rural urban poverty differences in transition countries summary this paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of central and eastern europe and the former soviet union the paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across countries and changes over time

the impact on economic performance of a transformation in workplace relations this study examines how a transformation in patterns of conflict and cooperation affected economic performance in 25 work areas of a large unionized manufacturing facility in the period 1984 87 unlike most studies of industrial relations and economic performance this study clearly distinguishes conflict from cooperation but evaluates the two together rather than focusing on only one an analysis of data collected from union and employer records and interviews strongly suggests that work areas with traditional labor management relations rooted in adversarial assumptions had higher costs more scrap lower productivity and a lower return to direct labor hours worked than work areas with transformational relations characterized by increased cooperation and improved dispute resolution

collateral and credit rationing a review of recent empirical studies as a guide for future research abstract the relationship between firms and banks often suffers from informational opacity that may result in credit rationing in theory providing collateral to the bank can have a mitigating effect on these informational asymmetries and thus solve the credit rationing problem even though collateral is already a widespread debt contract feature recent trends predict that in the future collateral will become even more important for informationally opaque firms the aim of this paper is twofold first we provide a review of the recently growing empirical research on collateral as a remedy for credit rationing second we would like to pinpoint gaps and limitations in current empirical research most studies contend with a flawed research design by not distinguishing between business and personal collateral and excluding other information opaqueness reducing tools such as the strength of the relationship between borrower and lender loan maturity and covenants we also discuss the limitations of using a single equation estimation method and the usefulness of incorporating interaction effects into the estimation models finally we provide suggestions for fruitful research avenues that would fill these gaps and enrich the empirical knowledge in this research domain

extrinsic versus intrinsic problems of agricultural cooperation anti incentivism in tanzania and china peasant willingness to engage in collective farming and the efficiency of collective farms once established may be preconditioned on local self determination participatory control discriminating work incentives and external manoeuvrability in the absence of such preconditions whether or not there exist economies of scale sufficient to offset effectively minimised incentive problems cannot be determined anti incentivism bureaucratic controls and extractive external environments are identified as factors inhibiting successful collective farming in both tanzania and china explanations of these tendencies in the two countries are sought in their political economies and ideological structures

livelihoods and farm efficiency in rural georgia this study contributes to the literature on the role of livelihood strategies in rural growth and poverty reduction it distinguishes between livelihood diversity strategies that contribute to sustainable growth in household incomes and those that mainly have a coping function it suggests that typically the contribution of livelihood diversity to growing household income is through relaxing dependence on credit for access to capital in this scenario livelihood diversity would lead to higher technical efficiency in agriculture via investment and thereby to higher household incomes survey data from georgia are introduced and used to test these hypotheses using a bayesian stochastic frontier approach the findings are relevant to defining more clearly the scope and aims of policies to stimulate the rural non farm economy in developing and transition countries

industrial relations performance economic performance and qwl programs an interplant analysis this study analyzes the relationship among plant level measures of industrial relations performance economic performance and quality of working life programs the analysis employs pooled time series and cross section data from 18 plants within a division of general motors for the years 1970 79 the empirical results show strong associations between industrial relations and economic performance measures and limited support for the hypothesis that quality of working life efforts improve both kinds of performance

resource allocation and use under collective rights and labour management in peruvian coastal agriculture a critical issue in the evaluation of labour management as a development policy is its impact on production in an effort to contribute to that evaluation and to the economics of labour management this study analyses production data collected from cooperative firms established by the peruvian agrarian reform the data present an unusual opportunity for careful microeconomic analysis of the reform itself as well as an opportunity to confront and refine existing propositions about the effects of the collective property rights of labour management on production property rights may affect production because of their effort on incentives for conventional resource allocation decisions they may also affect intrafirm principal agent decisions which determine the intensity with which given resources are utilised beginning with ward s i 958 paper a number of theoretical studies have compared labour managed and capitalist resource allocation and an approximate consensus has emerged about conditions under which differences occur in this study measures of the allocative behaviour of peruvian firms are estimated and compared with the theoretically expected behaviour of both capitalist and peasant agricultural producers the impact of collective ownership on the intensity of resource utilisation i e technical efficiency of the observable production function arouses greater theoretical dispute than the resource allocation question a collective assignment of property rights may weaken supervisory authority which can control free rider externality problems within the production process on the other hand participation of labour in management may foster cooperative attitudes and other social control devices which can fulfill the same functions as hierarchical supervision existing literature offers the competing hypotheses that labour management leads either to a breakdown in intrafirm coordination and the observable technical efficiency of production as jensen and meckling i 979 claim or to an improvement as vanek i 969 claims the results of the present paper do not unequivocably support either view instead they portray a diversity in labour managed production performance and suggest the importance of policy and institutional factors which condition the impact of labour management on production the results also provide a

