Use Of Cross-section Data Research Articles

Assessing the Performance and Participation among Young Male and Female Entrepreneurs in Agribusiness: A Case Study of the Rice and Maize Subsectors in Cameroon

The role played by youth in agriculture cannot be overemphasized, while agribusinesses are important generators of employment and income worldwide. Improving the sustainability of food value chains can benefit millions of rural poor people living in developing countries, especially young women. Despite policies and programs aimed at encouraging agricultural entrepreneurs, they are still facing challenges such as high-cost agrochemicals, limited access to credit, price volatility, etc. which seriously affect their capacity to remain in the sector. This study was undertaken to assess the performance and participation of young male and female entrepreneurs. This study made use of cross-section data from a survey conducted on 1019 young agricultural entrepreneurs in Cameroon. The data were analyzed using gross margin, student t-test, and logistic regression. Our study contributes to the literature by showing that young women agribusiness entrepreneurs are as competitive as their male counterparts and that the opportunities for young women in agriculture are good. Incentives such as single-digit interest rates and no collateral security should be directed to young women to receive more credit for purchasing agrochemicals and improved varieties of seed. Furthermore, a price control policy should be set up throughout the year to enable young women earn as their young men counterparts to enable them remain in production and marketing activities.

INCOME, EDUCATION AND AGE EFFECTS ON MEAT AND FISH DEMAND IN TUNISIA

Socio-economic and demographic variables can have a deep impact of the demand for food. The objective of this work is to analyze how these variables can affect the demand for meat and fish for Tunisian consumers. This study covers two important aspects: the nonimposition of, a priori, a functional form and the use of cross-section data including demographic and socioeconomic variables. Relations among meat and fish through cross price elasticities can be substitutions or complementary. The consumption of these products patterns by age, level of income and level of education. This consumption is relatively different as regards to the economic factors (food expenditure and price). Elasticities expenditure for beef and mutton increases with age whereas elasticities expenditure for chicken and fish decrease with age. Age is a major factor in consuming meat and fish as it integrates health dimension. These results imply that changes in economic and demographic factors and increasing health awareness have influenced the changes in meat and fish demand in Tunisia.

The effect of diabetes complications on health-related quality of life: estimating the bias due to unobserved heterogeneity using the UKPDS

The impact of six diabetes related complications: myocardial infarction, ischemic heart disease, stroke, heart failure and amputation on quality of life is studied based on EQ-5D data on 3,380 patients collected in the UKPDS Post Trial Monitoring Study over the period 1997-2007. Analysts tend to resort to cross-section data to estimate the determinants of quality of life, as these are easier and less expensive to collect. The use of cross-section data may come at a cost in terms of biased estimators due to unobserved heterogeneity that can be addresses by the use of panel data. The importance of non response (e.g. sample selection) is tested, and cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches to study effects on QoL are compared. The variation in utility across patients in our data is more than twice that observed within a patient over-time and, this heterogeneity is often correlated with the likelihood of having complications, making the results of pooled estimations biased. Cross-sectional analysis in our sample over-estimates the effects of complications on utility. We address this problem by using fixed effects (FE). The bulk of the variation in the unexplained utility appears to be largely determined by time-invariant differences across patients’ characteristics: gender, race, socio economic status and habits. We therefore link panel data methods with cross sectional analysis in a two-stage analysis, using the fixed effects as the dependent variable in the second stage regression to examine the extent to which certain time-invariant patient characteristics and variables recorded only at baseline in the trial, are related to patients’ utility score. The results highlight the importance of studying quality of life changes over time to distinguish between time invariant correlates of wellbeing and the effect of diabetes complications.

How effective is “lifetime health cover” in raising private health insurance coverage in Australia? An assessment using regression discontinuity

The Australian government introduced three major private health insurance policy initiatives in recent years. These are, in chronological order, (i) the Private Health Insurance Incentives Scheme (PHIIS), which imposes a tax levy on high-income earners who do not have private health insurance and provides a means-tested subsidy schedule for low-income earners who purchase PHI; (ii) a 30% premium rebate for all private health insurance policies to replace the means-tested component under PHIIS; and (iii) lifetime health cover, which permits a limited form of age-related risk rating by insurance funds. Together, these policy changes have been effective in encouraging the uptake of PHI; the percentage of the population covered by PHI rose from 31% in 1999 to 45% at the end of 2001. The difficult issue, however, is in disentangling the effects of the three policy changes, given that they were introduced in quick succession. This article attempts to evaluate the effect of lifetime health cover using a regression discontinuity design, an approach that makes use of cross-section data that allows the effect of lifetime health cover to be isolated via local regression. The results suggest that the importance of lifetime health cover appears to be grossly over-rated in previous studies. Our estimates indicate that it accounts for roughly 22–32% of the combined effects of all the policy initiatives introduced in the late 1990s. While these figures suggest that its effect is clearly significant, it is nonetheless nowhere near the effect often associated with lifetime health cover.

