devaluation and the j curve some evidence from ldcs within the international trade literature it is not uncommon to find arguments about whether devaluation will improve the trade balance it is argued that the flows of goods respond only with time lags to changes in the exchange rate the j curve terrn is used to describe the movement over time of the trade balance it may deteriorate at first and improvement may come later this paper presents a method by which one could detect the existence of the j curve the method is applied to four developing countries the empirical evidence supports the pattern of movemnent described by the j curve a major policy option for a country facing a persistent balance of payments deficit is said to be devaluation of its currency within the international trade literature it is not uncommon to find arguments about whether devaluation will improve the trade balance or the balance of payments for example proponents of the elasticities approach describe the necessary and sufficient conditions for an improvement in the trade balance in terms of elasticities of demand and supply referred to as the marshall lerner condition while there is abundant empirical evidence to suggest that these conditions are indeed met at least for industrial countries there have been circumstances under which 2 devaluation has not been successful for example one might wonder why the u s trade balance deteriorated so much in 1972 despite the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 this unfavorable effect of devaluation on the trade balance is termed the j curve phenomenon received for publication august 23 1984 revision accepted for publication november 26 1984 the university of wisconsin milwaukee i would like to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the initial draft of this paper 1 proponents of the absorption approach e g alexander 1952 describe how devaluation may change the terms of trade increase production and switch expenditures from foreign to domestic goods thus improving the trade balance international monetarists argue that devaluation reduces the real value of cash balances and or changes the relative price of traded and nontraded goods thus improving both the trade balance and the balance of payments 2 for an cstimate of the elasticities see houthakker and magee 1969 and warner and kreinin 1983 the former study provides the elasticities estimates under fixed exchange rates and the latter under floating rates this content downloaded from 157 55 39 17 on wed 31 aug 2016 04 39 37 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

green taxes can we protect the environment and improve the tax system at the same time on a cursory inspection public economics appears to provide a straightforward and compelling answer of yes to the question posed in the title to this paper as economists have long argued appropriately designed taxes can in principle at least efficiently restrain levels of polluting activities and in addition such taxes will generate revenues so that we can reduce rates on other forms of taxation that distort the functioning of the economy green taxes in short promise a double dividend they can both reduce excessive levels of pollution and increase the efficiency of the overall tax system at least so several economists have argued recently 17 20 but is this really so with the growing recognition of the enormous revenue potential of certain environmental taxes especially carbon taxes to address the problem of global warming public economists have returned to this question with a new round of research efforts directed both to understanding the properties of pollution taxes as revenue sources and to estimating their revenue potential and the magnitude of their effects on the economy and the newly emerging literature is producing some quite astonishing and very troubling findings in this paper i want to review this work and explore its implications when viewed in relation to some other research it appears to suggest that most forms of regulatory activity at least those that increase the costs of the regulated activities may have hitherto unappreciated costs of a stunning magnitude what many of us would have taken to be second order side effects of environmental and other regulatory policies can be of a magnitude that compromises to a significant extent their welfare enhancing properties having reviewed this body of work i wish also to explore some issues in the political economy of green taxes it is helpful to begin by briefly putting the issue in historical perspective

remodeling international tourism demand old theory and new evidence abstract the purpose of this study is to advance the tourism demand theory by excluding simultaneous effects of exchange rates and prices in empirical models formulating an alternative pricing modus operandi consistent with recent research in the area and demonstrating the efficacy of the use of an industrial production index ipi as a proxy for income a panel fully modified ordinary least squares fmols method is employed to estimate the inbound tourism demand for turkey study findings suggest that the inclusion of exchange rates and prices as mutually exclusive components can be misleading the ipi is not a good proxy for income and country specific coefficients need to be analyzed to accurately explain determinants of tourism demand for countries in the panel

input demand under yield and revenue insurance previous studies disagree on the effects of insurance on fertilizer application rates the effect of increased fertilizer on the probability of low yields primarily determines whether fertilizer and insurance are substitutes or complements we estimate conditional distributions of corn yields to determine if the technical relationship between yields and fertilizer supports the hypothesis that insurance increases optimal application rates our results indicate no support for this hypothesis at all nitrogen fertilizer rates and reasonable levels of risk aversion nitrogen fertilizer and insurance are substitutes suggesting that those who purchase insurance are likely to decrease nitrogen fertilizer applications

