terror as a bargaining instrument a case study of dowry violence in rural india this ethnographic study examined the sociocultural context of domestic violence and dowry in india and describes a theoretical model and econometric methodology the model was tested with survey data collected from a sub caste of 149 potter families from 3 villages in karnataka state in south india interviews were conducted among 139 adult married women and 130 married men the case studies demonstrate that violence can be used as a way to redistribute resources bargaining over dowry amounts occurs twice once before the marriage and renegotiations after the wife had moved to the husbands family domestic violence may be a weapon in order to obtain higher transfers at the renegotiation stage the model assumes that the level of dowry and the occurrence of violence are determined simultaneously hypotheses tested whether increases in husbands family wealth in the dowry paid and husbands cost of violent behavior reduces the incidence of violence tests determined whether increases in wifes familys wealth and increases in wifes human capital husbands human capital or wifes cost of violence increase violence 23 reported wife beating at some time a 10000 rupee increase in the wifes parents income increased the risk of violence by 4 a 10000 rupee increase in the husbands parents income reduced the risk of violence by 10 a 10000 rupee increase in dowry reduced the risk by 5 an additional male child reduced the risk by 11 female sterilization increased the risk by 16 findings suggest that husbands beat wives when the wifes family is rich and when dowries are small

divorce abortion and the child sex ratio the impact of divorce reform in china abstract this paper estimates the effect of china s pro women divorce reform on sex selection behavior within marriages the 2001 reform liberalized divorce in favor of women and secured women s property rights after separation the paper applies a regression discontinuity analysis on the child sex ratio and finds that the likelihood of having a son after a firstborn daughter decreased by 8 1 percentage points amounting to a reduction of 11 7 compared with the prior proportion of male children further analyses provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that improved divorce options empower women within marriage and enable them to avoid health damaging sex selective abortion the effect of the divorce reform is stronger in provinces where divorce is comparatively viable because of more lenient family planning policies governing fertility in the next marriage the effect is also stronger among women who face higher health costs of abortion

accounting for the value of ecosystem services abstract a value of ecosystem services ves may be calculated by multiplying a set of ecosystem services by a set of corresponding shadow prices this paper examines the role of the ves concept in measuring trends in human well being under conventional arguments from applied welfare economics standard measures of market consumption may be extended to include the value of direct environmental services which affect welfare in ways that are not mediated by the consumption of purchased goods the ves concept does not capture values such as ecological sustainability and distributional fairness that are not reducible to individual welfare and its operationalization is constrained by the well known limitations of nonmarket valuation methods nonetheless attempts to calculate the value of environmental services can provide insights into the tradeoffs between market activity and environmental quality that are implicit in the process of economic growth such efforts can promote informed debate concerning the achievement of sustainable development

exploring futures for amazonia s sierra del divisor an environmental valuation triadics approach to analyzing ecological economic decision choices in the context of major shifts in boundary conditions abstract this text presents a new methodological approach to ecological economic analysis employing georgescu roegen s flow fund theory of economic process it offers an alternative to monetary valuation based analyses and aims to contribute toward advancing work concerned with addressing complex ecological economic questions as complete wholes the methodology is demonstrated through reference to the empirical case of a proposed rail link between peru and brazil which would cut across the sierra del divisor of western amazonia connecting the pacific and atlantic coasts and further opening up the amazon commodity frontier in order to analyze the potential impacts of the rail link four flow fund representations of economic process two at the regional and two at the local level are developed in order to juxtapose two alternative political economy contexts that might govern the rail link s impacts in the region one where conservation is prioritized over cash income and one where it is not our results suggest that completion of the rail link under the current political economy context which prioritizes cash income over conservation is likely to have substantial negative consequences for forest conservation in both peru and brazil and for local livelihoods throughout the region

the gender wage gap and domestic violence three quarters of all violence against women is perpetrated by domestic partners this study exploits exogenous changes in the demand for labor in female dominated industries to estimate the impact of the male female wage gap on domestic violence decreases in the wage gap reduce violence against women consistent with a household bargaining model these findings shed new light on the health production process as well as observed income gradients in health and suggest that in addition to addressing concerns of equity and efficiency pay parity can also improve the health of american women via reductions in violence

substitution effects in the valuation of multiple environmental programs abstract a theoretical framework for understanding substitution and complementary effects between environmental programs is derived a multiple program valuation function is specified and its structure analyzed a maximum likelihood estimator is derived to estimate the parameters of the valuation function using referendum type contingent valuation data the empirical analysis shows that the conventional benefit aggregation approach of independent valuation and summation overstates the benefits of two and three program policies by an average of 24 and 54 respectively

influence of soil conservation on farm land values worldwide concern for the loss of agricultural soil has led many governments to establish programs to slow the loss of soil from farms mcconnell 1983 has shown however that in the absence of externalities farmer decisions on investment to reduce onfarm soil loss can be socially optimal and concludes p 188 as follows increasing soil loss does not imply that farmers ignore physical production relations if farmers know that the soil base affects farm resale value they will conserve it it suggests that the impact of soil depth on the value of farms be investigated earlier rausser 1980 reached a similar conclusion suggesting that land values which fail to reflect soil quality encourage the farmer to ignore his long run impact on the resource two recent studies failed to find clear cut relationships between soil erosion and farm land prices ervin and mill 1985 942 in a cross section study of farm land prices in page county iowa concluded the group of variables measuring past and future erosion damages and conservation structures did not exhibit large and reliable effects gardner and barrows 1985 studied the capitalization of the value of soil conservation practices into farm land prices in southwestern wisconsin and concluded p 946 the most reasonable conclusion is the most obvious conservation