conjecture uncertainty and cooperation in prisoner s dilemma games some experimental evidence abstract this paper presents experimental tests of two models of cooperation in finitely repeated prisoner s dilemma games kreps milgrom roberts and wilson 1982 the models suggest that either a perception that the other party may use the tit for tat strategy or mutual uncertainty concerning dominant noncooperative strategies can lead to rational cooperation the experiment independently manipulated both types of uncertainty and allowed for inferences concerning the players prior homemade preferences for cooperation only in relatively restricted situations did either type of uncertainty promote cooperation instead players cooperated much more than was predicted they also cooperated more when they were certain of their opponents payoffs

on nonparametric supply response analysis in this paper we explore the usefulness of nonparametric methods in the investigation of production behavior and the estimation of price elasticities of output supply and input demand functions the approach can handle the situation where some data points are not consistent with production theory the method is illustrated by estimating supply demand elasticities of outputs and inputs in u s agriculture

agriculture in transition economies from common heritage to divergence the 23 former socialist countries in central and eastern europe cee and the commonwealth of independent states cis started the transition in 1989 1990 from a common institutional and organizational heritage represented by the soviet agricultural model despite the common heritage in agriculture the reform policies in cee and cis diverged from the start as significant differences emerged between the two groups of countries in legal attitudes to private land ownership transferability of land the extent of agricultural privatization and individualization and restructuring of farms this divergence in the implementation of agricultural reform has led to divergence in standard development measures the cee countries are outperforming the cis countries by growth in gdp and agricultural product since 1992 the productivity of agricultural labor in cee is generally increasing and in cis it is decreasing while the cis countries at best can be characterized as reluctant reformers the cee countries have achieved significantly higher levels of economic and institutional reform better performance in cee is associated with greater readiness of the governments in these countries to implement a comprehensive package of economic and social reform policies including more radical land reform and deeper individualization and restructuring of agriculture

the capitalization of coupled and decoupled cap payments into land rental rates this article explores the extent to which payments under the common agricultural policy cap are capitalized into land rents in ireland with implications for the transfer efficiency of such payments since subsidies may not benefit targeted recipients if they are capitalized into input prices capitalization in the years preceding and following the decoupling of agricultural support payments from agricultural production is explored in the period prior to decoupling direct support pillar 1 payments were highly capitalized into irish agricultural rents 67 90 cents per euro of subsidies while in the post decoupling period capitalization appears to have declined somewhat

who are the producers and consumers value chains and food policy effects in the wheat sector in pakistan we develop a disaggregated nominal rate of assistance nra methodology to disentangle the welfare impacts of policies for various interest groups along the value chain to disaggregate effects within the producer and consumer umbrellas we apply our value chain nra methodology to the case of pakistan s wheat price and trade policy we analyze the welfare implications for various agents in the wheat flour value chain from 2000 to 2013 a period characterized by major global price volatility and by regular adjustments of domestic policies we find that the wheat policy has generally benefitted flour consumers and wheat traders at the expense of wheat farmers with limited effects on flour millers our findings illustrate that the welfare implications of policies can be quite different within the producer and consumer umbrellas which has potentially important implications for economic and political economy analyses and for the design of policies that aim to target the poorest groups along value chains

toward an economic model of the japanese firm i owe a great deal to professor moses abramovitz who suggested that i write this article i appreciate his constant encouragement and guidance which aided me throughout its preparation i am also indebted to three anonymous referees of the journal and to professors ryutaro komiya and michael riordan for their critical comments and helpful suggestions needless to say i am solely responsible for the views expressed in this paper

