do macroforecasters herd we show that typical tests of whether forecasters herd will falsely indicate herding behaviour for a variety of types of behaviour and forecasting environments that give rise to disagreement amongst forecasters we establish that forecasters will appear to herd if di erences between them reject noise as opposed to private information or if they arise from informational rigidities noise can have a behavioural interpretation and if so will depend on the behavioural model under consideration an application of the herding tests to us quarterly survey forecasts of inflation and output growth data 1981 2013 does not support herding behaviour

optimal supply of a depletable resource with a backstop technology heal s theorem revisited heal s theorem states that if the extraction cost of a depletable resource increases with cumulative extraction and if a backstop technology exists the user cost of the depletable resource declines to zero at the date of exhaustion in this paper we first present a simple method for proving this proposition using a social planning model that determines the optimal rates both of extraction of the depletable resource and of production of the backstop technology we then present two examples that show how this method can be used to solve more difficult problems in the theory of resource economics the first example involves learning by doing in the backstop sector that is backstop costs decline with cumulative production the second example involves uncertainty of backstop costs

does household composition matter the impact of the grain for green program on rural livelihoods in china article i nfo this research introduces family composition into the sustainable livelihoods framework for policy analysis we apply this approach to a case study on the grain for green program in western china using recent survey data from zhouzhi county we show that the impact of the policy on rural livelihoods varies across household compositions the environmental program neither targets asset poor households nor does it necessarily shift the on farm labor to non farm sectors which would improve household incomes after controlling for the effect of assets households with children but without the elderly tend to have lower migration rates and lower incomes after participation in the program policy strategies should consider household heterogeneity particularly household composition in rural china

corporate conservatism and relative compensation this paper demonstrates that in a simple setting with managerial concern for reputation and asymmetric information on ability most managers may refrain from undertaking innovations that stochastically dominate an industry standard common components of uncertainty lead to market inferences of managerial ability based on relative performance managers who undertake the industry standard are consequently evaluated with a more accurate benchmark than those innovating discontinuities in compensation when performance is low because of firings lead managers to have differing valuations of an accurate benchmark depending on type in particular very high and very low ability managers are more likely to undertake superior innovations than those of average ability

spatial targeting of payments for environmental services a tool for boosting conservation benefits abstract payments for environmental services pes have become an increasingly popular market based instrument to translate external non market environmental services into financial incentives for landowners to preserve the ecosystems that provide the services however lack of spatial differentiation in the targeting mechanism may lead to efficiency losses addressing this challenge we construct an applied site selection tool which takes into account three variables that vary in space environmental services provided risks of losing those services and participation costs using data from costa rica s nicoya peninsula we empirically test the tool s potential to increase the financial efficiency of the forest focused pes program in place results show that given a fixed budget efficiency increases radically if per hectare payments are aligned to landowners heterogeneity in participation costs involving opportunity transaction and direct costs of protection respectively selecting sites based on environmental service potential also moderately increases efficiency overall additionality could in the best case be doubled but remains generally limited due to current low deforestation risks prevailing in costa rica to take advantage of the high efficiency potentials of flexible payments we propose inverse auction systems as a cost effective approach for the determination of micro level participation costs

world stock markets some random walk tests 1982 world stock markets some random walk tests applied economics vol 14 no 5 pp 515 531

post reform forestland markets in china land markets developed rapidly in china after agricultural land tenure reforms but not after forest reforms we surveyed farmers in three provinces to examine the post reform forestland markets and options to strengthen them using household choice experiments we estimate land market demand and supply under alternative contractual arrangements our findings are consistent with the currently thin markets but also suggest that alternative institutional and contractual conditions could support broader participation in land markets strengthening property rights on forestland emerges as an especially effective possible policy instrument we illustrate its predicted effects on equilibrium rental rates and market participation

the effect of the sloping land conversion programme on farm household productivity in rural china abstractthe objective of this paper is to examine the treatment effect on farm household productivity induced by the sloping land conversion program using large balanced household level data from five provinces during 1996 2010 this study shows that the slcp significantly improved the productivity of participants during the first round of funding of the programme until 2008 while the effects decreased gradually in the second round with most years not showing significant differences moreover it is found that there are heterogeneous effects on farm household productivity between the south and north as well as between poor and rich regions

land tenure arrangements and rural urban migration in china summary obstacles to internal migration in china contribute to inefficiency inequality and land degradation academic and policy debate has primarily focused on discrimination against rural migrants on arrival in urban areas meanwhile barriers to migration out of rural areas have received less attention this paper examines the role of incomplete rural property rights in the migration decisions of rural households we examine the relationship between tenure insecurity and restrictions on land rentals and participation in outside labor markets the results indicate that tenure insecurity reduces migration this relationship is particularly pronounced on forest land which has implications for the conservation of recently replanted forest areas

the household responsibility system in china s agricultural reform a theoretical and empirical study the emergence and eventual prevalence of the household responsibility system which replaces the production team system as the unit of production and income distribution has brought about dramatic changes in china s rural areas since 1979 this institutional change has resulted in remarkable growth in agricultural productivity however in the literature on collective farms a theory that is capable of explaining the causes and effects of this change is yet to be developed the formal theory about collective economies developed so far by ward domar sen oi and clayton bradley maurice and ferguson cameron bonin chinn israelsen putterman and others suggests that the allocation of resources in a collective farm is efficient at least in

