agricultural economics challenges to the profession anniversaries whether related to age marital status or the life of an organization are highly arbitrary anniversaries merely serve to accentuate the obvious and to create benchmarks in the continuum of life the fact that the american agricultural economics association is approaching its seventy fifth year might not merit more than passing comment except that agricultural economics may be moving into the most important and possibly the most turbulent period in the history of the profession the work done by agricultural economists and the decisions made within the profession in the next few years promise to be extraordinarily influential not only in terms of the future of agricultural economics but in terms of the welfare of the entire human family

intra metropolitan variation in earnings and labor market discrimination an econometric analysis of the atlanta labor market one of the most enduring debates concerning racial differences in earnings is whether housing segregation within metropolitan areas adversely affects the employment opportunities of urban blacks two possible negative effects can be listed first the decentralization of lower skilled jobs combined with the suburban residential exclusion of low income households may have caused wage rates within the suburban labor market to rise above those paid within the central city if this is the case and if housing market discrimination restricts the relative ability of blacks to offer their labor supply to suburban employers then at least part of the racial difference in earnings can be attributed to housing segregation second housing segregation may cause private sector labor market discrimination to be more severe within the central city in comparison to suburban areas as suggested by becker s taste for discriminating model 3 a relatively large black labor supply within the central city may require a lower black to white earnings ratio in order to induce prejudiced employers to hire large numbers of black workers with the workforce of most central cities becoming increasingly black this may be an important factor in explaining racial differences in earnings surprisingly while variation in discrimination among occupations regions industries and sectors have been examined in some detail spatial differences in discrimination between the central city and suburbs have largely escaped analysis in this paper the earnings of private sector workers broken down by occupation race and sex are compared between worksite areas encompassing the metropolitan area of atlanta georgia while an extensive literature can be found on interregional differences in earnings little evidence exists on the spatial variation in wage rates within metropolitan regions in fact virtually nothing has been done on this issue since the classic study of the chicago labor market by rees and shultz 19

introduction imperfect information and rural credit markets puzzles and policy perspectives rural credit markets have been at the center of policy intervention in developing countries over the past forty years many governments supported by multilateral and bilateral aid agencies have devoted considerable resources to supplying cheap credit to farmers in a myriad of institutional settings the results of many of these interventions have been disappointing and one explanation for this must be that they were based on an inadequate understanding of the workings of rural credit markets the articles in this symposium issue are devoted to empirical and theoretical investigations of rural credit markets in the framework of the imperfect information paradigm the authors show how this framework is useful not only in explaining puzzling features of these markets but also in providing a policy perspective to assess the successes and failures of specific interventions

labor migration and risk aversion in less developed countries in this paper we question the pioneering work of todaro which states that rural to urban labor migration in less developed countries ldcs is an individual response to a higher urban expected income we demonstrate that rural to urban labor migration is perfectly rational even if urban expected income is lower than rural income we achieve this under a set of fairly stringent conditions an individual decision making entity a one period planning horizon and global risk aversion we obtain the result that a small chance of reaping a high reward is sufficient to trigger rural to urban labor migration

media exposure and internal migration evidence from indonesia abstract this paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in indonesia we exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure our estimates reveal important long and short run effects an increase of one standard deviation in the number of private tv channels received in the area of residence as an adolescent reduces future inter provincial migration by 1 7 2 7 percentage points and all migration inter and intra provincial by 3 9 6 8 percentage points short run effects are similar in magnitude we also show that respondents less exposed to private television are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups in society as we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information these findings are consistent with indonesian citizens over estimating the net gains from internal migration when access to television is limited