the role of credit constraints on firms exporting and importing activities this article investigates the role of credit constraints on export import and two way trade activities of european manufacturing firms using direct financial constraints indicators and accounting for endogeneity issues we find that credit rationing significantly reduces both the probability of entering foreign markets and the intensive margins of trade empirical results also point out that the role of extra entry costs differs according to the location of foreign markets and to the type of imported goods and services conditional on trading in the european union rationing is not an obstacle to entering additional exporting and importing markets even though two way traders behave differently and are negatively affected by financial constraints when they enter non eu markets

spatial allocation and the shadow pricing of product characteristics abstract the paper considers an industry transforming primary commodities farm products into processed commodities food products it focuses on the allocation of embedded characteristics carbohydrate protein etc both across space and among commodities the approach generates a spatial competitive market equilibrium of production consumption transformation and trade for both primary and processed commodities along with the spatial distribution of shadow prices for the product characteristics the model provides a basis for analyzing the allocation and pricing of agricultural products food products and characteristics in spatial markets the empirical usefulness of the model is illustrated in the context of regional resource allocation in the u s dairy sector

the distributive impact of land markets in uganda abstract this article presents first hand evidence about land distribution and the impact of land markets in central uganda this area is characterized by unequal distribution of land inheritance rural rural migration and active land markets we show that land markets and particularly land purchases tend to reduce the initial inequality in the initial inherited distribution of land land purchases by landless farmers in their native village represent an important part of this adjustment

farm strategy self selection and productivity can small farming groups offer production benefits to farmers in post socialist romania abstract this paper addresses two questions why are romanian farmers continuing to place land in cooperative forms of farming when theory suggests that private farming is more productive and are there efficiency gains to be had from cooperative farming endeavors results from an econometric selection model suggest that smaller endogenously developed farming cooperatives such as family societies provide benefits over private farming strategies under certain conditions this paper questions the wholesale rejection of cooperation around production and challenges policy to move away from the typically dichotomized presentation of agrarian structure as being a trade off between private small scale farming and large scale collective farming

union membership in the united states 1973 1981 this paper reports estimates of union membership gathered from may current population surveys from 1973 to 1981 the authors present data by occupation industry selected states and smsas race gender and educational attainment the paper both extends and differs from that by freeman and medoff which presents unionism estimates for the private sector for 1968 75 to facilitate longitudinal analysis this paper reports three year moving averages of occupational and industry data and annual estimates of demographic classifications the data include public sector as well as private sector workers and they exclude workers not covered by the national labor relations act also the authors provide only union membership estimates not estimates on workers covered by union contracts this paper suggests that the percentage of all workers that are unionized in the united states remained fairly constant over the 1973 81 period

efficient wage bargaining as a repeated game this paper builds a bridge between the two existing approaches for wage and employment determination in a unionized market the monopoly union model and the efficient bargaining model both fail to capture the dynamic aspects of wage bargaining when the repeated nature of the wage bargaining process is considered the equilibria are neither as inefficient as the monopoly union model predicts nor as fully efficient rather the two models can be regarded as particular cases with certain discount rates we apply our model to issues such as the endgame interpretation of the u s steel industry wage concessions and featherbedding

global land investments in the bio economy evidence and policy implications for countries dependent on agriculture the recent wave of investor interest in farmland could in principle help set in motion a virtuous cycle of economic growth and poverty reduction a large literature documenting failure of such investments documents the risks involved to appreciate associated opportunities and challenges we review past experience quantify country level potential for area expansion versus intensification and identify determinants of countries attractiveness for investors in the initial stages of the land rush the fact that weak land governance seems to increase rather than reduce land demand justifies an emphasis on improving institutions transparency and accountability while at the same time providing concrete suggestions for policy and research

the impact of china s economic reforms on agricultural productivity growth this paper presents a method for assessing the relative importance of price increases and strengthened individual incentives due to the introduction of the responsibility system for the post 1978 increase in china s agricultural productivity data on post 1978 chinese agricultural performance suggest that a little over three quarters of the measured productivity increase is due to payment system changes and the remainder to price increases we also use our method to calculate incentive indices giving an estimate of the fraction of their marginal product that peasants received under the pre 1978 regime