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis revisited summary more than two decades ago schlager and ostrom 1992 developed a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights the conceptual framework has profoundly influenced research on natural resource governance common property and community resource management however currently natural resource governance has changed dramatically challenging the applicability of the conceptual schema there are now many more social actors involved in resource management than the local communities at the focus of original analysis additionally resource management increasingly provides access to various kinds of benefits from outside the immediate context including indirect benefits such as payments for environmental services and results based payments for redd these changes demand addition of new property rights to the original framework this paper updates the conceptual schema in reaction to changes in natural resource governance proposing three specific modifications on the focus of use rights control rights and authoritative rights to come up with a framework that distinguishes eight types of property rights we apply the framework to three purposefully selected governance interventions in china and laos that include the provision of indirect benefits in addition to the direct benefits derived by local people from natural resources the empirical application shows how contemporary governance changes may not lead to local people s outright dispossession since they continue to possess direct use rights to natural resources however local people may be excluded from control and authoritative rights which are exercised exclusively by state agencies and international actors the latter make available indirect benefits to local people which may or may not translate into use rights in the sense of policy based entitlements the empirical insights suggest the possibility of a wider trend of compensated exclusions in natural resource governance

forest loss monetary compensation and delayed re planting the effects of unpredictable land tenure in china abstract over the past 65 years forest tenure in china has oscillated unpredictably between private and village property regimes this policy induced uncertainty has distorted the harvesting decisions of individuals granted rights to grow trees and has lowered the value of china s forest output we provide an analytical framework for assessing these effects quantitatively understanding the consequences of this policy induced uncertainty is particularly important since china is currently engaged in an ambitious plan to increase its domestic supply of timber to conduct this analysis we extend the literature on forestry economics when there is a risk of loss due to forest fire or pests we 1 take account of the possibility that replanting can only resume after an interval of uncertain length with immediate replanting as a special case 2 investigate the effects of compensation for such losses based only on the net value of the stand of trees at the time of the loss and 3 compare it to compensation that would leave the wealth and rotation decisions of the farmer unaffected by the presence of uncertainty

china s sloping land conversion program does expansion equal success this paper uses a 2003 household survey to examine implementation and impacts of china s sloping land conversion program we find that land targeting has been strongly influenced by program goals but that mistargeting also occurred using a treatment effects approach to evaluate program impact we find evidence of positive impact on cropping husbandry and total income though the results are not robust enough to support government claims of huge gains we also find evidence that lack of participant choice could be dampening program impacts and that allowing households autonomy could lead to improvement in program cost effectiveness and outcomes

central local relations in china during the reform era the economic and institutional dimensions abstract central local relations are a core but problematic issue in china s reform process the conventional wisdom is that the economic reforms have considerably weakened control by the central government over economic activities in the localities political implications are derived directly from these economic observations the prevalent view is that the economic reforms have reduced the political control of the center and indeed have called into question the viability of china as a single political entity this article disputes these views it shows that economic decentralization has been accompanied by a strengthening of china s unitary political system this has direct bearings on local economic conduct because of the political and institutional constraints local officials surrender tax revenues to the central government and curb their inflationary investment demand

analyst forecasts and herding behavior the use of analyst forecasts as proxies for investors earnings expectations is commonplace in empirical research an implicit assumption behind their use is that they reflect analysts private information in an unbiased manner as demonstrated here this assumption is not necessarily valid there is shown to be a tendency for analysts to release forecasts closer to prior earnings expectations than is appropriate given their information further analysts exhibit herding behavior whereby they release forecasts similar to those previously announced by other analysts even when this is not justified by their information these results are shown to have interesting empirical implications article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

households decisions to participate in china s sloping land conversion program and reallocate their labour times is there endogeneity bias abstract past impact evaluations of china s largest ecological restoration program have assumed the absence of self selection endogeneity in the likelihood and extent of participation using appropriate testing procedures and a panel dataset of 1000 households over 11 years in two primary provinces we found evidence of self selection in household behavior of generating off farm income but the hypothesis was rejected that there was a significant self selection component in households decision to participate in the program and generate farming income evaluations ignoring the self section for off farm labor were found to be biased and overly positive on program income impact self selection should thus be explicitly included unless there is counter evidence in any study of this kind

a note on quarterly returns to investment in ordinary shares 1919 1970 two tests of market efficiency this note analyses the data of foldes and watson 1982a it gives some statistics to test for weak form efficiency fama 1976 for quarterly returns xt for a valueand equally weighted equity portfolio and for 2 per cent consols gross and net of tax all series show a very high degree of randomness which implies a high quality in index construction the second test has returns for shares and consols regressed on inflation for the whole period and for five sub periods to see if they account for inflation foldes and watson 1982b in an excellent and detailed paper have examined uk and us equity portfolio returns over 1926 1970 for normality stationarity seasonal variation autocorrelation and a variance curve the autocorrelation section uses spectral analysis integrated spectra and a firstorder autoregression for the united states to see if the series are random it used only one uk equity portfolio value weighted money terms gross of tax but the spectra of this and value weights real terms and equal weights money terms were similar spectral analysis is the least reliable method of testing for dependence in financial returns given the very small samples used here and the need for covariance stationarity for return data this is discussed in praetz 1979 with the very difficult problem of testing for a flat spectrum the time domain tests using serial correlations and a runs test are much more powerful and easier to understand table 1 comprises 12 quarterly serial correlation coefficients r l r 12 an omnibus test of them chi squared 24 124 r j 2 durbin watson dw statistic dw xt xt 1 2 x2 and z runs a standardized statistic of the number of runs minus its expectation over the standard deviation of runs it has value weighted and equally weighted equity portfolios and 24 per cent consols gross and net of tax for whole period a 1 per cent significance level is used because of the large sample however not one statistic is significant supporting a very high degree of randomness a quarterly seasonal pattern praetz 1975 would have large positive values at r 4 r 8 etc which is clearly not the case here weak form efficiency means that a market cannot be exploited systematically for economic profit which is supported by the very low values of the statistics in table 1 cooper 1982 has studied the uk and other countries for randomness but at daily weekly and monthly intervals so the quarterly data used here are for a much longer period of time the only other index with dividends added over a comparable period is the de zoete equity index which has much more dependence in its returns over time benjamin 1980 the stock returns and inflation are related to market efficiency in an efficient market all relevant public information such as inflation should be reflected in market prices this is the semi strong form of market efficiency

