RURAL SHADOW WAGES, LABOUR SUPPLY AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION UNDER IMPERFECT MARKETS: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM VIET NAM

Due to market imperfections and sexual division of labour, this paper takes interest in gender specific values of agricultural labour products (or shadow wages) and the problem of aggregating agricultural production activities. The paper analyses two farming systems instead of using an aggregated agricultural harvest under the presumption that households are restricted in choosing crop patterns and consequently limited in their allocation of labour. The farming systems differ in the level of diversification over crops where a limited number of households are able to engage in the more diversified system (two crops: rice and sugar cane) while other households are restricted to cultivate only one of the two (rice). These circumstances are likely to be widespread in developing countries. Since an entry restriction limit the choice of crop pattern, production functions for rice and sugar cane are estimated separately. We find labour returns to differ significantly between farming systems with lower returns for single-crop producers. The paper tests whether non-separability conditions holds and find in general that theoretical predictions cannot be falsified. This implies that over the whole sample households are on average unable to adjust their labour supply at the margin and hence, using shadow wages from an aggregated agricultural production is likely to mislead policy conclusions. We also find that diversified household members do equate returns between the farming systems while households that are restricted to one production activity yield lower returns. Since less diversified households are in general poorer poverty alleviation policies must address the entry restriction but first, policy makers should check whether they need to redraw policy conclusions made on aggregate harvests.Labor and Human Capital,

Environmental Policy and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment in China.

This paper introduces an environmental policy variable, i.e. the provincial pollution levy paid by an average firm, and measure its impact on the foreign investors' location decisions over the 1987 to 1998 period. We argue that less developed regions in China are more inclined to sacrifice environmental policies as an instrument to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). National level results show that stringent environmental policies have insignificant effect on foreign investors' location decision, and that transportation, economic growth, and regional location matters more. At the provincial level, stringent environmental policies reduce FDI in the less developed regions.foreign direct investment, environmental policy

Hunting Down the Best Model of Inflation with Bayesian Evidence

We present the first calculation of the Bayesian evidence for different prototypical single field inflationary scenarios, including representative classes of small field and large field models. This approach allows us to compare inflationary models in a well-defined statistical way and to determine the current "best model of inflation". The calculation is performed numerically by interfacing the inflationary code FieldInf with MultiNest. We find that small field models are currently preferred, while large field models having a self-interacting potential of power p>4 are strongly disfavoured. The class of small field models as a whole has posterior odds of approximately 3:1 when compared with the large field class. The methodology and results presented in this article are an additional step toward the construction of a full numerical pipeline to constrain the physics of the early Universe with astrophysical observations. More accurate data (such as the Planck data) and the techniques introduced here should allow us to identify conclusively the best inflationary model.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, uses RevTeX. Misprint corrected, references added. Matches published versio

Online Appendix to "Firm-Specific Capital, Nominal Rigidities and the Business Cycle"

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

First CMB Constraints on the Inflationary Reheating Temperature

We present the first Bayesian constraints on the single field inflationary reheating era obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. After demonstrating that this epoch can be fully characterized by the so-called reheating parameter, we show that it is constrained by the seven years Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropies Probe (WMAP7) data for all large and small field models. An interesting feature of our approach is that it yields lower bounds on the reheating temperature which can be combined with the upper bounds associated with gravitinos production. For large field models, we find the energy scale of reheating to be higher than those probed at the Large Hadron Collider, Ereh > 17.3 TeV at 95% of confidence. For small field models, we obtain the two-sigma lower limits Ereh > 890 TeV for a mean equation of state during reheating = -0.3 and Ereh > 390 GeV for = -0.2. The physical origin of these constraints is pedagogically explained by means of the slow-roll approximation. Finally, when marginalizing over all possible reheating history, the WMAP7 data push massive inflation under pressure (p < 2.2 at 95% of confidence where p is the power index of the large field potentials) while they slightly favor super-Planckian field expectation values in the small field models.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures, uses RevTeX. References added, matches published versio

Firm-Specific Capital, Nominal Rigidities and the Business Cycle

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior. Macroeconomic data suggest that inflation is inertial. Microeconomic data indicate that firms change prices frequently. We formulate and estimate a model which resolves this apparent micro - macro conflict. Our model is consistent with post-war U.S. evidence on inflation inertia even though firms re-optimize prices on average once every 1.5 quarters. The key feature of our model is that capital is firm-specific and pre-determined within a period.

A mechanism of the large-scale damping in the CMB anisotropy

We present a mechanism through which a certain class of short-distance cutoff affects the CMB anisotropies at large angular scales. Our analysis is performed in two steps. The first is given in an intuitive way, using the property of the inflationary universe that quantum fluctuations of an inflaton field become classical after crossing the Hubble horizon. We give a condition for a cutoff to yield a damping on large scales, and show that the holographic cutoff introduced in the preceding paper (hep-th/0307029) does satisfy the condition. The second analysis is carried out by setting an initial condition such that each mode of inflaton starts as the vacuum fluctuation of the Hamiltonian when being released from the constraint of cutoff. The first intuitive discussion is then shown to be correct qualitatively.Comment: 31 pages, 14 figures, final version, to appear in Nuclear Physics

Firm-specific capital, nominal rigidities and the business cycle

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior. Macroeconomic data suggest that inflation is inertial. Microeconomic data indicate that firms change prices frequently. We formulate and estimate a model which resolves this apparent micro - macro conflict. Our model is consistent with post-war U.S. evidence on inflation inertia even though firms re-optimize prices on average once every 1.5 quarters. The key feature of our model is that capital is firm-specific and predetermined within a period.Business cycles ; Macroeconomics ; Microeconomics

Playful Collaborative Exploration: New Research Practice in Participatory Design

Within the Participatory Design community as well as the Computer Supported Cooperative Work tradition, a lot of effort has been put into the question of letting field studies inform design. In this paper, we describe how game-like approaches can be used as a way of exploring a practice from a design point of view. Thinking of ethnographic fieldwork as a base for sketching, rather than descriptions, creates openness that invites collaborative authoring. The concept of playful collaborative exploration suggests certain ways of interacting with material from field studies so that it becomes a design material for an open-ended design process. We have carried out field studies, transformed the field material into design material, and set up a design game for working with it together with the people we followed in the field. The design game builds on an idea about the power of narratives and the benefits of constraining rules. We believe that this framework for collaboration opens for playfulness, experimentation, and new design ideas

Firm-specific capital, nominal rigidities, and the business cycle

Macroeconomic and microeconomic data paint conflicting pictures of price behavior. Macroeconomic data suggest that inflation is inertial. Microeconomic data indicate that firms change prices frequently. We formulate and estimate a model which resolves this apparent micro - macro conflict. Our model is consistent with post-war U.S. evidence on inflation inertia even though firms re-optimize prices on average once every 1.5 quarters. The key feature of our model is that capital is firm-specific and predetermined within a period.Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy ; Business cycles