Inefficacité marshallienne, partage de coûts et modèles contractuels avec marchés manquants : Résultats empiriques tunisiens

En présence de risque moral, la théorie des contrats prédit que le métayage sera assujetti au problème de l’inefficacité marshallienne, ce qui veut dire que les métayers utiliseront des quantités d’intrants différents sur les terres qu’ils exploitent par opposition aux propriétaires exploitants. Dans cet article, nous examinons cette question à l’aide d’une base de données unique en son genre collectée en 1993 dans le village tunisien d’El Oulja, grâce au financement du programme PARADI. Nous examinons quatre questions jusqu’à présent ignorées par les chercheurs : (1) le partage des coûts entre propriétaires et tenanciers; (2) les intrants en gestion fournis par les propriétaires; (3) la supervision des tenanciers par les propriétaires; (4) l’interaction répétée entre propriétaires et tenanciers. Nous utilisons des méthodes économétriques en panel avec effets fixes et en tobit en utilisant la méthode du trimmed LAD proposée par Honoré (1992). Nos résultats empiriques appuient l’argument selon lequel le risque moral est présent dans les relations contractuelles dans ce village. Par contre, l’importance quantitative des termes des contrats dans la détermination de l’utilisation des intrants, ainsi que de l’output, est relativement limitée. Il s’ensuit que le métayage est probablement choisi pour des raisons autres que le risque moral, telles que le partage du risque ou les coûts de transaction.When moral hazard concerns are present, standard contract theory predicts the "Marshallian inefficiency" of sharecropping contracts, in the sense that, ceteris paribus, sharecropping tenants will use different amounts of inputs than owner operators. In this paper, we examine this issue using a unique dataset collected in 1993 in the Tunisian village of El Oulja, thanks to the financial support of the PARADI program. We focus our attention on four questions that have been neglected by previous studies, namely: (1) cost sharing between landlords and tenants; (2) management inputs provided by landlords; (3) direct supervision of tenants by landlords; (4) repeated interaction between landlords and tenants. We implement panel estimation with household-specific fixed effects and control for the censoring of the dependent variable using the trimmed LAD estimator proposed by Honoré (1992). Our empirical results show that moral hazard is indeed an issue in tenancy contracts in the village, but that its quantitative importance in determining input use, in comparison with other factors, is relatively small. It follows that sharecropping is probably not chosen because of moral hazard concerns, and that other motivations, such as risk sharing or transaction costs, may be more important determinants of contractual choice

Investigating the causal role of MRE11A p.E506* in breast and ovarian cancer

The nuclease MRE11A is often included in genetic test panels for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC) due to its BRCA1-related molecular function in the DNA repair pathway. However, whether MRE11A is a true predisposition gene for HBOC is still questionable. We determined to investigate this notion by dissecting the molecular genetics of the c.1516G > T;p.E506* truncating MRE11A variant, that we pinpointed in two unrelated French-Canadian (FC) HBOC patients. We performed a case-control study for the variant in ~ 2500 breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancer patients from the founder FC population of Quebec. Furthermore, we looked for the presence of second somatic alterations in the MRE11A gene in the tumors of the carriers. In summary, these investigations suggested that the identified variant is not associated with an increased risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer. We finally performed a systematic review for all the previously reported MRE11A variants in breast and ovarian cancer. We found that MRE11A germline variants annotated as pathogenic on ClinVar often lacked evidence for such classification, hence misleading the clinical management for affected patients. In summary, our report suggests the lack of clinical utility of MRE11A testing in HBOC, at least in the White/Caucasian populations

Language in Economic Development: Is English Special and is Linguistic Fragmentation Bad

