taboos agriculture and poverty we study the impact of work taboos fady days on agriculture and poverty using cross sectional data from a national household survey for madagascar we find that 18 per cent of agricultural house

social security pensions and retirement behavior within the family this paper estimates a structural model of family retirement using us data from the health and retirement study hrs it provides further insight into household retirement decision making and the reasons for interdependence in the retirement decisions of each spouse improvements in hrs data and matched employer provided pension histories allow more precise identification of key parameters governing interdependent behaviour within the household in an earlier study we found that interdependence was due to preferences rather than coordination of retirement incentives in the budget and in particular that it is not a correlation in preferences but the appearance of the spouse s retirement status in the husband s and wife s utility function that is largely responsible for coordination of retirement between spouses we now find that a measure of how much each spouse values being able to spend time in retirement with the other accounts for a good portion of that apparent interdependence for the wife the husband s retirement status influences her retirement decision only if she values spending time in retirement with her husband for husbands the effect of having the wife already retired on his retirement decision is roughly doubled if he enjoys spending time in retirement with his wife but there is some effect even if he does not this is consistent with our earlier findings that the husband is more influenced by having a retired spouse than the wife is the increase in the extent of the dependence of the wife s labour supply on the husband s retirement from our past work probably is traceable to better measurement of the opportunity set facing the husband in hrs data once estimated we use the model to investigate the labour supply effects of alternative social security policies examining the effect of dividing credit for earnings evenly between spouses or of basing social security benefits on the amounts accumulated in private accounts both policies change the relative importance of spouse and survivor social security benefits within the household and both raise the relative reward to work later in the life cycle the incentives created are modest and retirement responds accordingly nevertheless at some ages such as 65 there may be as much as a 6 increase in the old age work force under privatized accounts copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

l etranger status property rights and investment incentives in cote d ivoire this study uses data from cote d ivoire to show that outsider households have relatively small land holdings and less complete rights over land than locals it then demonstrates a link between property rights and investment incentives by looking at the decision to leave land fallow outsiders fallow a smaller proportion of their land indicating that their farms are left uncultivated for shorter periods this is only partly explained by their incomplete property rights and relative land poverty these differences in investment patterns lead to lower yields per hectare jel o12 q15

measuring subjective expectations in developing countries a critical review and new evidence the majority of economic decisions taken by individuals are forward looking and thus involve their expectations of future outcomes understanding the expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial importance to designing and evaluating policies in health education finance migration social protection and many other areas however the majority of developing country surveys are static in nature and do not contain information on the subjective expectations of individuals possible reasons given for not collecting this information include fears that poor illiterate individuals do not understand probability concepts that it takes far too much time to ask such questions or that the answers add little value this paper provides a critical review and new analysis of subjective expectations data from developing countries and refutes each of these concerns the authors find that people in developing countries can generally understand and answer probabilistic questions such questions are not prohibitive in time to ask and the expectations are useful predictors of future behavior and economic decisions the paper discusses the different methods being tried for eliciting such information the key methodological issues involved and the open research questions the available evidence suggests that collecting expectations data is both feasible and valuable suggesting that it should be incorporated into more developing country surveys

structural reform of social security governments around the world have enacted or are currently considering fundamental structural reforms of their social security pension programs the key feature in these reforms is a shift from a pure pay as you go tax financed system in which taxes on current workers are primarily distributed to current retirees to a mixed system that combines pay as you go benefits with investment based personal retirement accounts this paper discusses how such a mixed system could work in practice and how the transition to such a change could be achieved it then analyzes the economic gains that would result from shifting to a mixed system i turn next to the three problems that critics raise about any investment based plan administrative costs risk and income distribution finally i comment on some of the ad hoc proposals for dealing with the financial problem of social security without shifting to an investment based system

