a test of the wagner s hypothesis for the fiji islands in this article we examine wagner s law for fiji for the period 1970 to 2002 using the johansen 1988 test for cointegration we find one cointegration relationship between national output and government expenditure using five different long run estimators we find robust results on the impact of national income on government expenditure the elasticity ranges from 1 36 to 1 44 implying that a 1 increase in income leads to a 1 36 1 44 increase in government expenditure moreover we find that in the long run national income granger causes government expenditure while these results are consistent with wagner s law we warn policy makers that because fiji s total debt stands at around 69 of gdp in future the bulk of expenditure will go towards debt financing at the expense of productive sectors

stuck on stubble the non market value of agricultural byproducts for diversified farmers in morocco diversified agricultural households often use byproducts of one activity as inputs for another for crop livestock farmers cereal production provides grain and crop residue where the latter can be used as livestock feed to properly assess the cost of introducing new technologies into such systems one must value the implicit cost of byproducts which is made difficult by missing byproduct markets we estimate the shadow value of non market crop stubble using household data from morocco and find that stubble accounts for around one quarter of the value of cereal production in a normal rainfall year and three quarters in a drought year

the family and the state the immaturity of children sometimes precludes efficient arrangements between children and parents or others responsible for child care the difficulty in establishing efficient relations within families provides the point of departure for our interpretation of the heavy state involvement in the family the authors believe that a surprising number of state interventions mimic the agreements that would occur if children were capable of arranging for their care many regulations of the family improve the efficiency of family activities these interventions include subsidies to education and training social security and other old age support subsidies to births laws that limit access to divorce and the sale of children and laws that require parents permission for early marriage and other choices of children families that leave bequests can force children to repay parents for investments in human capital by reducing bequests therefore these families do not underinvest in childrens human capital by contrast families that do not leave bequests often poorer families do underinvest in children the state may subsidize schools and other training facilities to raise investments in children by poorer families to efficient levels authors modified

a system comparison approach to distinguish two nonseparable and nonnested agricultural household models this study distinguishes two nonseparable agricultural household models for a self employed farm household one assumes heterogeneity of farm and nonfarm labor and a competitive market for nonfarm labor the other assumes homogeneity of the two types of labor and a restricted market for nonfarm labor we compare demand systems that are derived from them which have different dependent variables and different numbers of equations we apply a cox type test to compare these complicated nonnested systems results show clearly that the former is better for japanese rice farming households comparison of price elasticities for those models verifies the importance of that test copyright 2008 oxford university press

peacock and wiseman on the growth of public expenditure the late nineteenth century view of the growth of the public sector enuciated by adolph wagner 1890 now known as wagner s law accorded well with the doctrine of comparative advantage with the growth of the industrial economy a complementary demand was set up alongside industrial and manufacturing expansion for transport and communication services energy and waste disposal central and local governments were viewed as having a comparative advantage in providing such services justifying wagner s law that government expenditure would continuously increase as a percentage of gross domestic product in a growing economy in 1961 as part of their seminal study of the growth of public expenditure in the united kingdom alan t peacock and jack wiseman1 questioned the generality of wagner s law and introduced their now famous displacement effect hypothesis to explain the time path of the growth of government in democratic countries writing before the public choice research program was at all well established peacock and wiseman nevertheless rejected wagner s reliance upon the organic state and relied instead on political propositions that

security analyst superiority relative to univariate time series models in forecasting quarterly earnings abstract this paper provides evidence of security analyst sa superiority relative to univariate time series ts models in predicting firms quarterly earnings numbers and shows that sa forecast superiority in our sample is attributable to 1 better utilization of information existing on the date that ts model forecasts can be initiated a contemporaneous advantage and 2 use of information acquired between the date of initiation of ts model forecasts and the date when sa forecasts are published a timing advantage

