the impact of progresa on food consumption abstract in this article we used data from the mexican poverty alleviation program called progresa programa de educacion salud y alimentacion to examine whether eligibility for a cash transfer provided by the program conditional on children s regular school attendance and regular visits to health centers is also associated with increased consumption of food we used a longitudinal sample of approximately 24 000 households from 506 communities a distinguishing characteristic of this sample was that some of the communities were randomly selected for participation in progresa while the rest were introduced into the program at later phases exploiting this feature in our analysis we found that eligible households in the villages covered by progresa increased caloric acquisition compared with eligible households not receiving these benefits by november 1999 median beneficiary households in treatment localities obtained 6 4 more calories than did comparable households in control localities perhaps eve

resolving differences in willingness to pay and willingness to accept reply gwendolyn c morrison 1997 raises a logical point regarding our experimental test of the divergence between willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta measures of economic value shogren et al 1994 she argues that our design does not provide a true test of the existence of a fundamental endowment effect since we did not control for the potential of a pivoting indifference map daniel kahneman et al 1990 she concludes that even though our ev idence shows that the mean wtp and wta bids for market goods with close substitutes e g candy bars and coffee mugs converge after market experience the endowment effect might still be alive and well albeit at statisti cally insignificant levels

nonparametric and parametric analysis of calorie consumption in tanzania abstract the empirical literature on the demand for calories in developing countries suggests mixed results regarding the role of income and other socioeconomic characteristics on calorie demand this study employs both nonparametric and parametric methods to examine the impact of household expenditure and other socioeconomic variables on household demand for calories in tanzania using recent survey data the parametric methods include estimation strategies that ensure consistent estimates in the presence of behavioral endogeneity and measurement error under each estimation strategy we employ we find a strongly significant and positive relationship between household expenditure and calorie demand lending support to conventional wisdom that income growth can alleviate inadequate calorie intake the results also show a negative and significant relationship between food prices and calorie demand suggesting that effectively targeted food subsidies for very poor households may play a role in improving their calorie intake

preferences for environmental quality under uncertainty abstract although the expected effects of environmental policies and interventions are rarely known with certainty stated preference surveys rarely elicit preferences over uncertain environmental outcomes this article presents empirical results challenging the view that ignoring such uncertainty during preference elicitation is of no consequence so long as people only care about final environmental states we show that measured preferences for final environmental states water quality in this case depend on whether people choose between final states or between lotteries over final states in contrast to the typical finding for monetary lotteries we find significant under weighting of low probability events related to water quality

fdi as an outcome of the market for corporate control theory and evidence abstract much foreign direct investment fdi takes the form of mergers and acquisitions m a it is commonplace in finance to view acquisitions as manifestations of the market for corporate control following on that insight we propose a model of fdi in which headquarters bid to control overseas assets we derive an equation for bilateral fdi stocks that resembles the recently developed fixed effects approach to modelling bilateral trade flows we estimate the model and use its parameters to construct benchmarks for evaluating multilateral inward and outward fdi

income elasticities for food calories and nutrients across africa a meta analysis abstract this paper aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between income and the demand for different types of food nutrients and calories in africa by conducting a meta analysis of income elasticity estimates we build a meta sample consisting of 1523 food income elasticities 369 nutrient income elasticities and 123 calorie income elasticities extracted from 66 primary studies covering 48 african countries the sample displays a large heterogeneity in income elasticity estimates which our meta analysis aims to explain by looking into attributes of the primary studies and characteristics of the countries considered there are significant differences in the size of the income elasticities across food and nutrient groups foods that make up basic diets tend to have lower income elasticities while elasticities are considerably higher for less basic and more aspirational foods the role of methodological attributes of the primary studies in explaining heterogeneity is found to be small overall our results confirm that although income growth in africa will increase food consumption and lead to more nutritionally diverse diets it is also associated with excessive intakes of fats and sugars raising concerns about over in addition to undernutrition this suggests that income based policies can still play a role in the fight against hunger but that targeted programs are needed to promote nutritionally valuable and healthy diets

