Germany has committed itself to reducing its carbon emissions by 25 percent in 2005 as compared to 1990 emission levels. To achieve this goal, the government has recently launched an environmental tax reform which entails a continuous increase in energy taxes in conjunction with a...

This paper identifies a new reason for giving preferences to the disadvantaged using a model of contests. There are two forces at work: the effort effect working against giving preferences and the selection effect working for them. When education is costly and easy to obtain (as in the U.S.),...

The causes and consequences of child labour are examined theoretically and empirically within a household decision framework, with endogenous fertility and mortality. The data come from a nationally representative survey of Indian rural households. The complex interactions uncovered by the...

A service provider firm in an outsourcing relationship is distinct from a typical firm because it is not a stand alone organization and fits somewhere in between the value chain of its client's business. Thus, conventional factors like wages, capital, rent, energy consumption cannot...

We model the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic but paternalistic parents benefit from having married sons live with them. By choosing uneducated...

Engel's verbal formulation of his Law expresses a "negativ stochastic association" of the bivariate distribution of income and food share across the population. Among the many different definitions of association four are chosen: Kendall's tau, negative quadrant dependence, stochastically...

This paper examines consumer preferences for the attributes of alternative sources of water supply in Chennai, based on a household survey where respondents were given the description of a set of options. Their decision to choose one of the options is examined using discrete choice models....

[Background] The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development made the first call for the creation of sustainability indicators to measure the changes in the social, economic, political, and physical factors of sustainability. Different concepts of carbon (Rees, 1992) and water...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...

The vast majority of firms in developing economies are micro and small enterprises owned by families whose members also provide the labour to the units. Often, they fail to grow in size even with the relaxation of credit constraints. In this paper, we show that frictions in the labour market...