grain versus food a hidden issue in china s food policy debate abstract the paper examines the likely pattern of china s food trade in the future should china s food trade policy be adjusted to accommodate its comparative advantage differing from the common perception that china s overall food sector will follow the path of grain trade and face an ever growing trend of net imports this study has found an evolving pattern of exchanging food for food in china over the last 15 years the pattern is in part characterized by strong export expansion of selected food products such as vegetables and fruits aquatic products etc the economic rationale behind the pattern is examined through a comparison of relative costs among alternative food products in china the policy implications of the study are discussed

u k financial market returns 1955 2000 we present and analyze new monthly index series for u k financial assets covering equities bonds bills and inflation the data are consistent with the crsp ibbotson series for the united states we use our indices to estimate equity and bond premia and to make international comparisons especially with the united states germany and japan we illustrate potential uses of the new series by investigating stock market seasonality inflation linked bonds real dividend growth rates and the small firm effect while some of our findings resemble u s results we also report differences between u k and u s stock market behavior copyright 2001 by university of chicago press

designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice an overview of the issues abstract payments for environmental services pes have attracted increasing interest as a mechanism to translate external non market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services es in this introductory paper we set the stage for the rest of this special issue of ecological economics by reviewing the main issues arising in pes design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics we start with a discussion of pes definition and scope we proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of pes programs and then analyze how pes compares to alternative policy instruments finally we examine in detail two important aspects of pes programs their effectiveness and their distributional implications pes is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems those in which ecosystems are mismanaged because many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers pes is based on the beneficiary pays rather than the polluter pays principle and as such is attractive in settings where es providers are poor marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors an important distinction within pes is between user financed pes in which the buyers are the users of the es and government financed pes in which the buyers are others typically the government acting on behalf of es users in practice pes programs differ in the type and scale of es demand the payment source the type of activity paid for the performance measure used as well as the payment mode and amount the effectiveness and efficiency of pes depends crucially on program design

dimensions and diversity of property rights in rural china dilemmas on the road to further reform abstract this paper contributes to the debate over land tenure in rural china by conceptualizing and measuring multiple dimensions of property rights in a way that elucidates the competing interests that are affected by the property rights regime utilizing a unique village level data set this paper argues that the regional and temporal variation in rural property rights signals a pattern in which decentralized institutional innovation occurs in response to the competing interests of the national state of local authorities and of present and possible future individual land users unlike the earlier debate concerning the household responsibility system the current property rights dilemma is intrinsically more complex because the potential conflicts of interest between individuals local collectives and the state are greater resolution of that debate will ultimately require careful exploration of the reality and substance of the tradeoffs and competing interests that make further reform of rural property rights so difficult

the supply of non renewable resources there exists no formal treatment of non renewable resource nrr supply systematically deriving quantity as function of price we establish instantaneous restricted fixed reserves and unrestricted nrr supply functions the supply of a nrr at any date and location not only depends on the local contemporary price of the resource but also on prices at all other dates and locations besides the usual law of supply which characterizes the own price effect cross price effects have their own law they can be decomposed into a substitution effect and a stock compensation effect we show that the substitution effect always dominates a price increase at some point in space and time causes nrr supply to decrease at all other points this new but orthodox supply setting extends to nrrs the partial equilibrium analysis of demand and supply policies thereby it provides a generalization of many results about policy induced changes on nrr markets the properties of restricted and unrestricted supply functions are characterized for hotelling homogeneous as well as ricardian non homogeneous reserves for a single deposit as well as for several deposits that endogenously come into production or cease to be active

uncertainty and economic self sufficiency existing formal analysis of international trade under uncertainty has established that it is never optimal to forgo completely the opportunity of trade this paper uses some simple trade models to derive conditions under which zero trade or complete self sufficiency is optimal when uncertainty is present the paper does not advocate extreme policies against international trade and specialization its purpose is to show that under certain circumstances involving uncertainty economic self sufficiency in some goods may be desirable

optimal management of strategic reserves of nonrenewable natural resources abstract this paper studies the stockpiling issue for an oil importing country that is likely to suffer embargoes the occurrence and duration of which are uncertain i show the existence of a decreasing reserves path that the country wants to attain in order to hedge against these disruptions allowing the importing country to invest in r d in order to free itself from the embargo threat i determine the optimal effort that should be engaged in research the incentive to develop a backstop is shown to increase with the depletion of the reserves

are choice experiments incentive compatible a test with quality differentiated beef steaks this study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions we test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes in general hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical responses thus hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness to pay for beef steaks however marginal willingness to pay for a change in steak quality is in general not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings

natural resource economics under the rule of hotelling abstract natural resource stocks held in situ are physical assets equilibrium in the assets market requires that their rates of return be such that their owners are just willing to hold on to them rather than invest elsewhere i discuss a number of factors relating to the evolution of extraction costs to the durability of the resource to market structure and to uncertainty that are important in correctly characterizing the rate of return on holding exhaustible natural resource stocks the emphasis is put on how those factors can potentially help bridge the gap between the basic hotelling s rule of natural resource exploitation and the historical behaviour of the flow price of a number of resources i also highlight some theoretical and empirical issues that need further attention

supply management with intermittent trade disruptions when the probabilities are not fully known abstract previous studies of trade disruptions have assumed that the probabilistic transition rates between normal and disrupted markets are known this may be unreasonable if disruptions occur infrequently in this paper a bayesian procedure for estimating the transition rates is derived under the assumption that the transition processes are exogenous and poisson the procedure is applied to the problem of managing emergency reserves in an import dependent economy time consistent plans for consuming and replenishing reserves are derived optimal reserves are found to be generally larger than if the transition rates were known and equal to current expected values

digging for victory agricultural policy and national security the following sections are included introductionthe economic theory of embargoesthe requirement for foodthe probabilities of an effective embargoagricultural production under embargostrategic stocksconclusionsreferences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

on the optimal order of natural resource use when the capacity of the inexhaustible substitute is limited consider a general equilibrium framework where the marginal cost of extraction from several deposits of an exhaustible resource is constant in terms of an inexhaustible perfect substitute and differs between deposits the instantaneous rate of production form the inexhaustible resource is subject to a capacity constraint

china s sloping land conversion program institutional innovation or business as usual abstract china s sloping land conversion program slcp is the largest land retirement reforestation program in the developing world having the goal of converting 14 67 million hectares of cropland to forests by 2010 4 4 million of which is on land with slopes greater than 25 and an additional soft goal of afforesting a roughly equal area of wasteland by 2010 pending successful completion it could represent a 10 20 increase in china s national forest area and a 10 decrease in current cultivated area in contrast to china s other forest sector policies slcp uses a public payment scheme that directly engages millions of rural households as core agents of project implementation and has the stated principals of volunteerism thus insofar as current or future de facto program implementation involves decentralized voluntary grassroots participation slcp represents an important departure from business as usual in how china manages its forest resources this work draws upon current available research of the program and uses a 2003 household and village level survey conducted by the center for chinese agricultural policy cas to examine program design implementation and outcomes to date results indicate that significant problems in design and implementation exist with these including shortfalls in subsidies delivered lack of respect of the principals of volunteerism and insufficient technical support and budgeting for local implementation costs more fundamentally some program goals appear to be based on common misperceptions regarding the linkages between forests and watershed services overall slcp contains both innovative elements volunteerism and the direct engagement of farmers as well as components that hark back to policies and mindsets of decades past the program s top down simplified contract structure lack of sufficient consultation with local communities and rural households and campaign style mobilization the paper concludes by providing four main suggestions to improve the program 1 increase local community input in design and implementation and ensure that households have full autonomy in participation choice 2 improve technical support and budgeting for local administrative costs and capacity building 3 clarify the environmental services targeted and verify the measures needed to acquire these services and 4 integrate slcp into an overall package of complementary policies aimed at the rural sector

financial markets forecasts revisited are they rational stubborn or jumpy this paper evaluates professional forecasters behavior using a panel data of individual forecasts we find that i professional forecasts are behavioral and ii there exists a stock bond dissonance the forecasting behavior seems to be stubborn in the stock market but jumpy in the bond market even in the same country forecasting behavior is quite different by market

optimal transition from coal to gas and renewable power under capacity constraints and adjustment costs this paper studies the optimal transition from existing coal power plants to gas and renewable power under a carbon budget it solves a model of polluting exhaustible resources with capacity constraints and adjustment costs to build coal gas and renewable power plants it finds that optimal investment in renewable energy may start before coal power has been phased out and even before investment in gas has started because doing so allows for smoothing investment over time and reduces adjustment costs gas plants may be used to reduce short term investment in renewable power and associated costs but must eventually be phased out to allow room for carbon free power one risk for myopic agents comparing gas and renewable investment is thus to overestimate the lifetime of gas plants e g when computing the levelized cost of electricity and be biased against renewable power these analytical results are quantified with numerical simulations of the european commission s 2050 energy roadmap

grain for green versus grain conflict between food security and conservation set aside in china summary this paper examines the conflict that may exist between conservation and food security in china policymakers and scholars are debating whether or not conservation set aside programs threaten food security to address the debate we describe china s conservation set aside program known as grain for green and compare it with similar programs outside of china we then use data that we collected to measure the production and price impacts of the program on china s grain economy since 1999 our simulations find that grain for green has only a small effect on china s grain production and almost no effect on prices or food imports

