Extension services,product quality and yields: the case of grapes in Argentina

This article studies the impact of publicly subsidized agricultural extension services on yields and product quality. We use panel data from grape producers in Mendoza, Argentina to estimate the impacts of farmer trainings. We find a negative overall impact on yields and evidence of a positive average impact on the adoption of higher‐quality grape varieties. By analyzing the dynamic pattern of the estimated effects, we find evidence of a temporary decrease in yields suggesting the existence of an adjustment process following the introduction of higher‐quality grapes. The overall negative effect on yield is driven by a sharp drop in the year of participation. This fades after year one, and two to three years after treatment we observe increases in higher‐quality grape production. Findings reinforce the importance of temporal dimension of extension services.     

Ideology and endogenous constitutions

We study a legislature where decisions are made by playing an agenda-setting game. Legislators are concerned about their electoral prospects but they are also genuinely concerned for the legislature to make the correct decision. We show that when ideological polarization is positive but not too large (and the status quo is extremely inefficient), institutions in which the executive has either no constraints (autocracy) or many constraints (unanimity) are preferable to democracies that operate under an intermediate number of constraints (simple majority rule). When instead ideological polarization is large (and the status quo is only moderately inefficient), simple majority turns out to be preferable.     

Beauty contested: how much of Keynes' remains in behavioural economics' beauty contests?

Abstract

In one of the most famous passages of the economic literature, John Maynard Keynes likens the stock market to a beauty contest (BC), in which the winners are those who anticipate the average opinion. In behavioural economics there have recently been attempts at investigating the BC experimentally. We argue that there exist important differences between Keynes' and behavioural economics' BCs. We identify several types of BCs and propose a taxonomy. We also suggest that, in spite of these differences, Keynes' theory of decision under uncertainty is central to understanding the actual behaviour observed in experimental BCs.     

Destination Online Communication: Why Less is Sometimes More. A Study of Online Communications of English Destinations

This research investigates the relationship between Web site design and the Web site end-user experience of a vast number of English tourism destinations, both local and regional ones. Following recent research in the field, this paper evaluates destinations’ online communication based on the implemented Web site features and on the effectiveness of the communication itself, borrowing its research methodology from different domains. After content and functionality analysis, a user-experience, scenario-based investigation has been carried out, which demonstrated that complex Web sites do not always serve end-users’ needs properly; in other words, Web site complexity is not directly related with good user experience. This research may help destination managers to foster their online communication if they have fewer content and functionalities but are better focused and clearly user-oriented.     

The adjustment mechanism in the Euro Area

This paper analyses the adjustment mechanism in the euro area prior to the crisis. Results show that the real exchange rate adjusted to redress cyclical divergences and that after monetary unification, real exchange rate dynamics became less reactive to country-specific shocks but also less persistent. Regulations affecting price and wage nominal flexibility and employment protection play a role in the adjustment mechanism. Indicators of product and labour regulations appear to matter for both the reaction of price competitiveness to cyclical divergences and for the inertia of competitiveness indicators.     

Child Labour Education and Nutrition in Rural India

Decisions concerning child labour, education and nutrition are taken by parents simultaneously with decisions affecting fertility and infant mortality. This implies that child labour cannot be abolished without altering the conditions that make it optimal for parents to make their children work. Such conditions can be altered not only by educational policies, such as free or subsidized provision of school facilities, but also by more broadly aimed policies, such as sanitation or preventive medicine.     

Can inflation data improve the real‐time reliability of output gap estimates?

Potential output plays a central role in monetary policy and short‐term macroeconomic policy making. Yet, characterizing the output gap involves a trend‐cycle decomposition, and unobserved component estimates are typically subject to a large uncertainty at the sample end. An important consequence is that output gap estimates can be quite inaccurate in real time, as recently highlighted by Orphanides and van Norden ( 2002 ), and this causes a serious problem for policy makers. For the cases of the US, EU‐11 and two EU countries, we evaluate the benefits of using inflation data for improving the accuracy of real‐time estimates. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Job Creation, Job Destruction, and the International Division of Labor

The authors incorporate equilibrium unemployment due to imperfect matching into a model of trade in intermediate inputs. Firms are assumed to be price‐takers and their size is given by technology. Firms enter the market as long as expected profits cover the search cost they incur initially; jobs are endogenously destroyed by random shocks that affect firms’ price–cost margins. Trade increases productivity in the final good and then demand for each intermediate input. Steady‐state unemployment is reduced after trade integration because the rate of job destruction is reduced, which in turn induces an indirect positive effect on job creation. A more volatile environment faced by firms does not necessarily increase unemployment. However, the rate of job destruction unambiguously rises, and rises more under free trade.     

Private benefits, block transaction premiums and ownership structure

A simple model shows that both price premiums and standardized block premiums (SBPs) are biased measures of private benefits because they do not account for the transfer of control effectively taking place with the block. This depends not only on the fractional size of the block, but on the whole distribution of shareholdings. We propose an alternative methodology to measure private benefits which makes it possible to weight the size of traded blocks on the basis of their strategic power. We apply our method to a sample of Italian block transactions and show that the traditional method underestimates control rents. The sensitivity of private benefits to net worth, leverage, and nonvoting shares is also examined. Finally, we show how to forecast the price of out-of-sample blocks of shares on the basis of information on company capital and ownership structure.