of unionization particularly hourly compensation and employment opportunities

benefit sharing among local resource users the role of property rights skewed distributions of benefits from natural resources can fuel social exclusion and conflict threatening sustainability this paper analyzes how user group property rights to harvest forest products affect the distribution of benefits from those products within user groups we argue that groups with recognized harvesting rights share benefits more equally among group members than groups without such rights we test this argument with data from 350 forest user groups in 14 developing countries our results suggest that securing harvesting rights for local user groups can contribute to more equal benefit sharing especially in ethnically homogenous groups

where have all the union members gone this paper examines trends in union membership during the twentieth century the hypothesis is advanced that the provision of certain social welfare benefits by government substitutes for the private provision by unions thereby reducing the attractiveness of union membership the empirical implications of this hypothesis are examined using time series data on aggregate union membership for the period 1904 80 and using pooled state data for the period 1964 80 these latter data are used to examine the effect of departures from the traditional doctrine of employment at will both the time series and the cross section evidence suggest that government supply of union like services reduces union membership

does participation in common pool resource management help the poor a social cost benefit analysis of joint forest management in jharkhand india abstract joint forest management jfm has succeeded in halting forest degradation in india but its poverty reduction objective has not fully been evaluated previously this paper compares jfm forests and government managed forests to assess their respective net social benefits to different groups of local villagers it shows that the jfm regime reflects the social preference of the rural nonpoor and that the poor are net losers over a 40 year time horizon future plans for jfm need to include suitable compensatory mechanisms to reduce the poverty of the poorest within a village