oiling the palms restructuring of settlement schemes in malaysia and the new international trade regulations abstract the felda resettlement program in malaysia is internationally recognized as a success story in terms of cultivated area number of settlers and scope of vertical integration in the malaysian palm oil industry since the mid 1980s however a series of reorganizations of work and property rights in the settlement schemes have taken place it is argued here that the recent adjustments of felda are in accordance with the new rules for international regulation of agricultural production and trade in the wto international trade regulations increasingly influence the direction of socioeconomic and institutional struggles over rural reform programs in developing countries

optimal unemployment insurance in a matching equilibrium this article considers optimal unemployment insurance ui in an equilibrium matching framework where wages are determined by strategic bargaining it compares the outcome with the standard nash bargaining approach which can be interpreted as union wage bargaining with an insider outsider distortion it also shows that a coordinated policy approach one that chooses job creation subsidies and ui optimally generates a much greater welfare gain than a policy that simply varies ui payments by duration

market externalities of large unemployment insurance extension programs we provide evidence that unemployment insurance affects equilibrium conditions in the labor market which creates significant market externalities we provide a framework for identification of such equilibrium effects and implement it using the regional extension benefit program rebp in austria which extended the duration of ui benefits for a large group of eligible workers in selected regions of austria we show that non eligible workers in rebp regions have higher job finding rates lower unemployment durations and a lower risk of long term unemployment we discuss the implications of our results for optimal ui policy jel e24 j64 j65 r23

is internet job search still ineffective using national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy97 data for 2005 8 we find that unemployed persons who look for work online are re employed about 25 faster than comparable workers who do not search online this finding contrasts with previous results for 1998 2001 and is robust to controls for cognitive test scores and detailed indicators of internet access internet job search ijs appears to be most effective in reducing unemployment durations when used to contact friends and relatives to send out resumes or fill out applications and also to look at advertisements we detect a weak positive relationship between ijs and wage growth between jobs over the past decade the internet has been credited for substantial reductions in search frictions in markets ranging from life insurance to apartment rentals brown and goolsbee 2002 kroft and pope 2010 in contrast studies of the internet s effects on labour market matching have been few in number and on balance find little or no evidence of a friction reducing effect for example kuhn and skuterud 2004 find that unemployed workers who look for work online have longer unemployment durations than comparable non internet searchers whereas kroft and pope 2010 find no evidence that the rapid expansion of craigslist as a job search tool has affected city level unemployment rates 1 at least on the surface these results seem puzzling in view of the dramatic expansion of online job search sites as well as the general decline in communication costs associated with the internet both of these changes should increase the arrival rate of matches between job searchers and vacancies thereby reducing search frictions in labour markets in this study we provide new evidence relevant to this puzzle of ineffective internet job search ijs using data on young us jobseekers during the period 2005 8 taken from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy97 our main result is that internet searchers unemployment durations are about 25 shorter than comparable workers who search offline only specifically after replicating kuhn and skuterud s 2004 estimate of a counterproductive effect of ijs using their current population survey cps data from 1998 2001 for this age group we show that this counterproductive effect is reversed in the more recent period in the same regression specification this reversal holds whether or not we control for a possible source of endogenous selection searchers scores on a widely used cognitive skills test that was not available in the earlier data we speculate that improvements in technology over this period ranging from better online job sites to network externalities associated with greater overall internet penetration might explain this change over time

re inventing dualism policy narratives and modes of oil palm expansion in sarawak malaysia the policy narrative underpinning the current rapid expansion of large scale private oil palm plantations in sarawak malaysia implies a dualistic conception of the agrarian transformation underway such as prevailed in the 1950s this narrative is inconsistent with the history of smallholder commercialisation in sarawak post 1981 policy has sought to limit smallholder development and deliver large land areas to private estates thus re inventing a dualistic agrarian structure oil palm expansion in sarawak has various potential pathways and is driven in its present direction not by dualistic economics but the exercise of state power to maximise opportunities for surplus extraction and political patronage

the employment effect of reforming a public employment agency by how much does an increase in operating effectiveness of a public employment agency pea and a reduction of unemployment benefits reduce unemployment using a recent labour market reform in germany as background we find that an enhanced effectiveness of the pea explains about 20 of the observed post reform unemployment decline the role of unemployment benefit reduction explains just about 5 of the observed decline due to disincentive effects resulting from the reform the reform of the pea could have had an even higher impact on unemployment reduction if there had been less focus on long term unemployed workers

swimming upstream local indonesian production networks in globalized palm oil production summary when agricultural commodities in developing countries experience an economic boom they offer potential pathways out of poverty while creating environmental and social problems while recent research provides insights into the governance of international supply chains it provides less analysis of the local production networks creating critical problems indonesia is now the world s largest exporter of crude palm oil this paper analyses processes of oil palm development in three oil palm districts it considers how policy models regime interests and agribusiness strategies shape local production networks generate local outcomes and affect the possibilities of tackling issues associated with this boom