the effects of differential income replacement and mortality on u s social security redistribution we study redistribution via the u s social security retirement system for cohorts of men born during the second half of the 20th century our focus is on redistribution across race and education groups the cohorts we study are younger than cohorts studied in previous similar research and thus more exposed to recent increases in earnings inequality all else equal this should increase the degree of progressivity of social security redistribution due to the structure of the benefit formula however we find that redistribution is only modestly progressive for individuals born as late as 1980 differential mortality rates across race and education groups are the primary explanation while black white mortality gaps have narrowed some in recent years they remain large and dull progressivity mortality gaps by education level are also large and unlike the gaps by race they are widening which puts additional regressive pressure on social security redistribution

health longevity and retirement reform abstract in this paper we study alternative retirement reforms designed to achieve fiscal sustainability in the face of demographic change we are particularly interested in the heterogeneous effects across demographic groups as improvements in health and longevity have not been uniform across the population to this end we develop a dynamic structural life cycle model of heterogeneous agents who face health mortality and income risk we consider the following policy reform measures 1 increasing the early access age to old age retirement 2 raising income taxes 3 lowering old age retirement benefits and 4 lowering old age retirement and disability benefits we find that of the considered policies proportionally lowering old age retirement and disability benefits results in the highest average welfare for all education categories it is also the most successful at boosting employment

deutsche mark dollar volatility intraday activity patterns macroeconomic announcements and longer run dependencies this paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five minute returns the approach captures the intraday activity patterns the macroeconomic announcements and the volatility persistence arch known from daily returns the different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability both at the intraday and daily level the implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental driving forces behind the volatility process is also discussed the efficient market hypothesis contends that financial asset prices provide rational assessments of fundamental values and future payoffs by implication price changes should reflect the arrival and processing of all relevant new information however the proportion of return variability that can be ascribed to public news announcements is low for example cutler poterba and summers 1989 find that even the largest daily price changes in the stock market generally cannot be associated with any significant economic news 1 moreover proxies for the flow of public information e g the number of news items released by reuter s news service berry and hiowe 1994 or dow jones company mitchell and mulherin 1994 explain little of the overall variation thus if private information is ruled out proponents of rational price formation have to assert the existence of important news items

the impact of public information on the stock market we study the relation between the number of news announcements reported daily by dow jones company and aggregate measures of securities market activity including trading volume and market returns we find that the number of dow jones announcements and market activity are directly related and that the results are robust to the addition of factors previously found to influence financial markets such as day of the week dummy variables news importance as proxied by large new york times headlines and major macroeconomic announcements and non information sources of market activity as measured by dividend capture and triple witching trading however the observed relation between news and market activity is not particularly strong and the patterns in news announcements do not explain the day of the week seasonalities in market activity our analysis of the dow jones database confirms the difficulty of linking volume and volatility to observed measures of information

the profits of power land rights and agricultural investment in ghana we examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in akwapim ghana we show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output the intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual s security of tenure over those specific plots and in turn to the individual s position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots

review of de soto s the mystery of capital in the mystery of capital hernando de soto promotes his explanation of why formal capital markets function poorly in developing countries de soto argues that much of the population of developing countries lacks access to credit not because they lack assets but because ownership of their property is secured informally which prevents the use of property as collateral the inability to convert assets into capital keeps the developing world from benefiting from capitalism

land tenure and property rights theory and implications for development policy this article explores the nature of property rights systems their evolution and their effect on resource allocation it is argued that certain institutional arrangements for land rights have evolved in order to reduce uncertainty and increase efficiency in credit as well as in land markets of particular relevance to developing countries the article emphasizes the contribution of public sector infrastructure to effective land rights systems an appendix to the article presents a formal model analyzing the effects of security of land rights on land prices the intensity of cultivation and the use of credit empirical evidence from thailand supports several of the propositions derived from the model