modeling conditional yield densities given the increasing interest in agricultural risk many have sought improved methods to characterize conditional crop yield densities while most have postulated the beta as a flexible alternative to the normal others have chosen nonparametric methods unfortunately yield data tends not to be sufficiently abundant to invalidate many reasonable parametric models this is problematic because conclusions from economic analyses which require estimated conditional yield densities tend not to be invariant to the modeling assumption we propose a semiparametric estimator that because of its theoretical properties and our simulation results enables one to empirically proceed with a higher degree of confidence copyright 2003 oxford university press

a neglected welfare cost of monopoly and most other product market distortions abstract a neglected effect of monopoly is the distortion in the quantity of resources supplied monopoly not only affects the economy s output mix it also results in factor prices that are below social marginal value products this latter distortion is shown to be quantitatively important when other policies such as taxes on labor earnings also depress factor prices under plausible conditions the welfare cost due to this distortion of monopoly is shown to be between five and fifteen times larger than the more familiar harberger triangle output mix distortion of monopoly it is suggested that the resource supply effects of many other policies are similarly likely to be more important than their commonly evaluated output market effects

hedging with crop yield futures a mean variance analysis this investigation into the use of new chicago board of trade yield futures to manage price and yield risks shows that a risk minimizing firm can reduce its variance of profit by hedging in both markets compared to hedging in price futures only the greater the variance of the contract underlying yield the less effective the two instrument hedge hedging effectiveness of the dual strategy also depends on the price and yield bases and the effect of a change in either basis depends on whether the established crop yield futures position is short or long

bilateral j curve between india and her trading partners india a land of over one billion people and one of the newly emerging industrial powers in the world is going through a slow but steady metamorphism for centuries india has played a major role in the international trade it was not uncommon to see her ships carrying silk and spices across the arabian seas and bringing back machine made textile invasions of india first by mughals and latter by the british through the east india company were all trade oriented india s presence in the world trade is relatively small at this time but is gaining momentum after independence in 1947 india for a brief period experimented with socialism the five year plans were mainly focused towards building infrastructure and development of small scale agriculture based industries the industrial development even though extremely important for growth played a secondary role the foreign investment was encouraged but only in the selected sectors of the economy however threat of nationalization a large bureaucracy corruption lack of understanding of the indian business practices and the requirement that a major share holder must be an indian national discouraged foreign capital investment in india during 1991 1992 india adopted a policy of trade liberalization to attract foreign capital and to encourage non resident indians to invest in their home country government of india established a separate unit within the home ministry whose main function was to expedite processing of applications india also relaxed the requirement that a major partner be an indian national india provided export subsidies to the exporters in terms of cash as well as foreign exchange so that they could import machines and raw materials exports responded to the trade liberalization and increased from 44 041 crores of rupees in 1991 1992 to 141 603 crores in 1998 1999 where one crore is equivalent to ten million in us dollar terms at a current exchange rate of 42 48 rupees per dollar this translates to an increase from 10 37 billion to 33 34 billion over eight years india also anticipates that through a major increase in the information technology mainly software industry her exports will increase to 90 billion by 2005 the trade liberalization has been accompanied by changes in the monetary policies the inflation rate has been reduced from about 12 to 9 per year the interest rates have declined from 14 to 10 and the exchange rate has been allowed to respond to market forces as a result from 1991 1992 to 1998 1999 the rupee has declined from 19 62 rupees per dollar to 42 48 rupees per dollar by december 2000 rupee had further devalued to 46 25 per dollar with a hope that it will further boost india s exports and improve her trade balance however the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance is not instantaneous indeed there is ample evidence in the literature that after currency depreciation the trade balance worsens in the short run before improving in the long run since this pattern of movement of the trade balance over time resembles the letter j magee 1973 labelled it the j curve phenomenon magee argued that after devaluation contracts that are in transit at old exchange rates dominate the short run response of the trade balance over time new contracts at new prices begin to exert their favourable impact at this stage elasticities may increase leading to an eventual improvement in the trade balance of course the delayed response could also be due to lags in the process of increasing the production of exportables junz and rhomberg 1973 have identified five lags namely recognition lags decision lags delivery lags replacement lags and production lags only after the realization of these lags the trade balance could improve early studies that tried to investigate the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance relied upon estimating the marshall lerner condition the condition

