the effect of land scarcity on farm structure empirical evidence from mali abstractwe analyze the individualization of farm units in mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields since a moral hazard in team problem plagues production on the latter and the household head extracts his income from it he faces a trade off between efficiency and capture we show within the framework of a patriarchal farm household model that private plots become profitable for the head once land becomes sufficiently scarce specifically greater land scarcity raises both the probability to find private plots in afarm and the share of farmland allocated to these plots on the basis of firsthand data collected in southern mali we test and confirm the two predictions yielded by the above theory moreover we show that a higher number of married men within the household has the same effect as land scarcity thus suggesting an interesting refinement of the moral hazard in team argument

the economic viability and stability of capitalised family farming an analysis of agricultural decollectivisation in peru agricultural decollectivisation in peru created a nascent capitalist family farm sector does the empirical fact of parcellisation suggest that small scale agriculture is optimal will land reconcentration occur with differentiation among the parceleros studying the causes and consequences of parcellisation provides insight into a number of questions relating to alternative production systems productive efficiency is compared between the parceleros and their co operative predecessors and among the parceleros some conclusions reached are 1 rice yields increased relative to the final years of co operative production 2 sample parceleros and co operatives exhibit similar levels of technical efficiency 3 the production potential of parcelled units is estimated to be less than that of a well functioning co operative system and 4 differentiation among parceleros is occurring as a range of incomes is realised from a more or less homogeneous resource base

speculative bubbles in bitcoin markets an empirical investigation into the fundamental value of bitcoin amid its rapidly increasing usage and immense public interest the subject of bitcoin has raised profound economic and societal issues in this paper we undertake economic and econometric modelling of bitcoin prices as with many asset classes we show that bitcoin exhibits speculative bubbles further we find empirical evidence that the fundamental price of bitcoin is zero

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

nonoptimality of the friedman rule with capital income taxation this paper studies the efficient taxation of money and factor income in intertemporal optimizing growth models with infinite horizons transaction costs technologies and flexible prices second best optimality calls for a positive inflation tax and a non zero capital income tax when there are restrictions on taxation of production factors or profits rents our cases of nonoptimality of the friedman rule which differ from those of mulligan and sala i martin 1997 and extend substantially those of schmitt grohe and uribe 2004a follow from the violation of the diamond and mirrlees 1971 principle on production efficiency

monitoring costs in chinese agricultural teams large productivity gains have been observed in chinese agriculture following the transition from collective farming to household contracting using a model of mutual monitoring in an egalitarian production team we estimate that labor supervision absorbed about 10 20 percent of total labor time for a sample of chinese agricultural teams during 1970 76 these agency costs are lower than comparable estimates derived from aggregate data

platform competition in two sided markets many if not most markets with network externalities are two sided to succeed platforms in industries such as software portals and media payment systems and the internet must get both sides of the market on board accordingly platforms devote much attention to their business model that is to how they court each side while making money overall this paper builds a model of platform competition with two sided markets it unveils the determinants of price allocation and end user surplus for different governance structures profit maximizing platforms and not for profit joint undertakings and compares the outcomes with those under an integrated monopolist and a ramsey planner jel l5 l82 l86 l96

the organization of work a historical dimension abstract an evaluation of the organizational efficiencies of various modes of production by o e williamson has led him to conclude that given identical technologies the factory was more efficient than the putting out system the superior organizational efficiency of the former he maintains was one reason for the transition to factory production during the nineteenth century this paper challenges that view it is argued that the way in which williamson evaluates efficiency is open to methodological and other objections and that there is limited empirical support for his hypothesis given an identical technology the evidence suggests that the putting out system was usually able to compete with the factory

time consistent collection of optimal seigniorage a unifying framework this paper reviews the existing literature on the time consistency problem of seigniorage collection when monetary policy is determined by optimal taxation considerations it develops a unifying accounting framework and suggests a general measure for seigniorage which encompasses the standard measures employed in the literature in addition the ex ante optimal solution to the optimal taxation problem is derived and interpreted in relation to the ramsey principle we show that the different recommendations of the public finance literature i e the friedman rule of optimal deflation moderately positive inflation and seigniorage maximizing inflation are specific solutions to the optimal taxation problem the paper continues with a formal illustration of the time consistency problem of the ex ante optimal policy and the characterization of the time consistent solution under discretion as possible solutions to the time consistency problem we consider reputational forces institutional reforms that establish central bank independence and specific ways of asset and debt management in particular it is formally shown that a modified version of the asset and debt management scheme suggested by persson persson and svensson is not only necessary but also sufficient for optimality although this did not hold in their model