land tenure and agricultural productivity in africa a comparative analysis of the economics literature and recent policy strategies and reforms summary this paper examines the convergence and divergence of results from economic studies of the relationships between land tenure security and agricultural productivity in africa and how these results have been incorporated into recent agricultural poverty alleviation and land policy documents the paper finds that there are both areas of convergence and divergence in the economics literature similarly the attention given to land tenure and its perceived effects on productivity varies considerably in the policy literature the significant heterogeneity in findings itself suggests that policy responses must pay attention to local context and the overarching macro and sectoral conditions within which tenure systems operate

is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective evidence from madagascar formalizing land rights has been promoted as a way to encourage agricultural investment and stimulate land markets yet little is known about the benefits of such policies in sub saharan africa where the preconditions for success are less favorable the analysis uses a large sample of plots from an intensively titled rice growing area of madagascar and compares land specific investments land productivity and land values for titled and untitled plots cultivated by the same household having a title has no significant effect on plot specific investment and correspondingly little effect on land productivity and land values these results are broadly consistent with a simulation of a theoretical model of investment under expropriation risk calibrated to the same data a cost benefit analysis suggests that the current system of formal titling should not be extended in rural madagascar and that any new system of land registration will have to be quite inexpensive to be worthwhile

the productivity impacts of formal and informal land rights evidence from madagascar this paper studies the relationship between land rights and agricultural productivity whereas previous studies used proxies for soil quality and instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of land titles the data used here include precise soil quality measurements which in principle allow controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity between plots empirical results suggest that formal land rights i e land titles have no impact on productivity but that informal land rights i e landowners subjective perceptions of what they can and cannot do with their plots have heterogeneous impacts on productivity

how family status and social security claiming options shape optimal life cycle portfolios we show how optimal household decisions regarding work retirement saving portfolio allocations and life insurance are shaped by the complex financial options embedded in u s social security rules and uncertain family transitions our life cycle model predicts sharp consumption drops on retirement an age 62 peak in claiming rates and earlier claiming by wives versus husbands and single women moreover life insurance is mainly purchased on men s lives our model which takes social security rules seriously generates wealth and retirement outcomes that are more consistent with the data in contrast to earlier and less realistic models

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

does social security privatization produce efficiency gains while privatizing social security can improve labor supply incentives it can also reduce risk sharing we analyze a 50 privatization using an overlapping generations model where heterogeneous agents with elastic labor supply face idiosyncratic earnings shocks and longevity uncertainty when wage shocks are insurable privatization produces about 18 100 of extra resources for each future household after all transitional losses have been compensated for with lump sum taxes when wages are not insurable privatization reduces efficiency by about 2 400 per future household we check the robustness of these results to different model specifications as well as policy reforms and arrive at several surprising conclusions first privatization performs better in a closed economy where interest rates decline with capital accumulation than in an open economy second privatization also performs better when an actuarially fair private annuity market does not exist third government matching of private contributions on a progressive basis is not very effective at restoring efficiency and can actually cause harm

the effect of pension reform on pension benefit expectations and savings decisions in japan using the japanese study of aging and retirement jstar which is a new japanese panel survey of people aged 50 and over we find that more japanese in their early 50s expect their level of public pension benefits to decline compared with those in their late 50s and early 60s we also find that recent pension reforms that raised the pensionable age affected the japanese population by increasing the age at which they expect to claim their benefits by almost the exact same amount as the increase in the pensionable age the reforms have also decreased the population s expectations about receiving public pension benefits although this effect is not necessarily significant we also find evidence that anxiety about the public pension programme s future increases private savings

land tenure security and investment incentives puzzling evidence from burkina faso abstract the commonsense logic associating higher land security and higher incentives to invest has been recently called into question in the case of african agriculture to be meaningful empirical tests have to be carefully designed so as to take account of the possible endogeneity of the land rights variable this is done in this paper by applying suitable econometric methods to the original data collected in burkina faso the results obtained cast doubt on the existence of a systematic influence of land tenure security on investment by reviewing the justifications for scepticism in the recent literature we are able to conclude that the traditional village order where it exists provides the basic land rights required to stimulate small scale investment