estimating distributions of willingness to pay for heterogeneous populations random parameters logit models have emerged as a standard approach in estimating public preferences for a range of goods and services however to simplify calculation of welfare measures the marginal utility of income is often assumed to be constant across the population we show that by shifting distributional assumptions from marginal utilities to the welfare measures themselves a random parameters version of a censored logistic regression model cameron 1988 yields distributions of welfare measures more directly and without imposing any unnecessary assumption on the marginal utility of income we develop the theoretical framework for the model and apply it to contingent choice survey data for siting a noxious facility in rhode island in this application our proposed model and random parameters logit yield similar mean willingness to pay but welfare measures are more readily interpretable in the proposed model

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

framing decisions in uncertain scenarios an analysis of tourist preferences in the face of global warming abstract this paper presents the results of a choice experiment survey of tourists in mallorca spain to elicit preferences for designed policies aimed at addressing the attractiveness losses of the destination in the face of global warming the study is novel in two main ways first it introduces the uncertainty deriving from the stochastic nature of global warming not as a policy attribute but as an inherent feature of the valuation scenario for this reason the expected temperature change and its probability of occurrence were kept constant across alternatives but not across different choice tasks second it measures the willingness to pay for a set of pro environmental policies under different framings results show that the inclusion of uncertainty shapes individuals decisions

how elastic is calorie demand parametric nonparametric and semiparametric results for urban papua new guinea this article seeks further evidence on the elasticity of calorie demand with respect to household resources the case presented is for urban areas of papua new guinea where just over one half of the population appear to obtain less than the recommended amount of dietary energy the relationship between per capita calorie consumption and per capita expenditure in urban areas of papua new guinea is not consistent with the view that income changes have negligible effects on nutrient intakes the unconditional calorie demand elasticity is approximately 0 6 for the poorest half of the population using parametric and semiparametric estimation to control for a wide range of other influences on calorie consumption does not materially reduce the size of the elasticity therefore these results are not supportive of growth pessimism and instead suggest that policies that increase urban household incomes will also act to reduce undernutrition

waiting or acting now the effect on willingness to pay of delivering inherent uncertainty information in choice experiments abstract this paper analyzes the effect of inherent uncertainty on the willingness to pay wtp for a policy aimed at reducing expected climate change impacts to do this it relates outcome uncertainty to the probability of occurrence of one of these impacts within a given time horizon unlike the existing studies this paper links outcome uncertainty to the uncontrollable component of environmental uncertainty derived from the stochastic nature of an ecosystem s behavior results show that the wtp for the policy in the presence of uncertainty does not decrease compared to the scenario where climate change impacts are assumed to occur with certainty this suggests individuals are adopting a precautionary attitude when stating their wtp thus the paper provides economic justification for preventive measures in highly uncertain contexts however findings are not conclusive with respect to the influence of the degree of uncertainty on the support for such measures

do respondents adjust their expected utility in the presence of an outcome certainty attribute in a choice experiment in a stated preference valuation survey the expected benefits of environmental policies are generally presented to respondents without reference to the fact that the predicted outcomes are rarely known with certainty this omission may reduce the credibility of the valuation scenario and contribute to hypothetical bias in the study outlined in this paper a choice experiment was conducted to elicit values for environmental improvements in the great barrier reef australia with outcome certainty included as a separate attribute different specifications of the utility functions which imply different behavioural assumptions about the way choices have been made generate variations in value estimates results showed that respondents incorporate outcome certainty into their decisions but that an expected utility formulation represented by the interaction between environmental protection and likelihood of occurrence underestimated environmental values some environmental protection values appear to be independent of outcome certainty which may be consistent with existence values and other non use categories a partial expected utility model is cautiously recommended

