rule making in community forestry institutions the difference women make abstract forest use rules determine what products are extracted from community governed forests in what quantity by what methods and by whom the nature of rules and the process by which they are formulated e g who participates in formulating them can impinge critically on institutional sustainability given their potential impact on the commitment and incentive to protect and on equity and conservation outcomes this is well recognized in the substantial literature on institutions governing common pool resources cprs it is also well recognized although in relation to other types of institutions such as legislatures and village councils that there can be notable differences in women s and men s policy priorities yet there is surprisingly little existing work on or statistical testing of potential gender differences in rule making in institutions managing natural resources such as forests this paper based on the author s primary data for india and nepal seeks to fill this conceptual and empirical gap it examines why we might expect women to favour different rules from men and statistically tests whether the gender composition of the executive committees ecs the main decision making bodies of community forestry institutions cfis in south asia makes a difference to the strictness of forest use rules this is analyzed both by specifying a strictness index which aggregates rules across products and by examining rules for selected products and both for all sample districts together and for each district separately gender is found to make a significant difference to the rules specified but not always in the expected direction given their substantial and daily dependence on local forests especially for firewood and fodder rural women may normally be expected to veer toward lenient rules of extraction in fact groups with more ec women and especially with all women ecs tend to make stricter rules than other groups in most of the sample districts except one district where they tend to make less strict rules greater strictness is attributable especially to the resource constraint faced by all women groups ie cfis with all women ecs which receive smaller and more degraded forests than groups with men less strict rules among cfis in the exceptional district are attributable especially to the disproportionate presence of landless women on their ecs in other words not simply women s presence in rule making but also their economic class can matter strictness also varies by type of product forest and population characteristics the ec s average age and dominant caste and monitoring constraints the potential implications for equity institutional sustainability and forest conservation are also discussed

market returns transfers and demand for schooling in malaysia 1976 89 if parents expect higher market returns to schooling or additional transfers from their children they invest more in their children s schooling results from models of schooling demand using data from the malaysian family life surveys of 1976 and 1989 suggest that market returns of mothers but not fathers positively affected schooling the propensity for parents to spend time with their parents had a small positive effect on education of daughters but other transfers had a weak negative effect the results suggest that if one generation perceives a low return to schooling then the next generation especially daughters pays the price of lower schooling

production function regressions returns to scale and externalities a number of recent papers have used simple linear regressions in an attempt to identify market structure the extent of returns to scale and possible external effects in u s manufacturing industries the results obtained from these regressions have important implications for several branches of modern macroeconomics as a result the macro literature frequently cites specific numerical evidence from caballero and lyons 1992 and hall 1990 which suggests that there are quantitatively significant increasing returns to scale or external effects in u s manufacturing in contrast it is the argument of this paper that this evidence is not convincing the most robust evidence suggests that the typical u s manufacturing industry displays constant returns with no external effects on the other hand there is significant heterogeneity across industries

the impact of job security on job satisfaction in economic contractions versus expansions job security often measured using the perceived risk of job loss in the near future is a significant determinant of job satisfaction we posit that the impact job security has on job satisfaction is not only a function of how likely it is that a worker loses a job but also how likely it is that a worker could find another the effect this has on worker job satisfaction then is different depending on whether perceived job loss occurs or not when job openings are scarce or when job openings are plentiful we use difference in differences analysis of the 1997 and 2008 waves from the national study of the changing workforce to show that three measures of job security increase private sector worker job satisfaction and reduce worker incentives to quit more when job openings are relatively scarce during contractions than when job openings are relatively plentiful during expansions we find that our results are strongest among less educated workers

regional differences in job satisfaction job satisfaction is significantly higher in wales than in london and the south east the rest of england and scotland this is despite the fact that among these four regions earnings are lowest in wales using data from the british household panel survey bhps we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction and attempt to explain why workers in wales are happier in their work than workers in other parts of the uk we find that workers in wales appear to be less concerned about pay than workers in other regions we suggest that because lower earnings tend to be associated with higher levels of unemployment and inactivity being in work may be regarded more favourably in more economically depressed regions we also suggest the climate of industrial relations as perceived by workers is better in wales than elsewhere

anticipation free rider problems and adaptation to trade unions re examining the curious case of dissatisfied union members this paper documents evidence that rejects the paradox of dissatisfied union members using eleven waves of the bhps it studies the past contemporaneous and future effects of union membership on job satisfaction by separating union free riders from other nonmembers in the fixed effects equations i find significant anticipation effects to unionism for prospective members and covered nonmembers of both genders workers go on to report on average a significant net increase in overall job satisfaction at the year unionization occurs nonetheless adaptation to unionism is complete within the first few years of joining a unionized firm one hypothesis for this is that workers adapt their reported satisfaction over time to support their union bargaining efforts which would be consistent with the explanation given by freeman and medoff 1984 of union s role in fanning the flame of discontent to the management during contract negotiations

