women s access to credit does it matter for household efficiency studies that assess the impact of credit constraints on farm households efficiency have largely used the household as the unit of analysis this can be problematic when there are gender based market imperfections and asymmetries in how rights resources and responsibilities are distributed within the household constraints on women matter in addition to the efficiency loss associated with the husbands credit constraints when women are unable to meet their needs for capital their households experienced an additional 11 drop in efficiency this suggests that there are efficiency based arguments for enhancing women s access to capital and that studies based only on the household s head may significantly underestimate the true economic impact of credit constraints copyright 2008 oxford university press

beauty premium and marriage premium in search equilibrium theory and empirical test we propose a theoretical explanation for the so called beauty premium our approach relies entirely on search frictions and the fact that physical appearance plays an important role in attracting a marriage partner we analyze the interaction between frictional labor and marriage markets making use of what we label constrained job search the optimal strategy entails different reservation wages for different men and we establish the existence of a search equilibrium characterized by a beauty premium and or marriage premium predicted profiles of premia allow for potential falsification tests and point to relevant empirical evidence in support of our theory

why does overnight liquidity cost more than intraday liquidity abstract in this paper we argue that the observed difference in the cost of intraday and overnight liquidity is part of an optimal payments system design in our environment overnight liquidity affects output while intraday liquidity affects only the distribution of resources between money holders and non money holders the low cost of intraday liquidity is explained by the friedman rule the optimal cost differential achieves the twin objective of reducing the incentive to overuse money at night and encouraging payment risk sharing during the day

farm household production efficiency evidence from the gambia this article investigates the economic efficiency of farm households with an application to the gambia the efficiency analysis is conducted not at the farm level but at the household level thus capturing the importance of off farm activities output based measures of technical allocative and scale efficiency are generated using nonparametric measurements an econometric analysis of factors affecting the efficiency indexes is then conducted using a tobit model technical efficiency is fairly high indicating that access to technology is not a severe constraint for most farm households the cost of scale inefficiency is modest allocative inefficiency by contrast is found to be important for the majority of farm households on the basis of the tobit results imperfections in markets for financial capital and nonfarm employment contribute to significant allocative inefficiency

allocable fixed inputs as a cause of joint production a cost function approach the multiproduct cost concepts of baumol panzar and willig are used to explore the contention of shumway pope and nash that allocable fixed inputs cause joint production allocable fixed inputs may create an interdependence in the short run cost function when none exists in the long run however this will not necessarily lead to joint production for joint production to occur in the short run either the short run cost function must exhibit economies of scope or stand alone production of one of the commodities must exhibit diseconomies of size the issue of whether allocable fixed inputs cause joint production is an empirical question

normal inputs and joint production with allocatable fixed factors when jointness is caused by allocatable fixed factors in the normal case the marginal cost of any output increases as any other output increases the supply of any output decreases as any other output price increases and an input price increase may cause the supply of some outputs to increase

child labor and schooling responses to anticipated income in south africa abstract forward looking unconstrained households make child labor and schooling decisions considering their permanent income and weighing the relative returns to child time in various potential activities the timing of anticipated changes in income should have no effect on child labor and schooling in a setting where households can borrow against permanent income however this study documents large increases in schooling attendance and declines in total hours worked when black south african families become eligible for fully anticipatable social pension income as an explanation the data are most consistent with liquidity constraints for black elder males forcing rural families into less schooling for boys than they would choose absent the constraint perhaps because of schooling costs

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

pension transfers and farm household technical efficiency evidence from south africa this article analyzes the effect of entitlements from the old age pension program of south africa on household technical efficiency using a sample of farm households in south africa s kwazulu natal province the analysis is at the household level and off farm activities are considered as additional outputs in a nonparametric estimation of technical efficiency this approach captures the jointness between farm and off farm activities the pension s effect is identified by exploiting the age eligibility criteria in the pension program results show a positive effect of the pension and suggest that this large cash transfer can improve households ability to make use of the best available technologies

