Land Tenure and the Adoption of Conservation Practices

We use a logit adoption model with data on 941 U.S. corn producers from the 1996 Agricultural Resource Management Study to analyze the influence of land tenure on the adoption of conservation practices. We extend previous analyses by distinguishing renters according to lease type and by distinguishing practices according to the timing of costs and returns. We find that cash-renters are less likely than owner-operators to use conservation tillage, but share-renters are not. Both cash-renters and share-renters are less likely than owner-operators to adopt practices that provide benefits only over the longer term (grassed waterways, stripcropping, and contour farming).     

Responses to foreign export subsidies

Export subsidies remain a nettlesome issue in international trade relations and negotiations. Although economists typically point to the welfare losses associated with subsidies, there is a growing professional literature describing possible welfare gains from subsidies. Economists have spent less time determining the appropriate response to foreign subsidies. This study establishes a framework for making such a determination, given various policy objectives to be achieved in a subsidy response.     

Corruption and Technological Progress: A Takeoff Theory of Good Governance

Corruption is known to be a function of its return relative to productive activity. But the idea that corruption might itself respond to technological progress has not been emphasized. This paper presents an approach for thinking about institutional features that lower corruption by lowering its relative return. Policies that promote productivity growth in market exchange may cause the relative reward to rent-seeking to decline. The evolutionary development of anti-corruption efforts may be a normal part of modernization, much as changes in income distribution and urbanization.     

The high-frequency impact of news on long-term yields and forward rates: Is it real?

Macroeconomic news announcements move yields and forward rates on nominal and index-linked bonds and inflation compensation. This paper estimates the reactions using high-frequency data on nominal and index-linked bond yields, allowing the effects of news announcements on real rates and inflation compensation to be parsed far more precisely than is possible using daily data. Long-term nominal yields and forward rates are very sensitive to macroeconomic news announcements. Inflation compensation is sensitive to announcements about price indices and monetary policy. However, for news announcements about real economic activity, such as nonfarm payrolls, the vast majority of the sensitivity is concentrated in real rates. Accordingly, most of the sizeable impact of news about real economic activity on the nominal term structure of interest rates represents changes in expected future real short-term interest rates and/or real risk premia rather than changes in expected future inflation and/or inflation risk premia. Such sensitivity of real rates to macroeconomics news is hard to rationalize within the framework of existing macroeconomic models.     

Uncertainty and pollution: The role of indirect taxation

This paper explores the potential usefulness of indirect taxation as a supplement to effluent charges. It is argued that effluent charges should typically be accompanied by taxes on privately traded commodities linked to the pollutant in consumption or production. The performance of such combinations of taxes and charges is then compared to that of an effluent standard.     

Is advertising rational?

Advertising is not a process by which gullible consumers are persuaded to buy things they don't want, according to the authors of this paper. Instead, it furnishes consumers with some useful information. It is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful, but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money on a product that is informative. The authors find tentative evidence for this view of advertising and discuss its implications.     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

A multi-motivational general model of entrepreneurial intention

We develop and test an overarching model of entrepreneurial intention that includes profit, social impact, and innovation as the three main drivers of entrepreneurial behavior. A holistic model is developed to identify separately the generic intention to be a self-employed entrepreneur from the associated intention to be a specific type of entrepreneur. The latter is revealed by using a conjoint experiment to reveal the individual's relative preferences for profit, social impact, and innovation outcomes. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis we provide insights into individuals' motivations for different types of entrepreneurial careers and for their multiple pathways to the same entrepreneurial type.