human capital minimum wage and unemployment a harris todaro model of a developed open economy in many developed countries unemployment is a serious and persistent problem although the character of this problem is highly complex one of its features which can easily be observed is the substantially higher incidence of unemployment among unskilled workers than among those who are skilled a possible explanation for this is the existence of an institutionally given minimum wage which exceeds the market clearing wage for unskilled labour but lies below the equilibrium wage for skilled labour moreover for those who find themselves unemployed because of the minimum wage the principal source of job opportunities tends to be the services sector of the economy which is relatively intensive in its use of unskilled labour the objective of this paper is to develop a simple model of a small open economy based on these observations and to examine the policy implications that emerge from it in connection with the unemployment problem the focus of the analysis however is not on the cyclical aspects of this problem but rather on its steady state nature the basic structure of the model is as follows our economy has two sectors engaged in the production of consumption goods one of these goods is assumed to be traded internationally and the other is non traded following rodriguez 1975 i draw a further distinction between the two sectors nontraded goods which may be regarded as services are assumed to require the use of only capital and unskilled labour as inputs while the traded goods sector uses only capital and skilled labour skills are viewed as productive human capital which can be acquired through formal training in order to sharpen the focus of our analysis on the process of human capital formation i will ignore the problems of physical capital accumulation and population growth the economy is assumed to be small facing a given world price of traded goods as well as a given rental at which the supply of capital from abroad is infinitely elastic in contrast with the assumption of perfect capital mobility neither type of labour is mobile internationally with only one traded commodity and one mobile factor international trade for this economy amounts to an exchange of the single traded consumption good for the services of capital at fixed terms of trade section i of the paper presents the model and solves for the stationary composition of the labour force i e skilled v unskilled and the equilibrium values of relative factor and commodity prices section ii introdluces an institutionally given minimum wage which is binding only in the market for unskilled labour in the spirit of harris and todaro 1970 it is assumed that

intraurban wage gradients evidence by race gender occupational class and sector abstract a general functional form is used to estimate intraurban wage gradients for various groups of workers with 1980 data from the philadelphia detroit and boston metropolitan areas as predicted by the standard monocentric model of urban land use the following results are obtained for most groups of white workers negative and statistically significant wage gradients steeper wage gradients for higher wage earners and an increase in the steepness of wage gradients as the cbd is approached positive wage gradients are not found for black workers despite the fact that suburban employers hire large numbers of these workers who reside within the central city this result is taken as support for the hypothesis that blacks have been disadvantaged by job suburbanization and continued housing market segregation

the impact of alternative forms of state regulation of at t on direct dial long distance telephone rates federal and state regulatory agencies have traditionally used rate of return regulation to set profit and rate levels for utilities a price cap framework in which the regulatory agency sets a maximum rate below which the regulated utility has pricing flexibility is possibly a more efficient alternative to rate of return regulation this article presents an econometric analysis that compares at t s prices of intrastate long distance telephone service in states that allow at t pricing flexibility with those in states that do not the results of this analysis suggest that at t s daytime evening nighttime and weekend rates are significantly lower in states that allow pricing flexibility than in states that use rate of return regulation

trade education and growth the small country case this paper develops optimal educational and trade policies for a small open economy capable of growth a theoretical structure previously used for the analysis of education and growth in closed economies manning 1975 1976 1978 1979a 1979b 1981b is extended to do this the analysis is aggregative it differs from that of a similar problem by aarrestad 1978 by allowing for heterogeneity of the labor force recently henry 1979 and henry and manning 1980 developed the model of this paper to permit the endogenous determination of international commodity prices but only in the context of balanced growth all of these papers belong to a small literature on aggregative aspects of education and growth other examples of which include aarrestad 1975 hu 1976 razin 1972a 1972b tu 1969 1970 and uzawa 1965 oniki and uzawa 1965 is the classic extension of the heckscher ohlin theory of international trade to permit growth in models of their type production possibilities are given instantaneously and are altered over time by factor accumulation educational policy affects the production possibility set in two ways an increase in educational activity reduces the factors available to produce traded goods and so shrinks the production possibility set immediately in the longer term the level of skill is altered so changing the production possibility set both the size and shape of the production possibility set are determined statically and dynamically by educational policy mcmillan 1978 has recently presented a model of public intermediate goods trade and growth with the same property a problem like this is considered in manning 1981a for a general model of capital accumulation and growth the structure of this paper is as follows the model and optimality conditions are first presented growth is then analyzed and it is found that specialization is the most likely pattern of production a deeper investigation of the economics of the model explains this conclusion some concluding remarks are then made details of the lengthy mathematical proofs of two propositions are relegated to a mathematical appendix

on agglomeration economies and optimal migration abstract in this paper we identify socially optimal levels of rural to urban migration after identifying the reason that private actions do not add up to the social optimum we offer an analysis of instruments which could confer efficiency gains by closing the gap between the privately efficient and socially optimal urban concentrations