job satisfaction trade unions and exit voice revisited many studies have found that unionized workers express less job satisfaction than nonunion workers the exit voice explanation of this phenomenon is that dissatisfied nonunion workers tend to qui

indeterminacy and sunspots with constant returns recently there has been a renewed interest in the possibility of indeterminacy and sunspots or alternatively put in the existence of a continuum of equilibria that arises in dynamic economies with some market imperfections much of the research in this area has been concerned with the empirical plausibility of indeterminacy in markets with external effects or with monopolistic competition and which exhibit some degree of increasing returns while the early results on indeterminacy relied on relatively large increasing returns and high markups more recently benhabib and farmer 1996a showed that indeterminacy can also occur in two sector models with small sector specific external effects and very mild increasing returns

migration livelihood and well being evidence from indian city slums what helps workers from low income households to access urban job market information and whether migrants are able to experience upward mobility at the place of destination are the two pertinent issues in urban development which this paper tries to examine results based on a slum survey in four indian cities highlight the importance of various informal channels through which urban jobs are accessed however these networks reduce the probability of upward mobility as network extension leads to excess supplies of labour relative to demand the issue of upward mobility has also been examined by constructing a well being deprivation index based on the factor analysis of a large number of social economic demographic education and health specific variables although findings are indicative of improvements in the well being of migrant workers over time several of the long duration migrants and natives in the cities still lead a low quality life the paper therefore argues in favour of urban employment

remittances and chain migration longitudinal evidence from bosnia and herzegovina abstractmost of the literature on remittances focuses on their implications for the welfare of family members in the country of origin and disregards their role as facilitator of chain migration we address this issue with the use of longitudinal data from bosnia and herzegovina one of the primary exporters of migrants and recipients of remittances in the world we find that remittances have a significant positive impact on the migration prospects of their recipients better endowed people are most likely to migrate which highlights a potential negative implication of migration and remittances

asymmetric information about migrant earnings and remittance flows this paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of indian households with husbands working overseas in qatar on average wives underreport their husbands income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants the discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated with variation in remittances greater underreporting by wives is associated with lower remittances an exchange model of remittances is developed with asymmetric information and costly state verification the optimal remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances that invites verification only if unmet the model s predictions closely match our empirical findings

siblings strangers and the surge of altruism abstract we demonstrate how altruism can surge in a population of nonaltruists we assume that each individual plays a one shot prisoner s dilemma game with his or her sibling or with a stranger and that the probability that an individual survives to reproduce is proportional to his or her payoff in this game we model the formation of couples and the rule of imitation of parents and of nonparents we then ask what happens to the proportion of altruists in the population we specify a case where the unique and stable equilibrium is one in which the entire population will consist of altruists

altruism and beyond an economic analysis of transfers and exchanges within families and groups 1 introduction 2 altruism transfers and wellbeing 3 the timing of intergenerational transfers an implication 4 an exchange implication of transfers the demonstration effect 5 transfers by migrants a strategic motive for remittances 6 exchange with recognition costs an explanation of migrants performance 7 intrafamilial transfers and exchanges forming and sustaining altruism

the check in the mail household characteristics and migrant remittance from the us to mexico we develop a household model of migrant remittance that supports testable hypotheses about the effect of migrant income family composition and distribution transaction costs associated with remittance mode income and residence security and other household characteristics on remittance levels and frequency we test these hypotheses using survey data on individual mexican migrants in the united states the results are broadly consistent with our hypotheses

