Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Milk In The Data: Food Security Impacts From A Livestock Field Experiment In Zambia, Margaret Jodlowski, Alex Winter-Nelson, Kathy Baylis, Peter Goldsmith

Kathy Baylis

Smallholder livestock ownership has potential to enhance food security by raising incomes of the poor and by increasing the availability of nutrient-dense foods. This paper exploits the staggered rollout of livestock distribution by Heifer International in Zambia to identify the effects of livestock using statistically similar treatment and control groups in a balanced panel of households. Results indicate that livestock ownership improves dietary diversity through both direct consumption of animal products produced on farm and through increased consumption expenditures. Further results indicate that expanded livestock ownership alters the local food economy to influence food consumption by households lacking farm animals.

Farmers' Risk Preferences And Pesticide Use Decisions: Evidence From Field Experiments In China, Kathy Baylis, Yazhen Gong, Robert Kozak, Gary Bull

Kathy Baylis

Can Peers Improve Agricultural Revenue?, Tisorn Songsermsawas, Kathy Baylis, Ashwini Chhatre, Hope Michelson

Kathy Baylis

Crop revenues vary greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood. Using a household survey from India, we estimate peer effects on cash crop revenue. Results show that 60% of farmers' revenue can be explained by peers. Peer effects in input expenditure and land allocation cannot fully explain the variation in revenue, implying peers may also associate with management, negotiation and marketing strategies. Although caste-based networks are important, their effect is substantially smaller than that of self-reported peers. Peer effects are strongest for agricultural peers and in the cultivation of a new crop.

The Political Economy Of Export Restrictions: The Case Of Vietnam And India, Kathy Baylis, Murray E. Fulton, Travis Reynolds

Kathy Baylis

No abstract provided.

Trade-Facilitated Technology Spillovers In Energy Productivity Convergence Processes Across Eu Countries, Kathy Baylis, Peter Mulder

Kathy Baylis

This empirical paper tests for trade-facilitated spillovers in the convergence of energy productivity across 16 European Union (EU) countries from 1995 to 2005. One might anticipate that by inducing specialization, trade limits the potential for convergence in energy productivity. Conversely, by inducing competition and knowledge diffusion, trade may spur sectors to greater energy productivity. Unlike most previous work on convergence, we explain productivity dynamics from cross-country interactions at a detailed sector level and apply a spatial panel data approach to explicitly account for trade-flow related spatial effects in the convergence analysis. Our study confirms the existence of convergence in manufacturing …

How Effective Are Biodiversity Conservation Payments In Mexico?, Sebastien Costedoat, Esteve Corbera, Driss Ezzine De Blas, Jordi Honey-Roses, Kathy Baylis, Miguel Angel Catillo-Santiago

Kathy Baylis

Friends Or Traders? Do Social Networks Explain The Use Of Market Mechanisms By Farmers In India?, Tisorn Songsermsawas, Kathy Baylis, Ashwini Chhatre, Hope Michelson, Satya Prasanna

Kathy Baylis

A farmer's long-term relationship with a trader can improve access to market information, but removes the farmer's option to sell to other traders in any specific year. Social networks could ace either as substitutes to traders, helping disseminate market information and fostering economies of scale, or as complements, where farmers help build relationships between their trader and their peers. Using a household survey from India, we investigate whether and how social networks are associated with a farmer's choice to enter into a long-term relationship with a trader. We find that peers directly affect this choice. Further, we find that network …

Mainstreaming Impact Evaluation In Nature Conservation, Kathy Baylis, Jordi Honey-Roses, Jan Boerner, Esteve Corbera, Driss Ezzine-De-Blas, Paul Ferraro, Renaud Lapeyre, Martin Persson, Alex Pfaff, Sven Wunder

Kathy Baylis

Evaluating Heterogeneous Conservation Effects Of Forest Protection In Indonesia, Payal Shah, Kathy Baylis

Kathy Baylis

Do Peer Effects Influence The Household Bargain? Evidence From Children's Food Consumption In India, Eeshani Kandpal, Kathy Baylis

Kathy Baylis

This paper uses primary data on women's social networks to estimate causal peer effects in the household bargain. Using an extension of a spatial weighting technique that relies of friends-of-friends to identify peer effects, we examine how a woman's friend's participation in an education program affects her physical mobility, access to outside employment, and probability of working outside the household, as well as her children's food consumption. Results show that peer effects have a significant impact on all proxies of female bargaining power. We decompose the overall peer effects into those on participants and non-participants, and focus on the effects …

Spatial Environmental And Natural Resource Economics, Amy Ando, Kathy Baylis

Kathy Baylis

Environmental and natural resource economics has long wrestled with spatial elements of human behavior, biophysical systems, and policy design. The treatment of space by academic environmental economists has evolved in important ways over time, moving from simple distance measures to more complex models of spatial processes. This chapter presents knowledge developed in several areas of research in spatial environmental and natural resource economics. First, it discusses the role played by spatial heterogeneity in designing optimal land conservation policies and efficient incentive policies to control pollution. Second, it describes the roles space plays in non-market valuation techniques, especially the hedonic and …

