Prior studies that have empirically investigated the impact of rail station proximity on property values have not fully investigated the factors that may account for this relationship. Stations may ...raise the value of nearby properties by reducing commuting costs or by attracting retail activity to the neighborhood. Possibly countering these positive effects are negative externalities emitted by stations and the access to neighborhoods that stations provide to criminals. This paper sorts out these effects by presenting the results from estimating a hedonic price model and auxiliary models for neighborhood crime and retail activity. Results show that all four effects play a role in defining the relationship between property values and rail stations, but the relative importance of these effects varies with distance from downtown and the median income of the neighborhood.
This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of living ...standards among households within the same network. We contrast altruism, pressure, exchange, and risk sharing as motives to transfer in simple models with asymmetric information. Testing the model predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by recipients of transfers. Our findings suggest that recipients set the terms of the transfers, either by exerting pressure on donors or because they hold substantial bargaining power in their exchange relationships.
Property rights reform is typically hypothesized to boost investment through investment demand and credit supply effects. Yet when the credit supply effect is muted, property rights reform would be ...expected to induce liquidity-constrained farms to reduce investment in movable capital even as they increase investment in attached capital. This expectation is corroborated by econometric analysis of panel data from Paraguay. While all farmers experience a positive investment demand effect, liquidity-constrained producers correspondingly reduce their demand for movable capital. Given an estimated pattern of wealth-biased liquidity constraints, property rights reform will get institutions "right" for only wealthier producers.
This paper examines 77,236 federal offenders sentenced under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and concludes the following. First, after controlling for extensive criminological, demographic, and ...socioeconomic variables, I found that blacks, males, and offenders with low levels of education and income receive substantially longer sentences. Second, disparities are primarily generated by departures from the guidelines, rather than differential sentencing within the guidelines. Departures produce about 55 percent of the black‐white difference and 70 percent of the male‐female difference. Third, although black‐white disparities occur across offenses, the largest differences are for drug trafficking. The Hispanic‐white disparity is generated primarily by those convicted of drug trafficking and firearm possession/trafficking. Last, blacks and males are also less likely to get no prison term when that option is available; less likely to receive downward departures; and more likely to receive upward adjustments and, conditioned on having a downward departure, receive smaller reductions than whites and females.
In this article we estimate the technical and environmental efficiency of a panel of Dutch dairy farms. Nitrogen surplus, arising from the application of excessive amounts of manure and chemical ...fertilizer, is treated as an environmentally detrimental input. A stochastic translog production frontier is specified to estimate the output-oriented technical efficiency. Environmental efficiency is estimated as the input-oriented technical efficiency of a single input, the nitrogen surplus of each farm. The mean output-oriented technical efficiency is rather high, 0.894, but the mean input-oriented environmental efficiency is only 0.441. Intensive dairy farms are both technically and environmentally more efficient than extensive farms.
The transition to a market economy has produced a substantial and rapid change in the wage structure in Russia. Household surveys taken before and after the transition indicate that overall wage ...inequality nearly doubled from 1991 to 1994 and has reached a level higher than that in the United States. Returns to both measured skills (education, occupation) and unmeasured skills within groups have increased considerably. Skill premiums across experience groups, however, have become more compressed and relative wages of older workers have declined. In addition, female wages have declined relative to male wages across all percentiles of the wage distribution.
Even as the Internet continues to grow as a global platform for communication and commerce, the success of new value offerings on the Internet hinges on acquisition of new customers and retention of ...existing customers. Central to the flow of customers in and out of trial and repeat behavior in this burgeoning and dynamic environment, characterized by diversity among both producers and consumers of value offerings, is the process of social contagion—active word of mouth that flows among customers or passive observation of others. To estimate contagion on the Internet, the authors develop a trial-repeat purchase diffusion model for successive innovations in value offerings on the Internet. The model extends the state-of-the-art diffusion modeling by incorporating (i) dynamic market potential, (ii) heterogeneity among first-time triers, (iii) heterogeneity in word of mouth due to repeat buyers and non-repeaters (i.e., positive and negative word of mouth), and (iv) dynamic repeat purchase rate. The model also incorporates the influence of product characteristics, specifically source of innovation (i.e., whether the innovation is driven by environmental needs or competitive pressures) and product bundling, and competition. The authors test the model with weekly adoption data for 11 computer software products available on the shareware system, involving over 100 new versions in the period 1991–1994, and in a market whose size grows by a factor of fifty from early 1991 to late 1994. The findings clarify the role of word of mouth effects, competition, and product characteristics in fostering the diffusion process for digital information goods.
Within an output distance function framework, the Total Factor Productivity growth index is decomposed into four components (technical change, technical and allocative efficiency, and scale ...component). We estimate stochastic translog output distance functions using panel data from dairy farms over the period 1991–94 for three European countries (Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland). Results indicate that the change in the productivity growth index in Germany (+6%) and Poland (−5%) are mainly dictated by the technical change component. In contrast, the productivity growth index in the Netherlands (+3%) is influenced by allocative efficiency components.
Empirical studies that use self-reported data on remittances to measure the latter's impact on microeconomic incentives mostly ignore the potential errors associated with reporting/measurement ...issues. An econometric procedure to control for these errors is developed and applied to household level data from Armenia. We find evidence of systematic underreporting of remittances. After controlling for this, we find a strong negative impact of remittances on incentives to work.
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