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

the rise in the disability rolls and the decline in unemployment between 1984 and 2001 the share of nonelderly adults receiving social security disability insurance income di rose by 60 percent to 5 3 million beneficiaries rapid program growth despite improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency declining demand for less skilled workers and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate we estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit propensity of displaced high school dropouts after 1984 lowering measured u s unemployment by one half a percentage point steady state calculations augur a further 40 percent increase in the rate of di receipt

threshold effects and incentives for the conservation of biodiversity biological diversity is a central component of the stock of natural capital on which all economic development is based other things being equal loss of biologically diversity implies loss of development potential and its conservation through sustainable use or outright protection implies the protection of that potential one characteristics of biodiversity loss of especial importance is that biodiversity loss more than any other current environmental problem is associated with ecological threshold effects the paper explores the implication of this characteristics for the properties of a biodiversity conservation strategy

economic valuation of biodiversity sense or nonsense this paper critically evaluates the notion and application of economic monetary valuation of biological diversity or biodiversity for this purpose four levels of diversity are considered genes species ecosystems and functions different perspectives on biodiversity value can be characterized through a number of factors instrumental vs intrinsic values local vs global diversity life diversity vs biological resources etc a classification of biodiversity values is offered based on a system of logical relationships among biodiversity ecosystems species and human welfare suggestions are made about which economic valuation methods can address which type of biodiversity value the resulting framework is the starting point for a survey and evaluation of empirical studies at each of the four levels of diversity the contingent valuation method is by far the most used method an important reason is that the other valuation methods are unable to identify and measure passive or nonuse values of biodiversity at first sight the resulting monetary value estimates seem to give unequivocal support to the belief that biodiversity has a significant positive social value nevertheless most studies lack a uniform clear perspective on biodiversity as a distinct concept from biological resources in fact the empirical literature fails to apply economic valuation to the entire range of biodiversity benefits therefore available economic valuation estimates should generally be regarded as providing a very incomplete perspective on and at best lower bounds to the unknown value of biodiversity changes 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

the economic benefits of surface water quality improvements in developing countries a case study of davao philippines two nonmarket valuation techniques the contingent valuation method and travel cost model are used to estimate the economic value that people in davao philippines place on improving the water quality of the rivers and sea near their community the contingent valuation and travel cost estimates are very close to each other and are quite low both in absolute terms and as a percentage of household income these findings suggest that water pollution control is simply not a high priority for davao s residents and support the argument that households willingness to pay for environmental amenities such as improved water quality is low

economic valuation of the leuser national park on sumatra indonesia abstract the leuser ecosystem in northern sumatra is officially protected by its status as an indonesian national park nevertheless it remains under severe threat of deforestation rainforest destruction has already caused a decline in ecological functions and services besides it is affecting numerous economic activities in and around the leuser national park the objectives of this study are twofold firstly to determine the total economic value tev of the leuser ecosystem through a systems dynamic model and secondly to evaluate the economic consequences of deforestation versus conservation disaggregating the economic value for the main stakeholders and regions involved using a dynamic simulation model economic valuation is applied to evaluate the tev of the leuser national park over the period 2000 2030 three scenarios are considered conservation deforestation and selective use the results are presented in terms of 1 the type of benefits 2 the allocation of these benefits among stakeholders and 3 the regional distribution of benefits the economic benefits considered include water supply fisheries flood and drought prevention agriculture and plantations hydro electricity tourism biodiversity carbon sequestration fire prevention non timber forest products and timber the stakeholders include local community members the local government the logging and plantation industry the national government and the international community the regions considered cover the 11 districts involved in the management of the leuser ecosystem with a 4 discount rate the accumulated tev for the ecosystem over the 30 year period is us 7 0 billion under the deforestation scenario us 9 5 billion under the conservation scenario and us 9 1 billion under the selective utilisation scenario the main contributors in the conservation and selective use scenarios are water supply flood prevention tourism and agriculture timber revenues play an important role in the deforestation scenario compared to deforestation conservation of the leuser ecosystem benefits all categories of stakeholders except for the elite logging and plantation industry

construct validity of averting cost measures of environmental benefits construct validity is concerned with the consistency of empirical measures with theoretical relationships this paper reviews and extends the theoretical relationship between averting costs and willingness to pay measures of these two theoretical constructs with empirical averting costs savings and contingent valuation from one population are used to establish construct validity of the averting cost technique used empirical results indicate that the contingent valuation and averting costs measures have a low correlation although low correlation is consistent with the construct validity of averting costs measures these results indicate that inferences from averting cost measures are quite limited

valuing biodiversity for use in pharmaceutical research biodiversity prospecting has been touted as a mechanism for both discovering new pharmaceutical products and saving endangered ecosystems it is unclear what values may arise from such activities however evidence from transactions is incomplete and existing theoretical models are flawed we calculate an upper bound on the value of the marginal species even under favorable assumptions this bound is modest slightly modified assumptions lead to drastically lower estimates we extend our findings to the value of the marginal hectare of habitat and find that the incentives for habitat conservation generated by private pharmaceutical research are also at best very modest

trade credit and the propagation of corporate failure an empirical analysis using an exhaustive data set on claims held by trade creditors suppliers on failed trade debtors customers we quantify the importance of trade credit chains for the propagation of corporate bankruptcy we show that trade creditors experience significant trade credit losses due to trade debtor failures and that creditors bankruptcy risks increase in the size of incurred losses by exploring the roles of financial constraints and creditor debtor dependences we infer that the trade credit failure propagation mechanism is driven by both credit losses and demand shrinkage finally we show that the documented propagation mechanism constitutes a significant part of the overall bankruptcy frequency suggesting that it has measurable implications for the aggregate level

ecotourism demand and differential pricing of national park access in costa rica ecotourism presents developing countries with growing opportunities for enhancing resource conservation and economic growth but also raises pressing management and policy challenges this paper presents a conceptual framework and empirical analysis of the impacts of introducing a differential entrance fee policy at three national parks in costa rica data are collected using a contingent behavior methodology designed to elicit information on foreign tourists hypothetical park visitation behaviors at alternative entrance fee levels park visitation demand functions and price and income elasticities are estimated revenue maximizing fees are calculated and applications of differential pricing principles to park management are discussed

the value of biodiversity markets society and ecosystems the value of biodiversity is discussed at different levels including market value non market values to humans and the value of biodi versity to ecosystems the main conclusion is that although market exchange values of environmental services may be used to justify biodiversity protec tion measures it must be stressed that exchange value constitutes a small portion of total biodiver sity value the total value of existing biodiversity is largely unknown but indications are that it is essen tial to human existence the various levels of biodi versity value point to the need for a hierarchical and pluralistic methodology to determine appropri ate policies for its preservation jel q21 i introduction among ecologists there is a general con sensus that biodiversity1 is of critical impor tance to the health of ecosystems and even for the long term survival of the human species there is also a consensus that bio diversity is being lost at a rate which is a cause for concern 2 economists on the other hand generally view biodiversity as just an other good which is to be placed in the basket of market choices just as any other the discussion of the specifics of biodiver sity policy has been unsatisfactory partly because of the different meanings of the word value used by economists and ecolo gists many ecologists fail to understand the logic of market allocation and why biologi cal resources are used in seemingly irra tional ways many economists fail to ap preciate the narrowness of the concept of economic value as indicated by relative prices determined by market exchange fol lowing anderson 1966 and brown 1984 the discussion below considers economic measures of value to be species of the genus assigned value which belongs to the family value many biologists and paleontologists be lieve that we are at a critical point in the history of the human species and perhaps even in the 600 million year history of com plex multicelled life on earth if the paleon tologists and biologists who study the phe nomenon of mass extinction are correct the current human induced mass extinction may be of the same order of magnitude as the five other major extinction episodes which destroyed between 20 and 96 percent of existing species on the planet ehrlich and ehrlich 1992 ward 1994 wilson 1992 we are living in a truly remarkable period in earth s 41 billion year history the valua tion decisions our species has made in the recent past and will make during the next few decades will determine the fate of life on earth for the next tens of millions of years it is critical to clarify the language and concepts we use to estimate the value of biodiversity and thus policies leading to its destruction or preservation the importance attached to the issue of biodiversity preservation necessarily in volves ethical judgments about duty to fu ture generations and responsibility toward the nonhuman natural world although in dividuals hold a variety of conflicting beliefs about human responsibility to the natural world this does not mean that policy choices