a frontier approach to measuring the effect of market discrimination a housing illustration one area of particular interest to analysts and policymakers concerned with poverty and discrimination has been the housing market since world war ii housing has been a focus for antipoverty policies and therefore an area in which discrimination could not be tolerated however even though the civil rights act of 1968 expressly prohibits the offering of housing to nonwhites at terms that are different than those afforded whites it has been clearly demonstrated that discrimination continues to be a real problem in both the rental and owner occupied segments of the housing market 17 as james heilbrun points out in his summary of the 1977 survey of housing market practices conducted by the department of housing and urban development

the alternative funding of agricultural economics research the experience of the past decade and challenge to the profession christensen and robinson carefully document the relative decline in federal funding support for economics research in the state agricultural experiment stations saes within the category of federal funding they note the sharp erosion of support from csrs sources relative to that provided by usda cooperative grants and agreements and by allocations from other federal non usda agencies the obvious implication is that alternative nonfederal sources have become of increasing importance to the funding of economics research programs in saes institutions the central question is whether the relative shifts in funding sources might have an impact on the research contributions of individuals and departments and if so might the impact be for the better or for the worse it is unlikely that there is a generalizable valid response to the query yet it may justly deserve our serious consideration for it is not difficult to accept the general notion that shifting sources of research support are likely to have exerted incremental changes in research agendas and in the kind of research that is now supportable in departments of agricultural economics in the mid 1980s and should the trends continue the forces in motion might seriously influence how we go about meeting the substantive research challenges of the 1990s this paper seeks to establish some albeit a quite limited basis for further discussion by examining selected aspects of recent changes in support for economics research and by providing initial comments on alternative funding opportunities and on challenges for agricultural economists and for programs of agricultural economics research changes in economics research funding 1971 73 to 1981 83

strategic investment and conjectural variations abstract this paper analyzes investment decisions under the alternative assumptions of competitive collusive open loop non cooperative and feedback non cooperative behavior steady state capital stocks prices and outputs are obtained and compared the paper shows that one of the linear feedback equilibrium decision rule coefficients is a dynamic version of a contemporaneous conjectural variation the same decision rule coefficients are shown to imply a particular value for the contemporaneous conjecture the implied conjecture embodies subgame perfection and approaches the competitive value as the number of firms in the industry increases

testing static oligopoly models conduct and cost in the sugar industry 1890 1914 we explore the widespread methodology of using demand information to infer market conduct and unobserved cost components under the hypothesis of static oligopoly behavior direct measures of marginal cost and conduct indicating small market power serve as benchmarks the more competitive models yield better cost estimates the best cost estimates occur when conduct is estimated as a free parameter which in turn only slightly underestimates our direct measure it also tracks the decline in market power accompanying the industry s structural changes the methodology is largely validated although partial cost information can improve its predictive power conclusions are robust to demand function

product substitutability and competition in long distance telecommunications i introduction the growing availability of detailed firm level data and advances in econometric techniques have led to the estimation of industry structural parameters in order to evaluate proposed policy changes hausman leonard and zona 1994 in particular estimates of own and cross elasticities of demand are used to draw inferences about competition under various assumptions about producer behavior e g hausman 1994 and stern 1994 generating estimates of structural parameters requires not only price and demand data but often requires firm level factor price data to be used as instrumental variables even when firm level factor price data are available they may not fulfill the independence requirements of residual demand estimators because the competitors purchase from the same input market because the data requirements for the estimation of marshallian demand elasticities are less severe they may yield unbiased estimates residual demand elasticities can then be constructed under various assumptions about the extent of pricing coordination among producers this article carries out this process for the u s long distance telecommunications industry a unique and detailed data set that includes firm level output price and factor price information is employed the analysis focuses on the so called basket 1 services which are ordinary interstate and international message toll service operator assistance and calling card service these services are generally regarded as the ones in which at t is likely to possess the most market power despite the detailed nature of the available data some of the factor prices are shown to lead to biased estimates when used as instrumental variables results from specifications that omit these instruments indicate that at t faces a marshallian demand elasticity of about 10 residual demand elasticities are estimated for various assumptions regarding the degree of pricing coordination in the industry for plausible assumptions regarding the degree of price coordination among firms at t s residual demand elasticity is likely below 5 implying an industry dead weight loss of less than 1 5 revenues since the courts and the federal communications commission fcc opened u s long distance telecommunications to competitive entry the number and size of entrants has grown to the point that at t once the legal monopolist now supplies less than half of the total market the fcc s incremental approach to deregulating at t decreased regulatory oversight in specific product markets as competition became more vigorous and culminated in its 1995 decision to declare at t nondominant essentially deregulating at t the results of this analysis tend to support this decision nevertheless debate over the extent of competition continues primarily to evaluate the claim that allowing the bell operating companies bocs into these markets will yield consumer benefits from still more vigorous competition this analysis suggests that these benefits are likely to be small hence as brennan 1987 points out the case for permitting boc entry into long distance should focus on whether they are likely to provide the service at lower cost or whether they have scope for discriminatory actions rather than on whether they will make the long distance market substantially more competitive ii previous studies the extent of competition in the u s long distance industry and the effects of price regulation have been the subject of policy interest and the focus of a few empirical studies macavoy s 1995 analyses lead him to conclude that the industry is increasingly collusive his event study finds that a portfolio of mci and sprint stock realizes positive abnormal returns when an at t price increase is reported while this indicates that the industry is imperfectly competitive it could result from either unilateral or coordinated pricing behavior