The part that language might play in economic development has long intrigued scholars from various disciplines. However, no clear story has emerged from the investigations published to date, and the empirical evidence remains inconclusive (Nettle, 2000). The issues at hand are exceedingly broad, and the nature of the links that one wishes to identify, and then measure, is difficult to pinpoint precisely: what do we mean exactly by “development”? And since ‘language' pervades just about every facet of individual and social life, including economic processes, what manifestations of language should we assume to play a specific role in determining development related outcomes? The very existence of such a link is not self-evident, and most economic analyses, including those in the field known as development economics, tend to assume language away on the grounds that the economic processes at hand, being universal, transcend linguistic variables. It is only in recent years that ‘culture', which, as an explanatory variable, had largely been relegated to the fringes of development economics as merely contextual, has been allowed to drift back near the centre of the field. Typical recent examples include work by Nobel laureate George Akerlof (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000) on the relationship between economics and identity, or the study of the role played by religiosity in economic development (Barro and McCleary, 2003)

De l'efficacité allocative des contrats agricoles : Cheung avait-il raison ?

On the Allocative Efficiency of Agricultural Tenancy Contracts : Was Cheung Right ? In the presence of moral hazard, received contract theory predicts the «marshallian inefficiency» of sharecropping contracts, meaning that sharecroppers will deviate, in their use of inputs, from the first-best optimum attained by owner-operators. In this paper we examine this issue using a unique dataset collected in the Tunisian village of El Oulja thanks to the financial support of the PARADI program. Panel estimation at the plot level, with household-specific effects, reveals that contractual terms are a significant determinant of the use of labor and of output. A direct test on a subsample of owner-operators, some of whom are also landlords, shows that the opportunity cost of the supervision by landlords of their tenants is not zero, as the Cheungian approach would have it. In the village of El Oulja, at least, Cheung would not have been right.En présence de risque moral, la théorie des contrats prédit que le métayage sera assujetti au problème de l'inefficacité marshallienne, ce qui veut dire que les métayers utiliseront des quantités d'intrants différents sur les terres qu'ils exploitent par opposition aux propriétaires-exploitants. Dans ce papier, nous examinons cette question à l'aide d'une base de données unique en son genre collectée en 1993 dans le village tunisien d'EI Oulja, grâce au financement du programme PARADI. Nous appliquons des méthodes économétriques en panel avec effets spécifiques aux ménages qui montrent que les termes des contrats de métayage ont un effet statistiquement significatif sur l'utilisation des intrants et de l'output. Un test direct montre également que le coût d'opportunité de la supervision de la part des propriétaires est non nul. Pour le cas d'EI Oulja, au moins, Cheung n'a pas raison.Ai Chunrong, Arcand Jean-Louis, Ethier François. De l'efficacité allocative des contrats agricoles : Cheung avait-il raison ?. In: Revue d'économie du développement, 5e année N°2, 1997. La nouvelle microéconomie du développement. pp. 103-127

Moral Hazard and Marshallian inefficiency : Evidence from Tunisia

International audienceWe formalize the link between optimal cost-sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well-known results from duality theory. Building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature, we show that optimal contractual structure is determined by the (i) substitution possibilities that exist between different observable factor inputs, as well as (ii) between these inputs and unobservable effort. We endogenize contractual choice using landlord characteristics as instruments, exploiting the fact that, in our dataset, landlords interact with several tenants and vice versa. The approach is applied to an unbalanced plot-level panel of cost sharing contracts in a Tunisian village, using a translog representation of the restricted profit function. Contractual terms are found to be a significant determinant of input use and therefore lead to Marshallian inefficiency, while the optimality of the underlying contractual structure is rejected

Moral Hazard and Marshallian Inefficiency: Evidence from Tunisia

In the presence of moral hazard, received agency theory predicts the Marshallian inefficiency of agricultural tenancy contracts, meaning that inputs per hectare on sharecropped land will differ from that on owned land. in this paper, we test for the presence of Marshallian inefficiency using a unique data set collected in the Tunisian village of El Oulja in 1993

Inefficacité marshallienne, partage de coûts et modèles contractuels avec marchés manquants