traditional vs modern production systems price and nonmarket considerations of cacao producers in northern ecuador many factors besides profit maximization such as nonmarket ecological and social benefits influence smallholder households to adopt a specific agricultural production system or sell in a particular market thus different analytical techniques are needed that take into consideration more than monetary income to fully capture these additional benefits to better understand the production decisions of smallholder farmers we build on previous work on the household model and shadow wage estimation to develop a shadow wage for ecuadorian cacao producers that includes these nonmarket benefits we found that the shadow wage correctly indicated that on average these households would prefer to use an agroforestry production system instead of the more profitable modern system because of the nonmarket benefits received from the former system

valuing ecosystem goods and services a new approach using a surrogate market and the combination of a multiple criteria analysis and a delphi panel to assign weights to the attributes a new approach to valuing ecosystem goods and services egs is described which incorporates components of the economic theory of value the theory of valuation usnot vert similarappraisal a multi model multiple criteria analysis mca of ecosystem attributes and a delphi panel of experts to assign weights to the attributes the total value of ecosystem goods and services in the various tenure categories in the wet tropics world heritage area wtwha in australia was found to be in the range aud 188 to 211 million year 1 or aud 210 to 236 ha 1 year 1 across tenures as at 30 june 2002 application of the weightings assigned by the delphi panelists and assessment of the ecological integrity of the various tenure categories resulted in values being derived for individual ecosystem services in the world heritage area biodiversity and refugia were the two attributes ranked most highly at aud 18 6 to 20 9 million year 1 and aud 16 6 to 18 2 million year 1 respectively

allocating scarce financial resources across regions for environmental management in queensland australia abstract regional governance agencies such as catchment or watershed management committees are playing a significant role in the management of natural resources these agencies often depend on central governance agencies for their revenue in australia this has created a policy dilemma for federal and state governments how should limited funds be allocated to regional groups this question is being encountered by central governance agencies worldwide based on a study from queensland australia this paper shows how multiple criteria analysis mca was used to inform fiscal equalisation of environmental funds worth a 146 6 million across 14 regions fiscal equalisation aims to equalise the ability of each region to address its natural resource management problems the mca approach allows decision makers to weight criteria and define a needs index which forms the basis for allocating funds

local labor markets and criminal recidivism abstract this paper estimates the impact of local labor market conditions on criminal recidivism using administrative prison records on four million offenders released from 43 states between 2000 and 2013 exploiting the timing of each offender s release from prison i find that being released to a county with higher low skilled wages significantly decreases the risk of recidivism the impact of higher wages on recidivism is larger for both black offenders and first time offenders and in sectors that report being more willing to hire ex offenders these results are robust to individual and county level controls such as policing and corrections activity and do not appear to be driven by changes in the composition of released offenders during good or bad economic times

gender identity and relative income within households band s income we argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband we present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation the wife s labor force participation the wife s income conditional on working marriage satisfaction likelihood of divorce and the division of home production within marriage markets when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man marriage rates decline in couples where the wife s potential income is likely to exceed the husband s the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work in couples where the wife earns more than the husband the wife spends more time on household chores moreover those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce these patterns hold both cross sectionally and within couples over time

systemic risk in financial systems we consider default by firms that are part of a single clearing mechanism the obligations of all firms within the system are determined simultaneously in a fashion consistent with the priority of debt claims and the limited liability of equity we first show via a fixed point argument that there always exists a clearing payment vector that clears the obligations of the members of the clearing system under mild regularity conditions this clearing vector is unique next we develop an algorithm that both clears the financial system in a computationally efficient fashion and provides information on the systemic risk faced by the individual system firms finally we produce qualitative comparative statics for financial systems these comparative statics imply that in contrast to single firm results even unsystematic nondissipative shocks to the system will lower the total value of the system and may lower the value of the equity of some of the individual system firms

valuing option existence and bequest demands for wilderness to assess the relative importance of current costs and future benefits of nuclear waste storage we develop a simple model of bequest value the basic model of nonparternalistic altruism is extended to account for the uncertain nature of the externality

measuring the systemic risk in interfirm transaction networks using a unique and massive dataset that contains information on interfirm transaction relationships this study examines default propagation in trade credit networks and provides direct and systematic evidence of the existence and relevance of such default propagation not only do we implement simulations in order to detect prospective defaulters we also estimate the probabilities of actual firm bankruptcies and compare the predicted defaults and actual defaults we find first that an economically sizable number of firms are predicted to fail when their customers default on their trade debt second these prospective defaulters are indeed more likely to go bankrupt than other firms third firms that have abundant external sources of financing or whose transaction partners have such abundant sources are less likely to go bankrupt even when they are predicted to default this provides evidence for the existence and relevance of firms called deep pockets by kiyotaki and moore 1997 that can act as shock absorbers

labor market opportunities and women s decision making power within households abstract despite the perceived importance of labor market opportunities in shaping married women s outside option and their bargaining power within households as a result this link has received very little empirical attention using longitudinal data on who makes the decision on a wide range of issues within mexican households and data from the administrative records of the mexican social security institute this paper identifies the effects of relative changes in labor market opportunities for men and women on both working and non working women s decision making power i find that increases in labor market opportunities improve women s decision making power as well as children s health using differential labor demand shocks across mexican industries caused by china s admission to the wto gives similar results

a test of the equality of closed ended and open ended contingent valuations a test is developed to find whether open ended and closed ended contingent valuation mechanisms lead to significantly different results the test is based on joint estimation of willingness to pay responses to open and closed ended questions asked of the same sample of individuals in a public good example individuals do respond differently depending on question format possible explanations include different incentives for strategic behavior and respondents lack of familiarity with the open ended question type no differences in willingness to pay were found in a private good example