production organization and efficiency during transition an empirical analysis of east german agriculture enterprise restructuring is expected to improve efficiency in transition economies with data from former east germany we compare the efficiency of family farms and partnerships with large scale successor organizations of the collective and state farms lsos using parametric and nonparametric techniques we show that lsos display lower technical efficiency than do family farms and partnerships but that this difference is small and declining during transition mainly as a result of structural changes in agriculture family farms are not as scale efficient as partnerships and lsos and partnerships are superior to all other organizational forms

pay equality and industrial politics personnel managers often argue that equitable pay treatment manifested as wage compression is useful because it reduces disharmony among workers but it is far from obvious that a compressed salary structure is morale improving since better workers may feel disenchanted by this scheme however when workers rewards are based on relative comparisons salary compression reduces uncooperative behavior that is detrimental to the firm relative comparisons imply that some reference group must be selected the major result is that within the relevant groups some wage compression is efficient

the performance of private and cooperative socialist organization postwar yugoslav agriculture socialist enterprises in yugoslav agriculture show higher levels of productivity than private producers the author examines the sources of these differences with total factor productivity estimates based on sectoral aggregate cobb douglas production functions which permit separation of environmental policy and organizational effects the results support the following conclusions cooperative socialist enterprises are not inherently inefficient and can even outperform private producers both types of producers were responding to their environment and their differential rates of technological change reflect the different constraints they faced and socialist enterprises exhibited technology adoption behavior similar to nonsocialist enterprises elsewhere copyright 1987 by mit press

is private farming more efficient than socialized agriculture this paper examines the technical efficiency of state and private farms in poland for the period 1960 74 we find that the average technical efficiency of the two types of farms does not differ although the dispersion of efficiency levels is greater among state farms than among private ones we do find clear evidence of allocative inefficiency with state farms oversupplied with fertilizer and machinery

aggregating capacity limiting separable inputs 1 introduction in many empirical studies on productivity researchers frequently need to use data on capital goods in their analyses unfortunately capital goods are extremely heterogeneous and data on them are difficult to capture in a single measure there are many different types and vintages of capital goods in the same firm it is very difficult to gather all information on all capital goods in practice capital goods are aggregated into one input named capital recent studies that aggregate capital goods are fare grosskopf and tyteca 1996 who used the installed generating capacity as capital acemoglu and zilibotti 2001 who applied the perpetual inventory method to recover capital from investment mathijs and swinnen 2001 who adopted the deflated book value of fixed assets as capital and taymaz and saatci 1997 who used the depreciation allowance as capital though each method has its merits there may be information loss during the process of aggregating capital goods five possible types of errors during the aggregation process are identified here they are i error of separability there is a close relation between input aggregation and separability when different capital goods are separable from other inputs it is possible to find an aggregate of capital goods without information loss in this case there is no error of separability if capital goods are not separable from other inputs however and we aggregate them then actually we are approximating the production function by a separable function mak 1988 noted that the success of approximating a nonseparable function depends on whether that function is close enough to a separable function thus when the technology is not separable the error of separability occurs when the production function is not close to a separable function the error of separability is even larger ii error of formula suppose the production function is approximated by a separable function then there is a way to aggregate capital goods if the formula we use to aggregate capital goods cannot give us an aggregation consistent with that separable function then we face the error of formula iii error of measuring opportunity costs some measures of capital require information about prices of capital goods in economic theories all prices of inputs are the opportunity costs of using those respective inputs if the prices used do not reflect opportunity costs then this error occurs iv error of the deflator when we need to add up capital goods bought in different periods by using price information we have to deflate the values if an inappropriate deflator is chosen then there is an error of the deflator v error of accounting practices information reported by firms follows bookkeeping rules the value of fixed assets for example may not be the same as the concept of capital in economics thus investment and fixed assets may be biased this problem is larger when firms in different industries or countries are compared whether or not there is the error of separability depends on the structure of the technology it is beyond the control of researchers though we must cope with the error of separability what we can do is to avoid the other four errors in this paper i link the literature on separability with that on maximum capacity in favor of using the output capacity of plants to aggregate heterogeneous capital goods we find that when some inputs are separable in the production function their maximum capacity can be used as an aggregate measure for them this aggregate measure is economically meaningful and empirically tractable this paper is organized as follows section 2 discusses the properties of capacity limiting inputs section 3 relates capacity limiting inputs to separability section 4 comments on some applications of aggregating captial goods section 5 concludes the paper