some neglected social costs of government spending in farm programs economic welfare analyses of farm programs typically assume that the direct social opportunity cost of subsidy payments is one dollar per dollar of government spending recent literature suggests that the marginal opportunity cost of a dollar of u s federal government spending is more likely to be in the range of 1 20 to 1 50 this implies that the net social costs of farm programs that involve government spending are significantly greater than the typical estimates in addition the normative efficiency ranking of alternative policies is sensitive to the marginal opportunity cost of government spending

insuring eggs in baskets the vast majority of crop and revenue insurance policies sold in the united states are single crop policies that insure against low yields or low revenues for each crop grown on a particular farm this practice of insuring one crop at a time runs counter to the traditional risk management practice of diversifying across several enterprises to avoid putting all of ones eggs in a single basket this paper examines the construction of whole farm crop revenue insurance programs to include livestock the whole farm insurance product covers crop revenues from corn and soybeans and livestock revenues from hog production the results show that at coverage levels of 95 percent or lower the fair insurance premiums for this product on a well diversified iowa hog farm are far lower than the fair premiums for the corn crop alone on the same farm the calculation of premium rates for the whole farm insurance product is derived from a method for imposing correlations first proposed by iman and conover in 1982

revenue insurance purchase decisions of farmers the objective of this study is to evaluate farm household and financial characteristics of cash grain farmers decisions of whether to purchase revenue insurance using farm level data these characteristics were identified by estimating a logit model of revenue insurance purchase decisions by farm operators results indicate that farm operators with the ability to self insure through accumulation of sufficient wealth reserves measured in terms of the ratio of debts to assets operators with off farm income and participation in production and marketing contracts are more likely to pursue these strategies as a substitute for federal revenue insurance programmes further study finds that older and wealthy cash grain farmers are less likely to buy revenue insurance

impact of copula choice on the modeling of crop yield basis risk a number of problems in agricultural economics involve modeling joint distributions for which the assumption of multivariate normality may not be warranted yet very little work has been conducted evaluating competing methods for modeling joint dependence we develop a simulation framework to evaluate the bias and efficiency impacts of copula choice in the context of evaluating county to farm basis risk the results suggest significant differences in performance across various copulas and approaches the findings have important implications for risk analysis insurance and policy modeling problems in agriculture regarding the selection of method to model dependence among random variables

tourism demand modelling and forecasting a review of recent research abstract this paper reviews the published studies on tourism demand modelling and forecasting since 2000 one of the key findings of this review is that the methods used in analysing and forecasting the demand for tourism have been more diverse than those identified by other review articles in addition to the most popular time series and econometric models a number of new techniques have emerged in the literature however as far as the forecasting accuracy is concerned the study shows that there is no single model that consistently outperforms other models in all situations furthermore this study identifies some new research directions which include improving the forecasting accuracy through forecast combination integrating both qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches tourism cycles and seasonality analysis events impact assessment and risk forecasting

price leadership and welfare losses in u s manufacturing reply a model of price leadership is used to estimate the welfare losses dueto monopoly in u s manufacturing given that the leaders behave independently an hypothesis confirmed empirically the deadweight lossis estimated at 0 114 percent of gnp based on a sample of 445 four digit industries this estimate lends strong support to arnold c harberger s finding of thirty years ago copyright 1986 by american economic association

determinants of the demand for us exports and imports of tourism this study estimates real income and relative price elasticities of demand for us exports and imports of tourism with annual data from 1973 2002 overall there is empirical support for the model of tourism expenditure with one exception the estimated parameters have the correct signs and most are significantly different from zero the us trading partners appear to be more sensitive to the determinants of international tourism than is the us the greater response of the us trading partners to changes in real income may account for the us running surpluses on its tourism balance during 16 of the 29 years of our sample period

the j curve a literature review due to lag structure currency devaluation is said to worsen the trade balance first and improve it later resulting in a pattern that resemble the letter j hence the j curve phenomenon since its introduction by magee in 1973 brooking papers on economic activity 1 pp 303 25 a large number of studies have attempted to test the phenomenon using different techniques and different model specifications the results are at best ambiguous and deserve to be collected together for the future generation of researchers and graduate students this paper fills such a vacuum in the literature by reviewing the j curve related empirical papers