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

the grey paradox how fossil fuel owners can benefit from carbon taxation abstract this paper considers the distributional impact of optimal carbon taxation on fossil fuel owners a carbon emitting exhaustible resource competes with a dirtier abundant resource and a clean backstop a time dependent carbon tax is set to optimally use these resources under a cap constraint over co 2 atmospheric concentration as the cap is tightened the dirtier resource becomes less competitive compared to the exhaustible resource the competition effect but the timing and duration of extraction of the exhaustible resource is modified the timing effect we provide analytical expressions of these effects and determine conditions over size of reserves pollution contents extraction costs and demand elasticity such that the exhaustible resource owners profits increase as the ceiling is tightened calibrations for the transport and power sectors suggest that the profits of conventional oil and natural gas owners increase compared to a baseline without regulation for plausible carbon ceiling values

payments for ecosystem services and wealth distribution abstract payment for ecosystem services pes has come to be regarded as a promising market based policy instrument to internalize environmental externalities the potential of pes is linked to the relationship between the willingness to pay wtp of ecosystem service buyers and the willingness to accept wta of ecosystem service providers this study uses an economic model to analyze factors that influence aggregate wtp and wta in a pes scheme we demonstrate that wealth disparity between ecosystem services buyers and providers can increase transactions furthermore when wealth disparity exists between the buyers and sellers the wealthier population would contribute more into the program and the poorer population would benefit more from it under these conditions pes can be socially progressive and mitigate preexisting economic inequality in this sense the economic model provides justification for integration of pes and poverty alleviation programs results of our study indicate that pes is not a universally applicable conservation tool and there is a need for a more targeted approach to the design and application of pes

misspecification of capital asset pricing this study documents empirical anomalies which suggest that either the simple one period capital asset pricing model capm is misspecified or that capital markets are inefficient in particular portfolios based on firm size or earnings price e p ratios experience average returns systematically different from those predicted by the capm furthermore the abnormal returns persist for at least two years this persistence reduces the likelihood that these results are being generated by a market inefficiency rather the evidence seems to indicate that the equilibrium pricing model is misspecified however the data also reveals that an e p effect does not emerge after returns are controlled for the firm size effect the firm size effect largely subsumes the e p effect thus while the e p anomaly and value anomaly exist when each variable is considered separately the two anomalies seem to be related to the same set of missing factors and these factors appear to be more closely associated with firm size than e p ratios

forest tenure reform in china a choice experiment on farmers property rights preferences decentralization experiments are currently underway in the chinese forestry sector however researchers and policy makers tend to ignore a key question what do forest farmers really want from reform this paper addresses this question using a survey based choice experiment to investigate farmers preferences for various property rights attributes of a forestland contract we found that farmers are highly concerned with the types of rights provided by a contract reducing perceived risks of contract termination and introducing a priority right for the renewal of an existing contract significantly increases farmers marginal willingness to pay for a forest contract

volunteer and satisfied rural households participation in a payments for environmental services programme in inner mongolia using survey data from inner mongolia this paper explores the role of stakeholder engagement in the implementation of the sloping land conversion programme a payments for environmental services pes programme designed to restore forest in degraded land based on the idea that volunteerism and satisfaction with the programme s outcome are two important components of the programme s viability we successively analyse the intensity of households participation in the programme and their reported satisfaction with its economic achievement which we relate to their stated volunteerism we show that households participation intensity in the slcp is primarily driven by land and location characteristics and that these findings hold true whether or not the households voluntarily enrolled in the programme moreover as far as participants satisfaction can be interpreted as an indicator of potential long term support for the programme our findings also support plausible sustainability for the programme

herd behavior of japanese economists abstract this paper analyzes herding by japanese macroeconomic forecasters we find that japanese forecasters herd together regardless of their age in comparison lamont 1995 finds that older american forecasters stop herding

conditional cash transfers and payments for environmental services a conceptual framework for explaining and judging differences in outcomes we develop a conceptual framework elucidating the main determinants of the impact of conditional cash transfer cct and payments for environmental services pes programs using a simple multi agent model and evaluations of existing programs we show that 1 the share of the population who would meet the program s conditions in the absence of payments is a powerful predictor of program efficiency and that 2 program efficiency is eroded by selection bias people who already meet conditions self select into the programs at higher rates than others we then discuss possibilities for increasing efficiency and criteria for evaluating and choosing between ccts pes or other policy instruments

do hypothetical and actual marginal willingness to pay differ in choice experiments application to the valuation of the environment abstract in this paper we test the validity of choice experiments with donations for environmental projects in particular we test whether or not there are differences in preferences between a hypothetical and an actual choice experiment our experiments indicate no differences in addition internal tests of validity indicate transitive and stable preferences in both experiments although there are some indications of possible learning effects during the experiment

the role of forest related income in household economies and rural livelihoods in the border region of southern china quarterly socioeconomic data from 240 households are used to study the links between forest related income and rural livelihoods in southern china results show average forest related income shares of 31 5 which was predominantly derived from cultivated non timber sources forest related income was important to households at all income levels although lower income households were more dependent due to a lack of other sources higher income households monopolized off farm income and had more land than low income households forest related income could be increased by making forest land more accessible to the poor improving productivity and removing constraints to smallholder engagement in timber marketing

opec unconventional oil and climate change on the importance of the order of extraction we show that opec s market power contributes to climate change by enabling producers of relatively expensive and dirty oil to start producing before opec reserves are depleted we examine the importance of this extraction sequence effect by calibrating and simulating a cartel fringe model of the global oil market while welfare net of climate damage under the cartel fringe equilibrium can be significantly lower than under a first best outcome almost the entire welfare loss is due to the sequence effect of opec s market power in our benchmark calibration the cost of the sequence effect amounts to 15 trillion us which corresponds to 97 percent of the welfare loss moreover we find that an increase in non opec oil reserves decreases global welfare in a counterfactual world without non opec oil global welfare would be 13 trillion us higher 10 trillion us of which is due to lower climate damages

