Technology and labor contract: Two systems of rice harvesting in the Philippines

Major changes in agrarian institutions in the Philippines, such as landtenure and labor-contract arrangements, are analyzed in terms of theories of contractual choice and social interactions. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that introduction of a certain technology (e.g., machine threshing of rice) reduces transaction costs involved in specific contractual arrangements (e.g., sharecropping), thereby making specific forms of economic organization (e.g., the rice hacienda) viable. Land reform (and also the green revolution) in the rice-growing areas of the Philippines again causes a change in harvesting technology. Through complex social interaction this gives rise to changes in labor contracts.     

On the impact of the tests for serial correlation upon the test of significance for the regression coefficient

Monte Carlo methods are used to investigate the relationship between the power of different pretests for autocorrelation, and the Type I error and power of the significance test for a resulting two-stage estimate of the slope parameter in a simple regression. Our results suggest it may be preferable to always transform without pretesting. Moreover we find little room for improvement in the Type I errors and power of two-stage estimators using existing pretests for autocorrelation, compared with the results obtained given perfect knowledge about when to transform (i.e., given a perfect pretest). Rather, researchers should seek better estimators of the transformation parameter itself.