profit function approximations and duality applications to agriculture monte carlo simulations of profit functions indicate that flexible functional forms may be ranked nearly the same with respect to allen uzawa partial substitution elasticities or price and fixed factor elasticities flexible functional form approximations of output price elasticities are generally worse than approximations of input price or fixed factor elasticities minflex laurent functional forms did not appear to approximate underlying elasticities any better than did their translog and generalized leontief counterparts

β convergence and the cyclical dynamics of uk regional house prices the potential convergence of regional house prices in the uk is examined in contrast to the existing literature which focuses upon stochastic convergence the present paper considers alternative f

cost function estimation under risk aversion standard definitions of the cost function do not admit risk standard ex post approaches to cost function estimation yield biased and inconsistent estimates when production is stochastic recently an ex ante approach to cost function estimation with stochastic production has been developed by imbedding the distance function in the cost function estimation problem we generalize the approach to consider risk aversion in decision making only two empirical studies have considered stochastic production in cost function estimation both have required constant returns to scale we demonstrate a methodology sufficiently general to consider nonconstant returns to scale

regional house price interactions in the uk 1975 81 a cross spectral analysis 1986 regional house price interactions in the uk 1975 81 a cross spectral analysis applied economics vol 18 no 9 pp 1011 1023

output input and productivity measurement in u s agriculture 1948 79 tornqvist theil indexes of outputs and inputs are constructed these data are used to construct indexes of productivity growth over the postwar period the productivity indexes can be derived from a flexible multioutput multifactor representation of the structure of production constrained to constant returns to scale total factor productivity grew at an average annual rate of 1 75 compared with 1 70 per year estimated by the u s department of agriculture the similar estimates of productivity growth overshadow some important differences in measurement of individual inputs the major effort in measuring agricultural productivity is undertaken by the u s department of agriculture usda an american agricultural economics association task force on measuring productivity has examined the sources and procedures used in constructing the official statistics see loomis and barton lambert barton and durost the task force recommended that the usda adopt a series of specific improvements for constructing certain inputs and use an indexing procedure that does not impose a priori restrictions on the structure of production 1 this paper presents revised indexes of outputs and inputs the data are used to construct indexes of productivity growth over the postwar period the productivity indexes can be derived from a flexible multioutput multifactor representation of the structure of production the translog transformation function constrained to constant returns to scale 2 the indexes of outputs and inputs have the same form and their ratio coincides with the estimate of productivity growth

the convergence of regional house prices in the uk the ripple effect hypothesis implies a long run convergence of regional uk house prices however despite many authors believing in the existence of such an underlying constancy statistical evidence has yet to be presented supporting this implication in this paper an alternative approach is proposed to analyse regional house price ratios in contrast to the findings of previous studies application of this new procedure results in the detection of widespread convergence of house prices in a number of regions of the uk the results suggest that the failure of previous analyses to uncover convergence is due to an underlying asymmetry in the adjustment process being ignored interestingly the form of asymmetry detected varies between regions while regions in the south east experience faster convergence following downswings in prices other regions exhibit more rapid convergence following increases in prices

cost functions and duality for stochastic technologies cost functions dual to stochastic production technologies are derived and their properties are discussed these cost functions are shown to be consistent with expected utility maximization without placing serious structural restrictions on the underlying technology

supply and demand functions for multiproduct u s cash grain farms biases caused by research and other policies this study presents new estimates of supply and demand elasticities for u s multiproduct cash grain farms and estimates of input and output bias effects caused by public and private crop research extension and farmers schooling the study also shows that the social rate of return to public crop research is large about 62 percent

modeling supply response in a multiproduct framework the paper models multiproduct supply response in agriculture and tests key assumptions traditionally maintained in supply response studies the technology is approximated by a restricted profit function the properties of the restricted profit function are imposed during estimation the hypothesis that maintains the existence of output price and quantity indexes that satisfy the adding up property is rejected the existence of individual production functions for each output is also rejected unless joint production is permitted the estimates of responsiveness of a particular commodity to changes in own price or prices of competing outputs are likely to be considerably understated

usefulness of pretests for estimating underlying technologies using dual profit functions translog and generalized linear approximating forms are used to estimate dual profit functions from stochastically simulated data generated from a known relatively complex technology under profit maximizing conditions the hypotheses of monotonicity convexity and equality of parameters common to the profit function and demand equations are tested this last hypothesis is always rejected and monotonicity is never rejected convexity is rejected for about a third of the translog models and fewer than 5 percent of generalized linear models neither approximating form strongly dominates the other for accuracy in estimating the underlying elasticities of substitution copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

regional house price convergence in spain during the housing boom the aim of this paper is to identify convergence clubs in house prices among spanish regions over the period 1995 q1 to 2007 q4 and to investigate which factors are responsible for club formation employing a novel regression based convergence test proposed by phillips and sul 2007 we find that regional house prices do not converge to a common trend which confirms the existence of some degree of segmentation in the spanish housing market the research results support the existence of convergence clubs indicating that spanish regions form four separate groups that converge to different house price levels results of an ordered logit model suggest that differences in population growth size of the rental market initial house supply and geographical situation have played a crucial role in determining club membership

