Farm income, population and farmland prices: a relative information approach

This paper uses an entropy-based information approach to determine if farmland values are more closely associated with urban pressure or farm income. The basic question is: how much information on changes in farm real estate values is contained in changes in population versus changes in returns to production agriculture? Results suggest population is informative, but changes in farmland values are more strongly associated with changes in the distribution of returns. However, this relationship is not true for every region nor does it hold over time, as for some regions and time periods changes in population are more informative. Results have policy implications for both equity and efficiency.

Impact of income on nutrient intakes: implications for undernourishment and obesity

The relationship between income and nutrient intake is explored. Nonparametric, panel, and quantile regressions are used. Engle curves for calories, fat, and protein are approximately linear in logs with carbohydrate intakes exhibiting diminishing elasticities as incomes increase. Elasticities range from 0.10 to 0.25, with fat having the highest elasticities. Countries in higher quantiles have lower elasticities than those in lower quantiles. Results predict significant cumulative increases in calorie consumption which are increasingly composed of fats. Though policies aimed at poverty alleviation and economic growth may assuage hunger and malnutrition, they may also exacerbate problems associated with obesity.

Who owned Earls Colne in 1798....or how to squeeze more from the Land Tax

In this important article Richard Hoyle, one of the country’s leading historians of the early modern period, introduces new perspectives on the Land Tax and its use in the analysis of local communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He uses as his case study the parish of Earls Colne in Essex, on which he has already written extensively with Professor Henry French. The article begins with an overview of the tax itself, explaining its history and the procedures for the collection of revenues – including the numerous changes which took place. The sizeable problems confronting any would-be analyst of the data are clearly identified, and Hoyle observes that because of these apparently insoluble difficulties the potential of the tax returns has never been fully realised. He then considers the surviving documentation in The National Archives, providing an accessible introduction to the sources and their arrangement, and describing the particularly important question o f the redemption of the tax by payment of a lump sum. The extent of redemption (in the years around 1800-1804) is discussed. Hoyle draws attention to the potential for linking the tax returns themselves with the redemption certificates (which have never been subjected to historical analysis and thereby proposes new ways of exploiting the evidence of the taxation as a whole. The article then discusses in detail the specific case of Earls Colne, with tabulated data showing the research potential. Topics analysed include the ownership of property ranked by size of payment, and calculations whereby the amount paid may be used to determine the worth of land and the structure of individual estates. The important question of absentee owners is investigated, and there is a very valuable consideration of the potential for looking at portfolio estate ownership, whereby owners held land in varying proportions in a number of parishes. It is suggested that such studies will allow us to be more aware of the entirety of property ownership, which a focus on a single community does not permit. In the concluding paragraph it is argued that using these sources we may see the rise and fall of estates, gain new information on landownership, landholding and farm size, and even approach the challenging topic of the distribution of wealth.

Asymmetric oligopoly and foreign direct investment: implications for host-country tax-setting

We present a duopoly model with heterogeneous firms that vary in cost-efficiency, each of which can choose to serve a foreign market by either exporting or local production. We do so to analyse the effects of a host-country corporate profit tax on both the scale and composition of FDI, and find that: strategic interaction between oligopolistic firms provides for a pattern of FDI that favours cost-inefficiency to the detriment of host-country welfare; and the host-country tax rate can be optimally used to avoid such patterns of FDI and instead promote direct investment by a relatively cost-efficient firm.

Why was urban overcrowding much more severe in Scotland than in the rest of the British Isles? Evidence from the first (1904) official household expenditure survey

This article presents an analysis of British urban working-class housing conditions in 1904, using a rediscovered survey. We investigate overcrowding and find major regional differences. Scottish households in the survey were more overcrowded despite being less poor. Investigating the causes of this overcrowding, we find little support for supply-side theories or for the idea that the Scottish households in our survey experienced particularly great variations in income, causing them to commit to overly modest accommodation. We present evidence that is consistent with idea that particularly tough Scottish tenancy and local tax laws caused excess overcrowding. We also provide evidence that Scottish workers had a relatively high preference for food, rather than housing, expenditure, which can be at least partly attributed to their inheritance of more communal patterns of urban living.

Income multiples and mortgage repossession in the UK

This paper presents the findings of the study that examines how income multiples for mortgage loan associates with home repossession using the data of the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML). It employs a statistical measure for improving regression efficiency with conditioning information in the form of lagged instrument to unravel the pattern of association evident from the data. Based on the data, the study investigates what level of income multiples is optimum – that is the income multiple that minimises home repossession. A sensitivity analysis was undertaken to show how home repossession responds to changes in income multiples. For each of the analytical tasks, the study compares the aggregate market, first-time-buyers, and home movers.

The trees and the bees: using enforcement and income projects to protect forests and rural livelihoods through spatial joint production

Forest managers in developing countries enforce extraction restrictions to limit forest degradation. In response, villagers may displace some of their extraction to other forests, which generates “leakage” of degradation. Managers also implement poverty alleviation projects to compensate for lost resource access or to induce conservation. We develop a model of spatial joint production of bees and fuelwood that is based on forest-compatible projects such as beekeeping in Thailand, Tanzania, and Mexico. We demonstrate that managers can better determine the amount and pattern of degradation by choosing the location of both enforcement and the forest-based activity.

Applications of behavioural economics to tax evasion

The paper reviews recent models that have applied the techniques of behavioural economics to the analysis of the tax compliance choice of an individual taxpayer. The construction of these models is motivated by the failure of the Yitzhaki version of the Allingham–Sandmo model to predict correctly the proportion of taxpayers who will evade and the effect of an increase in the tax rate upon the chosen level of evasion. Recent approaches have applied non-expected utility theory to the compliance decision and have addressed social interaction. The models we describe are able to match the observed extent of evasion and correctly predict the tax effect but do not have the parsimony or precision of the Yitzhaki model.

Social networks and occupational choice: the endogenous formation of attitudes and beliefs about tax compliance

The paper analyses the emergence of group-specific attitudes and beliefs about tax compliance when individuals interact in a social network. It develops a model in which taxpayers possess a range of individual characteristics – including attitude to risk, potential for success in self-employment, and the weight attached to the social custom for honesty – and make an occupational choice based on these characteristics. Occupations differ in the possibility for evading tax. The social network determines which taxpayers are linked, and information about auditing and compliance is transmitted at meetings between linked taxpayers. Using agent-based simulations, the analysis demonstrates how attitudes and beliefs endogenously emerge that differ across sub-groups of the population. Compliance behaviour is different across occupational groups, and this is reinforced by the development of group-specific attitudes and beliefs. Taxpayers self-select into occupations according to the degree of risk aversion, the subjective probability of audit is sustained above the objective probability, and the weight attached to the social custom differs across occupations. These factors combine to lead to compliance levels that differ across occupations.