an evaluation of the swedish system of active labour market programmes in the 1990s we investigate the presence of short and long term effects from joining a swedish labor market program vis a vis more intense job search in open unemployment overall the impact of the program system is found to have been mixed joining a program has increased employment rates among participants a result robust to a misclassification problem in the data on the other hand it has also allowed participants to remain significantly longer on unemployment benefits and more generally in the unemployment system this being particularly the case for those entitled individuals entering a program around the time of their unemployment benefits exhaustion

should unemployment benefits decrease with the unemployment spell abstract in this paper we investigate whether unemployment benefits should decrease with the unemployment spell in a model where both job search intensity and wages are endogenous wages are set by collective agreements bargained by insiders it is shown that a more declining time sequence of unemployment benefits leads to wage increases when the tax rate is given such an effect may imply an increase in unemployment and counteracts the response of job search intensity that can be found in standard job search models with a given wage distribution calibration exercises suggest that it costs twice as much in terms of welfare loss for the long term unemployed workers to reduce the unemployment rate by 1 when wages are endogenous than in the standard job search model

does accessibility to local public employment agencies matter answers from a french quasi experiment abstractwe question whether accessibility to local public employment agencies impacts exits from unemployment we deal with the potential endogeneity of the residential location of jobseekers by using the unanticipated creation of a new agency in the french region of lyon as a quasi natural experiment we use exhaustive and geo located individual data on jobseekers and local public employment agencies contrary to past evidence based on aggregated data we find no evidence that jobseekers with improved accessibility to the local public employment services experience an improvement of their probability of exiting unemployment we however find evidence of transitory organizational effects these findings strongly question the costly strategy of a fine distribution of local public employment agencies across the territory while suggesting that institutional issues are key

information shocks and the empirical evaluation of training programs during unemployment spells we study the role of notifications in the evaluation of training programs for unemployed workers using a unique administrative data set containing the dates when information is exchanged between job seekers and caseworkers we address three questions do information shocks such as notification of future training have an effect on unemployment duration what is the joint effect of notification and training programs on unemployment can ignoring information shocks lead to a large bias in the estimation of the effect of training programs we discuss these issues through the lens of a job search model and then conduct an empirical analysis following a random effects approach to deal with selectivity we find that notification has a strong positive effect on the training probability but a negative one on the probability of leaving unemployment this attraction effect highlights the importance of accounting for notifications in the evaluation of active labor market policies

the new development economics abstract the theory of rural organization based on rational peasants in environments where information is imperfect and costly provides a simple explanation for a wide variety of phenomena in ldcs it provides insights into both why sharecropping is so widespread and why it takes on the particular forms that it does it provides an explanation of the interlinkage of credit and land markets and of cost sharing the paper argues that this theory provides a better explanation of these phenomena than do the competing theories this theory can be viewed as an important application of a more general paradigm the imperfect information paradigm which has been useful in explaining economic phenomena under a wide variety of settings under competition oligopoly and monopoly in labor markets capital markets in insurance markets and product markets and in developed and less developed countries

the mechanisms of spatial mismatch the spatial mismatch hypothesis smh argues that low skilled minorities residing in us inner cities experience poor labour market outcomes because they are disconnected from suburban job opportunities this assumption gave rise to an abundant empirical literature which is rather supportive of the smh surprisingly it is only recently that theoretical models have emerged which probably explains why the mechanisms of spatial mismatch have long remained unclear and not properly tested this article presents relevant facts reviews the theoretical models of spatial mismatch confronts their predictions with available empirical results and indicates which mechanisms deserve further empirical tests

active labor market policy evaluations a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies we categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007 job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective training programmes are associated with positive medium term impacts although in the short term they often appear ineffective we also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate

constructing a market performing theory the historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange this analysis of the history of the chicago board options exchange explores the performativity of economics a theme in economic sociology recently developed by callon economics was crucial to the creation of financial derivatives exchanges it helped remedy the drastic loss of legitimacy suffered by derivatives in the first half of the 20th century option pricing theory a crown jewel of neoclassical economics succeeded empirically not because it discovered preexisting price patterns but because markets changed in ways that made its assumptions more accurate and because the theory was used in arbitrage the performativity of economics however has limits and an emphasis on it needs to be combined with classic themes in economic sociology such as granovetterian embedding and the way in which exchanges can be cultures and moral communities in which collective action problems can be solved

palmed off incentive problems with joint venture schemes for oil palm development on customary land the oil palm boom has prompted governments and plantation companies to find ways to incorporate customary landholders in large scale plantation developments this paper examines the joint venture model that has been widely promoted in sarawak malaysia principal agent theory is used to analyze the structural relations between the actors in joint venture projects the landholders the government agency that acts as their trustee and the private investor the analysis shows that unequal access to information and influence has compromised the stated objectives of the joint venture schemes leaving customary landholders vulnerable to significant exploitation and losses thus there has been a systematic failure to achieve the anticipated developmental outcomes