grade selection under uncertainty least cost last and other anomalies abstract grade selection rules for heterogeneous resource deposits with increasing marginal extraction costs are derived it is shown that contrary to the conventional wisdom it can be optimal to extract the least cost deposits last there are a number of rules that are compatible with dynamic profit maximization under certainty nevertheless none explains empirical regularities in actual extraction patterns when uncertainty about future price is introduced however the theoretical model conforms closely not only to observed grade selection patterns but also to observed mineral industry price paths

redefining payments for environmental services abstract the environmental economics and the ecological economics perspectives on payments for environmental services pes propose rather different views on how to define pes its key elements and on the role of pes in ecosystem conservation and rural development this paper compares these two perspectives and addresses the following questions what is an appropriate definition of pes grounded in the theory and practice underlying it what are the key design elements of pes what should the scope of pes be given the possible trade offs between efficiency and equity it is found that pes schemes should focus on cost effectiveness and best practice for positive livelihood impacts pes schemes should be transparent and provide additional services with conditional payments to voluntary providers

the sloping land conversion program in china effect on the livelihood diversification of rural households summary through addressing the motivations behind rural households livelihood diversification this paper examines the effect of the sloping land conversion program slcp on livelihood diversification using a longitudinal household survey data set spanning the overall implementation of the slcp our results show that the slcp works as a valid external policy intervention to increase rural livelihood diversification in addition the findings demonstrate that the implementation of the slcp has had heterogeneous effects on livelihood diversification across different rural income groups the lower income group was more affected by the program in terms of income diversification

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

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

intertemporal depletion of resource sites by spatially distributed users mineral deposits and other exhaustible resources are scattered around the globe as are their users yet the theory for analyzing depletion of such resources assumes that all resource sites and all users are located in the same place when applying the theory therefore one is forced to disregard what often seems to be an important real world consideration our purpose here is to generalize harold hotelling s 1931 theory of exhaustible resources to accommodate situations in which resource sites and their users are spatially distributed our analysis has many applications it can be applied to a conventional exhaustible resource like oil alternatively it can be applied to an unconventional exhaustible resource like scarce landfill space shipments of solid waste to landfills in other states or countries have become a prominent public policy issue eduardo ley et al 2000 finally our analysis can be applied in situations where the space reflects not geographical location but characteristics of the resource e g the sulfur content hardness and so forth of coal which users find distinctive 2 only two theoretical papers in resource economics have introduced spatial considerations 3 jean jacques laffont and michel moreaux 1986 studied the extraction of resources from sites located along a line segment with all users at one end charles kolstad 1994 was the first to consider spatially distributed users in his formulation consumers are distributed uniformly along a line segment with resource sites at each end kolstad s approach although innovative requires that the set of users be parti

the efficient use of multiple sources of a nonrenewable resource under supply cost uncertainty whereas in a deterministic world leaving a high cost source of a nonrenewable resource untouched as long as a less costly source is available is always efficient this may not be the case in a stochastic world conditions are derived under which it can be efficient to use a risky supply source in order to conserve a cheaper nonrisky source or to use a costly nonrisky source while a less costly risky source is still available a supply embargo can be interpreted as a limiting case the nonrisky source can be reinterpreted as an artificial stockpile

egalitarianism subsistence provision and work incentives in china s agricultural collectives abstract collective agriculture in china failed because its reward system was too egalitarian to provide sufficient work incentives to the peasants a popular view attributes egalitarianism to the difficulties of monitoring work effort in a team an alternative view presented here argues that a the egalitarian provision of basic foodgrains to peasant households reflected more generally the consumption problem of the peasantry who were impoverished by the state s policy of extracting agriculture and b as a remuneration system time rates better served the work and income sharing purpose than piece rates and therefore better protected households with high dependency ratios egalitarianism survives under the household farming system

the effects of china s sloping land conversion program on agricultural households in the late 1990s china aimed to mitigate environmental degradation from agricultural production activities by introducing the world s largest payments for environmental services pes program the sloping land conversion program slcp in order to analyze its effects on agricultural households we develop a microeconomic agricultural household model ahm which can model the production consumption and non farm labor supply decisions of agricultural households in rural china in a theoretically consistent fashion based on this theoretical model we derive an empirical specification that we use to econometrically estimate the effects of the slcp and other exogenous factors using a large longitudinal farm household survey data set we estimate the empirical model with the hausman taylor estimation method the empirical results are generally consistent with the results of our theoretical comparative static analysis e g that the slcp significantly decreases agricultural production while the slcp increases non farm labor supply and total consumption in the yellow river basin these effects could not be observed in the yangtze river basin the recent reduction of the slcp compensation payment rates has had some notable but generally small effects

investigating fishers preferences for the design of marine payments for environmental services schemes we determine the effects of various management restrictions on adoption rates of marine payments for environmental services pes schemes choice experiments are used in order to determine how fisher participation rates change under different marine pes programme designs various designs with differing restriction rates show different rates of adoption however fishers show a high utility loss associated with any move away from the current management situation irrespective of restriction levels this indicates that pes scheme costs may be high and creating an enabling environment could be important to reducing perceived losses as could investment into conditional in kind compensation mechanisms the paper also shows choice experiments to be a useful tool in marine pes design

dynamic policy coordination stockpiling for energy security abstract this paper looks at the problem of coordinating the use of oil stockpiles during a disruption in the world oil market when an individual country s actions affect the market price we model the problem as a dynamic game between two oil importing nations when the disruption is expected to persist at the same intensity we show that there are no benefits to coordination more generally however the noncooperative equilibrium will differ from the cooperative one we characterize the benefits from cooperation and determine the key parameters on which they depend