local versus global separability in agricultural household models the factor price equalization effect of land transfer rights commonly employed global tests for separability between production and consumption decisions are theoretically inappropriate when the market failures creating non separabilities differentially constrain some but not all households simulated maximum likelihood estimates using chinese panel data reject the restrictions implied by a global separability test in favor of regime specific or local separability tests the estimates also show that a global approach to separability obscures the significant effect that less encumbered land transfer rights would have on shadow factor price equalization across households and allocative efficiency the findings on transfer rights suggest a resolution to the debate in china on further property rights reform copyright 2002 oxford university press

what does she see in him the effect of sharing on the choice of spouse all husbands and wives share in the spoils of marriage sharing makes each partner a residual claimant and encourages spouses to provide marital inputs however because each spouse is only a partial residual claimant each may be inclined to provide a suboptimal level of marital inputs the choice of spouse influences the level of distortion and under some circumstances the eficient mating is between individuals of equal value people tend to end up choosing partners of approximately their own social worth romantic choices appear to be a delicate compromise between one s desire to capture an ideal partner and one s realization that he must eventually settle for what he deserves

an evaluation of univariate time series earnings models and their generalization to a single input transfer function the development of statistical models for accounting earnings has been an evolving process earlier studies used simple index and or naive models e g ball and brown 1968 and brown and kennelly 1972 because of the lack of tools to deal with formal time series later dopuch and watts 1972 ball and watts 1972 and others employed formal time series models to annual earnings and collins and hopwood 1980 brown and rozeff 1979 foster 1977 griffin 1977 and watts 1975 did the same with quarterly earnings while this research has produced some conclusions with respect to the time series properties of earnings and how these may be used in predicting earnings brown and rozeff 1978 and then collins and hopwood 1980 recently provided evidence that financial analysts can produce forecasts more accurate than those based on the arima models alone this suggests that other information may be useful in providing estimates of future earnings when incorporated with knowledge of the time series properties of earnings the purpose of this study is twofold a we first evaluate the models used in past studies of quarterly time series of earnings in order to determine whether they are systematically misspecified due to the omission of other information which is implicitly contained in a market earnings index the evidence suggests that the misspecification exists and b we introduce a transfer function model which utilizes the timeseries properties of both the index and earnings numbers this model is obtained based on both theoretical derivation and inspection of data

an econometric test of wagner s law for six countries based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques the present study empirically examined five different versions of wagner s law by employing annual time series data on six countries over the period 1951 1996 three countries are part of the emerging industrialized countries of asia south korea taiwan thailand and three are industrialized countries japan usa and the united kingdom the analysis is an advance over previous work in two ways first the stationarity propertities of the data and the order of integration of the data are empirically investigated using the augmented dickey fuller adf and the kwiatkowski et al journal of econometrics 1 1992 kpss tests and second the hypothesis of a long run relationship between income and government spending is tested using bivariate cointegrated systems and employing the methodology of cointegration analysis as suggested by johansen journal of economic dynamics and control 12 1988 and johansen and juselius oxford bulletin of economics and statistics 52 1990 the results indicate that

estimating labor supply and production decisions of self employed farm producers abstract this paper proposes a model oriented towards integrating farm households production and consumption decisions into a unified theoretical and econometric framework it is argued that in contrast with other forms of economic organization farm households utility and profit maximization decisions are not likely to be independent econometric estimation of a farm household model using canadian data suggests that utility and profit maximizing decisions are not indeed independent and moreover that there are significant gains in explanatory power and efficiency by estimating the consumption and production equations jointly

asymmetries in the conditional relation of government expenditure and economic growth previous studies on the relationship between government expenditure and economic growth have invariably aggregated periods of strong and weak gdp growth and reported a single government expenditure response coefficient estimate we argue that traditional test specifications of this relationship suffer from aggregation or omitted variables biases by failing to distinguish between diverse economic growth experiences and their impact on government expenditure we reexamine the evidence concerning wagner s law using a proposed conditional test specification that is capable of a separating periods of strong and weak economic growth b accommodating possible asymmetries in the marginal responses of government expenditure to variations in economic growth and c distinguishing between positive and negative asymmetries in such responses we present evidence showing that a the majority of government expenditure responses tend to occur during periods of an economic slowdown characterized by gdp growth t