a new paradigm for valuing non market goods using referendum data maximum likelihood estimation by censored logistic regression abstract this paper challenges the w m hanemann amer j agr econom 66 332 341 1984 and c sellar j p chavas and j r stoll j environ econom management 13 382 390 1986 utilizations of logit models to estimate the value of non market resources from referendum survey data these data are more informative than conventional choice data the random utility interpretation of logit models is therefore too restrictive bypassing the utility function entirely it will be shown that parameters and standard errors for utility theoretic inverse hicksian demand functions can be extracted directly and much more simply estimated demand functions need not be limited to those corresponding to the linear in parameters utility difference specifications which can be handled by packaged logit programs

decision making when choices are complex a test of heiner s hypothesis this paper explores heiner s hypothesis concerning a gap between the cognitive ability of decision makers and the difficulty of decisions the c d gap we discuss the implications of decision heuristics for coefficient estimates when uncertainty is faced by decision makers where the level of uncertainty varies with complexity statistical analysis strongly supports the presence of a c d gap and provides evidence supporting the use of decision heuristics the results of both direct and indirect methods suggest that mixed decision strategies may be used we also find that complexity effects can have important implications for welfare analysis

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

stated preferences for conservation policies under uncertainty insights on the effect of individuals risk attitudes in the environmental domain the outcome of a conservation policy is often subject to uncertainty in stated preference valuation it is increasingly recognised that uncertainty affects preferences for the outcomes of environmental policies however there is also agreement that the effect of uncertainty and people s attitudes towards risk need to be better understood to shed more light on the impact of risk we designed a discrete choice experiment to compare preferences for environmental outcomes under climate change across two split samples each sample was confronted with a scenario where results were presented as certain or uncertain but were otherwise associated with the same expected values we found significant differences between the certain and the uncertain treatment with uncertain outcomes being associated with more extreme utility levels and willingness to pay in absolute terms this finding was confirmed irrespective of whether gains or losses were considered and despite sensitivity to uncertainty specific to the socio demographic profile our results suggest that individuals are not risk neutral in the presence of uncertainty around environmental outcomes these findings are crucial to better understand stated preferences for conservation policies in risky contexts our results reinforce the idea that uncertainty should be explicitly incorporated in the design of stated preference studies to better inform policy

the effect of national culture on the choice of entry mode characteristics of national cultures have frequently been claimed to influence the selection of entry modes this article investigates this claim by developing a theoretical argument for why culture should influence the choice of entry two hypotheses are derived which relate culture to entry mode choice one focusing on the cultural distance between countries the other on attitudes towards uncertainty avoidance using a multinomial logit model and controlling for other effects the hypotheses are tested by analysing data on 228 entries into the united states market by acquisition wholly owned greenfield and joint venture empirical support for the effect of national culture on entry choice is found

regulation and investment use newly assembled data on regulation in several sectors of many oecd countries to provide evidence that regulatory reform of product markets is associated with an increase in investment a component of reform that plays a very important role is entry liberalization but privatization also has a substantial effect on investment sensitivity analysis suggests that our results are robust jel e22 l5

a theory of anticipated utility abstract a new theory of cardinal utility with an associated set of axioms is presented it is a generalization of the von neumann morgenstern expected utility theory which permits the analysis of phenomena associated with the distortion of subjective probability

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

economic growth sustainable development and food consumption evidence across different income groups of countries abstract considering that high population and income growths will lead the coming decades an increase in global food demand is expected livestock products such as meat are closely related to this trend but also associated with impacts on the environment and public health from land and water depletion to greenhouse gases emissions and higher risks of non communicable diseases this trend raises doubts about the sustainability of the food industry and thus a solution is needed for the problem how to feed the world population without compromising present and future generations the literature suggests that meat consumption should be reduced for the sake of the environment and global population however without considering the effects that such reduction would have on the economy inspired by these facts this paper empirically analyses the interactions between food consumption economic growth and sustainable development measured by the index of sustainable economic welfare more specifically the paper assesses the effect that food consumption has on the economy the econometric analysis applies the autoregressive distributed lag model for 77 countries further distinguished by their income group from 1995 to 2013 the findings support that meat consumption has different impacts on economic growth and sustainable development considering different income groups however there is an evident dilemma between economic growth and sustainable development since meat consumption has contradictory effects on each thus it is crucial to understand how to promote sustainability i e reducing the environmental externalities and chronic health diseases without compromising economic growth