embargo threats and the management of emergency reserves this paper develops a model of a country that can import oil in normal times but is subject to random trade disruptions to mitigate the effects of these disruptions some of the imported oil is stockpiled there are two kinds of uncertainty involved the date at which an embargo will be imposed is not known in advance and given that an embargo has been imposed the date at which it will end is uncertain optimal behavior is analyzed by means of dynamic programming 13 references

taking stock a comparative analysis of payments for environmental services programs in developed and developing countries abstract payments for environmental services pes are an innovative approach to conservation that has been applied increasingly often in both developed and developing countries to date however few efforts have been made to systematically compare pes experiences drawing on the wealth of case studies in this special issue we synthesize the information presented according to case characteristics with respect to design costs environmental effectiveness and other outcomes pes programs often differ substantially one from the other some of the differences reflect adaptation of the basic concept to very different ecological socioeconomic or institutional conditions others reflect poor design due either to mistakes or to the need to accommodate political pressures we find significant differences between user financed pes programs in which funding comes from the users of the es being provided and government financed programs in which funding comes from a third party the user financed programs in our sample were better targeted more closely tailored to local conditions and needs had better monitoring and a greater willingness to enforce conditionality and had far fewer confounding side objectives than government financed programs we finish by outlining some perspectives on how both user and government financed pes programs could be made more effective and cost efficient

pricing and depletion of an exhaustible resource when there is anticipation of trade disruption this paper considers pricing and depletion of an exhaustible nonrenewable resource in an economy wherein domestic consumption is provided for by supplementing extraction from the economy s own resource stock with imports the future supply of which is not assured the socially optimal response to threat of trade disruption is a more conservationist depletion program for the domestic resource stock than would be called for if import supplies were assured to persist competitive domestic firms adopt the socially optimal conversationist program however firms anticipating domestic market power after the disruption of import supplies are revealed to overextract the domestic resource stock 33 references 2 figures

performance of an agro forestry based payments for environmental services project in mozambique a household level analysis there has been a paucity of research on the impacts of small scale payments for environmental services pes projects in developing countries the aim of this paper is to evaluate the household level impacts of a small scale agro forestry based carbon sequestration project in rural mozambique in 2006 questionnaire based interviews were conducted quarterly of 290 randomly selected households in the buffer zone of the gorongosa national park in mozambique we used the propensity score matching technique to assess the pes project impacts on household cash income consumption expenditure forest resource use and crop yields we found that in contrast to nonparticipant households pes participant households earned more cash income incurred more consumption expenditure collected less forest products and harvested lower quantities of agriculture crops in addition we found through decomposition analysis that there was a differential in pes income both male headed and high income households were being favoured as project benefit recipients future pes projects should focus on a payment scheme that can better ensure the benefit to all the participant households and also pay extra attention on the benefits distribution to the vulnerable households

when additional resource stocks reduce welfare in the dominant firm model we show that an increase of the fringe s reserves of a nonrenewable resource may lead to a decrease in aggregate discounted social welfare this happens when the difference between the fringe s extraction cost and the dominant firm s is positive and large enough we also show that welfare might decrease if the fringe s marginal extraction cost decreases

the effectiveness of payments for environmental services we adopt a theory based approach to synthesize research on the effectiveness of payments for environmental services in achieving environmental objectives and socio economic co benefits in varying contexts our theory of change builds on established conceptual models of impact pathways and highlights the role of 1 contextual dimensions e g political institutional and socio economic conditions spatial heterogeneity in environmental service values and provision costs and interactions with pre existing policies and 2 scheme design e g payment type and level contract length targeting and differentiation of payments in determining environmental and socio economic outcomes to shed light on the overall effectiveness of payment schemes and its determinants we review counterfactual based empirical evaluations comparative analyses of case studies and meta analyses our review suggests that program effectiveness often lags behind the expectations of early theorists however we also find that theory has advanced sufficiently to identify common reasons for why payment schemes fail or succeed moreover payment schemes are often rolled out along with other policy instruments in so called policy mixes advances in theory and evaluation research are needed to improve our understanding of how such policy mixes interact with the targeted social ecological systems 2017

transboundary pollution game with potential shift in damages abstract complex systems exposed to pollution may suddenly and permanently shift to a dangerous regime this paper studies a dynamic game among countries that face the prospect of such a shift each country derives some flow utility from its own emissions which are chosen unilaterally but flow emissions by all countries increase the pollution stock in the world in addition to generating global damages such as global warming the pollution stock may trigger an irreversible and abrupt jump in global damages or catastrophe at an unknown date in the future we ask whether endogenous and exogenous threats of such a jump in damages or catastrophe mitigate the tragedy of the commons and examine their implications on welfare our analysis yields different emission responses to these threats as compared to the related literature that focuses only on the single polluter case for example when the hazard rate is exogenous and countries commit to nonlinear strategies we find that the threat of a possible jump in damages or catastrophe may induce a lower or larger emission level and initial welfare due to multiple equilibria these results are maintained when the hazard rate endogenously depends on emission decisions

