Cap reform: modelling supply response subject to the land set-aside

This paper uses duality theory to develop a model of European Community agriculture. The model is used to investigate the impact of the land set-aside provision of the recent package of reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy. We assume that producers chose output and variable input levels that maximize difference between revenue and variable cost. By including first-order conditions for the allocation of land across its uses, we impose that the observed allocations are profit-maximizing allocations. To overcome the problem of incorporating many outputs into an estimable production structure, we imposed a priori the restriction that the technology was weakly separable in major categories of outputs. With this restriction, it was possible to model production decisions in stages using consistent aggregates in the latter stages.     

Endogenous Managerial Incentives and the Optimal Combination of Debt and Dividend Commitments

This paper studies the optimal combination of debt and dividend commitmentsin an agency model of the firm. Financial policy is relevant because ex-post information asymmetry requires managerial rewards to depend on the ability to meet financial commitments. If perquisite or inside information problems exist in isolation, debt-based incentives as assumed in previous studies result endogenously. If the problems exist simultaneously, dividends can be optimal even when they appear excessively costly as a signal and unduly lenient as a disciplining device. The reason is that the set of dynamically consistent rewards increases when debt commitments are augmented with dividend commitments, and a larger set of ex-post rewards is more valuable as ex-antedecisions become more complex.     

Rejoinder : Food, agricultural and trade policy to the year 2000

This article, partly in response to Fred Sanderson's article (pp 363–73), challenges the narrow approach of forecasting the future food situation by extrapolating current trends, and the view that little can be done to improve the predicament of the ‘poorest of the poor’. This article argues that we must look for ways of breaking out of the vicious circle of low income, low economic demand, low productivity and low levels of resource utilization.     

Interest Originating from Invested Rent: Social or Prwate Property?

A bstract Herny George contends that rent , even whten derived from land purchased with the fruits of honest toil, cannot justly be privately appropriated, because land (not being a labor product) can have no clear moral title, and because its value is nto produced by the owner but by society Although he does nto explicity address the ethical propriety of interest earned by capital originating from invested rent, his writings yield the following implieit analysis Even as rent should be returned to the community, abstractjustice also demands that interest on capital that stems from rent should be returned to the community But there is no feasible way in which to implement this demand, since it is scarcely ever possible to separate interest derived indiretly from private rent from interest not so derived however, this poses no real problem if We seek justice for the present and the future instead of reparations for injustice in the past For the socialization of rent would render accumulations of private capital, regardless of how obtained, impssible to sustam (absent special privileges confeired by government) unless directed toward the satisfaction of public de mand as reflected in the marketplace     

Strategies for measuring risk in public use microdata files

Statistical agencies have the responsibility to design data release strategies which will not violate pledges of nondisclosure either through intent or neglect. In addition to ethical and legal concerns, statistical offices must be mindful that violating pledges of confidentiality may undermine an agency's ability to collect data due to loss of public trust. Statistical organizations also have the obligation to make information available to a variety of individuals and institutions to allow for informed discussion from differing perspectives on a range of issues. However, it is through fine, accurate detail on a file that risks of disclosure arise. In this report we discuss strategies for controlling risk in the release of public use microdata files. The equivalence class structure of a microdata file is defined and we show how the classic entropy function can be employed on the equivalence class structure to provide a measure of relative risk.     

On the Degree of Property Tax Assessment Inequity in Complex Tax Jurisdictions

A bstract . The extent of interest in the degree of inequity in property assessment is indicative of the importance of identifying determinants of assessment inequity. Previous attempts to identify such determinants were certainly incomplete. An additional variable is offered for the list that would be expected to explain statistically the degree of inequity in the distribution of property tax liabilities , in general, and to examine specifically the relationship between assessment, inequity and the degree of complexity for assessing Jurisdictions. The latter are often complex in the sense that individual properties, although subject to a set of two or more nominal tax rates on assessed values, are not subject to the same set of nominal tax rates. It is argued—to the extent that individual property tax liabilities are capitalized in sale prices for individual properties —that the greater the number of specific property tax rates on assessed value , the greater is the expected frequency of change in such specific property tax rates and, therefore, the higher the expected value of the measure of the degree of inequity.     

Economics at the Antitrust Division 2016–2017: Healthcare,Nuclear Waste,and Agriculture

This year the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice litigated an unprecedented number of cases. Two mergers, Anthem with Cigna and Aetna with Humana, threatened to dramatically alter the face of commercial health insurance. The Anthem case raised questions of how to evaluate a claim that competition costs billions annually in potential medical cost savings. The Aetna case raised questions of how commercial insurers compete against the public programs—specifically Medicare. The Division also litigated numerous other civil matters including a proposed merger of nuclear waste disposal facilities. In that case, economists had to explore the scope and bounds of competition within a variety of regulatory regimes. And, in a merger of two new technologies that improve the efficiency of planting seeds, the emerging nature of the market led to interesting variations in the analysis. This overview of the economic issues in these particular cases is intended to provide insights into the challenges of enforcing antitrust law and the way in which economic analysis in particular is used to address those challenges.     

Upstairs/Downstairs in Technical Education: The Unsettling Effects of Computerization

The world of technical education is moving towards an information collapse. This situation entails an aggravation of the contradiction between the desire to deliver more information to engineering students and the limitation imposed by the actual time that can be devoted to this activity. This, in turn, results in extensive competition between the subjects being taught and the consequent downgrading of certain areas. The second-grade subjects, such as drawing, subjects providing empirical knowledge, and the teaching of ideas about how things work are being pushed into the background by modern, updated, computer-aided and computer-serving subjects. The negative results of this competition in terms of teaching time and the better use computerized technology education are considered in this paper.     

Estimation of symmetric functions of a finite population

Summary Estimation of symmetric functions under the assumptions of noninformativeness of labels in a finite population of distinguishable units has been examined. The primitive strategies of srs, sample mean, sample variance etc. are found to play important roles.