how reliable is duality theory in empirical work the neoclassical theory of production establishes a dual relationship between the profit value function of a competitive firm and its underlying production technology this relationship commonly referred to as duality theory has been widely used in empirical work to estimate production parameters such as elasticities and returns to scale we generate a pseudo dataset by monte carlo simulations which starting from known production parameters yield a dataset with the main characteristics of u s agriculture in terms of unobserved firm heterogeneity decisions under uncertainty unexpected production and price shocks endogenous prices output and input aggregation measurement error in variables and omitted variables production parameters are not precisely recovered when performing econometric estimation based on the duality approach and the elasticity estimates are inaccurate deviations of own and cross price elasticities from initial median values given our parameter calibration range between 6 and 690 with an average of 90 also own price elasticities are as imprecisely recovered as cross price elasticities sensitivity analysis shows that results still hold for different sources and levels of noise and sample size used in estimation

expected profit price change and risk aversion perhaps no single area of recent inquiry has had greater impact on production economics than the duality results of shepard mcfadden and uzawa as lau binswanger and others have argued these dual approaches cost and profit functions have substantial advantages over primal specifications production functions plus equilibrium conditions although cost minimization is attractive for some problems like measuring the elasticity of substitution it seems sensible to view output as endogenous thus one must explain output changesat least for proper estimation this leads to profit maximization or some other explicit behavioral assumption the profit function approach is used increasingly in agricultural economics lau and yotopolous weaver yotopolous lau lin generally this approach is applied without formal recognition of risk or risk averse behavior the purpose of this note is to illustrate the changes in expected profit given various models of risk it shows that risk aversion biases the certainty results regarding factor demands and output supplies derived from the profit function the qualitative and quantitative nature of these biases also are analyzed these results should help researchers discern problems with the certainty approach and the possible consequences in agricultural applications where risk is present

economic transition and growth some extensions of neoclassical growth models are discussed that allow for cross section heterogeneity among economies and evolution in rates of technological progress over time the models oer a spectrum of transitional behavior among economies that includes con vergence to a common steady state path as well as various forms of transitional divergence and convergence mechanisms for modeling such transitions and measuring them econo metrically are developed in the paper a new regression test of convergence is proposed its asymptotic properties are derived and some simulations of its nite sample properties are reported transition curves for individual economies and subgroups of economies are estimated in a series of empirical applications of the methods to regional us data oecd data and penn world table data

random profits and duality dual production specifications derived under certainty are typically randomized for econometric purposes with ad hoc error specifications this article shows that such approaches can cause integrability conditionsto fail in particular if errorsin input demands represent errorsin optimization that affect output then typical dual approachesdo not yield congruent suppliesand demands copyright 2002 oxford university press

unemployment marriage and divorce in this paper we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce we use data on spain since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country we find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate pointing to a pro cyclical evolution of marriage however the response of the divorce rate to the business cycle is mixed results show the existence of different patterns depending on geography divorce rates in coastal regions are pro cyclical while in inland regions divorces react to unemployment in a counter cyclical way

on the choice offunctional forms in agricultural production analysis empirical results obtained by an analyst may depend on prior choice of functional form three alternative parametric specifications of the cost function are considered these are generalized leontief translog and normalized quadratic functions performance of these functional forms is evaluated by allen elasticities of substitution biases in technical change and some theory based hypotheses all three parametric specifications yielded mixed results together empirical results reinforce the need for model specification searches

a virtually ideal production system specifying and estimating the vips model we characterize the class of profit functions termed vips for virtually ideal production system vips is consistent with all derived demands being linear in numeric functions of output prices a flexible but parsimonious version of the vips profit function is specified and the implied supply response system is estimated using aggregate u s agricultural data

is there long run convergence among regional house prices in the uk this paper investigates the long run convergence of regional house prices in the uk existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on whether or not regional house prices exhibit long run convergence with each other the application is proposed of a new test involving unit root testing of the first principal component based on regional national house price differentials using mix adjusted quarterly data for 1973 2006 it is found that the first principal component is stationary this suggests that all uk regional house prices are driven by a single common stochastic trend further analysis suggests that those regions that are more distant from london exhibit the highest degrees of persistence with respect to deviations in house price differentials

the effects of government transfers on monthly cycles in drug abuse hospitalization and mortality this paper analyzes the monthly patterns of adverse outcomes due to the consumption of illegal drugs by recipients of government transfer payments we find evidence that certain subpopulations on government cash aid significantly increase their consumption of drugs when their checks arrive at the beginning of the month and as a result experience adverse events including hospitalization and death using data from california we find that the overall rate of drug related hospital admissions increases abruptly at the beginning of the month with admissions increasing 23 during the first five days of the month we find that this cycle is driven largely by recipients of supplemental security income ssi ssi recipients also experience an abrupt 22 increase in within hospital mortality after receiving their checks these findings suggest that full wallets adversely affect some aid recipients and that policymakers should explore alternate disbursement regimes such as a staggered disbursement schedule or in kind support that have the potential to reduce the rate of adverse events