nepotism discrimination and the persistence of utility maximizing owner operated firms reply much debate in the discrimination literature surrounds whether employers with biased preferences can persist in the market 7 10 this issue is a natural extension of the broader literature on owner operated firms which focuses on the consistency of utility and profit maximization 12 13 14 18 26 27 theories of owner operated firms which have a long history in economics model the entrepreneur as both a producer and consumer of goods that determines the level of production and consumption jointly through utility maximization 2 9 16 22 31 this approach is applied in this paper to examine employer discrimination and nepotism our analysis provides necessary conditions for utility maximizing firms to persist in the market and shows how biased preferences can yield seemingly uneconomic input and output choices that are in fact rationally inefficient empirical results using data on family farms support the prediction that utility maximizing entrepreneurs trade profit for nonmarket goods and do not hire inputs to maximize profits competitive neoclassical theories of the labor market do not provide a clear theoretical resolution to the issue of persistence of employer nepotism and discrimination the employer discrimination model proposed by becker 4 5 and extended by arrow 1 postulates that entrepreneurs maximize utility that increases with profit but decreases with a nonmarket attribute of some workers e g race ethnicity or gender these models predict that white male workers may initially have better market opportunities than comparable minority or female workers however entrepreneurs who hire based on nonproductive attributes are also predicted to earn less than a normal rate of return and because they derive disutility from an aspect of owning and operating a firm can improve their welfare by leaving the industry and converting firm assets to those that do not require employment decisions e g stocks and bonds this result has the important policy implication that market intervention may not be necessary to improve the relative pay and employment of disadvantaged groups when employers are the source of the discrimination alternatively goldberg 15 uses the arrow 1 framework but postulates that employers

job dissatisfaction of the self employed in indonesia in developed countries the self employed have been found to be more satisfied with their jobs than paid employees we found the exact opposite for a developing country after analyzing 8732 respondents in the indonesian family life survey the job dissatisfaction of the self employed was not fully explained by earnings personal traits job characteristics anticipation or adaptation but mostly by segregation into a small number of industries with few job benefits this finding is consistent with the dual labor market theory we also found that among the self employed those with the highest probability of being paid employees were the least satisfied paid employment was highly sought after in developing countries and these were presumably self employed workers with high abilities this finding cannot be explained by the dual labor market theory alone to explain this inconsistency we enriched this theory with relative deprivation our results suggest that the existence of the dual labor market and relative deprivation are important determinants of the job satisfaction of the self employed in developing countries

marital investments time consistency and emotions abstract a benchmark model of a married couple s educational investment yields an inefficient outcome due to the possibility of opportunistic divorce motivated by findings in social psychology i use psychological game theory to incorporate belief dependent guilt feelings multiple equilibria become possible some marriages have inefficient under investment some have efficient outcomes and preclude divorce if guilt is sufficiently important a life long efficient marriage is implied because a spouse may signal a trust so strong as to force the partner to hold beliefs that make divorce unattractive

long term care insurance does experience matter we examine whether long term care ltc experience helps explain the low demand for long term care insurance ltci we test if expectations about future informal care receipt expectations about inheritance receipt and ltci purchase decisions vary between individuals whose parents or in laws have used ltc versus those who have not we find parental use of a nursing home decreases expectations that one s children will provide informal care consistent with the demonstration effect nursing home use by in laws does not have the same impact suggesting that individuals are responding to information gained about their own aging trajectory nursing home use by either a parent or in law increases ltci purchase probability by 0 8 percentage points with no significant difference in response between parents and in laws use the estimated increase in purchase probability from experience with ltc is about half the previously estimated increase from tax policy induced price decreases

sibling rivalry and strategic parental transfers this paper develops a noncooperative nash model in which two siblings compete for their parents financial transfers treating sibling rivalry as a rent seeking contest and using a tullock skaperdas contest success function we derive the conditions under which more financial resources are transferred to the sibling with lower earnings we find that parental transfers are compensatory and that the family as an institution serves as an income equalizer within a sequential game framework we characterize the endogeneity of parental transfers and link it to parents income altruism and children s supply of merit goods e g parent child companionship or child services we show that merit goods are subject to a moral hazard problem from the parents perspective

stability of equilibria with externalities it is shown that in a class of models with multiple externalities one positive and one negative all stationary equilibria may be locally stable to perturbations in the sense that there exist perfect foresight trajectories leading back to the equilibrium thus scale diseconomies arising for example out of a common resource pool generally overturn the liviatan samuelson result that equilibria are either saddlepoints or sources

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

job satisfaction in britain individual and job related factors recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the analysis of job satisfaction variables job satisfaction is correlated with labour market behaviour such as productivity quits and absenteeism in this paper four different measures of job satisfaction are related to a variety of personal and job characteristics the data used are from the 28 240 british employees in the workplace employee relations survey 1997 this data set is larger and more recent than in any previous studies four measures of job satisfaction that have not previously been used are considered satisfaction with influence over job satisfaction with amount of pay satisfaction with sense of achievement and satisfaction with respect from supervisors the paper contributes to the literature by analysing job satisfaction with respect to industrial composition and occupations one of the striking findings is that those in the education and health sectors are less satisfied with their pay but more satisfied with their sense of achie