is there a j curve abstract if the response of the value of the trade balance to movements in the real exchange rate is described by a j curve then a real depreciation initially worsens a balance of trade deficit only improving it over time this paper investigates whether a j curve can be detected in the last twenty five years of american data no statistically reliable evidence of a stable j curve is detected the model is checked extensively to support this finding

risk and the value of bt corn a conceptual model is developed to evaluate the effect of bt corn on risk results highlight the importance of distinguishing between marginal and aggregate risk effects and demonstrate that the effect of bt corn on risk depends crucially on the price paid for the technology empirical results show that depending on the price bt corn can be marginally risk increasing or decreasing and can either increase or decrease corn acreage also depending on the price bt corn can provide a risk benefit to farmers even when bt corn is risk increasing bt corn is genetically engineered to produce a protein found in the soil bacterium bacillus thuringiensis bt the protein is toxic to lepidopterous insects such as the european

on the marginal welfare cost of taxation this paper develops a rigorous partial equilibrium analysis of the determinants of margin al welfare cost mwc of taxes on labor earnings it shows that four key parameters interact to determine the magnitude of mwc using aggregate data and plausible ranges of values for the parameters mwc can vary from under 10 percent to more than 300 percent of marginal tax revenue intermediate parameter values sugge st mwc is in the 25 50 percent range however the more extreme estimates cannot be ruled out on the basis of available evidence suggesting that mwc cannot yet be copyright 1987 by american economic association

agricultural land use and asset accumulation in migrant households the case of el salvador abstract this paper examines the effect that international migration and remittances have on agricultural outcomes at the household level in el salvador panel data are used to examine land use allocations agricultural asset accumulation and agricultural input use and returns findings suggest that migration and remittances cause a household to reallocate land away from commercial cash crops toward the production of subsistence food crops there is weak evidence that migration and remittances contribute positively to agricultural asset accumulation in the form of land and livestock holdings further results suggest that migration and remittance do not affect agricultural input use and may decrease the returns to land and labour on farm as migrant households farm their land less intensively than non migrant households

an empirical analysis of the influence of macroeconomic determinants on world tourism demand abstract this paper considers three econometric models to determine the relationship between macroeconomic variables and tourism demand tourism demand is measured by the inbound visitor s population and also by on the ground expenditures the database is an unbalanced panel of 218 countries over the period 1995 2012 there is evidence that an increase in the world s gdp per capita a depreciation of the national currency and a decline of relative domestic prices do help boost tourism demand the world s gdp per capita is more important when explaining arrivals but relative prices become more important when we use expenditures as the proxy for tourism demand we cannot reject the hypothesis of a relative prices unitary elasticity of expenditures additionally we have partitioned our data by income level and by continent results are robust in the first partition but less robust in the second although the main conclusions still hold finally we draw policy implications from our findings

a natural resource theory of u s crop insurance contract choice a large variety of subsidized crop insurance products are available to u s crop growers distinct and perhaps puzzling patterns in the choices of insurance products and coverage levels can be discerned where production conditions are better and yields are less risky then a higher insurance coverage levels are chosen and b revenue insurance is preferred over yield insurance also c the extent of preference for revenue insurance is stronger in more productive areas assuming as many do that growers seek to maximize subsidy transfers point a can be explained by the interaction between yield technology and natural resource endowments points b and c can be explained by location in conjunction with the natural hedge and a contract design bias in how revenue insurance guarantees are computed empirical study of risk management agency data on corn soybean and wheat yields and insurance contract choices lend support to our model inferences

impact of exchange rate uncertainty on trade flows evidence from commodity trade between the united states and the united kingdom previous studies that investigated the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows employed aggregate trade data and standard estimation techniques they provided mixed results in this paper we use disaggregated import and export data for 177 commodities traded between the united states and the united kingdom to investigate whether volatility of the real bilateral dollar pound exchange rate has any detrimental effect on trade flows at the commodity level additionally we employ the bounds testing approach to cointegration and error correction modelling that is suitable for the models used mostly because it does not require pre unit root testing and variables in the model could be stationary non stationary or a combination of the two in most trade flow models estimated we found a negative effect of exchange rate volatility on commodity trade

competition in tourism among the mediterranean countries this paper examines tourism competition among the mediterranean countries with particular emphasis on greece the estimated model includes as explanatory variables an income index a price index of the host country a price index of the competitors spain portugal and italy and exchange rate the results show that the main determinants of greece s tourism demand are both price indexes and exchange rate they also show that spain seems to be greece s main competitor