Cross-Section Data, Disequilibrium Situations and Estimated Coefficients: Evidence from Car Ownership Demand

The objective of this paper is to analyse to what extent the use of cross-section data will distort the estimated elasticities for car ownership demand when the observed variables do not correspond to a state equilibrium for some individuals in the sample. Our proposal consists of approximating the equilibrium values of the observed variables by constructing a pseudo-panel data set which entails averaging individuals observed at different points of time into cohorts. The results show that individual and aggregate data lead to almost the same value for income elasticity, whereas with respect to working adult elasticity the similarity is less pronounced.

Evaluating Educational Output: An Estimation Method Based on Cross-Section Data

One of the ways to evaluate educational output rests on its consideration as an investment. A part of the returns can be identified as the differential earnings obtained by individuals with a higher education level. The most common information on the earnings obtained by individuals comes in the form of cross-section data.These must be transformed in order to obtain a life-cycle earnings series from which the effects of education must be isolated. This paper defines a model adapted to the use of cross-section data, which allows us to both rank and respond to the different information problems that successively appear, as well as to propose a classification for the adjustments by which the earnings must be corrected, on the basis of the reasons that justify such adjustments and their order of application.The empirical application of the methodology is directed towards estimating the value of university education in Spain on the basis of the criteria discussed earlier in the paper.

On Aggregation of Micro-Relations : a Research Program

The message of this presentation is: by taking into account heterogeneity of the population in modelling macroeconomic behavioral relations one can make use of cross-section data in addition to aggregate time series data. To rely on this richer data set - i.e., time series of cross-section data - will improve the empirical content of macro-modelling.

The contribution of agriculture to economic growth: Some empirical evidence

This paper undertakes a statistical analysis of the significance of the contribution of agriculture to economic growth by the use of cross-section data. The major finding of the paper is that agricultural growth, while strongly linked to industrial growth over the development process, contributes to overall economic growth through its favorable impact on total factor productivity. In fostering productivity, the role of agriculture seems to be no less important than that of export performance. This empirical evidence reinforces the argument that agriculture and rural development should be given priority and be properly supported in an overall development strategy.

The Use of Cross-Section Data to Characterize Macro Functions

Abstract This article investigates the use of individual cross-section data to describe macro functions. Necessary and sufficient conditions (denoted by AS) are found for ordinary least squares (OLS) slope coefficients from a cross section to consistently estimate the first derivatives of the macro function. AS embodies both sets of aggregation assumptions known; linear aggregation and sufficient statistics, and thus represents generalized aggregation conditions. A methodology is given for estimating second-order derivatives of the macro function from cross-section data for distributions of the exponential family, which extends to higher-order derivatives. Finally, a general test of linear aggregation schemes is presented.

The Use of Cross-Section Data to Characterize Macro Functions

The Use of Cross-Section Data to Characterize Macro Functions

A computable prototype model of economic development

Economic development models need to advance beyond the two-gap type capital-output models of growth. This paper presents a prototype model of economic development where development is defined more broadly than aggregative output growth in terms of four objectives, namely, income, consumption, distribution, and employment. It is in keeping with the basic needs approach recently developed by the World Bank and other international organizations. The model formulation is based on the dualistic theory of capital formation and structural change. The specification is on the supply side. A novel aspect of the model is that it incorporates the role of education, health, and nutrition in economic development. Further it makes use of cross section data, which is unusual in model building. The model is put to illustrative use to generate dynamic policy multipliers of education and health expenditure. The results do not support the Malthusian fears that increased health expenditure would cause massive unemployment and reduce the standard of living in LDCs.

