Plantations,Resistance and the Greening of the Agrarian Question in Coastal Ecuador

Worldwide, industrial tree plantations are at the origin of a growing number of conflicts between local populations and commercial planters. Such conflicts – which often turn out to be ‘environmental’– have largely remained understudied. By focusing on the establishment of an industrial eucalypt monoculture in a coastal Ecuadorian canton, this paper investigates the effects of the penetration of capital into the rural sphere, emphasizing the resulting resistance campaign of a local NGO originating from a peasant organization. We analyse the evolution of land conflicts in the region – historically as well as operationally during the latest eucalypt campaign. We find that displacement of local peasants is a recurrent theme, while environmental issues have recently been incorporated into the resistance to landowners. We thus argue that the agrarian question also includes – now perhaps more than ever – an environmental dimension, thereby providing space for a fruitful dialogue between political ecologists and students of agrarian conflicts.     

QUADRATIC PEN'S PARADE AND THE COMPUTATION OF THE GINI INDEX

Following Milanovic's (1997) paper, we propose a simple way to compute the Gini index when income y is a quadratic function of its rank among n individuals.     

The Real Effects of Financial Shocks: Evidence from Exogenous Changes in Analyst Coverage

We study the causal effects of analyst coverage on corporate investment and financing policies. We hypothesize that a decrease in analyst coverage increases information asymmetry and thus increases the cost of capital; as a result, firms decrease their investment and financing. We use broker closures and broker mergers to identify changes in analyst coverage that are exogenous to corporate policies. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach, we find that firms that lose an analyst decrease their investment and financing by 1.9% and 2.0% of total assets, respectively, compared to similar firms that do not lose an analyst.     

STATUS QUO IN THE WELFARE ANALYSIS OF TAX REFORMS

The welfare analysis of tax reforms most often consists of comparing the post‐reform distribution of individual welfare with the pre‐reform distribution or possibly that obtained from another reform as if they were completely independent. Such an “anonymous” approach does not take into account “changes” in individual situations, generally the main source of contention in any tax reform debate. This paper proposes a welfare criterion that allows comparison of reforms while taking into account individual status quo—i.e. pre‐reform—situations. This is done by extending standard utilitarian social welfare criteria to the case where individual utilities depend on initial income and income change.     

Markups and the Welfare Cost of Business Cycles: A Reappraisal

Gali, Gertler, and Lopez‐Salido (2007) recently show quantitatively that fluctuations in the efficiency of resource allocation do not generate sizable welfare costs. In their economy, which is distorted by monopolistic competition in the steady state, we show that they underestimate the welfare cost of these fluctuations by ignoring the negative effect of aggregate volatility on average consumption and leisure. As monopolistic suppliers, both firms and workers aim to preserve their expected markups; the interaction between aggregate fluctuations and price‐setting behavior results in average consumption and employment levels that are lower than their counterparts in the flexible‐price economy. This level effect increases the efficiency cost of business cycles. It is all the more sizable with the degree of inefficiency in the steady state, lower labor–supply elasticities, and when prices instead of wages are rigid.