firms choice of method of pay using data from the bls industry wage survey the author tests the theory that firms choose their methods of pay by balancing the gains from more precise links between performance and pay against m

unions and cooperative behavior the effect of discounting using union contract and industry wage survey data this article examines the effect of discounting on cooperative bargaining behavior by unions and firms game theory predicts that higher discount rates raise the temptation to defect from cooperation measures of cooperative behavior included the presence of merit pay incentive pay wage employment guarantees or labor management study committees discount rates were proxied by the relevant industry s failure rate failure rates generally had negative effects on cooperation industry wage survey results showed larger effects for union than non union establishments providing support for the union bargaining framework

jobs and agricultural policy impact of the common agricultural policy on eu agricultural employment abstract this paper investigates the relationship between eu agricultural subsidies and the outflow of labor from agriculture we use more representative subsidy indicators and a wider coverage panel data from 210 eu regions over the period 2004 2014 than has been used before the data allow to better correct for sample selection bias than previous empirical studies we find that on average cap subsidies reduce the outflow of labor from agriculture but the effect is almost entirely due to decoupled pillar i payments coupled pillar i payments have no impact on reducing labor outflow from agriculture i e on preserving jobs in agriculture the impact of pillar ii is mixed our estimates predict that an increase of 10 percent of the cap budget would prevent an extra 16 000 people from leaving the eu agriculture sector each year a 10 percent decoupling would save 13 000 agricultural jobs each year however the budgetary costs are large the estimated cost is more than 300 000 per year or more than 25 000 per month per job saved in agriculture

union s threats and wage determination this paper considers local wage bargaining as a sequential game and focus es on how different rules of the game affect employment and equilibri um payment to workers and employers work to rule and other go slow t hreats lead to low employment while strike threats lead to high empl oyment an increase in the bargaining power of the union induces high er or unchanged equilibrium employment in the strike threat case whi le employment is reduced in the slow down case finally if all kinds of industrial actions are legal only one is credible which type de pends on the parameters of the model copyright 1988 by royal economic society

rural reforms and agricultural growth in china this paper employs province level panel data to assess the contributions of decollectivization price adjustments and other reforms to china s agricultural growth in the reform period decollectivization is found to improve total factor productivity and to account for about half of the output growth during 1978 84 the adjustment in state procurement prices also contributed positively to output growth its impact came mainly from the responses in input use the effect of other market related reforms on productivity and output growth was very small reasons for slowdown in agricultural growth after 1984 are also analyzed copyright 1992 by american economic association

exports and profitability first evidence for german manufacturing firms using unique recently released nationally representative high quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for germany this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability it documents that the positive profitability differential of exporters compared to non exporters is statistically significant though rather small when observed firm characteristics and unobserved firm specific effects are controlled for in contrast to nearly all empirical studies on the relationship between productivity and exports we do not find any evidence for selfselection of more profitable firms into export markets due to the sampling frame of the data used we cannot test the hypothesis that firms which start exporting perform better in the years after the start than their counterparts which do not start instead we use a newly developed continuous treatment approach and show that exporting improves the profitability almost over the whole range of the export sales ratio only firms that generate 90 percent and more of their total sales abroad do not benefit from exporting in terms of an increased rate of profit this means that the usually observed higher productivity of exporters is not completely absorbed by the extra costs of exporting or by higher wages paid by internationally active firms

a within farm efficiency comparison of silvopasture systems with conventional pasture and forestry in northeast argentina agroforestry which has multiple inputs and outputs would benefit from scrutiny of economic efficiency because levels of adoption have not met expectations previous literature estimated the efficiency of agricultural systems using data envelopment analysis however the vast variability between farms makes comparing systems difficult this study uses paired within farm comparisons of silvopasture a combination of planted trees and pasture to conventional cattle ranching and plantation forestry to evaluate the relative technical efficiency silvopasture proves to be more efficient than conventional cattle ranching forestry demonstrated increasing returns to scale cattle raising demonstrated decreasing returns to scale for large scale farmers and silvopasture was intermediate jel d24 o13