Negative Leakage, Kathy Baylis, Don Fullerton, Daniel H. Karney

Kathy Baylis

Our analytical general equilibrium model solves for effects of a small increase in carbon tax on leakage - the increase in emissions elsewhere. Identical consumers buy two goods using income from endowments that are mobile between sectors. Usually an increase in one sector's tax raises output price, so consumption shifts to the other good, causing positive leakage. Here, we find a new negative effect not recognized in existing literature: the taxes sector substitutes away from carbon into clean inputs, so it may absorb resources, shrink the other sector and reduce their emissions. This "abatement resource effect" could offset some or …

Effects Of Export Restrictions On Domestic Market Efficiency: The Case Of India’S Rice And Wheat Export Ban, Kathy Baylis, Maria Christina Jolejole-Foreman, Mindy Mallory

Kathy Baylis

The use of export restrictions has substantially increased in recent years. While a number of papers show how these restrictions have increased world commodity prices, in this paper, we empirically estimate how one country’s export restrictions affected the efficiency of their domestic market. We use a threshold cointegration model to estimate the integration between selected wheat and rice markets in India before and during the export bans and test whether those bans exacerbated the price effects of domestic production shocks. We find that before the ban, the majority of port markets for rice and wheat are integrated with the world …

Leakage, Welfare And Cost-Effectiveness Of Carbon Policy, Kathy Baylis, Don Fullerton, Daniel Karney

Kathy Baylis

We extend the model of Fullerton, Baylis, and Karney (2012 working paper) to explore cost-effectiveness of unilateral climate policy in the presence of leakage. We ignore the welfare gain from reducing greenhouse gas emissions and focus on the welfare cost of the emissions tax or permit scheme. Whereas that prior paper solves for changes in emissions quantities and finds that leakage maybe negative, we show here that all cases with negative leakage in that model are cases where a unilateral carbon tax results in a welfare loss. With positive leakage, however, a unilateral policy can improve welfare.

Spread And Backwash Effects For Non-Metropolitan Communities In The U.S., Joanna Ganning, Kathy Baylis, Bumsoo Lee

Kathy Baylis

Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on non-metropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 non-metropolitan communities in the United States from 2000-2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to non-metropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA influences growth. We compare three methods of weighting cities’ influence: nearest city only, inverse-distance and relative commuting flow to multiple cities. We find the inverse-distance approach provides slightly more reliable and theoretically supportable results than the traditional nearest city approach.

Empowering Women Through Education And Influence: An Evaluation Of The Indian Mahila Samakhya Program, Eeshani Kandpal, Kathy Baylis, Mary Arends-Kuenning

Kathy Baylis

Mahila Samakhya is an innovative Indian program that attempts to harness local peer networks to change social norms and empower women. While most studies focus on programs that target individuals, only a small number of papers evaluate community-level interventions. This article analyses the effect of this program on women's empowerment outcomes. We attempt to disentangle the mechanisms of the program, separately considering its eff#11;ect on women who work and those who do not work, where the program aff#11;ects the latter group solely through their reservation wage. We also consider the program's e#11;ffect on non-participants, to observe whether there are spillover …

Bridging Vs. Bonding Social Capital And The Management Of Common Pool Resources, Kathy Baylis, Yazhen Gong, Shun Wang

Kathy Baylis

Social capital can facilitate community governance, but not all social capital is alike. We distinguish bonding social capital (within a village) from bridging social capital (between villages), and we compare their effects on the management of a common pool resource. We develop a theoretical model and show that bonding social capital can improve common pool resource management, while the effect of bridging social capital is mixed. We test these findings using primary data from Yunnan, China on social capital and firewood collection on communal lands. We find that bonding social capital decreases the consumption of the common pool resource, and …

The Food Corporation Of India And The Public Distribution System: Impacts On Market Integration In Wheat, Rice, And Pearl Millet, Mindy Mallory, Kathy Baylis

Kathy Baylis

This paper examines the spatial integration of major staple commodity markets in India. We consider wheat, rice and pearl millet markets, two of which are highly regulated (wheat and rice) and one that is less regulated (pearl millet). Our data come from the states of Bihar, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal, states that produce a large share of India’s cereal grains. Access to food remains an important issue for India as it develops. Because of this, the Indian government regulates the markets for staple foods heavily, requiring almost all grain be marketed through government licensed mandis. The government enforces …

Expanding Horizons: Can Women’S Support Groups Diversify Peer Networks In Rural India?, Eeshani Kandpal, Kathy Baylis

Kathy Baylis

Peer networks in traditional societies may be homogenous and stratified by income or social hierarchy, therefore reinforcing social norms. Conservative social norms will reinforce current bargaining power, which is often skewed to the male in the household. Diversifying networks may improve female bargaining power of those women in the network by allowing them to connect with role models, facilitating information sharing with women who have a different range of experiences, or challenge the social norms in which they usually find themselves. We ask whether Mahila Samakhya, a women's empowerment program, was able to diversity social networks of women in the …