property rights by squatting land ownership risk and adverse possession statutes a fundamental aspect of private property is the right to exclude trespassers or squatters nonetheless in all 50 states a trespasser can acquire ownership by continuously occupying a parcel of land until the statutorily set period of limitations runs out although these adverse possession statutes appear to weaken property rights this paper explains how such limits are valuable to property owners by balancing the risk of claims from past legitimate owners against the cost of expelling future trespassers or squatters the empirical analysis using data from 46 states provides evidence that is consistent with the theory

perspectives from the president s commission on social security reform recently we were asked to serve on the president s commission to strengthen social security csss along with 14 other members drawn equally from both major political parties the commission s charge was to provide recommendations to modernize the social security system restore its fiscal soundness and develop a workable system of personal retirement accounts this paper explains how the commission arrived at some of its recommendations and the role that economics played in contributing to these recommendations we describe the key institutional constraints confronting efforts to reform social security and how these constraints influenced commission decisions we also illustrate how economics research influenced the commission s analysis of how to structure personal accounts ways to enhance traditional social security program finances and means of measuring the extent of financial progress achieved through reform

does the ndc scheme mimic the french point system after the implementation of the notional defined contribution ndc pension scheme in italy and sweden in the 90s some authors argued that its design merely replicates the functioning of the poin

governance and contract choice theory and evidence from groundwater irrigation markets abstract this paper examines the role governance institutions play in the adoption of contracts we develop a simple model of the contracting relationship in a setting where unverifiable outcomes exist and use it to interpret data on groundwater irrigation contracts in bangladesh a distinguishing feature of this market is the variety of village level institutions which impose different degrees of punishment for contract violation consistent with the model we find households adopt contracts that rely on unverifiable outcomes which are not formally contractible when punishment for contract violation is weak conversely households adopt contracts that rely on formally contractible and verifiable outcomes when punishment is severe this evidence is consistent with contract terms being chosen optimally given what is or is not formally contractible

how effective is redistribution under the social security benefit formula abstract this paper uses earnings histories from the social security administration linked to the survey responses for participants in the health and retirement study to investigate redistribution under the current social security benefit formula as advertised own benefits are significantly redistributed from individuals with high to those with low lifetime earnings however redistribution is roughly halved when spouse and survivor benefits are taken into account and redistribution is measured among families when families are arrayed by total earnings during years when both spouses are engaged in substantial work there is very little redistribution from families with high to low earnings capacity

trends in male labor force participation and retirement some evidence on the role of pensions and social security in the 1970 s and 1980 s this article estimates the effects of changes in pension plans and social security in the 1970s and 1980s on the steady state retirement of men work incentives associated with pension coverage and plan characteristics are calculated primarily from the 1969 79 retirement history study and the 1983 and 1989 surveys of consumer finances simulations with a structural retirement model suggest that the long run effects of changes in pension plans and social security account for about a quarter of the reduction in full time work by men in their early sixties but cannot explain the reduction by those age 65

property rights and productivity the case of joint land titling in vietnam this paper explores the effect of land titling on agricultural productivity in vietnam and the productivity effects of single versus joint titling for husband and wife using a plot fixed effects approach our results show that obtaining a land title is associated with higher yields for both individually and jointly held titles we conclude that there is no tradeoff between joint titling and productivity and so joint titles are potentially an effective way to improve women s bargaining power within the household with no associated efficiency losses

insecure land rights and share tenancy evidence from madagascar most studies of tenurial insecurity focus on its effects on investment this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and land tenancy contracts based on distinct features of formal law and customary rights in madagascar this paper augments the canonical model of sharecropping by making the strength of the landlord s property right increasing in the amount of risk she bears within the contract using data on landlords subjective perceptions in rural madagascar empirical tests support the hypothesis that insecure property rights drive contract choice but offer little support in favor of the canonical risk sharing hypothesis