Adjustment and Poverty: A Review of the African Experience*

Abstract: The social impacts of adjustment have received considerable research and policy attention in recent years. This paper is a review of recent studies on adjustment and poverty in African countries. The ambition is to understand what determines the differences in outcomes in terms of the impacts on the vulnerable groups. Résumé: Les effets sociaux d'ajustement ont recu dans les annees recentes considérablement d'attention. Cet revu étudie l'ajustement et la pauvreté dans les pays africains. Le but est de comprendre ce qui détermine les differents resultats en terme des effets sur les groupes vulnerables.     

The Increasing Selectivity of Foreign Aid, 1984–2003

The Monterrey Consensus includes the idea that foreign aid is more effective when targeted to countries with sound institutions. We examine the extent to which foreign aid, bilateral and multilateral, is “selective” in terms of democracy and property rights/rule of law. We find that multilateral assistance is more selective than bilateral aid in targeting countries with good rule of law. “Selectivity” is a new phenomenon. During 1984–89, both bilateral and multilateral aid had significant negative relationships with rule of law; by 2000–03 this had shifted to a significant positive relationship for multilateral aid, and a positive but statistically insignificant relationship for bilateral aid.     

Utility representation theorems for Debreu separable preorders

We prove the existence of arbitrary (resp., semicontinuous, continuous) utility representations for arbitrary (resp., semicontinuous, continuous) preorders satisfying some weakened Debreu order separability conditions. In this way we widely generalize a classical result for total preorders that essentially is due to Debreu.     

The value of information in monotone decision problems

We study the information preferences and information demand of decision-makers facing uncertainty. We focus on monotone decision problems in which the posterior beliefs induced by the decision-maker’s information can be ordered so that higher actions are chosen in response to higher signal realizations. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for decision makers with different classes of payoff functions to prefer one information structure to another. We also provide conditions under which two decision-makers in a given class can be ranked in terms of their information demand. Applications and examples are given.     

Optimistic irrationality and overbidding in private value auctions

Bidding one’s value in a second-price, private-value auction is a weakly dominant solution (Vickrey in J Finance 16(1):8–37, 1961), but repeated experimental studies find more overbidding than underbidding. We propose a model of optimistically irrational bidders who understand that there are possible gains and losses associated with higher bids but who may overestimate the additional probability of winning and/or underestimate the potential losses when bidding above value. These bidders may fail to discover the dominant strategy—despite the fact that the dominant strategy only requires rationality from bidders—but respond in a common sense way to out-of-equilibrium outcomes. By varying the monetary consequences of losing money in experimental auctions we observe more overbidding when the cost to losing money is low, and less overbidding when the cost is high. Our findings lend themselves to models in which less than fully rational bidders respond systematically to out-of-equilibrium incentives, and we find that our model better fits the effects of our manipulations than most of the existing models we consider.     

Trade flow lags, monetary and fiscal policy, and exchange-rate overshooting

In this paper model a is constructed that combines trade slow lags with the model in the appendix to Dornbusch's seminal paper on exchange-rate dynamics. Here output is free to vary and inflation is determined by a simple Phillips curve mechanism. It turns out that, because of the trade slow lags, monetary expansion causes interest rates to decline, but the exchange rate need not oveshoot, as one would expect; whereas fiscal policy always produces overshooting. It follows that monetary policy may be a less important source of exchange-rate variability than is commonly believed, and fiscal policy more important.     

What Determines Public Support for Affirmative Action?

We present a public higher-education finance model in which demand for education can exceed supply because of indivisibilities in educational investment. In such situations, a screening mechanism—which may exhibit a selection system bias—is required for allocation. We show how changes in the education premium and the test score gap between the minority and the majority might affect political support for affirmative action. When the education premium is relatively low, the matching efficiency gains provided by affirmative action are high compared with the opportunity cost of not acquiring education, and the majority supports affirmative action. When the education premium is high, the opportunity cost of not getting educated is high relative to the matching efficiency gains provided by affirmative action policies, and the majority's support for affirmative action is weaker. In contrast, a higher test score bias has a generally ambigious effect on the majority's political support. If the test score bias is sufficiently large, however, the majority does support affirmative action.