bilateral j curve between the uk vis a vis her major trading partners currency depreciation is said to worsen the trade balance first before resulting in an improvement yielding a short run pattern labelled the j curve phenomenon while early studies tested the j curve by using aggregate trade data a few recent studies have employed bilateral data mostly between the us and her major trading partners in this paper we extend the literature by considering the experience of the uk we test the phenomenon between the uk and her twenty major trading partners by employing data over 1973q1 2001q3 period in most instances we find no support for the j curve in the short run in the long run only in five cases has the exchange rate had significant impact on the bilateral trade balance

the j curve and nafta evidence from commodity trade between the us and mexico the north american free trade agreement nafta was predicted to have a substantial impact on the us mexico trade especially on specific importing and exporting industries in this article we use annual industry level export and import data from 1962 to 2004 to discern both the short and long run effects of real exchange rate depreciation on the mexico us trade balance as well as the effects of nafta on this trade we find that peso depreciation has a positive long run effect on 24 of 102 mexican industries and a negative short run effect on 19 of 102 industries only a small fraction 7 of 102 industries show any support for the j curve hypothesis nafta has had a significant effect on a significant number of the industries however

determinants of demand for international tourist flows to turkey abstract this article describes the development and findings of a set of models used to identify the most important of the following selected variables influencing international tourist flows to turkey per capita income relative prices relative exchange rate promotional expenditure the turkish government has invested a substantial amount in promoting foreign tourism and special events eg political unrest the demand for travel was measured both by the number of tourists and by the total tourist expenditure data were obtained from secondary sources and analysis was by least squares multiple regression income price and exchange rate were found to be important factors but the impact of promotional expenditure was minimal

budgetary and producer welfare effects of revenue insurance legislation passed in 1996 changed the way the u s federal government acts to reduce risks faced by u s crop products the authors compare the new alternative forms of revenue insurance to the 1990 deficiency payment program and to a no program alternative they estimate the effects of the alternative polices on the acreage allocations of a representative farm on the expected government cost and on producer welfare simulation results indicate that a revenue insurance scheme that guarantees 75 percent of expected revenue to risk averse produced could provide approximately the same level of benefits as the 1990 program at as little as one fourth the cost

is tourism an engine for economic recovery theory and empirical evidence abstract the purpose of this study is to examine the causal relationships between tourism development and economic growth for this purpose the dumitrescu and hurlin 2012 technique was employed to analyze the casual link between tourism development and economic growth in seven european countries the results showed that there is bidirectional causality between growth in tourism receipts and economic growth suggesting that economic growth and tourism development are interdependent and that tourism development stimulates economic growth and vice versa in these countries theoretical and practical implications are discussed within the realms of growth conservation feedback and neutrality hypotheses

the non tax wedge abstract this paper argues that there are a large number of non tax phenomena that have the effect of reducing input prices below marginal value products just as do taxes on income it is shown that the presence of the non tax wedge between the marginal value product of labor and the net wage is highly significant for the analysis of the total and marginal welfare costs of taxes similarly the presence of the tax wedge is significant for the analysis of the welfare effects of the non tax phenomena welfare costs are substantially higher when appropriate account is taken of tax and non tax wedges that both distort supply decisions

the real rate of protection the income and insurance effects of agricultural policy agricultural price policies in developed countries aim at protecting farmers against both low and volatile world market prices however traditional indicators of protection only refer to the income level effect of policy following other research it is argued that public policy can also yield an insurance stabilizing effect in this paper a way to measure these dual effects is proposed the method is illustrated with wheat market data for the usa and the european union strong evidence is found that the insurance effect is an important component of protection albeit a small one relative to the income effect policy support provided higher income and lower insurance effects in the eu than in the usa for both markets policy reforms in the 1990s led to significantly reduced income effects and smaller insurance effects without accounting for the influence of policy on income variability traditional measures of protection will understate the real rate of protection

the balance of trade and exchange rates theory and contemporary evidence from tourism abstract the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of exchange rate depreciations and appreciations on the tourism trade balance specifically we employed linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag ardl cointegration techniques to analyze the extent to which currency depreciations and appreciations affect the united states u s bilateral tourism trade with canada mexico and the united kingdom u k the results showed that the depreciation of the u s dollar subsequently improves the u s trade balance with all three trading partners however while the appreciation of the u s dollar deteriorates the u s bilateral tourism trade balance with canada and the u k it does not ultimately affect the u s bilateral tourism trade with mexico in the long term these results provide evidence contradicting the j curve theory supporting the postulations of the ml condition theoretical and policy implications are discussed within the realms of j curve theory marshall lerner ml condition international trade and tourism