the friedman rule in an overlapping generations model with nonlinear taxation and income misreporting this paper models a two period overlapping generations economy with money populated with individuals of different skills they face a nonlinear income tax schedule and can engage in tax evasion money serves two purposes the traditional one modeled through a money in the utility function it also facilitates tax evasion the main message of the paper is that income tax evasion in this framework leads to the violation of the friedman rule the paper also shows that even in the absence of tax evasion when optimality requires differential commodity taxation complementarity of real cash balances and labor supply does not guarantee the optimality of the friedman rule as a boundary solution an additional assumption is required

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

on the value of virtual currencies nous construisons un modele d analyse pour cerner les facteurs qui influent sur le taux de change des monnaies virtuelles trois elements importent tout d abord l utilisation actuelle d une monnaie virtuelle comme moyen de paiement ensuite la decision d investisseurs prospectifs d acheter de la monnaie virtuelle et de controler ainsi l offre de ce type de monnaie enfin les facteurs qui determineront ensemble l adoption d une monnaie virtuelle par les consommateurs et son acceptation par les commercants

the optimum quantity of money rule in the theory of public finance this paper examines optimal tax policy in a monetary economy in which money serves as an intermediate good that helps facilitate the conversion of scarce resources into tinal consumption goods by enabling consumers to economize on the costs of transacting it is shown that in such an environment even though distorting taxes must be levied for revenue purposes the optimal tax structure calls for abstaining from inflationary finance and adopting the optimum quantity of money rule

transition and enterprise restructuring the development of individual farming in romania economic reforms have induced enterprise restructuring in transition countries in agriculture the most dramatic form of restructuring is the break up of state and collective farms into individual farms the development of individual farming varies strongly between countries regions and households this paper uses household level data from a 1996 survey in romania to analyze which household and regional characteristics determine the shift to individual farming individual farming is influenced by several household characteristics such as the human capital education age farming experience physical capital endowments ownership of land buildings machinery livestock and access to other finance sources off farm wages pensions furthermore environmental factors such as infrastructure local access to inputs and the pre reform importance of individual farming in the region all affect the development of individual farming

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

international trade and exchange rate volatility for currencies with well developed forward markets several papers have investigated the conjectured negative relationship between trade and short term exchange rate volatility without being very successful a theoretical explanation for the empirical anomalies is provided by solving explicitly for the forward rate because importers and exporters are on opposite sides of the forward market so is their exposure towards exchange rate volatility moreover which trade flow benefits and which one loses from increased volatility is determined by the signs of the aggregate net foreign currency exposure and the aggregate measure of risk aversion

the incentive problem and the demise of team farming in china abstract this paper begins with a discussion of what can be inferred about the efficiency of collective farming from the demise of team production in rural china after reviewing the formal literature on incentives in collective farms it examines two problems that may have plagued the chinese teams first excessive egalitarianism which can be analyzed by modifying existing models and second monitoring problems which require a departure from the perfect information context of those models by numerical example it is shown that the superiority of household farming over forced collective farming does not preclude the possibility that some team production would have existed in a democratic equilibrium dominating both of them finally the post reform household contracting system is examined with special reference to distributive and allocative issues

a modified collective agriculture in rural growth with equity reconsidering the private unimodal solution abstract this paper identifies limitations of an agricultural structure of small private farms as a basis for rural growth with distributive equity and points out potential advantages of democratically managed collectives characterized by flexibility with respect to production scale group checks on inequality in land use and avoidance of the underemployment generating tendencies of large scale non collective agriculture after a critique of recent literature on scale economies and a discussion of stratification tendencies in private agriculture a model of democratic rural collectives incorporating features of chinese and tanzanian precedents is introduced and evaluated political feasibility is considered in a concluding discussion

