Vol. 27, No. 1
Milla Nyyssölä, Jukka Pirttilä and Susanna Sandström:
Technology Adoption and Food Security in Subsistence Agriculture – Evidence from a Group-Based Aid Project in Mozambique (pp. 1–33)
Abstract
This paper evaluates the impact of an intervention to improve farming techniques and food security in the Gaza area of rural Mozambique. We examine the impact of a group-based approach to technology adoption in subsistence agriculture, using panel data collected by our research team on over 200 households from treatment and control villages from 2008–10. The intervention was successful in encouraging vulnerable households to participate in farmers’ groups, and the impacts on farming techniques, such as fertilizer use, are significant in the first treatment year. The impact on food security is mixed across indicators but similar in both treatment years and cannot be attributed to whether or not households adopted new technologies.
(JEL: O1, O2)
Jani-Petri Laamanen:
Worker Turnover, Structural Change, and Inter-Regional Migration: Evidence from Finland (pp. 34–55)
Abstract:
I study the effects of regional labour market conditions on inter-regional migration using province-level panel data on bilateral migration flows and disaggregated labour market flows. My results indicate that hires from unemployment and job separations leading to unemployment have sizeable effects on migration. The effects of hires from and separations to other labour market states, while statistically significant, appear smaller. Further, the results suggest that inter-industry and inter-firm shifts in employment are immaterial for migration. Taken together, inter-regional migration is largely affected by regional differences in unemployment and the employment opportunities available for unemployed workers.
(JEL: J61, J63)
Christopher Müller and Enrico Böhme:
The Monopoly Benchmark on Two-Sided Markets (pp. 56–69)
Abstract:
The literature on the effects of market concentration in platform industries or two-sided markets often compares the competitive outcome against a benchmark. This benchmark is either the “joint management” solution in which one decision maker runs all platforms or a “pure” monopoly with just one platform. Literature has not generally discussed which benchmark is the appropriate one, i.e. how many platforms the monopolist will operate. In this paper we show that the optimal number of platforms depends on whether agents multi- or singlehome, whether the network externalities are positive or negative, and in some cases on the properties of the demand functions.
(JEL: D42, D43, K20, L12, L13, L51)