private monetary transfers in rural china are families altruistic monetary transfers between relatives may be motivated by altruism or they may represent payments for services rendered data from a large 1988 household survey are used to test these hypotheses and to study the size and direction of transfers in rural china the analysis suggests that altruism alone cannot explain the observed transfers and that exchange may be involved most of the money flows appear to be transfers from adult children to elderly parents and remittances from migrants child care is likely to be one of the main services that parents render to adult children in exchange for money

the relationship between unions and job satisfaction this paper examines the assoication between canadian unions and their member attitudes data on job satisfaction indicate that unionized workers in canada are less happy with the quality of their jobs than non union workers the former however are more satisfied with their financial compensation and job security than non members

the effects of merit pay on teacher job satisfaction the purpose of this study is to determine if the existence of a district level merit pay system has any effects on teacher job satisfaction using a large sample of public school teachers from the year 2007 the results of this study suggest that teachers who work in districts that use a merit pay system are no less satisfied with their jobs than are other teachers these results are consistent for both an ordered probit model and a two stage analysis although the effect of merit pay on overall job satisfaction was insignificant teachers in merit pay districts were less enthusiastic did not think teaching was important and were more likely to leave for better pay however in examining a sample of teachers who worked only in merit pay districts it was found that teachers who received merit pay were more satisfied overall with their jobs than were teachers who did not receive merit pay

do family ties with those left behind intensify or weaken migrants assimilation strong ties with the home country and with the host country can coexist an altruistic migrant who sends remittances to his family back home assimilates more the more altruistic he is and also more than a non remitting migrant

corrigendum to congestible public goods and local indeterminacy a two sector endogenous growth model journal of economic dynamics control 31 7 2007 2486 2518

altruism in networks we provide the first analysis of altruism in networks agents are embedded in a fixed network and care about the well being of their network neighbors depending on incomes they may provide financial support to their poorer friends we study the nash equilibria of the resulting game of transfers we show that equilibria maximize a concave potential function we establish existence uniqueness of equilibrium consumption and generic uniqueness of equilibrium transfers we characterize the geometry of the network of transfers and highlight the key role played by transfer intermediaries we then study comparative statics a positive income shock to an individual benefits all for small changes in incomes agents in a component of the network of transfers act as if they were organized in an income pooling community a decrease in income inequality or expansion of the altruism network may increase consumption inequality

balanced budget consumption taxes and aggregate stability in a small open economy in a small open economy facing a perfect world capital market this paper shows that if the government follows a balanced budget fiscal policy based on endogenous consumption tax rates then the steady state is saddle path stable and hence beliefs driven aggregate instability can be ruled out this result is in contrast to those obtained in some closed economy models and it suggests that unrestricted world capital mobility can help stabilize the economy under the balanced budget fiscal policy based on consumption taxation

harnessing the diaspora dual citizenship migrant return remittances political rights provided to immigrants by host countries have received much attention in the literature less attention however has been paid to the extension of extraterritorial rights by home countries in this article i focus on a common type of right provided by home countries to their expatriates the right of dual citizenship dual citizenship rights i argue help home countries leverage the financial and human resources of their diasporas encouraging both remittances and return migration i test this argument using migrant surveys performed in six host countries and find that migrants from homelands that extend dual citizenship are more likely to both remit and express a desire to return home the micro finding regarding remittances is confirmed using aggregate panel data for a large sample of homelands over the period 1980 2009 the results point to the importance of political rights and policies as extended by the migrant s homeland

charity and the bequest motive evidence from seventeenth century wills this paper researches motivations for charitable bequests by looking at gifts to the poor in wills written in suffolk england in the 1620s and 1630s the findings that wealthier and more religious individuals and those with fewer children give more to the poor support an altruistic model of testator utility however the result that individuals who give to more people outside of their immediate families are more likely to give to the poor contradicts the simple altruism model this result is consistent with a model that suggests that charitable giving is partially driven by the approbation granted to charitable behavior

don t tell on me experimental evidence of asymmetric information in transnational households although most theoretical models of household decision making assume perfect information empirical studies suggest that information asymmetries can have large impacts on resource allocation i demonstrate the importance of these asymmetries in transnational households where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute i implement an experiment among migrants in washington dc and their families in el salvador that examines how information asymmetries can have strategic and inadvertent impacts on remittance decisions migrants make an incentivized decision over how much of a cash windfall to remit and recipients decide how they will spend a remittance migrants strategically send home less when their choice is not revealed to recipients recipients make spending choices closer to migrants preferences when the migrants preferences are shared regardless of whether or not the spending choices are revealed to the migrants suggesting that recipients choices are inadvertently affected by imperfect information

international migration imperfect information and brain drain we consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than f

