Do School Subsidies Promote Human Capital Accumulation among the Poor?

We investigate the hypothesis that conditioning transfers to poor families on school attendance leads to a reallocation of household resources enhancing the human capital of the next generation, via the effect of the conditionality on the shadow price of human capital. We estimate the price effect of conditional transfers to mothers on intrahousehold allocations using data from a social program in Mexico, and show that price effects are large and statistically significant. The estimates suggest that household resources beyond those directly subject to conditionality have been reallocated favorably to children's human capital.

Deception and Misreporting in a Social Program

We investigate empirically the extent of misreporting in a poverty-alleviation program in which self-reported information, followed by a household visit, is used to determine eligibility. Underreporting may be due to a deception motive, and overreporting to an embarrassment motive. We find that underreporting of goods and desirable home characteristics is widespread, and that overreporting is common with respect to goods linked to social status. Larger program benefits encourage underreporting and discourage overreporting. The effect of benefits on underreporting is significant under a variety of specifications. We also investigate the effects of education and gender on misreporting.

Crop Substitution on UK Sugar Beet Farms and its Effects on the Environment: A Multi-Product Cost Function Approach

This paper analyzes the effect that the imminent reform of the EU sugar beet regime will have on United Kingdom (UK) sugar beet farms. Specifically, we estimate a multi-product cost function to analyze the effect the changes on the sugar beet price support and quota will have on the crop allocation of sugar beet farms and their aggregate use of inputs. Based on these estimates we discuss the implications that changes in the crop patterns may have on farm environmental variables such as soil loss and groundwater pollution.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Characterizing weak chaos in nonintegrable Hamiltonian systems: the fundamental role of stickiness and initial conditions

Weak chaos in high-dimensional conservative systems can be characterized through sticky effect induced by invariant structures on chaotic trajectories. Suitable quantities for this characterization are the higher cummulants of the finite time Lyapunov exponents (FTLEs) distribution. They gather the {\it whole} phase space relevant dynamics in {\it one} quantity and give informations about ordered and random states. This is analyzed here for discrete Hamiltonian systems with local and global couplings. It is also shown that FTLEs plotted {\it versus} initial condition (IC) and the nonlinear parameter is essential to understand the fundamental role of ICs in the dynamics of weakly chaotic Hamiltonian systems.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, submitted for publicatio

RETAILERS PRICE BEHAVIOUR IN THE UK FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLE MARKET

The purpose of this paper is to study the price behaviour of fresh produce at the retail level of two leading supermarkets, Tesco and Sainsbury, with the purpose of gaining knowledge about their interaction. We focus the study on six products from the fresh fruits and vegetable group (i.e., tomatoes, Bramley’s apples, white cabbage, cucumbers, Iceberg lettuce and Round lettuce) due to the fact on the one hand it is a less complex supply chain (e.g., perishable product, less number of intermediaries) and on the other hand, because during the last 20 years the group has significantly evolved with supermarkets becoming the major players in the chain. The empirical methodology consisted of using Granger causality tests to establish the relationship between the series (e.g., leader-follower) and then vector autoregressive (VAR) models and variance decomposition procedures to capture the interaction of supermarket prices by product. Overall results indicate that the competition behaviour amongst the two retailers changes by product and evolve over timeUK retail prices, supermarket competition, UK fresh produce market, Demand and Price Analysis,