Altruism, Cooperation, and Efficiency: Agricultural Production in Polygynous Households Altruism among family members can, in some cases, inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility that players expect to receive in a non-cooperative equilibrium. To test this, we examine agricultural productivity in polygynous households in West Africa. We find that cooperation is greater – production is more...

This paper develops a two-period disequilibrium model of a small open economy under Keynesian unemployment to analyse the effects of temporary, anticipated, and permanent coffee price shocks. The model includes a government sector that administers a commodity price stabilisation fund, and allows for capital market imperfections. The type of capital market imperfection makes an important differe...

Article history: Received 22 April 2011 Received in revised form 8 April 2013 Accepted 14 April 2013 Available online 23 April 2013 Using a panel dataset of 31 provinces in China, this paper computes the output-oriented Malmquist productivity indexes and their decomposition in China's agricultural sector over the period 1994–2008. In the second-stage regression, which uses the efficiency change...

there are two main reasons for studying investment in an economy. first, the combination of firms? investment demand and household?s saving supply determines how much of an economys? resoures is invested. second, investment is highly volatile; thus investment demand may be important in the short-run fluctuations. the present article examins the relationship and veracity of existence of banks pr...

Connecting private dwellings to the water main is expensive and typically cannot be publicly financed. We show that households’ willingness to pay for a private connection is high when it can be purchased on credit, not because a connection improves health but because it increases the time available for leisure and reduces interand intra-household conflicts on water matters, leading to sustaine...

Environmental conditional cash transfers are popular but their impacts are not well understood. We evaluate land cover and wealth impacts of a federal program that pays landowners for protecting forest. Panel data for program beneficiaries and rejected applicants allows us to control for fixed differences and time trends affecting both groups. We find the program reduces the expected land cover...

Household diversification into nonfarm work activities is a major rural livelihood strategy in many developing economies. In this paper, we explore empirically if rural households in Uganda leverage their nonfarm earnings to overcome credit constraints and invest in high yielding maize seed varieties. We use a semiparametric estimator of binary outcomes that accommodates endogenous regressors s...

This paper examines how robust economic, political, and demographic variables are related to water and air pollution. Employing Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) for a cross section of up to 74 countries, 33 variables and 3 proxies for air and water pollution over a period from 1980 to 1995 we confirm the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis, highlight the relevance of efficien...

Young Entrepreneurs in Rural Africa: Prevalence, Determinants, Productivity Africa is not only the poorest and most rural continent, it is also the most youthful continent in terms of population. Given the large number of young job seekers that will enter the labor market over the next decade, we need a better understanding of rural non-farm entrepreneurship, particularly with regard to the rol...

In this paper we use British Household Panel Survey data to examine the relationship between unionization and unpaid overtime in Britain. The findings indicate that in the for-profit, non-caring sector of the economy, union covered employees supply fewer unpaid overtime hours than noncovered ones due to union protection and the weakening of economic incentives caused by union bargaining. On the...