AGRIBUSINESS SIMULATORS FOR MANAGEMENT TRAINING

This paper describes four agribusiness simulators which can be processed on a microcomputer for use in undergraduate and extension teaching. The simulators model the environment in which supermarket chains, farm supply centers, and cooperative and proprietary grain elevators compete for business. Instruction manuals, user's manuals, and a diskette are distributed for each simulator. Each diskette contains programs to enter and edit team decisions, to process decisions and print reports, and to create graphs of team performance. The simulators can be used to teach financial management concepts and techniques, as well as economic principles.Agribusiness,

RENT: Notes on Efficiency Pricing, Rent Control and Monopolistic Landlords

We consider a model of 'tenancy rent control' where landlords are not allowed to raise the rent on sitting tenants nor to evict them, though they are free to set the nominal rent when taking on a new tenant. If there is any inflation in the economy, landlords prefer to take shortstaying tenants. Assuming that there is no way for landlords to tell a tenant's type, an adverse selection problem arises. If in this context, landlords have monopoly power--which, as we argue, is indeed pervasive--then the housing market equilibria can exhibit some unexpected properties. Most strikingly, landlords may prefer not to raise the rent even when there is excess demand for housing. Such rents are labeled "efficiency rents" in this paper and their existence shows that tenancy rent control can give rise to equilibria which look as it there were traditional rent control in which the rent of each unit has a flat ceiling. In other words, tenancy rent control may not achieve the flexibility, which it was expected to impart, to the system of traditional rent control.

Learning about Education

Limited human capital investment is a common characteristic of low-income countries despite the fact that estimated returns to educational investment in low-income countries are generally higher than in high-income countries. Empirical evidence suggests that income and credit constraints can only account for a small part of this underinvestment. Recent experimental evidence shows that families' misperceptions about the returns to education play a large role in their low investment levels. This paper builds a model of human capital and growth that incorporates an adaptive learning mechanism to capture the way agents form perceptions about returns to education. In an economy where human capital investments have both private and public returns, we find multiple learnable equilibria, including those which are characterized by low investment and low returns. We also find that even when the rational equilibrium corresponds to a high level of human capital investment, the learning mechanism, influenced by the agents' priors and cultural bias, may impart low human capital investment for extended periods. Policies that can speed up the learning process are examined and it is found that faster rates of growth can be achieved through interventions.growth, education, learning

Congressional Control of the Courts: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Expansion of the Federal Judiciary

Congress has many available tools to influence the federal judiciary. In this article, we consider Congress\u27 ability to balance, or stack, the courts through the creation of federal judgeships. While caseload pressure often produces the need for more judgeships, we demonstrate that political party alignment between Congress and the president often determines the timing of the judicial expansion. The net effect of expanding during political alignment is to speed up changes in the political balance of the judiciary in favor of the current Congress. We also examine the determinants of expansion size and show that both political alignment and caseload pressure influence Congress\u27 decision regarding how many judgeships to add

Are Microloans Bad for Growth?

This paper constructs a two-period overlapping generations model of human capital investment decisions where a microloan program designed to finance entrepreneurial activities is active. It is shown that, in the presence of human capital externalities (social returns to education) there exists a range of microloan amounts that are growth depressing and welfare decreasing through their affect on the opportunity cost of schooling. By increasing the opportunity cost of schooling, microloans divert investment away from human capital: by failing to internalize the social returns to education, households’ individually optimal investment decisions in the face of microcredit availability act to depress the growth of the economy and result in sub-optimal welfare outcomes.microloans, growth, human capital

Scalable Noise Estimation with Random Unitary Operators

We describe a scalable stochastic method for the experimental measurement of generalized fidelities characterizing the accuracy of the implementation of a coherent quantum transformation. The method is based on the motion reversal of random unitary operators. In the simplest case our method enables direct estimation of the average gate fidelity. The more general fidelities are characterized by a universal exponential rate of fidelity loss. In all cases the measurable fidelity decrease is directly related to the strength of the noise affecting the implementation -- quantified by the trace of the superoperator describing the non--unitary dynamics. While the scalability of our stochastic protocol makes it most relevant in large Hilbert spaces (when quantum process tomography is infeasible), our method should be immediately useful for evaluating the degree of control that is achievable in any prototype quantum processing device. By varying over different experimental arrangements and error-correction strategies additional information about the noise can be determined.Comment: 8 pages; v2: published version (typos corrected; reference added

THE ROLE OF ALTERNATIVE AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISES IN A CHANGING AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY

Agribusiness,

The inter-generational persistence of child labor

The authors use the"Pesquisa Nacional por Amostragem a Domicilio"(PNAD) data for Brazil. Their paper asks two related questions. First, does the child labor status of parents impact the child labor incidence of their children? The authors find strong evidence that it does. Second, is this link only a function of permanent family income or is there a direct link between the child labor status of the parents, and their children? They find evidence that such a direct link exists. This complements their previous research (Emerson and Souza 2002) in which they went on to ask if a person works as a child, would this increase the probability of his, or her child working by more than what can be explained, by the fact that the person will be poor as an adult (by virtue of having been a child worker), and therefore compelled to send the child to work? The answer to this is also yes. Hence, the presence of social factors can cause the perpetuation of child labor through non-income channels. It is, for instance, possible that having been a child laborer oneself, affects one's social norms, and attitude to child labor (Basu 1999, Lopez-Calva 2002), such that one is more prone to send ones'own child to work.

Still Waiting for Mister Right? Asymmetric Information, Abortion Laws and the Timing of Marriage

Previous studies have suggested that more liberal abortion laws should lead to a decrease in marriage rates among young women as 'shotgun weddings' are no longer necessary. Empirical evidence from the United States lends support to that hypothesis. This paper presents an alternative theory of abortion access and marriage based on asymmetric information, which suggests that more liberal abortion laws may actually promote young marriage. An empirical examination of marriage data from Eastern Europe shows that countries that liberalized their abortion laws saw an increase in marriage rates among non-teenage women.abortion, marriage asymmetric information