large cash transfers to the elderly in south africa we examine the social pension in south africa where large cash sums about twice the median per capita income of african households are paid to people qualified by age but irrespective of previous contributions we present the history of the scheme and use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers documenting who receive the pensions their levels of living and those of their families we also look at behavioural effects particularly the effects of the cash receipts on the allocation of income to food schooling transfers and savings in south africa a large social pension about twice the median per capita income of african households is paid in cash to people qualified by age irrespective of previous contributions we present the history of the scheme and explain how such large transfers could come about in an economy in which the recipients were not only politically weak but without any political representation whatsoever we then use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers documenting who receive the pensions their levels of living and those of their families we also look at behavioural effects particularly the effects of the cash receipts on the allocation of income to food schooling transfers and savings the pressing policy issue for south africans is whether it makes sense to target seven billion rand nearly 2 billion of social expenditure through the current pension schemes our analysis contributes to the discussion by documenting the redistributive and behavioural effects of the transfers we find that at least as far as immediate incidence is concerned and without allowance for behavioural effects the social pension is an effective tool of redistribution and that the households it reaches are predominantly poor because so many of the elderly among south africa s african population live with children the social pension is also effective in putting money into house

allocatable fixed inputs and jointness in agricultural production implications for economic modeling allocatable fixed inputs such as land are a potentially important source of jointness in agriculture as with other causes of jointness they necessitate multiple product systems for modeling product supply and input demand in other important ways however their analytical implications are very different from other causes of jointness model specification differs demand functions for the quantities of each input used in the production of individual commodities can be derived if a primal approach is used but such allocation equations cannot in general be identified from a dual specification available allocation data are not even useful in such dual estimations

health human capital height and wages in china abstract we estimate the returns to height using data from 12 chinese cities we present both ordinary least squares ols and two stage least squares tsls estimates in the latter height is instrumented using proxies for health human capital accumulated in childhood and adolescence which influence adult height the tsls estimates are much higher reflecting the fact that the ols estimates are determined by the random genetic factors influencing height while the tsls estimates also take into account returns from investment in health human capital during childhood and adolescence these results imply considerable returns to investment in health human capital

linkages between the farm and nonfarm sectors at the household level in rural ghana a consistent stochastic distance function approach this article explores the effects within households of an expanding rural nonfarm rnf sector in ghana we ask whether the growing rnf sector allows for economies of diversification within farms how it affects household input demands and whether it has measurable effects in overall household production efficiency we explore the intrahousehold linkages between agricultural and rnf activities first assuming perfectly competitive input and output markets and then with market failures in particular missing labor and credit markets we then measure these linkages using a household level input distance function finding high levels of inefficiency in ghanaian farms also there are cost complementarities between the rnf sector and the agricultural sector particularly with food crops in which the poorest tend to specialize the expansion of the rnf sector increases demand for most inputs including agricultural land finally we show that smaller farms tend to be more efficient and that rnf output is helping the farm household to become more efficient but the latter result is not robust

do private transfers displace the benefits of public transfers evidence from south africa abstract this paper investigates whether government transfer programs displace or crowd out private support focusing on a large increase in state old age pensions in south africa using data spanning the period of the expansion we find that each rand of public pension income to the elderly leads to a 0 25 0 30 rand reduction in private transfers from children living away from home however despite the large increase in income there were no significant changes in migration labor supply or household composition we also show that evaluations of the distributional effects of the pension are overstated when crowding out is ignored

panel thoughts on the future of payments and central banking we need to think straight about electronic payments electronic money and emerging payments are sometimes regarded these days as being entirely new types of money some economists model them as new types of barter in a sense that i ll try to be more specific about in a moment actually they are neither of these what they are is netting arrangements from this perspective the fact that emerging payment arrangements use new electronic technologies is really secondary it is not electronic technology but rather the deeper logic of how payments are made that raises very difficult questions about for instance what is the trade off between the economies of net payment and the risk that multilateral netting is thought by many people to create that is there is a risk when you are part of a large payment coalition that someone will fail to whom you are not directly exposed but that the legal arrangements for mutualizing the losses will nevertheless impose a loss on you the fact that new payment arrangements tend to involve creation of debt in the process of payment which also has to do with the logic of how the payments are made rather than with the coincidental fact that an electronic technology is used raises another set of difficult issues we are only now beginning to have adequate theories that address any of these issues by a model being adequate here i mean simply that economists feel comfortable about saying that our recommendations reflect our professional expertise rather than being personal opinion off the top of our heads about what is right or wrong we are only at the beginning of having research that we as economists can really be comfortable in claiming to be mature enough well enough able to confront with facts either in the form of history or econometrics evidence or whatever to be regarded as a highly corroborated model with compelling welfare implications and until such research has been accomplished those of us who are asked for professional advice by policymakers are in an awkward position the main points that i want to make in these remarks concern the urgency of this situation the high value of the type of foundationally oriented research on payments that is being presented in this conference and the fallacy of thinking that faster progress might be made if less scrupulous attention were to be paid to foundations