i m too clever for this job a bivariate probit analysis on overeducation and job satisfaction in australia using data from the first wave of the household income and labour dynamics in australia data set this article establishes an empirical relationship between overeducation and workplace satisfaction for australian adult males in the labour force in a departure from much of the existing literature both univariate and bivariate probit models are used to account for potential unobserved heterogeneity we find that estimates in the univariate probit models are positively biased for three of the six measures of workplace satisfaction studied this suggests that consideration should be given to the use of bivariate models when studying the determinants of workplace satisfaction and overeducation results show although levels of satisfaction remain high that across all measures of workplace satisfaction overeducated workers are less satisfied compared to their nonovereducated counterparts this intimates that satisfaction levels should be viewed from a relative rather than an absolute perspective pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work aristotle 384bc 322bc

job satisfaction in the low wage service sector the stylized facts associated with workers satisfaction are tested using a distinctive data set using principal components analysis five distinct measures of workers satisfaction and the factors that determine each one are examined the data set covering three low wage service sectors enables control for workplace characteristics to be made it is shown that characteristics previously identified as important by the job satisfaction literature in fact have differing effects according to the type of satisfaction being considered then is examined which of the satisfaction components has the greatest impact on overall satisfaction satisfaction with short term rewards and long term prospects are found to be far more influential in determining overall satisfaction than contentment with social relationships or work intensity

how well do theories of job matching explain variations in job satisfaction across education levels evidence for uk graduates using ordered probit estimation technique this paper examines the job satisfaction of recent uk graduates focussing primarily on explaining job satisfaction in terms of individuals matching to jobs with the match depending on reservation returns information sets and job offer rates only limited support can be found for the argument that job matching explains higher job satisfaction in addition stylizing graduates as a peer group who form satisfaction levels based on their rankings relative to each other we examine whether or not education quality which raises peer group status and increases the job offer rate is systematically related to job satisfaction the results broadly support the hypothesis that job satisfaction is neutral across graduates of different education qualities however our specification tests indicate that ordered probit estimation may not be fully appropriate for identifying the characteristics of those with high job satisfaction

indeterminacy in a small open economy ramsey growth model abstract this paper presents a small open economy version of the j benhabib and r e a farmer 1996 j monet econ 37 421 443 two sector optimal growth model with production externalities it is shown that indeterminacy is considerably easier to obtain under a regime of perfect world capital markets than in the closed economy variant furthermore the result is not dependent on a high labor supply elasticity since that input is fixed the paper also examines a variant which takes into account external borrowing constraints and it is shown that the qualitative results on indeterminacy remain basically unaffected by this extension journal of economic literature classification numbers e32 f12

microeconomic implications of remittances in an overlapping generations model with altruism and a motive to receive inheritance abstract the article develops a framework to examine the interaction between the migrant and the remittance receiving relative s under non cooperative and cooperative scenarios the model has an overlapping generations structure where both parties have altruistic behavioural traits we derive the relationships between the remittances consumption labour supply savings and bequests and compare these variables under the two scenarios for both scenarios the remittances have a positive effect on the relative s leisure consumption and investment the effects of the wage and the non wage income of the relative and the migrant and the interest rate on the equilibrium level of remittances are also qualitatively similar under the two scenarios however the parties degrees of altruism as well as the discount rates have different effects on the equilibrium level and incidence of remittances for the non cooperative and cooperative interactions these shed some light on the differences in remittance behavi

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

remitting behaviour of turkish migrants evidence from household data in germany this paper provides an empirical analysis of the remittances of turkish migrants using novel data from 589 households in berlin which holds the largest turkish community outside turkey the findings suggest that the remittances of turkish migrants are determined mainly by a combination of self interest and tempered altruism comparison of migrant groups who do and do not intend to return to turkey shows that those intending to return remit mostly for self interest and remit larger amounts while those with no such intention remit mainly due to implicit loan agreement within the family there is no evidence of pure altruism in any of the samples in addition remitters are more likely to increase the amount of remittances where they are to be spent on education and investment the same relationship does not hold for basic needs

asymmetry of information within family networks this paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from tanzania using cross reports on asset holdings we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network we show that there is significant asymmetry of information and no evidence of major systematic over evaluation or under evaluation of income in our data although there is a slight over evaluation on the part of migrants regarding non migrants we develop a static model of asymmetric information that contrasts altruism pressure and exchange as motives to transfer the model makes predictions about the correlations between misperceptions and transfers under these competing explanations testing these predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by the recipient our findings suggest that the recipient sets the terms of the transfers either by exerting pressure to give on the donor or by holding the bargaining power during the exchange of services with the donor