exposure to intimate partner violence and repayment of microcredit evidence from field experiments in bangladesh abstract this paper investigates the impact of intimate partner violence on poor women s repayment behavior in microcredit in a laboratory based field experiment we extended collateral free small loans to 485 currently married women in rural bangladesh and observed their repayment decisions over multiple loan cycles in a post experiment survey we asked subjects about their experience of spousal violence we find that women who experienced physical or sexual violence in the last 12 months are more likely to strategically default on their loans relative to those who did not experience such violence we conducted several robustness tests and the results suggest that the negative correlation between victimization and loan repayment rates is unlikely to be explained by selection into victimization non random underreporting of violence or the subjects attitude toward risk

love hate and murder commitment devices in violent relationships many violent relationships are characterized by a high degree of cyclicality women who are the victims of domestic violence often leave and return multiple times to explain this we develop a model of time inconsistent preferences in the context of domestic violence this time inconsistency generates a demand for commitment we present supporting evidence that women in violent relationships display time inconsistent preferences by examining their demand for commitment devices we find that no drop policies which compel the prosecutor to continue with prosecution even if the victim expresses a desire to drop the charges result in an increase in reporting no drop policies also result in a decrease in the number of men murdered by intimates suggesting that some women in violent relationships move away from an extreme type of commitment device when a less costly one is offered

valuation by conflict abstract nonmarket valuation remains a central issue in ecological and environmental economics this paper examines the properties of an ex post revealed preference approach to value nonmarket goods valuation through observed effort expended in an environmental conflict we consider the strategic interaction between players in a conflict address the implied nash equilibrium and report a benchmark 4x rule as an ex post valuation estimate for a symmetric player conflict we then illustrate the degree of bias that exists once one allows for asymmetries in delegation ability and valuation the benchmark tends to overestimate value if a firm hires a powerful delegate who receives a large contingency fee

sheltering in place and domestic violence evidence from calls for service during covid 19 the covid 19 pandemic has led to an economic slowdown as more people practice social distancing and shelter at home the increase in family isolation unemployment and economic stress has the potential to increase domestic violence we document the pandemic s impact on police calls for service for domestic violence the pandemic increased domestic violence calls by 7 5 during march through may of 2020 with effects concentrated during the first five weeks after social distancing began the increase in reported domestic violence incidents began before official stay at home orders were mandated it is not driven by any particular demographic group but does appear to be driven by households without a previous history of domestic violence

the social contingency of wants abstract economic models typically assume that individual wants are determined by forces exogenous to the economic system social psychology and consumer research in contrast support the view that the perceived benefits of goods and services are strongly affected by endogenously determined social norms we present a selective overview of the literature on the relationship between consumption and well being exploring the ways in which informal arguments from social science might be linked to formal models of economic behavior we find that the fixed preferences hypothesis leads to the systematic undervaluation of environmental services and the underprovisioning of environmental goods

local labor markets and welfare spells do demand conditions matter this paper examines the impact of changes in labor market conditions on participation in the aid to families with dependent children afdc program in california transitions off welfare and transi

employment and the risk of domestic violence does the breadwinner s gender matter abstractthis article studies the effect on the risk of female victimization of the employment status of the woman and her partner we use individual level data from the violence against women surveys for spain which also provide information on income and a rich set of sociodemographic characteristics to address the potential endogeneity of the binary employment indicators we exploit exogenous geographical information on the employment and unemployment rates by gender and age within a multivariate probit framework our estimation results show that male partner employment plays a major role in the risk of physical violence while female employment only lowers it when her partner is employed too the lowest risk appears for more egalitarian couples in which both partners are employed

use of dichotomous choice nonmarket methods to value the whooping crane resource market prices for endangered wildlife species rarely exist when prices do exist they arc not likely to reflect accurately individual preferences both consumptive uses such as hunting fishing and trapping boyle and bishop 1985 stou and johnson brookshire eubanks and randall and more esoteric benefits such as viewing and existence values must be considered this article is addressed to the valuation of whooping cranes grus americana a prominent endangered species the purpose of this article is to present a methodology for estimating nonconsumptive benefits associated with the existence of an endangered species a dichotomous choice form of contingent valuation is applied to quantify individuals economic surplus associated with preservation of the whooping crane resource specific issues and limitations of the empirical approach are discussed some of which have been previously examined by bishop and heberlein 1979 and hanemann the present paper expands upon earlier work in several ways fit in addition to discussing the above issues a unique application of the approach to an endangered species is presented second three model specifications are examined two of which arc consistent with utility theory and one which is not hanemann ti again following hanemann economic surplus is estimated at the sample median as well as the mean the dii cussion of the last two issues sheds sit on their implications for estimation of economic surplus throughout the article the suitability of alternative estimation techniques for dichom mous choice or referendum style data is examined the methodological and empirical results are relevant to a number of cumnt issues regarding model specification choice of binary response model and choice of estimator for equivalent surplus hanemann boyle and bishop 1984 sellar chavas and stoll

monetary valuation in life cycle assessment a review abstract monetary valuation is the practice of converting measures of social and biophysical impacts into monetary units and is used to determine the economic value of non market goods i e goods for which no market exists it is applied in cost benefit analysis to enable the cross comparison between different impacts and or with other economic costs and benefits for this reason monetary valuation has a great potential to be applied also in life cycle assessment lca especially in the weighting phase however several challenges limit its diffusion in the field which resulted in only a few applications so far the authors have performed a review of different monetary valuation methods for use in lca firstly monetary valuation approaches methods and lca applications were identified secondly key features and the strengths and weaknesses of each monetary valuation method were determined finally monetary valuation methods and lca applications were evaluated according to a comprehensive set of criteria ranging from scientific foundation to uncertainty and complexity it was found that observed and revealed preference methods and the abatement cost method have limited applicability in lca whereas the choice experiment method and the budget constraint method are the best options for monetary valuation in lca

the effect of marital endowments on domestic violence in india abstract numerous studies have documented a relationship between income and wealth of a woman and domestic violence one such factor that could potentially impact domestic violence is the gold endowment a woman receives at the time of marriage india presents a unique setting in which to test this relationship as despite being unlawful both dowry practices and domestic violence continue to prevail as actual marital endowments may endogenously affect spousal match quality i use the deviation of the price of gold at the time of marriage from its long term trend as a source of exogenous variation to proxy for initial marital endowment and examine its effect on domestic violence results show a positive and significant effect of an unusually high price of gold at the time of marriage on domestic violence