evidence of treatment spillovers within markets this paper provides a method to infer the presence of treatment spillovers within markets where a fraction of agents is treated we model individual outcomes as functions of the assigned treatment status and the distribution of assigned treatments in a market we develop a two step identification and estimation method focusing first on the treatment distribution among individuals within markets and then on the treatment distribution across markets we apply our approach to training programs for unemployed individuals in france using rich administrative data our results provide evidence of interactions within local labor markets as potential individual outcomes vary with the proportion of treated individuals

evaluating the employment impact of a mandatory job search program this paper exploits area based piloting and age related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program the new deal for young people in the u k a central focus is on substitution displacement effects and on equilibrium wage effects the program includes extensive job assistance and wage subsidies to employers we find that the impact of the program significantly raised transitions to employment by about 5 percentage points the impact is robust to a wide variety of nonexperimental estimators however we present some evidence that this effect may not be as large in the longer run jel j18 j23 j38

the entwined futures of financialisation and cities this article considers the future of financialisation as it is entwined with that of cities it poses the question of how cities can regulate financialisation financialization is understood here to encompass the myriad of social economic legal and political dimensions of the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism this transition implicates the financial sector and their motives as well as the new roles that financial ideas play in everyday lives that new role for finance has been understood to be a normative order of reason that informs public decision making and governance while the efforts of national and transnational law to regulate the financial sector have been studied there has been far less focus on local governments local governments however play a crucial role in how financial capitalism takes hold through their regulation of real estate and urban space real estate being a key current engine of financial markets local governments mediate the ways that finance takes hold in cities and the built environment and the way that those transformations exclude certain populations in short they mediate the spatialization of finance this triangular constitution of local governance financialisation and urban space can be observed in the shrinking of public space the article first examines the relationship between public space and democracy and the role of law as the underlying structure that allocates urban space towards the use of the public or the use of private real estate actors this engagement demonstrates how urban space is a key site of financialisation s dual dimensionality as a sector with material accumulation of resources and as a constellation of rationalities and cultures the article then turns to a discussion of city efforts to regulate the financial sector and popular resistance to the ideologies of finance through that examination this article hopes to demonstrate that efforts to regulate the financial sector are only one level on which to regulate financialisation regulation here becomes a complex endeavour requiring an engagement with the modes of reasoning and culture promulgated by financialisation as well as the financial sector and its activities

on the job search and precautionary savings in this paper i develop and estimate a model of on the job search in which risk averse workers choose search effort and can borrow or save using a single risk free asset i derive the implications for optimal savings behavior in this environment and relate this to the frictions that characterize the endogenous earnings process implied by on the job search savings behavior depends in a very intuitive way on the rate at which offers are received the rate at which jobs are destroyed and a worker s current rank in the wage distribution the implication is that workers who are identical in terms of preferences and opportunities have substantially different savings behavior depending on their history and current position in the wage distribution the mechanism that generates the substantial differences in savings behavior in the model is the dynamic of the wage ladder resulting from the search process there is an important asymmetry between the incremental wage increases generated by onthe job search climbing the ladder and the drop in income associated with job loss falling off the ladder the behavior of workers in low paying jobs is primarily governed by the expectation of wage growth while the behavior of workers near the top of the distribution is driven by the possibility of job loss the distributions of earnings wealth and consumption implied by the model suitably aggregated align reasonably well with the data with the notable exception of implying substantially less concentration of wealth among the richest one percent of the population in this paper i develop and estimate a model of on the job search in which risk averse workers choose search effort and can borrow or save using a single risk free asset i derive the implications for optimal savings behavior in this environment and relate this to the frictions that characterize the endogenous earnings process implied by on the job search savings behavior depends in a very intuitive way on the rate at which offers are received the rate at which jobs are destroyed and a worker s current rank in the wage distribution the implication is that workers at different point in the wage distribution have substantially different savings behavior resulting in wealth dispersion that is much greater than earnings dispersion the mechanism that generates the high degree of wealth dispersion in the model is the dynamic of the wage ladder resulting from the search process there is an important asymmetry between the incremental wage increases generated by on the job search climbing the ladder and the drop in income associated with job loss falling off the ladder this feature of the model generates differential savings behavior at different points in the earnings distribution the behavior of workers in low paying jobs is primarily governed by the expectation of wage growth while the behavior of workers near the top of the distribution is primarily driven by the possibility of job loss the wage growth expected by low wage workers combined with the fact that their earnings are not much higher than unemployment benefits causes them to dissave as a worker s wage increases the incentive to save increases the potential for wage growth declines and it becomes increasingly important to insure against the large income reduction associated with job loss the fact that high wage and low wage workers have such different savings behavior leads to a wealth distribution that is much more unequal 1