is the friedman rule optimal when money is an intermediate good in contrast to the recent literature on the optimal inflation tax we show that in models where money reduces transactions costs it is optimal to set the inflation tax to zero when seigniorage is replaced by revenue from distortionary taxes the main reasons for this result are that the variable costs of supplying real balances are negligible and the inflation tax is a unit tax we also show that the intermediate good optimal taxation rules in the public finance literature cannot be directly applied both when money is costless and when it requires resources to be produced

indeterminacy and increasing returns abstract we investigate properties of the one sector growth model with increasing returns under two organizational structures capable of reconciling the existence of aggregate increasing returns with competitive behavior by firms the first involves input externalities the second involves monopolistic competition we show for parameters in close accord with recent literature on real business cycles that the model displays an indeterminate steady state that can be exploited to generate a model of business fluctuations driven by self fulfilling beliefs in our first class of models growth is generated by exogenous increases in factor productivity in the second class the marginal product of capital is large enough for endogenous growth journal of economic literature classification numbers e00 e3 o40

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

on the indeterminacy of equilibrium exchange rates in this paper we consider a particular international economic policy regime the laissez faire regime the distinguishing features of which are unrestricted portfolio choice and floating exchange rates and as we show this regime although favored by many economists is not economically feasible it does not have a determinate equilibrium that is an implication of an overlapping generations model more basically it is an implication of the notion that money is wanted only in order to accomplish trades

agricultural price policy in tanzania abstract this paper examines agricultural price policy implementation and its strategic impact in tanzania over the period 1969 1980 trends in producer prices and the rural urban terms of trade are analysed by constructing weighted price and income indices for major categories of crops marketed through official channels the results indicate a substantial deterioration of real prices and incomes from crop sales during the 1970s when taken in conjunction with a concomitant deterioration in the efficiency of agricultural marketing the analysis suggests that price policy has had a major adverse impact both on peasant living standards and on the economic performance of tanzania since the mid 1960s

non optimality of the friedman rule and optimal taxation in a growing economy with imperfect competition abstract this paper shows that if capital generates production externality there exists a wedge between returns to money and to capital driving the friedman rule is not optimal however in the absence of capital externality the friedman rule may be valid even under imperfect competition

dynamic behavior of capital accumulation in a cash in advance model abstract this paper analyzes the dynamic behavior of capital accumulation in stockman s cash in advance model if the cash in advance constraint applies only to consumption then money is superneutral along the transition path as well as in the long run alternatively if the cash in advance constraint applies to gross investment as well as consumption then a permanent increase in the rate of monetary growth reduces the steady state capital stock the effect on the speed of adjustment depends on the sign of a certain simple function of the parameters of preferences and technology

inflation employment and welfare in the presence of transactions costs for some time now two issues of primary importance in macroeconomics and monetary theory have been the relation between inflation and unemployment the phillips curve and the optimum rate of inflation the optimum quantity of money in both of these areas the work of friedman and phelps has been influential friedman 1968 and phelps 1970 emphasized the role of inflationary expectations in generating a short run phillips curve like tradeoff but argued that in the long run the phillips curve is vertical that is friedman and phelps claimed that in the long run defined as the time period within which expectations fully adjust to actual circumstances inflation and employment should be uncorrelated more recently friedman 1977 has argued that since the rate of inflation and its variability tend to be positively related inflation and employment may be negatively related in the long run this is the positively sloped phillips curve phenomenon in recent years the link between inflation and employment has continued to receive considerable attention the vast rational expectations literature on the role of monetary policy and the equilibrium approach to the business cycle are in large part an outgrowth of the earlier phillips curve controversy the notion that there is an inverse long run relation between inflation and employment has recently received theoretical support from barro and santomero 1976 stockman 1981 and aschauer and greenwood 1983 related studies concerning the real effects of inflation have been undertaken by jovanovic 1982 stockman 1984 and abel 1985 the common element running through all of these papers is that the real effects of inflation arise from the transactions technology that underlies money demand l

