Replaced with revised version of paper Jan. 11, 2012

The income inequality implications of land reform are examined for the case of Georgia using regression-based inequality decomposition techniques. An egalitarian land redistribution is likely to equalize per-capita income among farm households, implying that continuing the land reform process in...

This paper explores the relationship between income distribution, prices, production efficiency and aggregate output in a decentralized search economy. We show that income distribution determines how competitive the market is, and thereby affects production efficiency and aggregate output. It is...

Democracy tends to cultivate short-sighted politicians, for whom the horizon extends more or less till next election. This feature gives rise to a discrepancy between the time rate of discount of a country’s polity and the interest rates at which the country borrows. I show how this...

In Israel, rural communities are those with up to 2000 residents, and rural areas include only rural communities. This paper explores the dependence of rural incomes on nearby urban areas. This dependence is mostly implied by rural-to-urban or urban-to-rural selective migration (or both)....

This paper deals with structural changes that are observed in farm sectors in many developed economies: the increase in farm size and in farm specialization. Using panel data on Israeli farm communities for the years 1992-2001, we estimate a system of simultaneous equations in which these...

We evaluate relationships among time allocation decisions for farm operators and their spouses and endogenous farm structure. We consider two aspects of farm structure{ farm scale, represented by acreage operated and harvested, and farm scope, which is represented by an index of diversification....