evaluating impacts from noxious facilities including public preferences in current siting mechanisms abstract this paper describes an approach to facility siting that ranks potential sites in terms of their social impacts a contingent choice survey based on paired comparisons is used to construct a utility index to rank sites consistent with predicting results of a hypothetical referendum based on the attributes of the sites the method is likely to be acceptable to public decision makers since it is analogous to site scoring methods that have been commonly used indeed our approach is currently being employed as part of a larger landfill site selection process in the state of rhode island

health and hunger nutrient response to income depending on caloric availability in nepal using data from nlss iii we estimate nutrient income elasticities for macronutrients vitamins and minerals we further allow for differential nutrient demand response to income depending on where a household is in the caloric availability distribution we find that some nutrients are income inelastic indicating that they are necessity goods while others are relatively income elastic we further test and reject equivalent nutrient income elasticities across the caloric availability distribution households in the lowest calorie quintile have highly income elastic nutrient demand leaving them vulnerable to income fluctuations moreover as households meet their first order caloric needs they substitute away from cheap calorie dense staples toward more expensive nutrient dense foods finally for most nutrients households in the highest calorie quintile exhibit more elastic nutrient demand similar to households in the lowest quintile our results suggest that policies aimed at improving income will likely also improve household nutrient availability particularly for the most calorie poor households they further suggest that policies aimed at protecting poor households from negative income shocks will also likely yield nutritional benefits

willingness to pay and willingness to accept how much can they differ comment i agree with the point made by edoh y amiran and daniel a hagen 2003 that there can be a substantial or even infinite divergence between the wta and wtp for a public good even where there is a nonzero elasticity of substitution between market goods and the public good provided that the indifference curves are asymptotically bounded with respect to market goods in the manner they describe this is an important point they are also correct to point out that the elasticity of substitution is a local concept whereas their asymptotic boundedness condition applies also for discrete changes my 1991 paper used a local analysis because it was following the structure of the analysis in robert d willig 1976 and alan randall and john r stoll 1980 i wanted to show that while randall and stoll appeared to extend willig s local result on wta versus wtp from price changes to changes in the quantity of a public good the relevant elasticity was in fact different and involved the substitution elasticity as well as the income elasticity i view these points by amiran and hagen as not two separate results but essentially the same result their asymptotic boundedness condition generalizes my zero elasticity of substitution condition to discrete changes the asymptotic boundedness condition can be expressed as follows assuming a bivariate utility function u x q and given a reference point x q associated with a reference utility level u u x q there exists some q q such that for all q q there exists no x such that u x q u in other words no amount of x can substitute for the reduction in public good from q to q q in the case of a zero elasticity of substitution q q but as amiran and hagen show in their theorem 1 this is unnecessarily restrictive when dealing with a discrete reduction in q furthermore their theorem 2 can be viewed as a special case of their theorem 1 in which q 0 which makes q an essential commodity it is well known in consumer theory that the wta to avoid the loss of an essential market good is infinite their theorem 2 extends this result to the case of an essential nonmarket good but as their theorem 1 shows essentialness is not necessary for an infinite wta the boundedness condition is the key and this implies a fundamental lack of substitutability between money market goods and the public good

how do cross border mergers and acquisitions answer to deregulation in services whereas competition in the manufacturing sector was progressively ensured beginning with the end of the second world war services have been progressively opened to international competition only since the late 1980s and are still among the most regulated sectors in oecd countries in this paper we analyse the impact of deregulation in that sector on cross border mergers and acquisitions m as in services we find that deregulation favours inward m as in services this positive effect occurs through two channels a reduction in entry costs and an increase in investment opportunities on the other hand deregulation has an ambiguous impact on outward m as that depends on the initial level of regulation in the acquiring country in particular we provide some evidence of a u shaped relationship between deregulation and outward m as in the service sector in countries that are initially highly deregulated deregulation fosters outward m as conversely in situations in which government control is large privatisation and deregulation are likely to reduce the incentive for firms to engage in cross border m a deals