labour intensive jobs for women and development intra household welfare effects and its transmission channels we examine the welfare impacts of poor women getting low skilled jobs and find large positive income consumption and poverty effects at household and individual levels however the women workers their husbands and oldest daughters reduced their leisure but the women to a much larger extent investigating the transmission mechanisms suggests that the impacts did not only go through income effects but also through a bargaining effect getting the job improved the bargaining power of the wife through several mechanisms which in turn added substantially to the positive impact on household consumption

valuing environmental functions tropical wetlands recent studies have suggested that tropical wetland systems may have a crucial economic role to play in development the following paper provides an overview of these benefits using the general framework of cost benefit analysis as the methodological approach to assessing wetland values an analysis of trade offs between conserving or converting tropical wetlands demonstrates that taking into account the opportunity cost of wetland loss leads to a lower level of conversion than would otherwise be the case finally the paper discusses the extensions and limitations of the production function approach as applied to valuing nonmarketed wetland benefits

leaving the mainstream behind uncovering subjective understandings of economics instructors roles in the wake of the economic crisis a number of student organizations and researchers highlighted the lack of pluralism and heterodox approaches in economics curricula the relevance of pluralism becomes clear once set within the implications of a given scientific discourse on reality e g economics and policy making this study explores the role of instructors in co constructing the pluralism discourse and debates while recognizing the role of institutional obstacles to change within the discipline an empirical field study is conducted with lecturers in introductory economics courses at the wu vienna university of economics and business where they place themselves within the pluralism discourse via a q study a mixed method employed for studying subjectivity in socially contested topics in q a set of statements undergo a sorting procedure on a relative ranking scale followed by factor rendering four voices are identified moderate pluralist mainstreamers responsible pluralists and applied pluralists the implications of their ideas are discussed from the viewpoint of discursive institutionalism stressing the role of ideas and discourse in institutional change although a discursive readiness for changes towards more pluralism is claimed strategies for overcoming the difficulties on the institutional level need to be developed

using the delphi method to value protection of the amazon rainforest abstract valuing global environmental public goods can serve to mobilize international resources for their protection while stated preference valuation methods have been applied extensively to public goods valuation in individual countries applications to global public goods with surveys in multiple countries are scarce due to complex and costly implementation benefit transfer is effectively infeasible when there are few existing studies valuing similar goods the delphi method which relies on expert opinion offers a third alternative we explore this method for estimating the value of protecting the amazon rainforest by asking more than 200 environmental valuation experts from 37 countries on four continents to predict the outcome of a contingent valuation survey to elicit willingness to pay wtp for amazon forest protection by their own countries populations the average annual per household values of avoiding a 30 forest loss in the amazon by 2050 assessed by experts vary from a few dollars in low income asian countries to a high near 100 in canada germany and norway the elasticity with respect to average ppp adjusted per household incomes is close to unity results from the delphi study match remarkably well those from a recent population stated preference survey in canada and the united states using a similar valuation scenario

the timing of welfare payments and intimate partner violence i examine transfer schedules for the temporary assistance for needy families tanf program and find a causal relationship between the time directly after welfare payments and intimate partner violence against women this study supports the hypothesis that the husband uses threats of violence as an instrument to gain control over the allocation of household resources and suggests that the increased incidence in physical violence after welfare payments is associated with alcohol use additionally i find that states that pay tanf recipients twice a month do not have this effect on threats of violence this suggests that smaller more frequent payments may reduce the husband s incentive to use verbal violence as a bargaining tool jel i38 j18 j12

caution men not at work gender specific labor market conditions and child maltreatment abstract this paper examines the effect of labor market conditions measured through unemployment mass layoffs and predicted employment on child maltreatment using county level data from california using these indicators we separately estimate the effects of overall and gender specific economic shocks we find only modest evidence of a link between overall economic conditions and child maltreatment however analysis by gender reveals robust evidence that maltreatment decreases with indicators for male employment and increases with indicators for female employment these opposite signed effects are consistent with a theoretical framework that builds on household time use models and is supported by an analysis of time use data though we discuss other mechanisms that may also play important roles

sensitivity of contingent valuation to alternative payment schedules insensitivity to payment schedule wherein respondents do not adequately differentiate between a one time payment and a series of payments may be an important but often overlooked factor in the design interpretation and use of contingent valuation studies several contingent valuation experiments involving a familiar private good and a less familiar environmental commodity indicate that although respondents distinguished between lump sum and periodic payment schedules implicit discount rates were very high suggesting that sensitivity to payment schedule is an important subject for further study

pathways for environmental evaluation a walk in the hanging gardens of babylon the paper gives a methodological overview of the valse project which was a european programme of research into valuation procedures for aiding the formulation and evaluation of sustainability policy a notion of valuation from the point of view of complexity is built up through emphasising the permanent co existence of multiple perspectives and more particularly the permanent possibility of shifts in perspective scientific enquiries and analyses are tested validated or invalidated partly by reference to internal norms of coherence and rigour and partly by reference to external considerations relating to the particular social and ecological context of the enquiry through reference to the four valse case studies it is shown how the application of a chosen method of analysis structures the enquiry while the researcher also learns about the reality through listening to what is said about the situation and about the research method itself from other points of view this demonstrates an approach to the design and implementation of environmental valuation studies that fully reconciles scientific and political dimensions of a social science process 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

women s empowerment and domestic abuse experimental evidence from vietnam abstract intimate partner violence is an important global health problem that policy makers seek to address by a variety of interventions including efforts to promote women s empowerment we use data from a randomized control trial in vietnam and find that this strategy may backfire women who participated in a gender and entrepreneurship training program suffer more frequent abuse than women in the control group we conjecture that increased female income is the mechanism linking the training program to domestic violence we also make a methodological contribution and show that the outcomes of our impact analysis depend on how we measure intimate partner violence

sectoral shocks and aggregate fluctuations abstract this paper presents a multisector dynamic general equilibrium model of business cycles with a distinctive feature aggregate fluctuations are driven by independent sectoral shocks the model hypothesizes that trade among sectors provides a strong synchronization mechanism for these shocks due to the limited but locally intense interaction that is characteristic of such input trade flows limited interaction characterized by a sparse intermediate input use matrix reduces substitution possibilities among intermediate inputs which strengthens comovement in sectoral value added and leads to a postponement of the law of large numbers in the variance of aggregate value added the chief virtue of this model is that reliance on implausible aggregate shocks is not necessary to capture the qualitative features of macroeconomic fluctuations building on horvath 1998 review of economic dynamics 1 781 808 which establishes the theoretical foundation for the relevance of limited interaction in the context of a stylized multisector model this paper specifies a more general multisector model calibrated to the us 2 digit standard industrial code economy simulations prove the model is able to match empirical reality as closely as standard one sector business cycle models without relying on aggregate shocks