microfoundations for a stable demand for money function scientific revolutions seldom occur when the prevailing theories appear to be performing well it is only when the accepted theory fails to offer a satisfactory explanation of events that new and more robust theories are proposed of these new theories the one which can explain the successful performance of the previous theory and also the events which led to its demise becomes the replacement so it is in the history of modern monetary economics the failure of the partial adjustment model in the mid s is well documented in the united kingdom and the united states and the search for a replacement has been the main point on the agenda since that time there are many contending theories some of which are advocated by the other contributors to this controversy but the mark of a truly better theory which can be claimed to supersede the partial adjustment model is one that can explain the success and the breakdown of the previous theory as well as the events subsequently central to the argument of this paper is the importance of individual behaviour in the context of a market for monetary assets only by means of careful investigation of the microeconomic behaviour underpinning monetary economics at the individual and the market level can the stability of the money demand function be restored it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the buffer stock approach has gone further than other approaches in dealing with the fundamental micro foundations of the demand for money it does not suggest that other approaches have no microfoundations but they tend to concentrate exclusively on specific aspects of the micro structure such as separability and ignore others relating to the behaviour of individual optimisers in a monetary market the buffer stock model has firm micro foundations which can explain the events both before and after the breakdown of the partial adjustment model section i provides an historical background to the debate and section ii gives a brief overview of buffer stock models which shows that unlike other approaches they have been able to reconcile the past success of the partial adjustment model with its present failure the nature of the microfoundations of buffer stock models are the source of the success and are discussed in more detail in section iii the final section evaluates the buffer stock approach in the light of the other alternatives

safety in small numbers local strategies for survival and growth in romania and the kyrgyz republic abstract using a comparative study of farm households from poor rural communities in kyrgyzstan and north east romania this paper explores the intricacies of a variety of forms of cooperation in agriculture the findings highlight the safety net labour specialisation asset pooling and service delivery functions of different groups that enable rural livelihoods to at times cope and at times improve in situations of imperfect information sluggish labour and land markets and constrained capital markets the research presented here indicates that small to medium forms of cooperation provide the rural poor with predictable livelihood strategies under conditions of uncertainty specifically cooperative action in the form of groups substitutes for imperfect markets despite the push for decollectivisation and privatisation across transition countries there remains a place for encouraging group initiatives at least for the medium term on the grounds of both poverty alleviation and agricultural growth

some behavioral perspectives on the dominance of hierarchical over democratic forms of enterprise abstract this paper explores possible reasons why participatory modes of organization whole potentially viable and preferable to hierarchical modes for a large majority of workers may be dominated by the latter in capitalist market economies after exploring the developmental preconditions for the evolution of a mature participatory mode using a behavioral approach to organizations it is suggested that since the interest of those possessing scarce managerial skills may lie with hierarchical firms a participatory sector may be uncompetitive unless rights to enter labor contracts are redefined thus the analysis offers a partial explanation of the political nature of the demand for workplace democracy

a further exploration in the theory of exchange rate regimes in an interesting paper in this journal elhanan helpman 1981 develops a simple two country model to compare the welfare levels that are achieved under different exchange rate regimes in a world characterized by perfect foresight his basic finding is that equilibrium consumption allocations and hence welfare levels are identical under a floating exchange rate system and a one sided peg fixed exchange rate regime this result is due to helpman s assumption that output is determined exogenously which allows a separation of the real and monetary sides of the economy the purpose of this paper is to extend helpman s model by making two alterations in his setup 1 to allow production to be endogenously determined as a function of labor force participation and 2 to allow welfare levels to be dependent on labor service as well as on consumption the main conclusion then obtained is that a country may achieve a higher welfare level under a flexible exchange rate regime than under a fixed exchange rate regime since it is able to choose an optimal rate of inflation or currency depreciation

economic reform and smallholder agriculture in tanzania a discussion of recent market liberalization road rehabilitation and technology dissemination efforts abstract this paper discusses the reforms affecting tanzania s small farm sector during 1984 1993 it focuses on changes in marketing and input supply including the revival of regional cooperative societies the ending of the state monopoly in food crop procurement and changes in the export crop sector efforts to rehabilitate the country s road network and the effects of institutional change on a technology dissemination program sasakawa global 2000 are also discussed the author concludes that improvements in the performance of the smallholder sector cannot be expected to follow automatically from a withdrawal of government

trigger strategies in chinese agricultural teams in this paper the reasons why chinese agricultural teams could not reply on the threat of internal effort response to solve incentive problems are investigated the detrimental effects of state extractive agricultural policies the basic needs program and cultural revolution era ideology on the dynamic self enforcing mechanism in chinese teams are analysed using the data on the teams of a moderately prosperous commune during the period 1970 76 the author estimates the discount factor and the impact of the trigger strategies on workers effort decisions it is found that the estimates of the discount factor and the trigger strategy effect are significantly greater than zero in some periods but not large enough to eliminate the need for monitoring