biased valuations damage assessments and policy choices the choice of measure matters abstract damages from for example an oil spill can be measured by how much people are willing to pay to avoid them or by the minimum compensation they demand to accept them and decisions to clean up can be justified by the willingness to pay to do it or by the compensation necessary to forgo it contrary to the usual official and unofficial conventions that the choice of measure is of no matter the empirical evidence and intuitions of most people strongly suggest otherwise the appropriate choice of measure appears to turn not on legal entitlements but on the reference state people use to judge negative and positive changes a criteria that is likely to call into question most estimates of the damages of increased health risks and the value of environmental mitigation efforts

species preservation versus development an experimental investigation under uncertainty the safe minimum standard sms is a decision rule to preserve renewable resources unless the social costs of doing so are intolerable while unpersuasive to many support for the sms has been advocated by some economists for settings involving irreversibility and a high degree of uncertainty the objective of this paper is to explore decision making involving species preservation versus development within an experimental laboratory setting and involving uncertainty the experimental design implements a number of prior game theoretic investigations of the sms bishop 1978 ready and bishop 1991 palmini 1999 involving insurance and lottery or combined games against nature the choices are between species preservation which possibly provides a cure for a disease or developing habitat leading to irreversible depletion econometric results from a random parameters logit model using responses from 117 participants across both u s and mexican university student samples and 9 treatment choices indicate that support for the sms varies across the type of game the imposed maximum regret condition concerning the relative magnitude of the costs of disease and net benefits of development a constructed measure of respondents risk aversion and other factors there is also strong evidence of unobservable heterogeneous preferences for preservation within our sample

stability of willingness to pay for coastal management a choice experiment across three time periods a key assumption of stated preference methods is that individuals have well formed preferences that are robust over time both the discovered and constructed preference perspectives imply this is not necessarily the case there can be a large situational component to expressed preferences that add to the uncertainty of sampling error most non market valuation studies only collect data from one point in time so the degree of temporal variability cannot be tested test retest studies that provide data from two points in time generally find significant differences in preference structure and willingness to pay wtp in this study we test stability of wtp for beach erosion management using a fully ranked discrete choice experiment survey with not one but two retests over a six month period we find that stability does not improve with the additional repetition as the preference discovery hypothesis implies it might wtp confidence intervals overlap but the models are significantly different at each point in time even after allowing for variation in choice error either the survey did not facilitate sufficient preference discovery or preferences were reconstructed however respondents with high scores of self reported certainty in their choices in the first survey had significantly more stable wtp estimates

openness to foreign direct investment in services an international comparative analysis this paper quantifies and analyses the extent of restrictions on inward foreign direct investment fdi in the service sector in developed and developing countries services account for an increasing share of global fdi recognition of the economic benefits of fdi clashes with nationalistic economic political and national security concerns about foreign takeover of strategic sectors such as telecommunications finance and transport consequently almost all countries impose restrictions on fdi in services several different types of restrictions are considered limitations on foreign ownership screening or notification procedures management restrictions and operational restrictions these restrictions on fdi are computed at the industry level and then aggregated into a single measure for the service sector as a whole for 23 developed and 50 developing countries notwithstanding the worldwide trend towards liberalisation of restrictions there remain substantial disparities between regions and individual countries in the severity of restrictions on inward fdi in services the lowest restriction scores are in europe and latin america whereas east asia south asia and the middle east have the highest levels of restrictions the evolution over time of fdi restrictions is also presented for developed countries over the period 1981 2005 showing liberalisation in all countries especially since the early 1990s although to varying extents across countries the severity of restrictions also differs considerably by sector with electricity telecommunications transport and finance most restricted the paper also finds a strong negative correlation of restrictiveness with inward stocks of fdi in services suggesting that restrictions impede fdi