introduction to monetary and financial arrangements abstract recent years have seen major innovations in the nature of monetary banking and payment arrangements these innovations which are certain to continue into the foreseeable future will have huge implications for the conduct of monetary policy for the regulation of banking and for the design of payment systems indeed central banks now need to think about the conduct of monetary policy in environments where the evolution of banking and payments systems already has implied and will continue to imply a declining demand for their liabilities central banks also need to think about the conduct of monetary policy in increasingly global markets and in a context where the number of currencies is shrinking as different nations abandon their own monies in favor of the dollar or the euro and at least in the united states all legal impediments to the issue of currency substitutes by private agents have been repealed this has occurred at the same time that developments in communications and record keeping technologies have made it feasible for agents to issue various forms of electronic currency substitutes what would the widespread issue of private possibly electronic currency substitutes imply for price level and interest rate determination or for the conduct of monetary policy in general in addition the increasing frequency and severity of financial crises around the globe and the increasing exposure of economies like the u s to external events raise issues about the appropriate roles for national central banks and the appropriate roles for international agencies like the imf and recent changes in u s banking legislation will force a rethinking of how the supervision and regulation of the banking system should be conducted and of how far the safety net created by deposit insurance provision and lender of last resort services should be extended these issues will become particularly vexing as the scope of activities conducted by banks increases and as the notion of a bank becomes more amorphous the papers in this issue are intended to provide frameworks for advancing research on these and other topics journal of economic literature classification numbers e0 e5 g0

making sense of the labor market height premium evidence from the british household panel survey we use data from the british household panel survey to examine the labor market premium in height most of the premium is explained by higher average educational attainment and sorting into higher status occupations and industries by those who are taller

a note on the height wage differential in the uk cross sectional evidence from the bhps abstract using bhps data for the first time evidence for the height earnings relationship is updated for the uk in contrast to prior findings baseline height differentials mainly vanish once individuals occupation and non linear height gradients are accounted for

physiology and development why the west is taller than the rest we hypothesise that the timing of the fertility transition is an important determinant of comparative physiological development in support we provide a model of long run growth that elucidates the links between population size average body size and income during development industrialisation is shown to be accompanied by a reduction in family size and an intensification of nutrition per child early transition countries are therefore expected to be more developed today economically and physiologically empirically the timing of the fertility transition is strongly correlated with average body size across countries

doing without money a critical assessment of woodford s analysis woodford employs an inter temporal general equilibrium model to examine the properties of the monetary system as it evolves from the use of a physical medium of exchange to an electronic medium he presents a structure in which cash as a means of payment can be made to vanish at the limit but where he claims the price level remains determinate it is shown that woodford s analysis involves fundamental but still widespread conceptual and methodological errors his general equilibrium model does not map into the world of electronic money and his analysis has no implications for the art of central banking copyright 2006 oxford university press

mental retirement and schooling we assess the validity of differences in eligibility ages for early and old age pension benefits as instruments for estimating the effect of retirement on cognitive functioning because differences in eligibility ages across country and gender are correlated with differences in years of schooling which affect cognitive functioning at old ages they are invalid as instruments without controlling for schooling we show by means of simulation and a replication study that unless the model incorporates schooling the estimated effect of retirement is negatively biased this explains a large part of the mental retirement effects which have recently been found