Spatial Analysis Of Illinois Agricultural Cash Rents, Shannon Woodard, Nicholas Paulson, Kathy Baylis, Joshua Woodard

Kathy Baylis

During the summer of 2008, corn futures prices rose 119.8% compared to the previous year. The resulting nominal prices were the highest in history. Anecdotal evidence implied that much of these benefits accrued to land owners through increased land values and cash rent levels. In this article, we use unique farm-level data and novel spatial econometric tools to determine how farmland rents are affected by changes in commodity prices and government payment levels. Contrary to predictions from the Ricardian rent model, we find that tenant farmers are able to capture the vast majority of price increases and a large fraction …

Something Fishy In Seafood Trade? The Relationship Between Tariff And Non-Tariff Barriers, Kathy Baylis, Lia Nogueira, Kathryn Pace

Kathy Baylis

As importing countries honor WTO commitments and lower tariff rates, they may be replacing traditional tariff barriers with non-tariff barriers. Recent literature has found that the implementation of food safety standards, specifically the use of import notifications and rejections, has acted as a significant barrier to trade in both the EU and the US. This article estimates the relation between declining tariff rates and the use of non-tariff barriers, measured by a count of EU seafood import notifications. We divide the motives for the use of import notifications into risk and protectionism. The results show that while non-tariff barriers are …

The Distributional Effects Of Nafta In Mexico, Kathy Baylis, Rafael Garduno-Rivera, Gianfranco Piras

Kathy Baylis

This paper studies the regional distribution of benefits from trade in Mexico after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Specifically, we ask whether or not NAFTA increased the concentration of economic activity in Mexico. Unlike previous work which uses state-level data, we identify the effect of NAFTA on economic activity at the municipal level allowing us to observe detailed growth patterns across space. To explicitly identify the effect of the trade agreement, we contrast changes in economic activity in regions and sectors more and less likely to be affected by trade. Given the spatial nature of these data, we …

Policy Risk In The Canadian Dairy Industry, Lia Nogueira, Richard Barichello, Kathy Baylis, Hayley Chouinard

Kathy Baylis

Canadian dairy farmers purchase a marketing quota through the Provincial Marketing Boards to sell milk in Canada. That quota captures rents created by regulations and is subject to policy risk. We define policy risk as the farmers' expectation that quota rents will decline or disappear over time. We calculate the effect of perceived policy risk to determine whether the Uruguay Round Agreement affected the amount of protection given to farmers. Calculated policy risk ranged from 14-29%. Policy risk increased in the years leading up to the Uruguay Round Agreement, but decreased after the WTO was established and remains at a …

Potential For Carbon Offsets From Anaerobic Digesters In Livestock Production, Kathy Baylis, Nicholas Paulson

Kathy Baylis

Fast-Food Consumption And The Ban On Advertising Targeting Children: The Quebec Experience, Tirtha Dhar, Kathy Baylis

Kathy Baylis

Amid growing concerns about childhood obesity and the associated health risks, several countries are considering banning fast-food advertising targeting children. In this paper we study the effect of such a ban in the Canadian province of Quebec. Using household expenditure survey data from 1984 to 1992, we examine whether expenditure on fast food is lower in those groups affected by the ban than in those who are not. We use a novel triple difference-in-difference methodology by appropriately defining treatment and control groups and find that the ban’s effectiveness is due not to the decrease in fast-food expenditures per week but …

Do Our Conservation Programs Work? A Spatially Explicit Estimate Of Avoided Forest Loss, Jordi Honey-Roses, Kathy Baylis, Maria Isabel Ramirez

Kathy Baylis

Food Import Refusals: Evidence From The European Union, Kathy Baylis, Lia Nogueira, Kathryn Pace

Kathy Baylis

No abstract provided.

Participation In The First Cdm Project: The Role Of Property Rights, Social Capital And Contractual Rules, Yazhen Gong, Gary Bull, Kathy Baylis

Kathy Baylis

Paying developing countries for carbon sequestration is seen as a vital component of climate change mitigation. If appropriately designed, these payments can also transfer income to poor villagers, which can aid both the long-term sustainability of the carbon sequestered, as well as meeting the goal of poverty reduction. However, to encourage the participation of small-scale producers, a CDM forest project must offer sufficient incentives with minimal costs to participants. Both incentives and costs are embedded in property rights, social capital and contractual rules. In this paper, we ask what factors affect participation in the world’s first CDM project, established in …

What Drives Food Import Refusals?, Kathy Baylis, Andrea Martens, Lia Nogueira

Kathy Baylis

No abstract provided.

Trade Diversion From Tomato Suspension Agreement, Kathy Baylis, Jeffrey M. Perloff

Kathy Baylis

: Trade barriers can cause output to be diverted to other countries and into other products. We study the effect of a voluntary price restraint (VPR) on Mexican tomatoes entering the United States. The diversion caused by the VPR is statistically and economically significant – representing over four-fifths of the direct effects of the trade barrier. When the VPR was binding, Mexico exported more tomatoes to Canada, the United States cut back on exports while Canada increased their exports to the United States. The VPR also diverted fresh tomatoes in Mexico into paste production, which was then exported to the …