Do rural households in developing countries make market participation and volume decisions simultaneously or sequentially? This article develops a two-stage econometric model that allows testing between these two competing hypotheses regarding household-level market behavior. The first stage models the household’s choice of whether to be a net buyer, autarkic, or a net seller in the market. The...

The sources of aggregate productivity growth are explored using detailed data for four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries during 1958-96 and a decomposition formula which allows to quantify the contribution of structural change. Labor productivity as well as total factor productivity are considered and the aggregation is performed with either value-added or employment shares. It is shown that ...

Many developing countries use food-price subsidies or controls to improve nutrition. However, subsidizing goods on which households spend a high proportion of their budget can create large wealth effects. Consumers may then substitute towards foods with higher non-nutritional attributes (e.g., taste), but lower nutritional content per unit of currency, weakening or perhaps even reversing the su...

Suppression of thermal expansion is of great importance for industry. Negative thermal expansion (NTE) materials which shrink on heating and expand on cooling are therefore attracting keen attention. Here we provide a brief overview of NTE induced by intermetallic charge transfer in A-site ordered double perovskites SaCu3Fe4O12 and LaCu3Fe4-x Mn x O12, as well as in Bi or Ni substituted BiNiO3....

This paper consists of an introductory survey of two fundamental questions regarding the link between entrepreneurship and economic growth. The first one deals with the endogenous relationship between entrepreneurship and growth. In particular, we suggest that, while more entrepreneurship could mean more economic growth, economic growth in turn could affect the individual arbitrage between diff...

The impact of endogeneity and measurement error on the estimated effect of household economic resources on child height is demonstrated. These econometric problems contribute to uncertainty in the literature about the significance of income effects on child health and nutrition. Results are based on a household survey from Papua New Guinea, where repeated within-year observations on households ...

The following notes contain a computer simulation concerning a basic nonWalrasian equilibrium system, following the Edmond Malinvaud “short side” approach, as far as the price adjustment is concerned, and the sequential Hicksian “weeks” structure with regard of the temporal characterization. Two strongly heterogeneous classes of agents will be taken into consideration: the “rich” and the “poor”...

Does Forced Solidarity Hamper Investment in Small and Micro Enterprises? Sharing is a norm in many societies. We present a theoretical model on the trade-off between sharing and investment which we test on data from tailors in Burkina Faso. The empirical results support the idea that there are two behavioural patterns: entrepreneurs following an ‘insurance regime’ comply with sharing norms, are...

This paper uses a field experiment to test whether intrahousehold heterogeneity in discount factors leads to inefficient strategic savings behavior. I gave married couples in rural Kenya the opportunity to open both joint and individual bank accounts at randomly assigned interest rates. I also directly elicited discount factors for all individuals in the experiment. Couples who are well matched...

Mongolia’s mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of competition and ownership on the efficiency of the newly privatized enterprises, using a representative sample of enterprises and controlling for possible selection biases. Competition has quantitatively large effects; perfectly competitive f...