a sequential study of migration and job search this paper designs a multiarmed bandit mab sequential model for the analysis of the migration job search process the implications either are compatible with well known migration behavior or when novel are also plausible for example regions with large wage variability attract migrants and regions with large nonpecuniary returns increase both in migration and out migration a major advantage of this approach is the relative ease with which martingale estimators can be derived from the martingale structure of the model these martingale methods are exemplified for the return migration phenomenon

estimating the costs of partial coverage rent controls a stochastic frontier approach this paper presents a modified frontier approach to estimate hedonic regressions for data on rent controlled and uncontrolled apartments this new approach allows the author to estimate the size of the subsidy from landlords to tenants of rent controlled apartments in addition this method provides the first estimates of the amount by which controls increase rents for uncontrolled apartments the study shows that in new york city in 1968 rents in the controlled sector would rise 22 to 26 percent upon decontrol while rents in the uncontrolled sector would fall about 22 to 25 percent upon removal of rent controls copyright 1993 by mit press

human capital graduate migration and innovation in british regions with the aid of a geographical information system our paper constructs a three stage least squares simultaneous equation model to investigate the interrelationships between the interregional flows of human capital and the innovation dynamism of a region in order to do this we model the interregional migration behaviour of high quality british university graduates from university into first employment and we relate these human capital flows to both the labour market characteristics and the knowledge characteristics of the employment regions this is done for all industries and separately for just high technology industries our results indicate that for england and wales there is a two way causality between the interregional human capital employment migration flows of recent university graduates and the innovation performance of regions however the results for great britain as a whole depend on whether london is included and scotland is excluded we find little or no support for the argument that the presence of local universities or small firms promotes regional innovation

on the shadow wage of urban jobs in less developed countries abstract this paper examines the relationship between the social opportunity cost associated with the creation of an urban job i e the shadow wage and the market wage taking into consideration induced rural to urban migration we suggest that the shadow wage is lower than the market wage first when agents are risk averse and second even if they are risk neutral but their contemporaneous consumption function is concave and the social value of savings exceeds the social value of consumption as is likely to be the case in less developed countries

the emergence of migration theory and a suggested new direction abstract the literature on internal labour migration is surveyed using a fourfold taxonomic scheme the potential migrant as presented in the existing literature can be viewed as a supplier of labour an investor in human capital and a consumer of regional amenities such as public goods the paper develops a fourth approach which treats the household rather than the individual as the migrating unit and which views the potential migrant as a producer of home produced commodities the continuities as well as the contrasts between the four approaches are discussed in the paper