separation hypothesis tests in the agricultural household model in an agricultural household model farmers production decisions can be either separated or nonseparated from preferences since previous studies on agricultural household behavior and policy effects have shown that the model with separation yields different results than the model with nonseparation it is important to have a test to identify the correct model this paper provides new tests that extend current tests in two directions first the new tests avoid issues that current tests have to address such as simultaneity bias and the estimation of the production function second the new tests make use of more information implied from the separation hypothesis than current tests

a bound testing analysis of wagner s law in nigeria 1970 2006 this study tests wagner s law the tendency for government activities to expand along with economic expansion for nigeria using annual time series data between 1970 and 2006 it adopts the bounds test approach proposed by pesaran et al 2001 based on unrestricted error correction model uecm and toda and yamamoto s 1995 granger noncausality tests empirical results from the bounds test indicate that there exists no long run relationship between government expenditure and output in nigeria in addition toda and yamamoto s 1995 causality test results show that wagner s law does not hold for more than the period being tested rather we found a weak empirical support in the proposition by keynes that public expenditure is an exogenous factor and a policy instrument for increasing national income

the curious attraction of wagner s law wagner s law of increasing state activity has recently been subjected to intensive use of recondite econometric testing procedures an examination of the relevant articles reveals ignorance both of wagner s definition of state activity and of his insistence that he was not engaged in prediction consequently the omission of public enterprises contained in wagner s definition leads to a model misspecification and the object of testing his hypothesiss remains obscure

celestial marriage and earthly rents interests and the prohibition of polygamy abstract just prior to the civil war the u s government set out on a relentless campaign to eliminate polygamy within the mormon church this paper offers evidence that the political restrictions on the practice of polygamy were the result of rent seeking by potential beneficiaries of such laws the edmonds act of 1882 polygamy created benefits for women but reduced the welfare of most men in a time period when only adult males had the franchise

migration and rural welfare the impact of potential policy reforms in europe summary this paper uses an agricultural household model in an imperfect market environment and data from burkina faso to explore the impact of potential immigration policy reforms in europe on the welfare of rural households simulation results demonstrate that in contrast to continental migration increased intercontinental migration has strong positive household welfare effects similarly an increase in the stay abroad of intercontinental migrants impacts positively on welfare of the migrant sending household results of these simulations lend support to the introduction of a tmp which would in addition to facilitating migration control in host economies improve the welfare of sending households by allowing for increased engagement in intercontinental migration the temporary nature of such a program would ensure that dutch disease effects would be mitigated through eventual migrant return

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

economic growth and government expenditure evidence from a new test specification a new test specification of wagner s law of public expenditure has been formulated the aim is to disentangle the effects of accelerating and decelerating economic growth on growth in government expenditure two alternative proxies for the state of the economy are experimented with the first defines the current state of the economy by relating it to its historical mean growth rate while the second defines it relative to a pooled time series cross sectional mean growth rate this distinction is then explicitly incorporated into an error correction model that parameterizes the bivariate relation between government expenditure and economic growth for alternative oecd country groupings the results suggest that government expenditure increases less than proportionately with accelerating economic growth and decreases more than proportionately with decelerating economic growth there is only a limited support for wagner s law

wagner s law versus displacement effect abstractthe public sector has grown dramatically over the past few centuries in many developed countries in this article we use wavelet methods to distinguish between two leading explanations for this growth wagner s law and the displacement effect in doing so we use the long term data of 10 oecd countries for a maximum time span of 1800 2009 we find that the validity of wagner s law is likely to vary strongly over time for each country a roughly similar feature in most of the countries is that the law is less valid in the earliest stage of economic development as well as in the advanced stages with the validity tending to follow an inverted u shaped pattern with economic development further our results indicate that the long run growth of government size cannot be adequately explained by wagner s law on the other hand the displacement effect appears to account for the bulk of the growth in most of the countries

