Capturing the risk premium of commodity futures: The role of hedging pressure

We construct long–short factor mimicking portfolios that capture the hedging pressure risk premium of commodity futures. We consider single sorts based on the open interests of hedgers or speculators, as well as double sorts based on both positions. The long–short hedging pressure portfolios are priced cross-sectionally and present Sharpe ratios that systematically exceed those of long-only benchmarks. Further tests show that the hedging pressure risk premiums rise with the volatility of commodity futures markets and that the predictive power of hedging pressure over cross-sectional commodity futures returns is different from the previously documented forecasting power of past returns and the slope of the term structure.     

When does growth trickle down to the poor? The Indian case

A theoretical analysis and several econometric tests have beenundertaken to examine whether the trickle down effect took placein rural India over a long time period. We found little evidenceto suggest that the trickle down effect had occurred at all;our analysis suggests that the emergence of capital-labour substitutionwas primarily responsible for preventing growth from reducingpoverty. The decline in poverty and a higher growth rate thattook place during the late 1970s and 1980s were largely a resultof government anti-poverty measures teamed with the more equitabledistribution of credit and inputs to smaller and marginal farmers.     

On Measuring Literacy

This paper presents a new approach to evaluating the aggregate literacy level in a country or region. The resulting 'effective literacy' measure takes into account the intrahousehold externality arising from the presence of a literate member. A simple and natural axiomatic characterisation is provided along with an empirical illustration using Indian data.     

The Intriguing Relation Between Adult Minimum Wage and Child Labour

Because most parents send their children to work when compelled by poverty, one would expect a rise in adult wage to lower child labour. However, if the rise in wage is achieved by a minimum wage law, its impact can be intriguing. It can, for instance, cause some adults to be unemployed and send their children to work, which in turn displaces more adult labour and sends more children to work. The paper solves this process and predicts the incidence of child labour. It shows that, for appropriate parametric configurations, child labour may fall or rise as the adult minimum wage is raised.     

Employment and wage behaviour of industrial enterprises in transition economies: The cases of Poland and Czechoslovakia1

In this paper we use two very large panel datasets from Poland, 1988-90 and Czechoslovakia, 1990-1992 to explore the dynamics of employment and wage determination at the enterprise level in the early years of transition. The study is intended to assist in building a coherent picture of microeconomic adjustment in transition, a field which was not sufficiently explored in the early years of reform. We find that Polish firms were already to some extent responsive to market conditions pre-reform, notably to demand in determining employment. Czechoslovak firms, however, were largely unresponsive to such pressures in 1989-90. The elasticities rose significantly in both countries in the early years of reform, especially in Czechoslovakia which quickly attained initial Polish patterns of adjustment. Firms became much more responsive to sales and cost pressures in adjusting employment and to their own productivity in setting pay. Ownership effects in these early years were, however, much more modest, with state-owned firms adjusting employment more than their private counterparts, perhaps because over-manning was more serious in that sector.     

The Babu and the Boxwallah: Managerial Incentives and Government Intervention in a Developing Economy

In developing economies a firm's strategy is directed more often at the government than at other competing firms. As an initial step towards modeling such interactions this paper considers a situation where a government confronts a monopoly. The latter chooses price and maximizes profit and the former chooses a tax rate and maximizes tax revenue. The government and the monopoly can delegate the final decision-making to, respectively, a bureaucrat and a manager. The incentive equilibrium of the model is characterized. It is shown that this kind of industrial setting is likely to exhibit greater inefficiencies than that which arises in standard models.