total factor productivity change in china s farming sector 1952 1989 a crucial problem in economic development is choosing institutions that are relatively efficient in resource allocation and conducive to growth however institutional innovations usually take time and it is often difficult to isolate these effects from the effects of noninstitutional factors modern china is one of the few exceptions it offers a rich experience in dramatic institutional changes after 1949 a smallholder system was experimented with immediately after the land reform this was quickly followed by various forms of collectivization since 1979 the household responsibility system hrs has gradually replaced the commune system thus china provides a unique opportunity for a comparative study of these different rural institutions in terms of the total factor productivity index tfpi this index measures the change in output relative to the change in inputs the examination of the tfpi also has policy implications the apparent plateau in grain production and the slow growth in other crop production from 1985 to 1989 constitute a sharp contrast to the period 1979 84 which witnessed rapid growth in both grain and economic crop production in china public ownership is favored by orthodox ideology and noneconomic factors often play an important role in economic life 2 in facing slower growth in crop production whether the hrs should or should not be the long term rural institution has become a sensitive question again and has kindled a heated debate within china in this study i will examine the performance of the successive rural institutions in china in terms of changes in the tfpi over the period 1952 89 using 1989 as the final year of my study the most important finding of this study is that the hrs showed a clear advan

the january size effect anomaly or risk mismeasurement 1986 the january size effect anomaly or risk mismeasurement financial analysts journal vol 42 no 6 pp 63 70

participation in the world s first clean development mechanism forest project the role of property rights social capital and contractual rules abstract clean development mechanism cdm forest projects are perceived as an attractive way to both help mitigate climate change and transfer income to rural poor however to engender participation of small scale producers a cdm forest project must offer sufficient incentives while minimizing their costs of participation all the while respecting the need for additionality property rights social capital and contractual rules are critical in the success of cdm forest projects in this paper we ask what factors affect participation in the world s first cdm project established in guangxi province china using village level surveys we find that although the project facilitates participation through carbon pooling and a share holding system much of the project land remains unforested we find that the primary reasons for the unforested regions are constrained contractual rules property rights allocation disputes and low levels of social capital in some villages

the welfare effects of intermittent interruptions of trade consider the problem of a buyer purchasing a costlessly storable good at a fixed price under threat of interruption of trade suppose there are two distinct and exhaustive regimes either one can buy as much as desired at the going price or one can purchase nothing at all and must rely on accumulated stocks for consumption the market moves randomly over time between these two states which will be referred to here as on and off respectively given the stochastic process governing the evolution of market regimes the price faced when the market is on and the intertemporal preferences of the buyer one may inquire as to the optimal acquisition rate for storage and consumption when the market is on and the optimal usage of accumulated stocks when the market is off solutions for these problems could then be used to ascertain the degree to which buyer and seller welfare is affected by the probabilistic curtailment of trading opportunities and the willingness to pay of the buyer for greater security of supply as well the possibility of inferring from purchase and storage behavior the buyer s perception of the likelihood and duration of trade interruptions may be explored this paper presents a general solution to this problem for stationary environments that is assuming intertemporal preferences to be representable by the expected present value of a uniformly discounted time independent flow utility function and taking the stochastic process governing change in regimes to be stationary markov optimal behavior and associated expected discounted utility are derived the method employed adapts to this context the dynamic programming arguments of my 1981 paper and is similar in structure to that employed in the analysis of resource depletion with technological uncertainty in partha dasgupta and geoffrey heal 1974 and dasgupta and joseph stiglitz 1981 there are many industrial markets in which these considerations are important recent events in the world oil market have stimulated much interest in the study of strategic mineral reserves see for example thomas teisberg 1981 in markets where demand fluctuates randomly and prices are inflexible for example the industrial market for natural gas the possibility of stochastic rationing has important implications for firm behavior see dennis carleton 1978 the prospect of strike upstream or lag in the delivery of goods on order has significant implications for inventory holdings in some industries the framework of this paper may even be adapted to the study of labor supply and savings behavior over the life cycle for a worker facing intermittent and uncertain unemployment

testing the rationality of japanese gdp forecasts the sign of forecast revision matters abstract this paper analyzes the rationality of japanese gdp forecasts of individual economists it finds that japanese forecasters are pessimistic optimistic when their forecast revisions frs are positive negative and that they always over react to new information across forecasters the magnitude of average fr is not correlated with the magnitude of average forecast errors fe these results together are consistent with neither the rational expectations hypothesis nor reputation models with rational and strategic forecasters

a welfare measurement of china s rural forestry reform during the 1980s abstract rural institutional innovation in china encompassed changes in land tenure arrangements and commodity pricing practices and their effects hinged on how they were carried out properly implemented the incentive structure could improve forest production would increase and thus producers and consumers would benefit otherwise if the reform programs were inappropriately implemented as reflected in market control and price distortions as well as policy uncertainty then the incentive structure might improve only slightly chances for production increase could be diminished making it hard for producers and consumers to benefit in addition to quantifying these impacts using contrasting cases this article also suggests some policy implications in a broader context

completing china s move to the market beginning in late 1978 by luck as much as design china arrived at a strategy for market oriented economic reform that combined substantial reform with rapid growth in gdp and exports the sequencing of reform began with the easy to reform sectors agriculture and foreign trade and then took up the more difficult task of reforming the large state owned enterprises with respect to agriculture small scale industry and foreign investment china found ways of introducing meaningful property rights into the increasingly marketized system a partially unreformed financial system and inadequate autonomy of large state enterprises accounts however for the current stop go nature of chinese development

land ownership security and farm productivity evidence from thailand the article discusses the impact of land ownership security on farmers input use and output value economic theory suggests that farmers with secure legal ownership will have more incentives and better ability to invest due to a lower perceived risk and a favourable access to institutional credit this leads to higher variable inputs use and higher output per unit of land the article uses farm level data from three provinces in thailand to test the above propositions the data pertain to samples of squatters who lack secure legal ownership as contrasted with legally titled farmers the results confirm that the provision of secure ownership in ldcs can increase productivity significantly