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

anticipated inflation and the capital stock in a cash in advance economy abstract an economy is constructed in which the steady state capital stock is inversely related to the rate of inflation as a result that is directly opposite the usual conclusion

two sided markets a progress report the paper provides a road map to the burgeoning literature on two sided markets and presents new results it identifies two sided markets with markets in which the structure and not only the level of prices charged by platforms matters the failure of the coase theorem is necessary but not sufficient for two sidedness the paper builds a model integrating usage and membership externalities that unifies two hitherto disparate strands of the literature emphasizing either form of externality and obtains new results on the mix of membership and usage charges when price setting or bargaining determine payments between end users

bitcoin and the legitimacy crisis of money the virtual currency and payment project bitcoin intends to challenge the current monetary and payment system that finds itself in a legitimacy crisis in the aftermath of the financial market turmoil of 2008 in examining the governance of the bitcoin system i try to assess its potential to create input and output legitimacy as a payment system and as a monetary system in comparison with current practice

price manipulation in the bitcoin ecosystem abstract to its proponents the cryptocurrency bitcoin offers the potential to disrupt payment systems and traditional currencies it has also been subject to security breaches and wild price fluctuations this paper identifies and analyzes the impact of suspicious trading activity on the mt gox bitcoin currency exchange in which approximately 600 000 bitcoins btc valued at 188 million were fraudulently acquired during both periods the usd btc exchange rate rose by an average of four percent on days when suspicious trades took place compared to a slight decline on days without suspicious activity based on rigorous analysis with extensive robustness checks the paper demonstrates that the suspicious trading activity likely caused the unprecedented spike in the usd btc exchange rate in late 2013 when the rate jumped from around 150 to more than 1 000 in two months

bitcoin 1 bitcoin 2 an experiment in privately issued outside monies the value of bitcoin depends upon self fulfilling beliefs that are hard to pin down we demonstrate this for the case where bitcoin is the only form of money in the economy and then generalize the message to the case of multiple bitcoin clones and or a competing sovereign currency some aspects of the indeterminacy we describe would no longer hold if bitcoin were an interesting bearing object

optimality of the friedman rule in economies with distorting taxes abstract we find conditions for the friedman rule to be optimal in three standard monetary models our main contribution is to shed light on two issues in the literature first the conventional view maintains that when money is a final good its services should be taxed moreover if money demand is interest inelastic its services should be taxed heavily we show that this view is incorrect second there is an ongoing controversy about whether the optimality of the friedman rule is connected to the intermediate goods result from public finance we resolve this controversy by showing a deep connection between these results

optimal monetary policy optimal monetary policy maximizes the welfare of a representative agent given frictions in the economic environment constructing a model with two sets of frictions costly price adjustment by imperfectly competitive firms and costly exchange of wealth for goods we find optimal monetary policy is governed by two familiar principles first the average level of the nominal interest rate should be sufficiently low as suggested by milton friedman that there should be deflation on average yet the keynesian frictions imply that the optimal nominal interest rate is positive second as various shocks occur to the real and monetary sectors the price level should be largely stabilized as suggested by irving fisher albeit around a deflationary trend path since expected inflation is roughly constant through time the nominal interest rate must therefore vary with the fisherian determinants of the real interest rate although the monetary authority has substantial leverage over real activity in our model economy it chooses real allocations that closely resemble those which would occur if prices were flexible in our benchmark model there is some tendency for the monetary authority to smooth nominal and real interest rates

inflation and welfare in the steady state this is a paper on expected inflation and welfare in steady state equilibrium the demand for money is an inventory demand with an endogenous payment period the clower constraint is not imposed higher inflation reduces welfare by reducing consumption as people devote more of their real income to maintaining lower average money holdings high inflation does not necessarily promote an increase in the capital stock the mundell tobin effect is absent the policy conclusion is standard deflate at the rate of time preference because capital is held socially optimal consumption falls short of its golden rule level if inside money is allowed it drives out fiat money and welfare is again at a maximum