collectivization and china s agricultural crisis in 1959 1961 the agricultural crisis in china in 1959 61 after the initial success of the collectivization movement resulted in 30 million extra deaths in this paper a game theory hypothesis proposes the main cause of this catastrophe i argue that because of the difficulty in supervising agricultural work the success of an agricultural collective depends on a self enforcing contract in which each one promises to discipline oneself a self enforcing contract however can be sustained only in a repeated game in the fall of 1958 the right to withdraw from a collective was deprived the nature of the collectivization was thus changed from a repeated game to a one time game as a result the self enforcing contract could not be sustained and agricultural productivity collapsed the empirical evidence is consistent with this hypothesis

the economics of agricultural decollectivization in east central europe and the former soviet union 1989 include both the privatization of agricultural production assets and the restructuring of state and collective farms farm restructuring and more specifically the breakup of large scale agricultural production units into individually operated farms a process we define as decollectivization differ considerably for the various ece and fsu countries differences in decollectivization can be observed across countries between regions within a country and over time we argue that these differences are not random this article identifies the factors that affect the decollectivization process and shows how they are consistent with empirically observed differences in agricultural decollectivization in ece and fsu countries the decollectivization process is a consequence of the decision of collective farm members to leave the collective production framework and start up individual farms factors affecting this decision are the expected productivity and profitability of individual farming relative to collective farming and the costs for individuals to leave the collective farm and start up an individual farm these costs are affected by land reform privatization and decollectivization regulations the relative productivity of individual versus collective farming depends on the distribution of collective farmers productivity the prereform average collective farm productivity and the advantages and disadvantages of individual farming compared to collective farming the literature on decollectivization identifies both advantages and disadvantages in collective production some of which would not extend beyond the transition period disadvantages include high transaction costs associated with the monitoring of labor and inefficiencies due to the right of

union wage practices and wage dispersion within establishments this study analyzes establishment level data primarily to examine the effect of unionism on the wage structure within establishments the major finding is that within establishment dispersion of wages is significantly narrower in unionized than in nonunionized establishments a pattern the author attributes in large part to unions wage practices such as single rate or automatic progression modes of wage payment as opposed to merit reviews and individual wage determination the data also show that dispersion in average wages is narrower among organized plants but by more modest amounts than the within establishment differential overall the evidence suggests a major role for explicit union wage policies in explaining the dispersion of wages within firms and in the economy as a whole

efficiency in social versus private agricultural production the case of yugoslavia this paper extends the work of michael l boyd 1987 by examining the question of efficiency in yugoslavian agricultural production using the stochastic production frontier the authors fin d the private sector produces with higher output efficiency than the social sector next they examine regional efficiency differences the authors findings reinforce earlier analysis of the economic impact of regional development policy pursued in yugoslavia less developed republics appeared unable to utilize efficiently the large volume of investment resources allocated from the more developed republics via the central government copyright 1993 by mit press

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

land market imperfections and agricultural policy impacts in the new eu member states a partial equilibrium analysis this article analyses how transaction costs and imperfect competition in the land market affect the welfare effects of agricultural subsidies in the new eastern member states of the european union benefits of land subsidies end up with landowners in new eastern member states also with imperfections in the new eastern member states land markets with unequal access to subsidies small tenant farmers may even lose out from the subsidies decoupling of payments shifts policy rents to farmers but constrains productivity enhancing restructuring using reserve entitlements to mitigate this effect reduces the intended benefits on distortions and target efficiency