structural changes and the forecasting of quarterly accounting earnings in the utility industry abstract this paper presents a statistical procedure to identify effects of three potential structural changes on accounting earnings temporary short run and long run the procedure is applied to quarterly accounting earnings of 39 utility companies structural changes are found to be commonplace statistical forecasting models that explicitly incorporate structural change effects are found to generate more accurate forecasts than other statistical models in the literature although no statistical model significantly dominates value line a firm specific model with structural change adjustment forecasts as well as value line moreover all statistical models examined have significant marginal forecasting power to complement value line forecasts

farm income variability and the supply of off farm labor if farmers are risk averse greater farm income variability should increase off farm labor supply this effect is confirmed for a sample of kansas farmers off farm employment of farmers and their spouses is also found to be significantly influenced by farm experience off farm work experience farm size leverage efficiency and farm specific education in addition farm operators and spouses who receive significant income support through government farm programs are less likely to work off the farm this may suggest that policy changes reducing farm income support payments may increase off farm employment of farmers and their spouses

using shadow wages to estimate labor supply of agricultural households with few exceptions most studies of the labor demand and supply decisions of agricultural households in developing countries have relied on the empirical advantages of separability given the questionable nature of some of the assumptions sufficient for separability i apply a recent methodology that accounts for the simultaneity between the production and consumption decisions of a farm household using data from rural india direct estimates of the marginal productivities shadow wages of family male and female labor are derived from a cobb douglas agricultural production function the estimated shadow wages and income are then used as regressors in a structural model of labor supply

shadow wages and shadow income in farmers labor supply functions this article extends the current literature on estimating the labor supply function in agriculture by providing a different method to derive the shadow wage and shadow income the method is based on the observation that the shadow wage is the marginal product of labor at the optimal point of both farm and household production functions thus under certain assumptions on the functional form of the production functions both the shadow wage and shadow income can be derived without estimating the production function using a sample of vietnamese farmers the results from the new method are shown to be consistent with the theory

law property and marital dissolution this paper challenges the view that legal rights are not important in affecting whether people divorce but it puts as much emphasis on property rights given for example by the law on alimony as on dissolution rights in the united states the paper sets out two stylised models of marriage and examines the consequences of fuller compensation for economic sacrifices made during marriage if the dominant economic issue in a marriage is who undertakes household tasks then a law giving fuller compensation makes divorce more likely if the dominant issue is child custody divorce is less likely excerpt

an investigation into adequate data for estimating annual earnings time series models abstract the purpose of this study is to examine the stability of corporate earnings per share eps time series models as the length of the time series are altered evidence is found to support the stationarity of corporate eps data furthermore outlier analysis is employed and supports the long run stability of corporate earnings series

a theory of dual labor markets with application to industrial policy discrimination and keynesian unemployment this paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers need to motivate workers in order to elicit effort from their workers employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage this changes fundamentally the character of labor markets the model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates it also can provide the basis for a theory of occupational segregation and discrimination that will not be eroded by market forces finally the model provides the basis for a theory of involuntary unemployment

effects of the internal wage on output supply a structural estimation for japanese rice farmers farmers are offered a higher wage rate by their off farm employers than the rate of remuneration they receive for their labor on their own family farms in japan however it is not possible for them to work for as many hours as they want for their off farm employers at the offered wage rate hence they perceive that they face an imperfectly competitive market for labor with only limited opportunities for wage employment see for example arayama 1986 kang and maruyama 1992 markets for their output and factors of production are observed to be perfectly competitive thus the state of the markets they face proves to be similar to the one producer consumer households face in the circumstances addressed in section 2 2 of the preceding chapter since the market for labor is not a perfectly competitive one because it offers only limited opportunities for wage employment the market wage rate ceases to be relevant in organizing their family farms and in making their choice over their level of consumption they are obliged to form an internal wage rate on their own for these purposes within their households the analytical results in section 2 2 show that the internal wage rate proves to be lower than the market rate and renders their supply of output and their demand for factors of production less elastic than in the instance in which all relevant markets are perfectly competitive in extreme cases it gives rise to a downward sloping supply function of output and upward sloping demand functions for the factors of production