funding for agricultural economics needs and strategies for the 1980s public funding for work in agricultural economics teaching research and extension appears to be declining in real terms at the start of the 1980s following two decades of real increases there is a call for reductions in spending by government at all levels a call for less taxes and for public accountability at the same time there are more students in the courses that agricultural economists teach there is a renewed interest in agricultural business curricula graduate study in agricultural economics is attracting new students from the biological and social sciences as well as agriculture the demand for competent applied economists particularly agricultural economists with advanced degrees appears to be growing the anomaly of apparent increases in demand coupled with declining public funding presents a challenge to the profession it should be one for which economists are prepared after all we regularly teach students about economic decision rules for allocating scarce resources among competing ends the political environment requires that we take our classroom lessons seriously and put them in practice in our own operations this paper explores several approaches and strategies for funding work in agricultural economics and more effective use of current resources we begin with an overview of changes in funding during the decade of the 1970s drawing upon secondary data and results of a mail questionnaire sent to agricultural economics department chairmen and administrators in the spring of 1981 we turn then to discussion of the demand current and prospective for services of agricultural economists and the capacity of current institutions to service that demand we conclude with discussion of funding strategies and recommendations on actions which might be pursued by the aaea

underpaid and overworked measuring the effect of imperfect information on wages this paper investigates the degree of shortfall between the wages workers earn and what they could earn assuming perfect or costless information in the labor market we use the stochastic frontier regression technique to estimate the degree of shortfall found in wages on an individual basis the paper tests in addition a number of hypotheses supplied by search theory in this context the results generally confirm the propositions from search theory and indicate that on the average worker wages fall short of worker potential wages by approximately 10 percent

does regulation improve small farmers access to brazilian rural credit abstract brazilian policymakers attempted to counter the inherent tendency for concentration in subsidized rural credit programs by requiring banks to lend a specified volume to small farmers inferences about the regulation s success are drawn from farm level panel data from sao paulo in the early 1980s membership in the target group should have a positive effect in an access rule relating farmers characteristics to their probability of receiving credit when allowing for time invariant individual effects possibly correlated with target group indicators tests indicate that the regulation had no effect subsidiary results cast doubt on the efficacy of a broader set of regulations

two way capital flows cross hauling in a model of foreign investment this paper presents a simple model of a small open economy which is open to both commodity trade and foreign investment of a sector specific kind and which exhibits the phenomenon of cross hauling or reverse flows of internationally mobile capital in two different sectors the model which assumes that a single domestic factor is combined with internationally mobile but sector specific capital in each of two sectors one of which produces a non traded good appears to be the simplest possible which permits cross hauling as an endogenous phenomenon

labor force migration and allocative efficiency in the united states the roles of information and psychic costs this paper examines the relative importance of information psychic and other costs of relocation as mitigating factors off sets to spatial earnings differentials within the migration decision the method employed for this examination is based upon 1 observation of relationships between the geographic allocation and personal characteristics of labor force migrants and 2 inferences drawn from these observations about the relative importance of various relocation cost components empirical analyses of the migration decision based upon this indirect method provide important insights on both the determinants and allocative efficiency of interstate labor force migration in the united states excerpt

is the dominant firm dominant an empirical analysis of at t s market power in this article we estimate the degree of market power held by at t in the interstate long distance market in the postdivestiture period our approach makes use of the dominant firm competitive fringe model to impose the structure needed both to obtain estimates of the relevant structural parameters and to translate these parameters into an estimate of at t s residual demand elasticity and associated lerner index because of the continued presence of regulation and other considerations however a direct estimation of the residual demand elasticity is not feasible consequently we take a more indirect approach that combines estimation of the elasticity of fringe firm supply market demand estimation and extant market share data to generate estimates of the desired elasticity the resulting estimates strongly support the conclusion that at t lacks significant market power in the postdivestiture long distance market

post migration earnings profiles an application of human capital and job search models several studies have noted that post migration earnings of migrants rise more rapidly than earnings of non migrants 13 42 9 human capital models would attempt to explain this by differences in the investment profiles of migrants and non migrants these differences could be due to migration selectivity whereby migrants have different investment incentives due to ability or motivation or to the loss of human capital by migrating and the recoupment of this capital after migration search models would explain this phenomenon by imperfect information migrants may have less information about wage distributions at the destination than non migrants enter the destination job market at a low wage and engage in subsequent post migration search for better earnings or as yezer and thurston 15 have suggested search may be selective and migrants whose reservation wages are not met after some time at the destination leave i e we observe migrants having steeper earnings profiles since those who do not obtain high earnings leave as one might expect neither of these pure models is alone sufficient to explain the factors that create the different earnings streams instead they can be viewed as complementary explanations the failure to recognize that migration involves both job search and human capital changes could lead to biased tests of hypotheses originating from only one model a good example of this and the one addressed in this paper is testing hypotheses regarding the source of differences between experience earnings profiles of migrants and non migrants for example yezer and thurston 15 establish and test the hypothesis that the distance migrated should be positively associated with income gains after migration they find the expected relation using regressions with a distance dummy 2 however it is well known that more educated individuals travel greater distances 11 and generally have steeper earnings profiles than less educated persons the correlation between education and distance migrated makes any test of the yezer and thurston hypothesis biased toward accepting their search model when education is not controlled

