Agriculture and 'Improvement' in Early Colonial India: A Pre-History of Development

The doctrine of 'improvement' has often been identified with the introduction – and presumed failure – of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal in 1793. Although recognized as central to British agrarian policies in India, its wider impact and significance have been insufficiently explored. Aesthetic taste, moral judgement and botanical enthusiasm combined with more strictly economic criteria to give an authority to the idea of improvement that endured into the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Concern for improvement also reflected dissatisfaction with India's apparent poverty and deficient material environment; it helped stimulate data-collection and ambitious schemes of agrarian transformation. A precursor of later concepts of development, not least in its negative presumptions about India and the search for external agencies of change, improvement yet shows many of the false starts and intrinsic limitations early attempts to transform rural India entailed. This article reassesses the significance of improvement in the first half of the nineteenth century in India, especially as illustrated through contemporary travel literature and through the aims and activities of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India.     

Research Published by Australian Economics and Econometrics Departments: 1988-93*

This paper measures an important component of the research output of economics and econometrics teaching departments, namely, the number of pages published during the period 1988-93, in journals listed by the Journal of Economic Literature. Based on page counts it is found that department rankings are similar over a broad range of journal groupings. It is also found that the median numbers of pages published by each of the groups of senior lecturers, associate professors and professors are quite small, indicating that within these groups research output is highly concentrated among a few active publishers.     

Management Buyouts and Industrial Relations

Acquisition by managers of the control of firms in difficulty is taming the unions. Norman Tebbit should devise means of inducing the large public sector unions to buy the nationalised industries.     

Comparaison empirique des méthodes d'inférence de probabilités subjectives*

Résumé. Les méthodes d'inférence de probabilités subjectives que sont l'amplitude directe et la bissection ont été comparées par l'auteur en ce qui a trait à l'exactitude, telle que déterminée par l'environnement (fréquence relative), des probabilités résultant de l'application de ces méthodes et à l'acceptabilité des méthodes d'inférence. Chaque participant à l'expérience a utilisé les deux méthodes et attribué à chacune d'elles une cote d'acceptabilité. L'auteur a mis à la disposition des sujets un logiciel d'inférence interactive, comprenant l'affichage graphique sous forme d'histogramme des probabilités selon les deux méthodes d'inférence, afin de les aider et d'assurer une comparaison plus raffinée des méthodes. Des étudiants de deuxième cycle diplômés en gestion, bien renseignés tant sur le contexte de la tâche que sur les probabilités subjectives, se sont prêtés à l'expérience. L'inférence directe a donné des probabilités subjectives beaucoup plus exactes que la bissection et s'est révélée beaucoup plus acceptable aux yeux des participants.     

A Model of Money and Credit, with Application to the Credit Card Debt Puzzle

Many individuals simultaneously have significant credit card debt and money in the bank. The credit card debt puzzle is as follows: given high interest rates on credit cards and low rates on bank accounts, why not pay down debt? While some economists go to elaborate lengths to explain this, we argue it is a special case of the rate of return dominance puzzle from monetary economics. We extend standard monetary theory to incorporate consumer debt, which is interesting in its own right since developing models where money and credit coexist is a long-standing challenge. Our model is quite tractable—for example, it readily yields nice existence and characterization results—and helps put into context recent discussions of consumer debt.     

ASYMMETRIC MARKET SHARES,ADVERTISING AND PRICING: EQUILIBRIUM WITH AN INFORMATION GATEKEEPER*

We analyze how asymmetric market shares impact advertising and pricing decisions by firms that have loyal, non‐shopping customers and can advertise to shoppers through a ‘gatekeeper.’ In equilibrium, the firm with the smaller loyal market advertises more aggressively but prices less competitively than the firm with the larger loyal market. Our results differ significantly from earlier literature which assumes that shoppers observe all prices and finds that the firm with the smaller loyal market adopts a more competitive pricing strategy. The predictions of the model are consistent with advertising and pricing behavior observed on price comparison websites such as http://Shopper.com .