The Great Leap Forward (GLF) disaster, characterized by a collapse of grain output, and the associated famine in China between 1959 and 1961, can be attributed to a systemic failure in central planning. Encouraged by unrealistic expectations for agricultural productivity gains from...

Farm households in modern environments engage in multiple productive activities. In this paper we formulate and estimate a profit maximization model in which human capital enhances earnings through both activity-specific effects and across-activity factor allocation. Our purpose is to decompose...

The most popular survey method used in contingent valuations asks "open-ended" dichotomous choice questions. This method generates grouped or interval-censored data on respondents' willingness to pay. This paper specifies the willingness to pay distribution using the proportional hazard...

This paper proposes a semiparametric willingness to pay distribution and discusses several aspects of statistical inference with dichotomous choice contingent valuation data. We study likelihood-based estimation of the model parameters with and without controlling for unobserved heterogeneity,...

In the econometric analysis of labor market transitions, the data generating process is often specified as a continuous-time semi-Markovian process with a finite state space. With typically short panel data, analysts have long been concerned with the initial conditions problem--- a complication...