designing optimal crop revenue insurance when the indemnity schedule is contingent on the farmer s price and individual yield an optimal crop revenue insurance contract depends only on the farmer s gross revenue however this design is not efficient if as is the case with available contracts the coverage function is based on imperfect estimators of individual yield and or price the producer s degree of prudence and the extent of basis risks have important influences on the optimal indemnity schedule in this broader context optimal protection is not provided by available u s crop insurance contracts and may include combinations of revenue insurance yield insurance futures and options contracts

on the premium for revenue insurance under joint price and yield risk this note provides two results pertaining to the pricing of agricultural revenue insurance contracts under joint price and yield risk first a weakening of the concordance ordering is used to sign the effect of greater dependence between the multiplicative risks price and yield on the expected indemnity payment second sufficient conditions are found when the premium rate for revenue insurance is smaller greater than the premium for the corresponding single risk price or yield insurance

a paradigm shift to a new strategy for small island economies embracing demand side economics for value enhancement and long term economic stability abstract the article answers three interrelated questions pertaining to small island economies and tourism development under the condition of globalization 1 why is tourism relevant for small island economies 2 why is a supply perspective inappropriate for these economies and 3 why is a demand perspective more appropriate for small island economies in the era of globalization empirical realities indicate that small islands have performed well in specializing as tourist destinations despite their size constraints and resulting disadvantage in economic terms the caribbean region is an appropriate proxy for small island economies however globalization may be taking its toll on sectoral specialization in the caribbean as a development strategy the supply side strategy seems to have lost its effectiveness to reverse this trend the study proposes the implementation of new tourism strategies based on a demand focused approach to sustain value enhancement these strategies have important managerial and policy implications

insuring against losses from transgenic contamination the case of pharmaceutical maize concerns about the risk of food supply contamination have limited the development and commercialization of certain pharmaceutical plants this article develops an insurance pricing model that helps translate these concerns into a cost benefit analysis the model first estimates the physical dispersal of maize pollen subject to a number of weather parameters this distribution is then validated with the limited amount of currently available field trial data the physical distribution is then used to calculate the premium for a fair valued insurance policy that would fund the destruction of possibly contaminated fields the flexible framework can be readily adapted to other crops management practices and regions

a dynamic model of tariffs output and employment under flexible exchange rates abstract a portfolio balance model of the open economy with imperfectly flexible wages and rational expectations is used to analyze the macroeconomic effects of commercial policy previous analyses have led to the counterintuitive and almost inconceivable conclusion that under flexible exchange rates a tariff is contractionary by considering a tariff in a dynamic setting and focusing on the process of adjustment it is shown that there may exist a tradeoff between a tariffs short run and long run effects in certain circumstances a tariff imposed under flexible exchange rates increases output and employment initially while reducing them subsequently

agricultural markets as relative performance evaluation relative performance schemes such as tournaments are commonly used in markets for a variety of livestock and processing commodities while explicit versions of these schemes are rarely used in markets for fresh fruits and vegetables and specialty grains we show how contracts for these latter commodities do in fact provide relative performance incentives albeit indirectly via a payment mechanism that depends on market prices in such contracts compensation is often an increasing function of revenue this implements a relative performance scheme by making each grower s payment an increasing function of his own output but a decreasing function of other s output in an important 1982 article holmstr om models the problem facing a group of agents each of whom produces an observable quantity of some good by taking an unobservable action a rather robust conclusion from this line of inquiry is that when the production of one agent is not independent of the production of another then the compensation awarded to the first agent should depend not only on his own production but also on the output of others in particular if agents production is positively correlated because of some common shock for example then an agent s compensation should be larger when other agents output is smaller a phenomenon which holmstr om terms relative performance evaluation relative performance evaluation ought to be particularly important for agricultural producers and the various intermediaries who purchase their output these producers face considerable common risk from aggregate production shocks and so one would expect that relative performance evaluation could improve efficiency in fact certain types of agricultural intermediaries do use explicit relative performance schemes as predicted by