estimating market power in the presence of capacity constraints an application to high fructose corn sweetener abstract we develop a structural econometric model within which to measure market power in an industry that has capacity constraints we implement our empirical framework using quarterly data from the market for high fructose corn sweetener between 1980 1 and 2000 4 we demonstrate that ignoring the natural restrictions from the capacity constraints as well as the existence of a near perfect substitute sugar in this case can lead to inconsistent estimates this may cause researchers to overestimate the market power of firms these results have implications for anti trust litigation

efficiency wage models of unemployment keynesian economists hold it to be self evident that business cycles are characterized by involuntary unemployment but construction of a model of the cycle with involuntary unemployment faces the obvious difficulty of explaining why the labor market does not clear involuntarily unemployed people by definition want to work at less than the going wage rate why don t firms cut wages thereby increasing profits

capital market imperfections labor market disequilibrium and migration a theoretical and empirical analysis i introduction in a thoughtful and pioneering work katz and stark 1986 suggest that capital market imperfections may be an important cause of migration in less developed countries their model is important because it provides an alternative to the host of migration models which focus exclusively on labor market conditions 1 consider for the moment an agricultural region of a less developed country that is undergoing rapid technological change to avail themselves of this change in agricultural technology individuals must possess some minimum amount of financial capital to invest if capital markets were perfect any individual could obtain financing provided that the potential project had an internal rate of return greater than the interest rate if on the other hand some minimum asset value is required to enter capital markets individuals whose asset value is below this level may migrate out of the region for reasons which are more fully discussed below 2 thus katz and stark predict strong migration outflows from regions with a high marginal product of capital and a significant absence of or imperfection in capital markets in a general equilibrium framework of course disequilibrium in one market must be reflected by disequilibrium in some other market so the labor market may be in disequilibrium as well but the fundamental cause may be capital market imperfections capital market imperfections may keep wages low by limiting the amount of capital per worker and hence the marginal product of labor which is then mistakenly interpreted in a migration model as corroboration of the todaro hypothesis in a sense perhaps the todaro model is correct low origin wages in comparison to the expected wage in the destination are driving outmigration but in a more fundamental sense capital market imperfections are causing the outmigration katz and stark derive an interesting and important conclusion from their model viz if a main cause of rural to urban migration a labor market phenomenon is capital market imperfections then a policy to constrain migration should aim at enhancing access to and improving the competitiveness of capital markets and shift away from exclusive attempts to reduce rural urban wage differentials p 137 but to get to the policy conclusion one must first deal with the thorny issue of observational equivalence are low origin wages due to labor or capital market conditions this essay is an attempt to empirically disentangle the two using empirical evidence from ecuador i will proceed as follows first i briefly describe imperfections in ecuadorian capital markets which might lead to out migration from rural areas and summarize recent changes in ecuadorian agriculture which may have intensified the impact of capital market imperfections on migration the combination of these factors may provide the conditions necessary for the katz stark hypothesis i e that imperfect capital markets limit individuals ability to take advantage of changed agriculture structure and technology and that outmigration results the next section formally presents the competing hypotheses labor market vs capital market explanations for internal migration and derives estimating equations the final section attempts to distinguish between the two hypotheses and outlines some important policy conclusions ii capital market structure and technological change in ecuadorian agriculture adios smallholders agricultural credit policy in ecuador was heavily influenced by the easy money of the 1970s and early 1980s as an oil exporter ecuador benefited enormously from the two oil shocks the central bank was flush with new found foreign exchange from oil revenues and external borrowing and much of this windfall was recycled into the domestic economy in the form of sectoral credit at negative real interest rates 3 the agricultural sector was a prime beneficiary of this largesse