unemployment and domestic violence theory and evidence is unemployment the overwhelming determinant of domestic violence that many commentators expect it to be the contribution of this paper is to examine theoretically and empirically how changes in unemployment affect the incidence of domestic abuse the key theoretical prediction is that male and female unemployment have opposite signed effects on domestic abuse an increase in male unemployment decreases the incidence of intimate partner violence while an increase in female unemployment increases domestic abuse combining data on intimate partner violence from the british crime survey with locally disaggregated labor market data from the uk s annual population survey we find strong evidence in support of the theoretical prediction

ecological economic analysis of wetlands scientific integration for management and policy abstract wetlands all over the world have been lost or are threatened in spite of various international agreements and national policies this is caused by 1 the public nature of many wetlands products and services 2 user externalities imposed on other stakeholders and 3 policy intervention failures that are due to a lack of consistency among government policies in different areas economics environment nature protection physical planning etc all three causes are related to information failures which in turn can be linked to the complexity and invisibility of spatial relationships among groundwater surface water and wetland vegetation integrated wetland research combining social and natural sciences can help in part to solve the information failure to achieve the required consistency across various government policies an integrated wetland research framework suggests that a combination of economic valuation integrated modelling stakeholder analysis and multi criteria evaluation can provide complementary insights into sustainable and welfare optimising wetland management and policy subsequently each of the various components of such integrated wetland research is reviewed and related to wetland management policy

more than total economic value how to combine economic valuation of biodiversity with ecological resilience abstract the assessment of total economic value has become a pragmatic and popular approach in nature valuation yet criticisms have been raised one major point of critique is that total economic value bases the monetary value of ecosystems purely on the flow of human benefits of services of ecosystems and consequently ignores questions of sustainable use of natural capital per se this paper explains why total economic value by itself is in principle an inadequate concept to guide sustainable use of ecosystems and gives an overview of essential ecological theory that needs to be taken into account in addition to total economic value to fully include ecosystem sustainability the paper concludes with a framework for combining ecological theory with economic valuation the key elements here are theoretical ecological insights about ecosystem resilience and portfolio theory which offers an economic perspective on investment in biodiversity portfolio theory puts total economic value in a framework where investment in biodiversity is expanded to cover functional diversity and mobile link species in order to maintain ecosystem resilience and so fosters sustainable use of ecosystems

booms busts and fertility testing the becker model using gender specific labor demand in this paper i present estimates of the effect of local labor demand shocks on birth rates to identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand i create indices that exploit cross sectional variation in industry composition changes in gender education composition within industries and growth in national industry employment consistent with economic theory i find that improvements in men s labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in women s labor market conditions have smaller negative effects i separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small decreases in birth rates at the state level

lowering standards to wed spouse quality marriage and labor market responses to the gender wage gap this paper examines the effect of the female to male wage ratio relative wage on women s spouse quality marriage and labor supply over three decades exploiting task based demand shifts as a

complementarities and comovements short run interindustry comovement may be due either to common shocks or to complementarities that progagate shocks across sectors this paper assesses the importance of input output linkages aggregate activity spillovers and local activity spillovers to comovement in postwar u s manufacturing i find that input output linkages and local activity spillovers are important to comovement while aggregate activity spillovers are not important i find that complementarities are important to aggregate volatility even after i remove observable aggregate shocks from the data local spillovers are particularly important explaining between 15 and 36 percent of manufacturing employment volatility the importance of local spillovers stems from the fact that industries that cluster together in space also comove through time contrary to the marshallian idea that industries with negatively correlated fluctuations should cluster together in order to stabilize local demand

reducing public private sector pay differentials the single spine pay policy as a natural experiment in ghana empirical studies have documented the existence of the public private pay differentials in both developed and developing countries the implementation of policies aiming to reduce this gap has however been mitigated or inconclusive this paper exploits the single spine pay policy sspp in ghana as a natural experiment to examine the effectiveness of wage policies in developing countries the sspp was implemented in 2010 by the government of ghana to address the public private sector wage gap and improve productivity in the public sector using a quantile treatment effect approach based on a difference in difference did estimation we show that the sspp has yet to reduce the wage gap between the public and private sectors across the entire distribution of earnings in ghana the improvement observed is only at the lower tail of the distribution of earnings however the sspp has a larger effect on the earnings of female workers than that of males in the education and health services sector suggesting that the policy was successful in reducing the gender wage gap in that sector moreover the sspp has decreased the productivity of workers across the distribution of earnings mainly due to a decrease in the effort of female public sector workers nevertheless the sspp has had some successes and could be improved by putting in place a good managerial quality in the government agencies in addition it is important that the government pays much attention to various macroeconomic factors that have challenged the success of the sspp

mine yours or ours the efficiency of household investment decisions an experimental approach we conduct an experiment to measure the relative importance of key factors that influence the efficiency of household investment decisions we find that both for men and women their spouse s access to information does not affect efficiency however they are willing to sacrifice much efficiency for greater personal control over household income intriguingly even when spouses control over household income is exogenously assigned inefficiency persists as a wife s assigned share increases husbands undercut their own income to reduce hers this self destructive and spiteful behavior is best explained by non economic factors such as identity seldom emphasized in mainstream household economic models

capturing the complexity of biodiversity a critical review of economic valuation studies of biological diversity biodiversity is a highly complex and abstract ecological concept even though it is not one physical entity it influences human well being in multiple ways mostly indirectly while considerable research effort has been spent on the economic valuation of biodiversity it remains to be a particularly challenging valuation object valuation practitioners therefore have to use proxies for biodiversity many of which are very simple single species habitats this paper presents a comprehensive and critical review of biodiversity valuation studies with special emphasis on biodiversity valuation in order to depict the state of the art in this research field it develops evaluation criteria so as to identify best practice applications and shows that the field of biodiversity valuation studies is rather heterogeneous regarding both valuation objects and valuation methods on the basis of our evaluation criteria and best practice studies we suggest that to account for the complexity and abstractness of biodiversity multi attribute approaches with encompassing information provision should be used that emphasise the roles biodiversity plays for human well being

economic valuation of biodiversity a comparative study abstract in recent years an intensive debate on the economic valuation of biodiversity has entered the environmental economics literature the present paper seeks to offer first a critical review of key concepts that are essential for a proper understanding of such evaluation issues particular attention is given here to various monetary valuation approaches and to comparative i e meta analytical methods from the perspective of conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity several illustrative examples are presented in order to highlight the usefulness of the various approaches discussed next an attempt is made to infer general findings and lessons from past applied research by means of meta analysis in this context a multi dimensional technique originating from the field of artificial intelligence is deployed it allows us to identify the most important variables responsible for changes in economic estimates of biodiversity