When moral hazard concerns are present, standard contract theory predicts the "Marshallian inefficiency" of sharecropping contracts, in the sense that, ceteris paribus, sharecropping tenants will use different amounts of inputs than owner operators. In this paper, we examine this issue using a unique dataset collected in 1993 in the Tunisian village of El Oulja, thanks to the financial support of the PARADI program. We focus our attention on four questions that have been neglected by previous studies, namely: (1) cost sharing between landlords and tenants; (2) management inputs provided by landlords; (3) direct supervision of tenants by landlords; (4) repeated interaction between landlords and tenants. We implement panel estimation with household-specific fixed effects and control for the censoring of the dependent variable using the trimmed LAD estimator proposed by Honoré (1992). Our empirical results show that moral hazard is indeed an issue in tenancy contracts in the village, but that its quantitative importance in determining input use, in comparison with other factors, is relatively small. It follows that sharecropping is probably not chosen because of moral hazard concerns, and that other motivations, such as risk sharing or transaction costs, may be more important determinants of contractual choice. En présence de risque moral, la théorie des contrats prédit que le métayage sera assujetti au problème de l’inefficacité marshallienne, ce qui veut dire que les métayers utiliseront des quantités d’intrants différents sur les terres qu’ils exploitent par opposition aux propriétaires exploitants. Dans cet article, nous examinons cette question à l’aide d’une base de données unique en son genre collectée en 1993 dans le village tunisien d’El Oulja, grâce au financement du programme PARADI. Nous examinons quatre questions jusqu’à présent ignorées par les chercheurs : (1) le partage des coûts entre propriétaires et tenanciers; (2) les intrants en gestion fournis par les propriétaires; (3) la supervision des tenanciers par les propriétaires; (4) l’interaction répétée entre propriétaires et tenanciers. Nous utilisons des méthodes économétriques en panel avec effets fixes et en tobit en utilisant la méthode du trimmed LAD proposée par Honoré (1992). Nos résultats empiriques appuient l’argument selon lequel le risque moral est présent dans les relations contractuelles dans ce village. Par contre, l’importance quantitative des termes des contrats dans la détermination de l’utilisation des intrants, ainsi que de l’output, est relativement limitée. Il s’ensuit que le métayage est probablement choisi pour des raisons autres que le risque moral, telles que le partage du risque ou les coûts de transaction.

Cross-Sectional Assessment of Achievement of Therapeutic Goals in a Canadian Multidisciplinary Clinic for Patients With Advanced Chronic Kidney Disease

Background: The implementation of advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) multidisciplinary clinics has now demonstrated their effectiveness in delaying and even avoiding dialysis for patients with CKD. However, very little has been documented on the management and achievement of targets for a number of parameters in this context. Objective: Our goal was to assess our multidisciplinary clinic therapy performance in relation to the targets for hypertension, anemia, and calcium phosphate assessment. Methods Design and setting: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted with a cohort including all patients followed up in our multidisciplinary clinic in July 2014. Measurements: Comorbidity, laboratory, and clinical data were collected and compared with the recommendations of scientific organizations. Results: The cohort included 128 patients, 37.5% of whom were women. Mean follow-up time was 26.6 ± 25.1 months and mean estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was 14.0 ± 4.7 mL/min/1.73 m 2 . A total of 24.2% of patients with diabetes achieved blood pressure targets of <130/80 mm Hg, while 56.5% of patients without diabetes achieved targets of <140/90 mm Hg. Hemoglobin of patients treated with erythropoiesis-stimulating agents was 100 to 110 g/L in 36.2% of the patients, below 100 for 39.7% of them, and above 110 for 24.1%, whereas 67.2% were within the acceptable limits of 95 to 115 g/L. In addition, 63.4% of patients had a serum phosphate of <1.5 mmol/L, and 90.9% of patients had total serum calcium <2.5 mmol/L. Limitations: Our study is a single center study with the majority of our patients being Caucasian. This limits the generalizability of our findings. Conclusion: The control rates of various parameters were satisfactory given the difficult clinical context, but could be optimized. We publish these data in the hope that they are helpful to others engaged in quality improvement in their own programs or more generally