poverty livelihood and class in rural south africa abstract using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993 this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural south africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in south africa about poverty and its alleviation pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment this paper analyzes what might be termed the class structure of poverty after exploring the range of claiming systems and livelihood tactics available in rural south africa the paper offers a first look at who the poor are by disaggregating the rural population into discrete livelihood strategy classes non parametric regression methods are used to then estimate and graphically explore the nature of the livelihood mapping between endowments and real incomes in addition to identifying those endowment combinations that map to consumption levels below the poverty line the asset basis of poverty the topography of the estimated livelihood mapping helps identify the constraints that limit household s ability to effectively utilize their assets and endowments these results suggest that poverty is a matter of not only having few assets but also of constraints which limit the effectiveness with which those assets are used and poverty and livelihood policy needs to be designed accordingly

estimation of limited dependent variable models with dummy endogenous regressors applied economists have long struggled with the question of how to accommodate binary endogenous regressors in models with binary and nonnegative outcomes i argue here that much of the difculty with limited dependent variables comes from a focus on structural parameters such as index coefcients instead of causal effects once the object of estimation is taken to be the causal effect of treatment several simple strategies are available these include conventional two stage least squares multiplicative models for conditional means linear approximation of nonlinear causal models models for distribution effects and quantile regression with an endogenous binary regressor the estimation strategies discussed in the article are illustrated by using multiple births to estimate the effect of childbearing on employment status and hours of work

public policy and extended families evidence from pensions in south africa how are resources allocated within extended families in developing economies this question is investigated using a unique social experiment the south african pension program under that program the elderly receive a cash transfer equal to roughly twice the per capita income of africans in south africa the study examines how this transfer affects the labor supply of prime age individuals living with these elderly in extended families it finds a sharp drop in the working hours of prime age individuals in these households when women turn 60 years old or men turn 65 the ages at which they become eligible for pensions it also finds that the drop in labor supply is much larger when the pensioner is a woman suggesting an imperfect pooling of resources the allocation of resources among prime age individuals depends strongly on their absolute age and gender as well as on their relative age the oldest son in the household reduces his working hours more than any other prime age household member

market imperfections liquidity and farm household labor allocation the case of rural south africa asset endowments and market imperfections shape households labor allocation decisions and lead to different production regimes within rural farm households in south africa this article uses a farm household model to explain the presence of three main household groups determined on the basis of the labor regime adopted small peasants working both on and off farm self cultivators autarkic in labor and hiring in households a partial generalized ordered logit is used to test the main predictions of the model and a brant test on threshold constancy is performed to identify the household specific factors affecting labor market participation the results show that liquidity constraints and market imperfections matter in the choice of the labor strategy adopted liquidity constrained households are more likely to sell labor off farm while access to information facilitates the hiring in of workers

statistical discrimination productivity and the height of immigrants building on the economic research that demonstrates a positive relationship between height and worker ability the author compares wage returns to height for immigrants and for natives to explore possible explanations for the positive wage height gradient using multiple data sets the article presents a robust empirical finding that the wage gains associated with height are almost twice as large for immigrants as for native born individuals this wage relationship occurs because the productivity gap between tall and short immigrants is greater than the productivity gap between tall and short native born workers the author next tests for the possibility that in the relative absence of other sources of information about immigrants employers place more importance on height for immigrants than for native born individuals the evidence does not support the hypothesis of statistical discrimination based on height

the payments system liquidity and rediscounting in an economy where fiat money serves both as a medium of exchange and the means by which debts are cleared it is shown that nonoptimal equilibria of constrained liquidity may arise optimality may be restored by temporary expansions of the monetary base e g an active central bank discount window copyright 1996 by american economic association

sorting by height education and economic outcomes of women in less developed countries abstracttaller height is commonly found to correlate with educational and economic outcomes most studies focus on a relationship to earnings and consider samples from individual countries this p

stature obesity and portfolio choice using multiple u s and european data sources we show that observed physical attributes are related to participation in financial markets specifically we find that individuals who are relatively tall and of normal weight are more likely to hold stocks in their financial portfolios we consider several potential mechanisms that could drive the relation between physical attributes and portfolio decisions we find that teenage social experiences as well as genetic and prenatal endowments that are fixed at birth are the two channels through which height affects financial decisions furthermore we find that the relation between body mass index and portfolio decisions is largely driven by education and race data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2016 2508 this paper was accepted by wei jiang finance