weak comparability of values as a foundation for ecological economics the main argument of this paper is that weak comparability of values should be seen as one characteristic feature of ecological economics the formal properties of the concepts of strong comparability implying strong or weak commensurability and weak comparability implying incommensurability will be clarified multicriteria evaluation offers the methodological and mathematical tools to operationalize the concept of incommensurability at both macro and micro levels of analysis the concept of incommensurability of values already has a long tradition in economics moreover we will show that analytic philosophy theories of complexity post normal science and the recent theories of rationality lead with different trajectories to a non algorithmic approach which in our view could be implemented by some forms of multicriteria evaluation 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

evidence from mexico on social status and violence against women this study investigates the impact of relative social status on violence against women in mexico using state level panel data relatively higher female social status measured by educational economic and political standings is associated with lower homicide rates for women and lower intimate partner violence rates more importantly different status variables affect violence against women through different channels depending on the victim offender relationship the results are robust to different specifications and different control variables this study may provide helpful guidelines to policy makers attempting to identify more effective means for deterring violence against women

do female officers improve law enforcement quality effects on crime reporting and domestic violence escalation we study the impact of the integration of women in us policing between the late 1970s and early 1990s on violent crime reporting and domestic violence escalation along these two key dimensions we find that female officers improved police quality using crime victimization data we find that as female representation increases among officers in an area violent crimes against women in that area and especially domestic violence are reported to the police at significantly higher rates there are no such effects for violent crimes against men or from increases in the female share among civilian police employees furthermore we find evidence that female officers help prevent the escalation of domestic violence increases in female officer representation are followed by significant declines in intimate partner homicide rates and in rates of repeated domestic abuse these effects are all consistent between fixed effects models with controls for economic and policy variables and models that focus exclusively on increases in female police employment driven by externally imposed affirmative action plans resulting from employment discrimination cases

credit chains and bankruptcy propagation in production networks abstract we present a simple model of a production network in which firms are linked by supplier customer relationships involving extension of trade credit our aim is to identify the minimal set of mechanisms which reproduce qualitatively the main stylized facts of industrial demography such as firms size distribution and at the same time the correlation over time and across firms of output growth and bankruptcies the behavior of aggregate variables can be traced back to the direct firm firm interdependence in this paper we assume that the number of firms is constant and the network has a periodic static structure but the framework allows further extensions to investigate which network structures are more robust against domino effects and if the network is let to evolve in time which structures emerge spontaneously depending on the individual strategies for orders and delivery

an evaluation of monetary and non monetary techniques for assessing the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services to people in countries with developing economies abstract biodiversity supports a range of ecosystems services that are of fundamental importance to people in poor countries economic valuation of biodiversity is important for the development of policies that protect biodiversity and alleviate poverty this paper provides an evaluation of monetary and non monetary techniques for assessing the value of biodiversity to people in least developed countries ldcs specifically research questions include 1 to what extent have monetary and non monetary techniques been used to assess the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services in ldcs 2 what are the key methodological practical epistemological and policy challenges to assessing the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services in ldcs 3 how can valuation methods be improved to allow more accurate valuation in ldcs

the market value of water in the ogallala aquifer the ogallala aquifer also known as the ogallala formation or the high plains aquifer is a 174 000 square mile body of water that underlies parts of colorado kansas nebraska new mexico oklahoma south dakota texas and wyoming the ogallala contains about 3 5 billion acre feet of water symposium ii 1984 but in many areas the aquifer has been declining from continued deep well pumping sloggett and dickason 1986 the aquifer receives little recharge especially in the southern portion and as such represents a finite nonrenewable resource stock as a result of the concerns of residents of the high plains states over declines in the ogallala aquifer congress authorized the secretary of commerce to conduct a six state regional resources study of the ogallala in 1976 high plains associates 1982 the study indicated even under the most effective water conservation program more than a million acres of farmland then

test retest reliability of the contingent valuation method a comparison of general population and visitor responses the reliability of the contingent valuation method is evaluated by resurveying the same general households and visitors nine months after their original survey test retest correlations on willingness to pay are statistically significant and ranged from 422 for the general population sample to 782 for the visitor sample using a paired t test there was no statistical difference between an individual s first and second reported willingness to pay chow tests comparing the original and resurvey willingness to pay functions showed no statistical difference at the 01 level reported willingness to pay is reasonably stable over the time period surveyed

what to value and how ecological indicator choices in stated preference valuation the ecological literature accepts that many policy outcomes cannot be observed directly and must be characterized using indicators multiple indicators can often be used to communicate similar ecological outcomes previous studies using alternative indicators in stated preference surveys suggest that welfare estimates may be indicator dependent casting doubt on whether welfare estimates are sufficiently reliable for cost benefit analysis we suggest that the reason for such indicator dependence may be that indicators used in these prior studies represented different outcomes valued by respondents this possibility underscores the need for greater attention to selection of indicators and their properties within stated preference survey design this paper develops a model introducing the concept of outcome equivalent indicators defined as indicators that provide alternative representations of identical underlying outcomes to assess empirically whether welfare estimates are indeed robust to indicator choice when alternative indicators are expected to be outcome equivalent we analyze data from a choice experiment estimating willingness to pay for migratory fish restoration in rhode island usa results demonstrate that welfare estimates are robust to the use of alternative ecological indicators within stated preference scenarios

network models and financial stability abstract systemic risk is a key concern for central banks charged with safeguarding overall financial stability in this paper we investigate how systemic risk is affected by the structure of the financial system we construct banking systems that are composed of a number of banks that are connected by interbank linkages we then vary the key parameters that define the structure of the financial system including its level of capitalisation the degree to which banks are connected the size of interbank exposures and the degree of concentration of the system and analyse the influence of these parameters on the likelihood of knock on defaults first we find that the better capitalised banks are the more resilient is the banking system against contagious defaults and this effect is non linear second the effect of the degree of connectivity is non monotonic i e initially a small increase in connectivity increases the contagion effect but after a certain threshold value connectivity improves the ability of a banking system to absorb shocks third the size of interbank liabilities tends to increase the risk of knock on default even if banks hold capital against such exposures fourth more concentrated banking systems are shown to be prone to larger systemic risk all else equal in an extension to the main analysis we study how liquidity effects interact with banking structure to produce a greater chance of systemic breakdown we finally consider how the risk of contagion might depend on the degree of asymmetry tiering inherent in the structure of the banking system a number of our results have important implications for public policy which this paper also draws out

