Institutions and Policies for Pro‐poor Agricultural Growth

Global experience with pro‐poor growth and empirical work spanning India, Malawi and Zimbabwe demonstrates the importance of agricultural growth for poverty reduction in poor rural areas, while also pointing to the need for complementary non‐farm sector growth. Theoretical arguments, historical evidence and livelihoods modelling in poor medium‐potential rural economies suggest that, contrary to thinking dominating much of current development policy, subsidies to relieve critical seasonal credit and cash restraints and reduce market and input supply uncertainties need to help in ‘kick‐starting’ agricultural markets if increased smallholder productivity in food‐grains is to drive rural non‐farm growth. Establishing the base conditions for these to work, designing and implementing them to be effective, and then phasing them out are major challenges facing policymakers.     

Collective Labor Supply,Taxes, and Intrahousehold Allocation: An Empirical Approach

ABSTRACT

Most empirical studies of the impact of labor income taxation on the labor supply behavior of households use a unitary modeling approach. In this article, we empirically analyze income taxation and the choice of working hours by combining the collective approach for household behavior and the discrete hours choice framework with fixed costs of work. We identify the sharing rule parameters with data on working hours of both the husband and the wife within a couple. Parameter estimates are used to evaluate various model outcomes, like the wage elasticities of labor supply and the impacts of wage changes on the intrahousehold allocation of income. We also simulate the consequences of a policy change in the tax system. We find that the collective model has different empirical outcomes of income sharing than a restricted model that imposes income pooling. In particular, a specification with income pooling fails to capture asymmetries in the income sharing across spouses. These differences in outcomes have consequences for the evaluation of policy changes in the tax system and shed light on the effectiveness of certain policies.     

On level and powee of anderson and hauck's peocedure for testing equivalence in compative bioavailability

The paper refers to a new procedure of Anderson and Hauck for the well-known problem of deciding whether two means of normal distributions with common but unknown variance differ within an admissible range. Analytical expressions for level and power of this method are derived and some numerical examples are given. A bound for the difference between real and no¬minal level is obtained which does not involve the variance.     

On lachin'S formulae for sample sizes of survival tests

Lachin [1981] and Lachin and Foulkes [1986] consider two groups of identically independently exponentially distributed random variables and four models of data sampling. The test problem they treat is to decide whether the two distributions are identical (null-hypothesis H⁰) or not (alternative hypothesis H¹). Basing the test on maximum-likelihood estimators and their asymptotic normal densities they obtain formulae for the group sizes necessary to yield asymptotic tests with guaranteed power under a prescribed level for specified hypotheses. It is intuitively reasonable to expect the sizes decrease the more the hypotheses differ. It the distance betwen H⁰ and H¹ is measured by the difference of the exponential parameters this assumption time or the deviation of the exponential parameter ratio from unity is the measure larger distances between the hypotheses do not necessarily lead to smaller sample sizes.     

Formulating corporate objectives and strategies

In this article Hans G. Krijnen sets out to illustrate part of the strategic policy-making of a firm. he uses three economic basic-aims and three groups of strategies. The basic-aims have been linked with the strategies which, in the author's opinion, contribute most towards the realisation of meaningful goals. He believes it should be possible to deduce some broad guidelines from the relationships mentioned, to be able to make a choice among a number of new product–market combinations.     

Generalized stochastic dominance and bad outcome aversion

Incomplete preferences over lotteries on a finite set of alternatives satisfying, besides independence and continuity, a property called bad outcome aversion are considered. These preferences are characterized in terms of their specific multi-expected utility representations (cf. Dubra et al., J Econ Theory, 115:118–133, 2004), and can be seen as generalized stochastic dominance preferences.     

Is Land Grabbing Always What It Is Supposed to Be? Large‐scale Land Investments in sub‐Saharan Africa

The term ‘land grabbing’ has recently attracted widespread, and sometimes agitated, attention, and its literature grows at exponential speed. At the same time, the concept remains little understood concerning both its meaning, magnitude and consequences and even who the grabbers are. Different attempts to define land grabbing appear to reflect ideological lenses and pre‐defined positions rather than a genuine ambition to find out what is actually going on. Based on a comprehensive literature review, this article aims at presenting a more nuanced understanding of this disputed topic and therefore a less biased account of what land‐grabbing and/or private investments in land represent.     

The Influence of Divorcing Mothers' Demeanor on Custody Evaluators' Assessment of Their Domestic Violence Allegations

A gap exists between empirical evidence demonstrating the risks posed by domestic violence (DV) and the weight that evidence is given by custody evaluators. This gap may result from common beliefs about DV that diminish or deny its seriousness, which include that mothers often make false allegations to gain advantage and that DV and high conflict are synonymous and do not require differential approaches. Using a multiple segment factorial vignette design, we systematically assessed how these beliefs influenced custody evaluators' (N = 603) recommendations and judgments of the believability of allegations. Mother's demeanor (i.e., hostile vs. pleasant) was the most consistent predictor of evaluators' recommendations and judgments of credibility. Findings have implications for providing research-based education and training for evaluators.     

Implementation of maximin efficient designs in dose‐finding studies

This paper considers the maximin approach for designing clinical studies. A maximin efficient design maximizes the smallest efficiency when compared with a standard design, as the parameters vary in a specified subset of the parameter space. To specify this subset of parameters in a real situation, a four‐step procedure using elicitation based on expert opinions is proposed. Further, we describe why and how we extend the initially chosen subset of parameters to a much larger set in our procedure. By this procedure, the maximin approach becomes feasible for dose‐finding studies. Maximin efficient designs have shown to be numerically difficult to construct. However, a new algorithm, the H‐algorithm, considerably simplifies the construction of these designs. We exemplify the maximin efficient approach by considering a sigmoid Emax model describing a dose–response relationship and compare inferential precision with that obtained when using a uniform design. The design obtained is shown to be at least 15% more efficient than the uniform design. © 2014 The Authors. Pharmaceutical Statistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.