Urban Influence on Costs of Production in the Corn Belt

This article determines the relative technical efficiency of rural- and urban-influenced crop/livestock enterprises in the Corn Belt. Farmers in urban-influenced locations are less technically efficient than farmers in rural locations. During 1998–2000, stochastic production frontier procedures indicate that a 10% increase in urban influence leads to a close to 4% decrease in technical efficiency. The most successful urban-influenced farms have controlled costs as effectively as rural farms. They have tended to de-emphasize that nondairy livestock activities—particularly beef and hogs—do not rely extensively on off-farm income, and have relatively large, less residential/lifestyle operations compared to less successful urban-influenced farmers. However, our statistical analysis clearly bears out the refrain in popular literature that urban proximity raises the cost for, and decreases the viability of, traditional farms.     

Modelling cost complementarities in terms of joint production

Cost complementarities arise from synergies in the production of heterogeneous goods. It is shown that synergies can be accounted for in terms of shared public inputs (roughly) if and only if synergies decrease as the scope of production increases. This case of “substitutive” synergies is argued to be typical. The key technical tool is a novel interpretation of conjugate Moebius inversion in terms of higher-order differences.     

Urban Sprawl and Farmland Prices

A theoretical model of farmland valuation is developed to explicitly account for three effects of urban sprawl: conversion of farmland to urban uses, effect on agricultural returns, and speculative effect as represented by farmland conversion risk. This model is estimated using county-level data in the continental United States. Evidence is found for all three effects of urban sprawl on farmland values. Counties more accessible to major urban centers have higher net agricultural returns. Subsidiary evidence supports that the latter effect may be attributed to survival of (or conversion to) high-valued agriculture around urban centers.     

Präferenzen und DDR-Exportstruktur im Innerdeutschen Handel

Summary Preferences and GDR-Export Structure in “Inner-German” Trade. — Trade between the two Germanys (FRG and GDR) is governed by special regulations. GDR’s exports to FRG are free of West-German import duties such as tariffs, Absch?pfungen and import-turnover taxes. The official discussion in the FRG always complains about the “unnormal” structure of GDR’s exports to FRG. Therefore, in this paper the hypothesis is tested whether this structure is (partly) due to the running preference system. Defining the divergence of GDR’s exports to FRG with reference to GDR’s exports to the OECD-region, the results of the multiple regression analysis show that GDR is acting by tendency rational: Her exports were — among other factors — indeed influenced by the West-German preferences. The empirical results of the analysis of changes of GDR’s export divergences suggest however that the adjustment efforts came into effect only in the medium to longer run since 1960. This ponderous flexibility of GDR’s export administration is perhaps also due to the difficulties resulting for her from the EEC-integration process in the 1960s.

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Résumé Les préférences et la structure des exportations de la RDA en commerce ?intra-Allemagne?. — Le commerce entre les deux Allemagnes (RFA et RDA) est soumis aux régulations spéciales. Les exportations de la RDA, vers la RFA sont exonérées des droits d’entrée d’Allemagne de l’Ouest comme des droits de douane, des absorbations et des taxes d’importation sur le chiffre d’affaires. La discussion officielle dans la RFA toujours plaind de la structure ?anomale? des exportations de la RDA vers la RFA. C’est pourquoi nous testons dans cet article la hypothèse si cette structure peut être partiellement expliqué par le système préférentiel courant. En définissant la divergence des exportations de la RDA vers la RFA en relation aux exportations de la RDA vers la région d’OCDE, les résultats de l’analyse de régression multiple démontrent que la RDA agit rationalement à la tendence: Les exportations étaient réellement influées par les préférences de l’Allemagne de l’Ouest — parmi des autres facteurs. Cependant les résultats empiriques de l’analyse des changes des divergences d’exportation de la RDA suggèrent que les efforts d’ajustement devenaient effectifs à moyen de long terme depuis 1960. Cette flexibilité pesante de l’administration d’exportation de la RDA est peut-être aussi due aux difficultés qui pour la RDArésultent du procès d’intégration de laCEE dans les années soixante.

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Resumen Preferencias y la estructura de exportatión de la RDA en el comercio ?intra-alemán?. — El comercio entre las dos Alemanias (RFA y RDA) es gobernado por regulaciones especiales. Las exportaciones de la RDA hacia la RFA están libres de derechos de importatión en Alemania Occidental tales como tarifas, ?Absch?pfungen? e impuestos de importatión. En la discusión oficial en la RFA siempre se critica la estructura ?anormal? de las exportaciones de la RDA hacia la RFA. En consecuencia, en el présente artfculo se somete a prueba la hipótesis de si esta estructura anormal se debe (en parte) al sistema preferencial vigente. Definiendo la divergencia de las exportaciones de la RDA hacia la RFA con referencia a las exportaciones de la RDA hacia la region de la OCDE, los resultados del análisis de regresión múltiple muestran que la RDA actúa tendencialmente en forma racional: sus exportaciones fueron — entre otros factores — en realidad influenciadas por las preferencias de Alemania Occidental. Los resultados empíricos del análisis de los cambios de las divergencias de exportatión de la RDA sugieren, sin embargo, que el ajuste se hizo efectivo solamente en el mediano hasta largo plazo desde i960. Esta pesada flexibilidad de la administratión de exportatión de la RDA se debe tal vez también a las dificultades que surgieron para la RDA a raíz del proceso de integratión de la CEE en los a?os 1960.

     

Arrow’s theorem as a corollary

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem is derived from a general result on social aggregation in ‘property spaces’ (S3 convex structures) obtained in prior work. In the derivation, the specific structure of Arrowian aggregation as an aggregation of weak orders plays a purely combinatorial role.     

Common priors under incomplete information: a unification

Summary. While the meaningfulness of the common prior assumption (CPA) under incomplete information has been established recently by various authors, its epistemic rationale has not yet been adequately clarified. To do so, we provide a characterization of the CPA in terms of a new condition called “Mutual Calibration”, and argue that it constitutes a more transparent and more primitive formalization of the Harsanyi Doctrine than the existing characterizations. Our analysis unifies the understanding of the CPA under incomplete information and clarifies the role of higher-order expectations and of the difference between situations with only two and those with at least three agents. In the concluding section, the analysis is applied to the problem of defining Bayesian consistency of the intertemporal beliefs of a single-agent with imperfect memory. The CPA yields a notion of “Bayesian updating without a prior”. Received: March 24, 2000; revised version: April 27, 2000     

Justifiable group choice

We study the judgment aggregation problem from the perspective of justifying a particular collective decision by a corresponding aggregation on the criteria. In particular, we characterize the logical relations between the decision and the criteria that enable justification of a majority decision through a proposition-wise aggregation rule with no veto power on the criteria. While the well-studied “doctrinal paradox” provides a negative example in which no such justification exists, we show that genuine possibility results emerge if there is a gap between the necessary and the sufficient conditions for the decision. This happens, for instance, if there is only a partial consensus about the appropriate criteria for the decision, if only a subset of these criteria can be elicited, or if the judgment on criteria is based on probabilistic acceptance thresholds.