an inquiry into the state s role in marriage abstract i view state intervention in marriage as a means of avoiding large transaction costs between men and women i define transaction costs as the resources devoted towards wealth capture and protection and i argue that they are high within a cohabitational contract state intervention is successful because marriage creates incentives that make private enforcement relatively costly and because marriages tend to be homogeneous i test the hypothesis by examining state responses to changing divorce laws and i find that these actions are consistent with the state increasing the social value of marriage by mitigating transaction costs

welfare and the family the canadian experience canada has a universal social assistance program that is almost completely administered through the federal canada assistance program however provinces determine the levels of assistance for various groups eligible for welfare this article exploits the variation in payments and uses microdata to estimate the effect of changes in welfare benefits on welfare participation single parenthood births out of wedlock divorce and labor force participation among low income women in canada it would appear that welfare benefits influence these decisions

til death or taxes do us part the effect of income taxation on divorce there is now much empirical evidence that economic incentives affect the divorce decision via their impact on the flow of benefits of divorced vs married individuals however the effect of the individual income tax on divorce has been neglected in this work the income tax in the us is structured so that tax liability often changes with marriage some couples incur a marriage penalty in the form of higher taxes when they marry while others receive a marriage subsidy because their tax burden falls with marriage in this paper the authors examine the impact of the individual income tax on the likelihood of divorce in the us using data from the panel study on income dynamics they estimate a discrete time hazard model of the probability of divorce from the first marriage to test the hypothesis that the probability of divorce rises with the marriage penalty they also examine the role of other economic factors in the divorce decision the authors find that individuals respond to tax incentives in their decision to divorce although these responses are typically small and differ for men and women authors

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

a time domain transfer function model of wagner s law the case of the united kingdom economy the dynamic relationship which is implied by wagner s law is well established in the literature however the methodology which has been applied to investigate this dynamic relationship has tended to avoid a dynamic specification this paper investigates wagner s law employing transfer function methodology in the time domain for the uk over the period 1946 85

social assistance and conjugal union dissolution in canada a dynamic analysis using statistics canadas general social survey on family and friends carried out in 1990 we piece together the matrimonial and conjugal life history of a large sample of canadian men and women we then estimate duration models coxs proportional hazard models describing the evolutionary laws of marriages and unions which depend on various economic or socio demographic explanatory variables the empirical modelling focuses primarily on estimating the impact of couples earned incomes and of provincial welfare programs on the dissolution rate of first marriages and unions we find that welfare benefits do not have an impact on the hazard of union dissolution and that earned incomes have a positive effect on conjugal stability excerpt summary in fre

marriage and divorce comment the author comments on an article by h elizabeth peters concerning the impact of state laws particularly no fault divorce laws on divorce rates in the united states a reply by peters is included pp 686 93 annotation

a new look at forecasting annual corporate earnings in the u s a abstract in this study composite earnings per share models are estimated for 35 chemical food and utility firms during the 1981 1982 period although it is generally held that financial analysts produce superior earnings forecasts when compared to time series model forecasts the results of this study indicate that analysts fared very poorly in 1982 and the average mean square forecasting error of analyst forecasts may be reduced by 74 2 percent by combining analyst and univariate time series model forecasts this reduction is very interesting when one finds that the univariate time series model forecasts do not substantially deviate from those produced by random walk drift models the arima 0 1 1 process moreover despite the high degree of correlation existing among analyst and time series forecasts the ordinary least squares estimation of the composite earnings model is a better forecasting model than the composite earnings models estimated with ridge regression and latent root regression techniques