A Survey of Agricultural Household Models: Recent Findings and Policy Implications

Semicommercial farms that produce multiple crops make up a largepart of the agricultural sector in developing economies. Thesefarms or agricultural households combine two fundamental unitsof microeconomic analysis: the household and the firm. Traditionaleconomic theory has dealt with these units separately. But indeveloping economies in which peasant farms dominate, theirinterdependence is of crucial importance. Researchers at theFood Research Institute, Stanford University, and at the WorldBank have developed models of agricultural households that combineproducer and consumer behavior in a theoretically consistentfashion. Recent empirical applications of these models haveextended them and expanded the range of policy issues whichcan be investigated using this general framework. This article reports the results of empirical applications ofthis model in India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea,Malaysia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Taiwan, and Thailand.It provides a comparative analysis of the policy implicationsof the approach for such matters as the welfare of farm households,the size of marketed surplus, the demand for nonagriculturalgoods and services, and for hired labor, and the availabilityof budget revenues and foreign exchange.     

Breaking out of the innovation box

In most companies, investments in innovation follow a boom-bust cycle. For a time, the cash flows. Then, as the economy sours or companies rethink their priorities, the taps go dry. But when research budgets are slashed, the strong projects are often abandoned along with the weak ones. Promising initiatives are cut off just when they are about to bear fruit. Expensive labs are closed; partnership agreements costing millions in legal fees are thrown away. When disruptive changes in the competitive landscape come, companies are caught flat-footed. Sustainable innovation requires a new approach: Instead of being largely isolated projects, innovation initiatives need to gain access to the insights and capabilities of other companies. To be protected from the ax of short-term cost reductions and the faddishness born of easy money, the initiatives must become part of the ongoing commerce that takes place among companies. But how can businesses traffic in such sensitive information without giving their competitors an advantage? The answer, the author contends, lies in a practice that's been common since the Middle Ages: the use of independent intermediaries to facilitate the exchange of sensitive information among companies without revealing the principals' identities or motives and without otherwise compromising their interests. Executive search firms, for example, allow job seekers to remain anonymous during the early stages of a search, and they protect businesses from disclosing their hiring plans to rivals. A network of innovation intermediaries would be in a unique position to visualize new opportunities synthesized from insights and technologies provided by several companies--ideas that might never occur to businesses working on their own.     

Enforcing Emissions Trading when Emissions Permits are Bankable

We propose enforcement strategies for emissions trading programs with bankable emissions permits that guarantee complete compliance with minimal enforcement costs. Our strategies emphasize imperfect monitoring supported by a high unit penalty for reporting violations, and tying this penalty directly to equilibrium permit prices. This approach is quite different from several existing enforcement strategies that emphasize high unit penalties for emissions in excess of permit holdings. Our analysis suggests that a high penalty for excess emissions cannot be used to conserve monitoring effort, and that it may actually increase the amount of monitoring necessary to maintain compliance.The authors are grateful to Anthony Heyes and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments. Partial support for this research was provided by the Cooperative State Research Extension, Education Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station under Project No. MAS00871.     

R&D investment intensity and jump volatility of stock price

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This paper studies the important but unexplored relationship between R&D investment intensity and different components of stock price...     

1917–2017: The Geopolitical Legacy of the Russian Revolution

The essays collected in this forum discuss the geopolitical legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the most momentous political events of the twentieth century. From a range of different academic disciplines and perspectives, the authors consider how the profound transformations in society and politics were refracted through space and geography, and how enduring these refractions proved to be. The authors focus on three themes that have been dominant in Russian affairs over the past century: 1)the problem of center-periphery relations, 2)the civilizational dynamics of Russia’s self-identification in relation to Europe and to Asia, and 3)the geopolitics of national identity.     

The Bank of England quarterly model of the UK economy

The Bank of England first acquired a macroeconomic model of the UK economy in early 1973, and used it for forecasting in June and July of that year. The initial model was obtained from the London Business School (LBS), but the last 14 years or so have, on the part of both the Bank and the LBS, led to developments which now make the models no closer to each other than to other large scale models of the UK. This article describes the structure and central properties of the current version of the Bank model, which has some 663 variables, 134 of which are modelled by behavioural equations, 153 by technical equations, 212 identities and 164 exogenous variables. In order to provide a transitional step between the kind of models with which most macroeconomists are familiar and the full scale version of the Bank model, one part of the article presents a very simple stylized version of the full model. This is a stepping stone to the full model which is described and analysed on a sectoral basis in Part 3, with a complete listing of equations in Part 4. Some of the simulation properties, and hence full model dynamic responses, are considered in Part 5.     

The French Communication Industry Defined and Analyzed through the Social Fabric Matrix,the Filiere Approach,and Network Analysis

This paper examines the relative impact of economic freedom, civil liberties, and political rights on growth. A system of three simultaneous equations is used to unearth the channels through which these institutional dimensions affect economic growth. These include greater efficiency and enlarged investment in physical and human capital. The sample contains 79 countries and six periods covering the years from 1976 to 2005. The results show that the three dimensions of institutional quality are important for economic growth either through a better allocation of resources or, indirectly, through the stimulation of investment in physical and human capital.     

The effect of sporting success and management failure on attendance demand in the Bundesliga: a revealed and stated preference travel cost approach

This study examines the private consumption benefits of sports attendance using revealed and stated preference data from 28 Football Bundesliga teams across three divisions. Survey respondents were presented with positive (sporting success) and negative (management failure) scenarios and asked for the number of game trips if each scenario occurred. The results of a pooled random effects Poisson model show that travel costs and ticket price have a significant negative effect on the number of home game trips. The weighted consumer surplus per game trip including travel costs and ticket prices is €345. Consumer surplus per game trip was found to change by €41 (first division) and €98 (second and third division) if the positive scenario occurred and by €39 if the negative scenario occurred.     

How widespread are nonlinear crowding out effects? The response of private transfers to income in four developing countries

This article investigates the relationship between household income and private transfers received in developing countries. If private transfers are unresponsive to household income, there is less likelihood of expansions in public social security crowding out private transfers. Most literature finds that private transfers are unresponsive, but this may be because responses have been obscured by the methods that ignore nonlinearities. Threshold regression techniques find such nonlinearity in the Philippines and scope for serious crowding out, with 30–80% of private transfers potentially displaced for low-income households (Cox et al., 2004). To see if these nonlinear effects occur more widely, semiparametric and threshold regression methods are used to model private transfers in four developing countries – China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. The results reported in this article suggest that nonlinear crowding out effects are not important features of transfer behaviour in these countries. The transfer derivatives under a variety of assumptions only range between 0 and ?0.08.