Manufacturing Agrarian Change - Agricultural production, inter-sectoral learning and technological capabilities

The aim of this paper is to investigate how industrial development, manufacturing in particular, has been contributing to agrarian change. In order to address this issue, it analyzes the technical bases and structural specificities – i.e. time and scale constraints – of agricultural production. Technical change in agriculture involves both improvements in organic transformation processes – i.e. biological production – and in the mechanical functions that have to be performed for obtaining a certain output – i.e. agricultural work. The paper shows how in-farm technological capabilities building as well as inter-sectoral learning are necessary in order to acquire and adapt biological-chemical innovations and mechanical technologies. The analysis of agrarian technical change – both in-farm learning and inter-sectoral learning – is developed by integrating peasant studies with evolutionary approaches to economic development. The relationship between agrarian change and manufacturing development is highly context specific, thus comparative historical analysis is adopted in order to shed light on the abovementioned processes of learning. Building on the analysis of technological change in agriculture, the last part of the paper will focus on those transformative policies such as innovative ‘extension services’ which facilitate inter-sectoral learning and, in turn, allow the emergence of inter-sectoral commons. This concept identifies that specific bundle of technological capabilities which concentrate in certain areas of strong inter-sectoral interdependence as a result of inter-sectoral learning.

Regulating altruistic agents

Altruism or `regard for others' can encourage self-restraint among generators of negative externalities, thereby mitigating the externality problem. We explore how introducing impure altruism into standard regulatory settings alters regulatory prescriptions. We show that the optimal calibration of both quantitative controls and externality taxes are affected. It also leads to surprising results on the comparative performance of instruments. Under quantity-based regulation welfare is increasing in the propensity for altruism in the population; under price-based regulation the relationship is non-monotonic. Price-based regulation is preferred when the population is either predominantly altruistic or predominantly selfish, quantity-based regulation for cases in between

Photon statistics in the macroscopic realm measured without photon-counters

In a macroscopic realm, in which photons are too many for being counted by any photon counting detector, photon statistics can be measured by using detectors simply endowed with linear response. We insert one of such detectors in a conventional photon-counting apparatus, which returns a voltage every time the detector responds to light by generating a number of elementary charges via its primary photo-detection process. We only assume that, when a single charge is photo-generated, the probability density of the voltages is a distribution that is narrow with respect to its mean value. Under this hypothesis the output voltages can be suitably binned so that their probability distribution is the same as that of the photo-generated charges, that is, of the detected photons

Beauty, Gender and Stereotypes: Evidence from Laboratory Experiments

The existence of a beauty premium in the labor market and the male-female wage gap suggests that appearance can matter in the real world. We explore beauty and gender in a public goods experiment and find similar effects. We find a beauty premium, even though beautiful people contribute, on average, no more or less than others. The beauty premium, however, disappears when we provide information on individual contributions, and becomes a beauty penalty. Players seem to expect beautiful people to be more cooperative. Relative to these expectations, they appear more selfish, which in turn results in less cooperation by others. These appear to be clear examples of stereotyping. We also find a substantial benefit to being male, especially with information. This is primarily due to men being better "leaders." Men tend to make large contributions, and people follow their example and give more in later rounds.