Impact of cooperatives on smallholders' commercialization behavior: evidence from Ethiopia

This article examines the impact of marketing cooperatives on smallholder commercialization of cereals using detailed household data in rural Ethiopia. We use the strong government role in promoting the establishment of cooperatives to justify the use of propensity score matching to compare households that are cooperative members to similar households in comparable areas without cooperatives. The analysis reveals that although cooperatives obtain higher prices for their members, they are not associated with a significant increase in the overall share of cereal production sold commercially by their members. However, these average results hide considerable heterogeneity across households. In particular, we find that smaller farmers tend to reduce their marketed output as a result of higher prices, whereas the opposite is true for larger farmers.     

ON THE MARTINGALE PROPERTY IN STOCHASTIC VOLATILITY MODELS BASED ON TIME‐HOMOGENEOUS DIFFUSIONS

Lions and Musiela give sufficient conditions to verify when a stochastic exponential of a continuous local martingale is a martingale or a uniformly integrable martingale. Blei and Engelbert and Mijatovi? and Urusov give necessary and sufficient conditions in the case of perfect correlation (). For financial applications, such as checking the martingale property of the stock price process in correlated stochastic volatility models, we extend their work to the arbitrary correlation case (). We give a complete classification of the convergence properties of both perpetual and capped integral functionals of time‐homogeneous diffusions and generalize results in Mijatovi? and Urusov with direct proofs avoiding the use of separating times (concept introduced by Cherny and Urusov and extensively used in the proofs of Mijatovi? and Urusov).     

Preparing a national plan: Thirty years of French experience

The author describes the planning process undertaken for the seventh plan, and the two roles filled by the plan—represented by the strategy and the priority programmes. The latter were introduced to overcome the problem of matching annual budgets to long-term plans. The author details the benefits derived from the by-products of the seventh plan, eg the technical reports, which aid communication. It is the process of planning rather than the plan itself which is of prime importance.     

Income inequality between one-earner and two-earner Households: Is it real or artificial

Summary Most welfare comparisons between countries or between household types are made on the basis of monetary income only. Taking into account the value of income in kind may change these comparisons considerably. In this paper we focus on one type of income, viz., home production. We estimate the monetary value of home production in Dutch one-earner and two-earner households. We find that if we account for this forgotten income component, income inequality between the groups of one-earner and two-earner households is almost reduced to nil. In most of the world the share of income in kind via non-market production may be assumed to be much higher than in a Western-type economy. Application of this analysis to less developed countries may be particularly revealing.He is now with SWOKA, Institute for Consumer Research.He is also a member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy, The Hague.     

A framework for the analysis of legal and fraudulent trade transactions in “Parallel” exchange markets

Zusammenfassung Ein Rahmen für die Analyse legaler und illegaler Handelstransaktionen auf parallelen Devisenm?rkten. - In diesem Aufsatz wird ein stochastisches Gleichgewichtsmodell für eine offene Volkswirtschaft mit dualem Devisenmarkt konstruiert and analysiert. In diesem Rahmen sind die Devisenm?rkte nicht vollst?ndig gegeneinander abgeschottet, und ein Teil der Warenhandelstransaktionen wird auf den Finanzm?rkten abgewickelt - sowohl wegen einer rechtlich gestatteten Durchl?ssigkeit als auch deshalb, weil es illegale Transaktionen gibt, die auch in der Realit?t vorkommen. Der Modellrahmen wird benutzt, um Fragen zu behandeln, die sich über die kurz- und langfristigen Wirkungen verschiedener struktureller St?rungen hinaus auf die dynamische Anpassung in einer solchen Volkswirtschaft beziehen.

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Résumé Un cadre pour l’analyse des transactions légales et frauduleuses de commerce en marchés de change parallèles. - Dans cet article les auteurs construisent un modèle d’équilibre stochastique d’une économie ouverte à un régime dual de marché de change. Dans ce cadre ses marchés de change ne sont pas complètement segmentés et une part des transactions commerciales du commerce extérieur est réglée en marché financier à cause du ?coulage? légalement sanctionné aussi bien qu’à cause des transactions frauduleuses en conformité avec la réalité économique. Les auteurs appliquent le cadre pour répondre aux questions qui s’occupent de l’ajustement dynamique dans une telle économie et des effets de court et de long terme de quelques perturbances structurelles.

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Resumen Un marco para el análisis de transacciónes comerciales legales y fraudulentas en el mercado paralelo de cambios. - En este trabajo se construye y analiza un modelo estocástico de equilibrio para una economía abierta que funciona con un mercado de cambios dual. En el presente marco el mercado de cambios no está completamente segmentado. Una parte de las transacciónes comerciales se rigen según el mercado financiero, tanto en forma legal como fraudulenta, de acuerdo con la realidad económica existente. Se utiliza este marco para estudiar cuestiones relacionadas con el ajuste dinámico en este tipo de economía como también las consecuencias a corto y largo plazo que puedan tener distintos disturbios estructurales.

     

Introduction to the IMM special issue on ‘Project marketing and the marketing of solutions’ A comprehensive approach to project marketing and the marketing of solutions

This introduction to the special issue on ‘Project Marketing and the Marketing of Solutions’ starts by highlighting the major contributions made in the field of project marketing during the last decade. Then it points out the emergence of integrated solutions and details the major challenges facing the marketing of solutions. It concludes on the possible synergies between the marketing of solutions and project marketing.     

Reducing conflict in balanced scorecard evaluations

Recent studies [Ittner, C., & Larcker, D. (2003). Coming up short on nonfinancial performance measurement. Harvard Business Review(November) 88–95; Ittner, C., Larcker, D., & Randall, T. (2003b). Performance implications of strategic performance measurement in financial services firms. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 28, 715–741] provide evidence of companies’ tendency to overlook the validity of the causal links between driver and outcome measures of the balanced scorecard (BSC), and to ignore the underlying strategically-linked causal business models. It is posited that this propensity leads to conflict between top management and divisional managers because of the failure of the former to evaluate and consider strategy effectiveness in performance evaluation. The present study hypothesizes that individuals in the top-manager role do not take into account strategy effectiveness unless they are explicitly required to do so. In contrast, individuals in the store-manager role automatically consider the quality of strategy without being prompted to do so. A study using 63 evening MBA students provides support for the hypotheses. The results have implications for the study of evaluation biases in BSC as well as in other performance measurement systems, and for devising means to mitigate them.     

A diagnostic m-test for distributional specification of parametric conditional heteroscedasticity models for financial data

This paper proposes a convenient and generally applicable diagnostic m-test for checking the distributional specification of parametric conditional heteroscedasticity models for financial data such as the customary Student t GARCH model. The proposed test is based on the moments of the probability integral transform of the innovations of the assumed model. Monte-Carlo evidence indicates that our test performs well both in terms of size and power. An empirical example illustrates the practical usefulness of the test and some of its possible extensions are outlined.