optimal fiscal and monetary policy under sticky prices this paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policy under sticky product prices the theoretical framework is a stochastic production economy without capital the government finances an exogenous stream of purchases by levying distortionary income taxes printing money and issuing one period nominally risk free bonds the main findings of the paper are first for a miniscule degree of price stickiness i e many times below available empirical estimates the optimal volatility of inflation is near zero this result stands in stark contrast with the high volatility of inflation implied by the ramsey allocation when prices are flexible the finding is in line with a recent body of work on optimal monetary policy under nominal rigidities that ignores the role of optimal fiscal policy second even small deviations from full price flexibility induce near random walk behavior in government debt and tax rates third sluggish price adjustment raises the average nominal interest rate above the one called for by the friedman rule finally an interest rate feedback rule whereby the nominal interest rate depends on inflation and output fits well the data emanating from the ramsey economy however the fitted rule is not of the taylor type for the implied inflation coefficient is less than one and close to zero and the output coefficient is negative jel classification e52 e61 e63

the buffer stock notion in monetary economics not the least of harry johnson s contributions to our discipline was the series of survey papers on aspects of monetary economics which he produced during the 1960s and 1970s it is no exaggeration to say that the way in which the literature of monetary economics is organised even now follows the design which johnson first set out in 1962 and built on in the subsequent decade nevertheless the subject has not stood still and one of the more interesting developments of the last few years has involved the introduction of what has been variously described as the disequilibrium money shock absorber or as i prefer to call it the buffer stock notion into monetary economics the development of this line of thought was getting underway before johnson s untimely death much of it indeed under the auspices of his own research programme at the lse even so this did not happen early enough for the relevant ideas to be put in their proper niche by johnson himself and the buffer stock approach is not yet fully integrated into the mainstream of monetary economics much of the relevant literature is empirical concerned with modelling particular aspects of the monetary experience of specific countries hence it is fragmented and contains few papers which attempt a coherent account of just what this approach is and how it relates to other approaches to monetary analysis although essays by goodhart 1982a b and judd and scadding 1982a contain important discussions of these issues to the best of my knowledge only jonson 1976a and knoester 1979a have devoted entire papers solely to this central issue and these are relatively inaccessible and hence less widely known than they deserve to be in this lecture i shall attempt to give a brief account of the essentials of this approach first i shall sketch out its microeconomic background and then i shall discuss those theoretical characteristics which differentiate it from the neo austrian analysis of robert e lucas jr and his associates as well as from the conventional keynesian approach to monetary economics last but by no means least i shall argue that it yields simple theoretical insights into important empirical and policy related issues which are troublesome for alternative approaches in short my tribute to harry

the impact of structural adjustment and property rights conflicts on nicaraguan agrarian reform beneficiaries abstract in nicaragua structural adjustment policies under the new government have led to sharply reduced agricultural producer credit and tighter conditions for its use along with conflicts over property rights that emerged from the sandinista era land confiscations the effect has been to speed a process of parceling and land sales among the population of agrarian reform beneficiaries which was the main recipient of redistributed lands faced with imperfect capital markets and tenure uncertainty small scale producers have resorted to distress sales of their parcels that could lead to a restratification of land ownership patterns

crypto currency bubbles an application of the phillips shi yu 2013 methodology on mt gox bitcoin prices the creation of bitcoin heralded the arrival of digital or crypto currency and has been regarded as a phenomenon since its introduction it has experienced a meteoric rise in price and rapid growth accompanied by huge volatility swings and also attracted plenty of controversies which even involved law enforcement agencies hence claims abound that bitcoin has been characterized by bubbles ready to burst any time e g the recent collapse of bitcoin s biggest exchange mt gox this has earned plenty of coverage in the media but surprisingly not in the academic literature we therefore fill this knowledge gap we conduct an econometric investigation of the existence of bubbles in the bitcoin market based on a recently developed technique that is robust in detecting bubbles that of phillips et al 2013a over the period 2010 2014 we detected a number of short lived bubbles most importantly we found three huge bubbles in the latter part of the period 2011 2013 lasting from 66 to 106 days with the