on the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility n b professor neary was based at trinity college dublin when this article was first published the full text of the article is not available in ora at this time citation neary j p 1981 on the harris todaro model with intersectoral capital mobility economica 48 191 219 234

job search and immigrant assimilation an earnings frontier approach this study examines labor market assimilation by measuring the information utilized by immigrants during job search assimilation is assumed to occur whenever such information increases with length of residence in the united states and repeated job searches the authors assert that information utilized during job search reduces differentials between actual and potential maximum attainable earnings coauthors are henry w herzog jr richard a hofler and alan m schlottmann copyright 1992 by mit press

measuring information in the market an application to physician services ever since stigler s 47 seminal piece on the economics of information there has been a great deal of research investigating equilibrium in markets with imperfect information while most of this research has been concerned with theoretically establishing the conditions under which there exists a distribution of prices in equilibrium the field now contains a small but growing body of empirical research this work has followed the suggestion of stigler and utilized the dispersion of prices usually the variance as a measure of incomplete information about price such as stigler 47 stigler and kindahl 49 pratt wise and zeckhauser 44 carlson and pescatrice 12 marvel 34 mathewson 35 cox deserpa and canby 13 dahlby and west 14 van hoomissen 51 and lach and tsiddon 29 there are two disadvantages to using the variance or another measure of dispersion such as the range of prices as a measure of incomplete information about price the first disadvantage recognized by stigler and others is that price can vary for many reasons other than incomplete information thus dispersion is not a pure measure of incomplete information about prices the second disadvantage which has not been commonly recognized in the empirical literature is that price dispersion encompasses incomplete information both on the part of buyers and sellers as indicated by rothschild 45 axell 4 butters 9 and telser 50 and hence fails to distinguish between these two components in this paper we propose a method for measuring incomplete information about price which

competition in the interexchange telecommunication market abstract using an econometric model that allows the nature of the oligopoly interaction to be determined by the data we estimate residual demand elasticities for the switched inter lata local access and transport area services of at t mci and sprint for the 9 year period from the third quarter of 1989 to the first quarter of 1998 these estimates fall in the relatively inelastic 1 5 to 1 9 range statistical tests of the several elasticity relationships decisively reject hypotheses of perfect competition and a cournot interaction but do not reject the hypothesis that the market functioned as a coordinated oligopoly

policy comparisons with an agglomeration effects augmented dual economy model abstract in this paper we incorporate urban agglomeration economies as a labor pull factor in an analysis of dual labor markets in ldcs in particular the equilibrium city size approach to urban growth and the expected income approach to rural to urban migration are synthesized making it possible to generalize results that hitherto were approach specific with the aid of a simulation based on a well specified model we exploit this synthesis to rank subsidy policies our results highlight the constructive role played by urbanization in economic development and structural change

life on the frontier migrant information earnings and past mobility this paper examines the extent to which information obtained from past geographic mobility affects both post move job search and earnings in subsequent migration in the united states the study considers this linkage between past and present mobility by estimating earnings frontiers for various categories of interstate migrants partitioned by prior mobility history the results demonstrate that migrant groups exhibiting high relative levels of human capital stock do not necessarily possess superior pre move labor market information it is also demonstrated that the incentive to acquire this pre move information is tied to psychic cost and variation in this cost among migrant types excerpt

on the harris todaro model with intersectoral migration of labour aspects of labor migration in developing countries are examined using the approach developed by j r harris and m p todaro in particular the author attempts to model the process of labor turnover between the urban unemployed and urban firms and between the rural sector and the urban unemployed the model includes a dynamic system of wage rates and urban unemployment rates annotation

observational equivalence in the modeling of african labor markets and urbanization abstract this article examines the appropriateness of neoclassical and rent seeking models of urbanization for the african milieu and demonstrates that the reduced forms of these two models may be quite similar the models are not observationally equivalent however and methods of distinguishing between them are discussed a demographic cohort shift model of african urbanization also is presented its excellent predictive power suggests that migration models that assume migrant homogeneity i e highly aggregate migration models ignore information that can be useful in predicting trends in migration flows