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

rational cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoner s dilemma experimental evidence this paper presents experiments designed to examine the sequential equilibrium reputation hypothesis in the finitely repeated prisoner s dilemma the authors test the hypothesis by controlling the subjects ability to build reputations and by manipulating their beliefs that their opponent is irrational or altruistic the responses of subjects strongly support the sequential equilibrium prediction the results also suggest an important role for homemade altruism that is a natural tendency to cooperate that subjects bring to the experiment from the outside the authors find that there may be no difference between the beliefs that an opponent is altruistic and the actual chance it is so copyright 1993 by royal economic society

institutional reform and labor reallocation during transition theory evidence from polish agriculture abstract reallocation of agricultural labor during transition differs widely between regions and countries our analysis shows that agricultural labor reallocation in poland is determined by a the dramatic adjustment of prices and production costs caused by price liberalization and subsidy cuts b regional differences in farm organization and the impact of institutional reforms on these organizations c structural problems constraining intersectoral mobility the latter limit the benefits from the institutional reforms long term efficiency gains and sustainable rural development are conditional upon reducing such structural constraints and improving the functioning of the labor market

capitalization of the single payment scheme into land value generalized propensity score evidence from the eu this paper estimates the capitalization of the single payment scheme sps into land values the theory suggests a nonlinear and discontinuous relationship between the sps and land rents in empirical analysis we employ unique farm level panel data and apply the generalized propensity score matching approach our estimates suggest a 6 to 10 sps capitalization rate on average in the european union the nonfarming landowners gains from the sps are only 4 however there is a large variation in the capitalization rate for different sps levels and between different member states 3 to 94

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

credit market imperfections and the distribution of policy rents this article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents in a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections when an area payment is given land rents go up by more than the subsidy on aggregate farms may lose from the subsidy the results depend on the extent to which subsidies have direct and indirect effects on the credit constraints on whether farms rent or own land and on farm heterogeneity

the impact of decoupled payments on farm choices conceptual and methodological challenges abstract in this paper we review the methodological framework for analysing decoupled payments in models of agricultural production market and technological uncertainty farm efficiency credit constraints farm household choices involving extra agricultural decisions policy uncertainty and long run impact of decoupling on investment and land values are the relevant issues that should be pursued by methodological and empirical analysis future research should refine the analysis of decoupled payments mainly trying to provide results that can be useful for policy simulation to bridge the gap between analysis at the individual level and sector policy models

collective agricultural production a solution for transition economies abstract the paper examines theoretical reasons and provides examples for productivity differences between agricultural service cooperatives and collectives service cooperatives can utilize economies of scale enhance competitiveness and provide technical information advantages that often outweighed problems of free riding low investment and excessive political intervention agricultural collectives while not adding substantial advantages are in addition associated with problems of supervision and effort supply tendencies to substitute casual workers or mechanization for regular members and low investment incentives while collective forms of organization in transition economies respond to high risk and market imperfections they do so inefficiently policies that create conditions for service cooperatives to compete may lead to large productivity gains

land rental markets in transition theory and evidence from hungary summary this paper analyzes the determinants of household farms participation in land rental markets in transition countries we derive several hypotheses on the impact of households human capital land endowment land quality and prices transaction costs rural credit and labor market constraints our empirical analysis uses data from a representative survey of more than 1 400 hungarian household farms and hungarian official statistics land rental markets reallocate land to households with better farm management capacities households combine buying and renting of land to extend their farms land ownership is fragmented and land consolidation occurs through renting the domination of corporate farms in some regions restricts households access to land

determinants of technical efficiency of crop and livestock farms in poland la pologne est l un des pays d europe de l est candidats a une accession a l union europeenne qui rencontre de graves problemes de restructuration agricole l article etudie l efficacite technique en 2000 d exploitations agricoles individuelles polonaises specialisees en elevage et en grandes cultures l efficacite est estimee par la methode de frontiere stochastique et sa variabilite statistique evaluee par la construction d intervalles de confiance l article examine egalement les determinants de l efficacite les resultats obtenus pas la methode de frontiere stochastique sont compares avec ceux obtenus par la methode de data envelopment analysis dea en moyenne l efficacite technique des exploitations d elevage est superieure a celle des exploitations de grandes cultures pour les deux specialisations la relation entre l efficacite et la taille des exploitations est positive les grandes exploitations sont les plus efficaces les resultats obtenus par la methode de frontiere stochastique sont generalement confirmes par la methode dea la qualite de la terre et le degre d integration dans les marches d aval sont d importants determinants de l efficacite la faible education est un obstacle majeur a l efficacite en particulier pour les exploitations de grandes cultures de plus celles ci utilisent beaucoup les marches de facteurs terre et travail alors que les exploitations d elevage utilisent plutot leurs propres terres et le travail familial