The Impact of Experience on Kibbutz Farming

T is an accepted proposition that there is a positive association between efficiency and experience in production. Yet, until quite recently, only industrial engineers tried to estimate and evaluate the contribution of experience to productivity, while economists have on the whole neglected this aspect of production. The growing interest in growth and the search for factors which can help to explain quantitatively the growth of production over and above the growth of the conventionally identified inputs have led economists to reconsider the problem. Arrow's pioneering article on the subject suggested that learning, which may be identified with cumulated experience, contributes to the growth of productivity.' In contrast to the engineer's approach, which usually concentrates on the effect of experience on efficiency in specific processes, the economist's approach is more general. Learning is not exclusively attributed to the individuals who make up a firm's labor force or to specific processes, though both are considered to be integral elements of the process. Rather, it is ascribed to the production unit as a multidimensional entity. It is therefore the modus operandi of the firm in each of its many facets entrepreneurial ability, technical expertise, the know-how of its labor force, layout, buying and selling, human relations, lines of command, all of them subject to continuous change which is the best testing ground of the empirical significance of the learning hypothesis. Since the acquisition of experience requires time, time or a proxy for it, such as cumulated investment and cumulated output, must obviously appear as an explicit variable in an empirical test of the hypothesis. Productionfunction analysis based on time series is therefore an obvious way of studying the quantitative effect of learning. Arrow's reference to the Swedish Horndal firm is a case in point.2 However, it is only rarely possible to find a similar example. This means that although empirical testing of the learning hypothesis can be carried out on the basis of time-series data,3 it strains the theoretical framework of the analysis. The use of cross-section data in estimating the contribution of experience to productivity is therefore an obvious alternative. Since the input and output figures necessarily refer to different firms, this way of tackling the problem is also constrained by the necessity of assuming that, except for random differences, the technologies applied by the firms concerned are identical. The requirement of intra-firm technological identity, or to put it more mildly, the similarityof-technology condition, can, in practice, be approximated under certain conditions. For example, a good approximation to the identical technology constraint can be obtained within a narrowly defined branch and for a group of firms located in a relatively small area, which maintain strong personal contact between managements so as to facilitate the inter-firm flow of information and whose labor forces are similar in background, attitude, and know-how. If the firms in such a group differ in their acquired experiences, and if these differences can be easily measured in terms of simple units, such a group may be a satisfactory testing ground for the learning hypothesis. These conditions obtain in the case of kibbutzim in Israel. They form a tightly organized group of collectives, relatively homogeneous in manpower, which has established effiReceived for publication December 6, 1971. Revision accepted for publication July 10, 1972. * This article makes use of data prepared for a comprehensive study on the Israeli kibbutz economy currently in preparation at the Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, and financed by the Falk Institute and the Twentieth Century Fund. The authors are indebted to Yoram Levin for his help in the preparation of the quantitative skeleton of this article. 1See Kenneth J. Arrow (1962), pp. 155-174. 2Production methods in this firm do not appear to have changed for about 15 years; productivity, however, increased continuously. 'Shifts in the production function cannot be ruled out if the period studied is long. For shorter periods, for which this objection may have less force, the number of observations may be too small to allow for statistically significant results.

Unionism and the Occupational Wage Structure in the United States

THIS PAPER PRESENTS a theory and measurement of the effect of unionism on occupational differentials. One possible theory of union occupational wage policy is sketched in Section 2 and is essentially an exercise in optimal pricing among multiple related markets. Union effects on skilled-semiskilledunskilled differentials are measured with the use of cross-section data in Section 3. Measurements are derived independently of Section 2 and are interesting in their own right. Thus, the reader may interpret them in ways other than is done here, though they tend to be consistent with the central hypotheses of the optimal pricing model. Major substantive results may be summarized: If production labor is divided into skilled or not-skilled categories, unionism has widened differentials, increasing rates of union skilled craftsmen compared with nonunion skilled craftsmen by relatively more than corresponding unionnonunion rates for atl other production workers. Further disaggregation of production labor into skilled craftsmen, semii-skilled operatives and unskilled laborers indicates unionism has probably increased rates of unskilled laborers by at least as much and possibly more than that of skilled craftsmen, confirming a result of several other investigators. However, the unionnonunion differential of unskilled labor is significantly higher than that of semiskilled operatives. The latter effect is quite small, though this group constitutes a high proportion of all production workers and the outcome is that unionism has most likely widened the occupational structure when all three groups are considered together.

Family composition and the labor force activity of American wives

Abstract This is a study of the employment patterns of American wives in relation to the composition of their families. The data are taken from the 1960 United States Census, both from published tabulations and the 1/1000 sample. The population studied is non-Negro, non-farm, married, husband present women who are under the age of sixty. The methods of analysis used include the comparison of employment rates among subpopulations and a dummy variable regression technique. Aspects of family composition studied include age of the youngest child (in single years in order to determine whether there are discontinuities in the rates of employment when youngest children enter school, etc.), number of children in the family, and the presence of other relatives in the family. The paper concludes with a discussion of the meaning of family status differentials in employment including differential preferences for employment, differential fertility experience, and differential demands on the mother’s time. Some discussion of the use of cross section data of this sort to infer life cycle patterns of employment is included.