domestic violence a nonrandom affair in this paper we develop and estimate a model of domestic violence we extend a noncooperative model of the family to include violence as a source of gratification and an instrument for controlling behavior we estimate the model by robust methods since the violence process appears to have a heavy tailed nonnormal error distribution we find that the properties of the equilibria depend on family income for low middle income families our results indicate an equilibrium in which one person s reservation utility constraint is binding whereas for higher income families both individuals may gain from the relationship

women s access to labor market opportunities control of household resources and domestic violence evidence from bangladesh summary while there are many positive societal implications of increased female labor force participation working may increase a woman s risk of domestic violence using data i collected from bangladesh i document a positive correlation between work and domestic violence but only among women with low education or young age at marriage these results suggest that women with low bargaining power face increased risk of domestic violence upon entering the labor force as their husbands seek to counteract their increased bargaining power consequently policies that increase women s baseline bargaining power will decrease the risk that they face domestic violence upon beginning work

until death do you part the effects of unilateral divorce on spousal homicides this study examines how the widespread adoption of unilateral divorce influenced the prevalence of lethal spousal violence in the united states these evaluations are based on fixed effects specifications for spousal homicide counts from an annual panel of u s states from 1968 to 1978 the results indicate that unrestricted unilateral divorce laws had small and statistically insignificant effects on the amount of lethal spousal violence directed against wives however the easy access to divorce created by such laws increased spousal homicides of husbands by approximately 21 these increases were concentrated in states where the division of marital property favored husbands

bargaining in the shadow of the law divorce laws and family distress this paper exploits the variation occurring from the different timing of divorce law reforms across the united states to evaluate how unilateral divorce changed family violence and whether the option provided by unilateral divorce reduced suicide and spousal homicide unilateral divorce both potentially increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused thereby potentially stopping the abuse in extant relationships in states that introduced unilateral divorce we find a 8 16 percent decline in female suicide roughly a 30 percent decline in domestic violence for both men and women and a 10 percent decline in females murdered by their partners

the effects of aggregate and gender specific labor demand shocks on child health we estimate the relationship between local labor market opportunities and child health using state unemployment rates and demand induced changes in mothers and fathers employment opportunities in contrast with studies of adult health we find little evidence that aggregate economic conditions are correlated contemporaneously with children s health however we find important patterns by gender in particular improvements in women s employment opportunities are consistently associated with worse child health while better labor market conditions for men have positive effects these patterns suggest that both family income and maternal time are important inputs to child health abstract from author

the effect of technical progress on erosion damage and economic incentives for soil conservation tion service scs was established by congress in response to the alarm generated by the high erosion rates observed during the dust bowl days through technical assistance provided by scs and through cost share payments made by the agricultural conservation and stabilization service farmers have been encouraged to adopt conservation practices designed to reduce soil loss from agricultural lands but after more than 40 years of effort soil loss rates remain excessive on 97 million acres usda 1980 6 the long term productive potential of these lands is being impaired by excessive erosion in this paper a damage function which incorporates the long run cost of erosion to a farmer is presented and applied to evaluate conservation tillage in the palouse wheatland of the pacific northwest the role of technology in the conservation adoption decision is explored to see if policy implications for the control of erosion in the region can be drawn from the analysis as erosion proceeds its cumulative effect is evident in reduced crop yield of the numerous factors that affect crop yields many are related to erosion damage soil moisture organic matter content fertility and soil structure are examples the depth of topsoil remaining is used as a proxy in this analysis for various variables related to erosion which impact crop yields although cumulative soil erosion may diminish the future productivity of soil apparently some operators continue to mine soil by using erosive farming practices which offer higher yields currently some practices for reducing soil erosion may impose a double penalty on farmers in the form of lower yields and higher costs currently these detriments to short run profits may discourage farmers from adopting methods of soil conservation however farm operators who ignore the long term effects of erosion may be mortgaging the future in their pursuit of current profits

can alcohol prohibition reduce violence against women violence against women is a critical problem across the world in this paper we exploit state and temporal variation in alcohol control in india to examine the impact of prohibition on alcohol consumption and violent crimes against women we first use detailed household survey data to show that prohibition policies are associated with substantially lower rates of drinking among men and domestic violence next we provide evidence that alcohol prohibition reduces aggregate violence against women in officially reported crime data the results suggest that policies that restrict access to alcohol may help reduce gender violence

economic abuse a theory of intrahousehold sabotage while research on domestic abuse in economics has to date almost exclusively focused on physical violence research in other disciplines has documented that abusive males frequently also use sabotage tactics to interfere with the employability and job performance of the victim this paper puts forward a theoretical framework that rationalizes why men may use labor market sabotage instrumentally to thwart their partners training or career efforts the model predicts a non monotonic relationship between the gender wage gap and intrahousehold sabotage committed by abusive males there are no one size fit all solutions when it comes to reducing the incidence of economic abuse instead specific measures have to be targeted at different types of households

shared agency the dominant spouse s impact on education expenditure summary in this paper we consider whether it is the gender of the decision maker or the extent of agency that they wield that is crucial to increasing household welfare this is an important question as development policy is often formed on the basis that placing resources in the hands of women results in greater household welfare indonesia provides the ideal opportunity to study this issue because it is home to ethnic groups with very different gender norms from male dominance the patrilineal batak to female dominance the matrilineal minangkabau using ifls data for three rounds we consider the impact of decision making by the dominant spouse on household expenditure on education we find that in indonesia when the dominant spouse male or female has sole control of decision making there is an overall negative impact on education expenditure this leads us to argue that it is more important to consider the issue of spousal dominance than to wholly focus on gender

accommodating indigenous cultural heritage values in resource assessment cape york peninsula and the murray darling basin australia in this paper we consider the problem of accommodating indigenous cultural heritage values in resource assessment and valuation we suggest a need for price based approaches to valuation to be replaced by or complemented with quantitative constraints on the decision space reflecting the requirement that rights should not be violated

real business cycles in this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles our explanation is entirely consistent with i rational expectations ii complete current information iii stable preferences iv no technological change v no long lived commodities vi no frictions or adjustment costs vii no government viii no money and ix no serial dependence in the stochastic elements of the environment we also provide a completely worked out example of the type of artificial economy we have in mind the time series properties of the example exhibit some major features of observed business cycles although this type of model may not be capable of explaining all of the regularities in actual business cycles we believe that it provides a useful well defined benchmark for assessing the relative importance of factors e g monetary disturbances