food quality calories and household income the authors investigate the relationship between calories food quality and household per capita expenditure using regression and semi parametric methods on a sample of poor households from rural mexico where programa de apoyo alimentario pal a targeted nutritional program is operating the semi parametric method yields an estimate of the elasticity between calorie and expenditure of 0 39 below the median and 0 28 above the corresponding estimates of the elasticity of the calorie price are 0 48 below the median and 0 45 above the authors also examine the extent to which the expenditure elasticity of the calorie price is explained by substitution between and within major food groups it is found that there is a very high incidence of substitution within cereals especially for poor households and that between group substitution explains at most 59 percent of the income elasticity for food quality these estimates suggest that the potential of a cash transfer program to have a positive impact on the food diversity and the nutritional status of households is quite limited the paper is organized as follows section one gives introduction section two describes the data the econometric specification and estimation approaches used and presents and discusses descriptive evidence on the intake of calories and the price of calories in the sample the relationship between calories the cost of calories and household expenditure is studied using regression and semi parametric methods in section three section four concludes by summarizing the policy implications of findings

cross border mergers and acquisitions and the role of trade costs abstract cross border mergers and acquisitions m as have increased dramatically over the last two decades this paper analyses the role of trade costs in explaining the increase in the number of cross border m as in particular we distinguish horizontal and non horizontal m as and investigate whether trade costs affect these two types of mergers differently we analyse this question using industry data for 23 oecd countries for the period 1990 2001 our findings suggest that while in the aggregate trade costs affect cross border merger activity negatively its impact differs importantly across horizontal and non horizontal mergers the impact of trade costs is less negative for horizontal mergers which is consistent with the tariff jumping argument

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

barbarians at the gates state control of global mergers and acquisitions cross border mergers and acquisitions are a major and often politicised component of foreign direct investment using data on individual transactions between 1970 and 2006 we examine the restrictions countries place on mergers and acquisitions whether they use these controls to discriminate against foreigners seeking to acquire domestic firms and what factors may predict the propensity to block foreign entry by this method of direct investment drawing partly on the existing literature we test hypotheses that state intervention can be explained by characteristics of the countries whose firms are targeted by acquirers including per capita income democracy trade exposure market size government share of national income and industrial structure although democracy trade exposure and high government expenditure are associated with more stringent merger control laws none of these attributes cause states to discriminate against cross border mergers countries with high per capita incomes large markets and strict merger control laws do use those regulations to discourage foreign acquirers a second set of tests based on observations of individual deals rather than national aggregates reveal that governments are particularly averse to foreigners acquiring firms that are bankrupt or in the defence sector overall governments do treat cross border mergers and acquisitions differently and use their merger control laws to discriminate against foreign investors particularly with respect to certain types of transactions

the impact of choice inconsistencies in stated choice studies a new test procedure revealing mutuallyinconsistent choices has been developed andapplied to stated choice data our analysisshows that inconsistent choices commonly occurin several stated choice tasks an applicationof the test to the norwegian value of timestudy data shows that failing to excludeinconsistent choices resulted in asubstantially higher value of time theinconsistent choices were made by less educatedparticipants as the tasks were undertaken inthe easy context of choosing travelalternatives with three attributes practitioners of more complex and cognitivedemanding designs should be particularilyconcerned with these results

willingness to pay for emissions reduction application of choice modeling under uncertainty and different management options abstract this paper presents the results of a choice modeling survey of households in queensland australia to assess values for reductions in national greenhouse emissions by 2020 the study is novel in two main ways first labeled alternatives were used to assess whether the types of management options for reducing net emissions green power energy efficient technologies or carbon capture are significant in understanding preferences for reducing emissions second the importance of the level and type of uncertainty involved in reductions is tested the types of uncertainty include 1 the uncertainty of achieving emissions reduction and 2 the uncertainty of international participation as the percentage of total global emissions covered by international agreements the results of this survey identified how choice responses vary when the level of uncertainty associated with emissions reduction options is included within choice alternatives