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Incomplete Contracts and Investment
Abstract: When contracts are incomplete, relationship-specific investments may be underprovided due to the threat of opportunistic expropriation or holdup. The authors find evidence of such underinvestment on tenanted land in rural Pakistan. Using data from households cultivating multiple plots under different tenure arrangements, they show that land-specific investment is lower on leased plots. This result is robust to the possible effects of asymmetric information in the leasing market. Greater tenure security also increases land-specific investment on leased plots. Moreover, variation in tenure security appears to be driven largely by heterogeneity across landlords, suggesting that reputation may be important in mitigating the holdup problem.
on measuring the benefits of lower transport costs
Abstract: Despite large amounts invested in rural roads in developing countries, little is known about their benefits. This paper derives an expression for the willingness-to-pay for a reduction in transport costs from the canonical agricultural household model and uses it to estimate the benefits of a hypothetical road project. Estimation is based on novel cross-sectional data collected in a small region of Madagascar with enormous, yet plausibly exogenous, variation in transport cost. A road that essentially eliminated transport costs in the study area would boost the incomes of the remotest households-those facing transport costs of about USD 75/ton-by nearly half, mostly by raising non-farm earnings. This benefit estimate is contrasted to one based on a hedonic approach.
Delayed Primary School Enrollment and Childhood Malnutrition in Ghana
Explores the effect of malnutrition on school enrollment and extent of schooling. In many developing countries, less than half of all primary school students have enrolled by age six, and many do not enroll until age eight or nine. This paper uses data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey to explore this phenomenon. The authors develop a number of explanations for delayed primary school enrollment in Ghana, but their main focus is on nutrition. They find that infant and child malnutrition has a major impact on the age at which children enroll in school. They argue that chronically malnourished children tend to be kept out of school by their parents because they perform poorly and the benef...
Monopoly Power and Distribution in Fragmented Markets
Evidence from Pakistan's Punjab indicates that monopoly power in the market for groundwater (irrigation water extracted using private tubewells) results in a substantial resource misallocation. But despite this substantial misallocation of groundwater, a welfare analysis shows that monopoly pricing of groundwater has limited effects on equity and efficiency. Policies aimed at eliminating monopoly pricing would do little to help the poorest farmers.
Environmental Determinants of Child Mortality in Rural China
Jacoby and Wang use a competing risk model to analyze environmental determinants of child mortality using the 1992 China National Health Survey, which collects information on cause of death. Their primary question is whether taking into account of cause of death using a competing risk model, compared with a simple model of all causes of mortality, affects conclusions about the effectiveness of policy interventions. There are two potential analytical advantages in using cause of death information: (1) obtaining more accurate estimates and (2) validating causal relationships. Although the authors do not find significant differences between estimates obtained from the competing risk model and t...