risk aversion and price risk in duality models of production a linear mean variance approach a duality model of production is developed that permits risk aversion and price uncertainty the linear mean variance framework employed is tractable for empirical research in contrast to duality models of risk based on a generalized expected utility function the framework is more general than in standard price certainty models while retaining the simplicity needed for empirical research

risk aversion and yield uncertainty in duality models of production a mean variance approach a duality model of production is developed that endogenizes stochastic output decisions under risk aversion the model incorporates both yield and price uncertainty and nonlinear mean variance risk preferences this permits modeling of the firm s expected output supply and input demand decisions under risk and also in principle the firm s output variance decisions the duality model is tractable for empirical research

testing for long run convergence across regional house prices in the uk a pairwise approach this article tests for stochastic convergence in uk regional house prices using the recently developed pairwise approach this approach allows for unit root tests to be conducted on all n n 1 2 possible pairs of house price differentials across n regions in the uk thus avoiding the need to choose a base region or alternative national figure as the benchmark using mix adjusted house price data from 1973 q4 to 2008 q4 the main finding is that there is no evidence of long run convergence among regional house prices or of an equilibrium relationship towards which uk regional house prices have a tendency to gravitate

cost functions under production uncertainty we characterize the cost functions which would be consistent with expected utility maximization when production is uncertain it is not generally possible assuming risk aversion to use only expected output as the constraint in a cost minimization problem in some leading cases cost functions consistent with expected utility maximization are particularly useful because they are devoid of risk preferences

input demands and inefficiency in u s agriculture markov chain monte carlo mcmc methods are used to estimate a seemingly unrelated regression sur system of input demand functions for u s agriculture our demand functions have flexible forms and allow for nonrandom technical inefficiency concavity constraints are imposed at individual data points and the distributions of measures of relative technical efficiency are constrained to the unit interval results are evaluated in terms of characteristics of the posterior distributions of parameters measures of relative technical efficiency and other nonlinear functions of the parameters

self exciting effects of house prices on unit prices in australian capital cities this paper examines the long and short run relationship between australian house and unit prices across all capital cities over the period december 1995 to june 2015 we find that house and unit prices are cointegrated and based on the results of granger causality and generalised impulse responses that house prices significantly influence unit prices across all cities however bi directional causality responses exists only for major capital cities with the exception of brisbane we also for the first time apply self excited threshold models to explore the complex interplay between house and unit prices in australia we find that when the market for units is self excited or bullish the positive effects of house prices on unit prices are noticeably larger than otherwise there is a varying degree of herd mentality in the australian property market with sydney and darwin being the most and least excitable capital cities respectively

profit maximization returns to scale and measurement error a nonparametric analysis of agricultural production behavior was conducted for each of the contiguous forty eight states for the period 1956 82 under the joint hypothesis of profit maximization convex technology and nonregressive technical change tests were conducted in each state for profit maximization and for constant returns to scale although considerable variability was observed among states measurement errors of magnitudes common in secondary data yielded test results fully consistent with the profit maximization hypothesis in all states with complete output and input data copyright 1992 by mit press

estimation of area elasticities from a standard profit function this article demonstrates that both crop area and output elasticities can be calculated from a profit function a chambers just profit function which includes land allocations as quasi fixed factors is used to derive shadow price equations for each crop area allocation jointly solving these shadow price equations for crop area makes it possible to calculate individual crop area elasticities a profit function is specified to represent agricultural producers in the state of iowa shadow price equations are jointly estimated with output supply and input demand equations from these estimated equations we derive the individual crop area response and output response to a change in prices

convergence in us house prices this paper analyses the convergence of us house prices our results confirm the existence of some degree of segmentation in the us housing market we also provide robust evidence that the bursting of the housing price bubble has altered this market observing different results when the sample includes information posterior to 2010 however we appreciate different effects depending on the geographical level of disaggregation that is employed

seasonality and cointegration of regional house prices in the uk the data generation process underlying regional house prices in the uk is investigated using new statistical tests it is found that causal flows tend to be northwards the south east rather than greater london acts as an exogenous price determinator of the other regions in the south the midland regions have a great influence on prices in the north and flows through the east midlands are characterised by bi directional causality these results are largely independent of assumptions made about the data generation process and tests of these assumptions have low power in any case there are also similarities between this causality and migration patterns particularly in the south of england

testing for convergence between uk regional house prices drake l 1995 testing for convergence between uk regional house prices reg studies 29 357 366 this paper uses the kalman filter time varying parameter estimation technique to test for convergence between uk regional house prices this issue is significant given the historical disparities in regional house price inflation rates and the unprecedented downturn in both uk and most regional house prices in the late 1980s and early 1990s the evidence suggests that there are clear regional differences in the pattern of uk house price movements in particular house prices in the north and scotland show evidence of greater divergence from prices in the rest of the south east region than do the southern and midlands regions drake l 1995 une analyse pour determiner la convergence des prix du marche immobilier regionaux au royaume uni reg studies 29 357 366 cet article se sert de la technique dite kalman filter afin de determiner la convergence des prix du marche immobilier regionaux au royaume uni c