No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis applies the 1978 Colombian EH-4 cross-sectional household budget study to two empirical versions of the Modigliani-Ando-Brumberg life cycle consumption model. The first version uses "normal income" as a proxy for life cycle income. Normal income is defined as a weighted average of the mean income of the socioeconomic groups (education, occupation, home-tenure, region) to which an individual belongs. As both the simple linear case and a slightly more complex approach permitting interactions among grouping variables, the marginal propensity to consume from normal income is less than one but greater than the MPC from the proxy for transitory income. The second empirical version derives from a one-parameter intertemporal utility function. In this model consumption depends on expected income in each period and the market interest rate. An individual's expected income i years in the future is defined as the mean income of members of his education/occupation group who are currently i years older. For a given interest rate (r), permanent income is (DIAGRAM, TABLE OR GRAPHIC OMITTED...PLEASE SEE DAI) where Y(,i) is expected income each year and L is the end of the planning horizon. Y('*) is calculated for various interest rates. The "best" interest rate is chosen as the rate which provides the highest adjusted correlation between Y('*) and consumption. For most groups the interest rate chosen is 7.5 percent. For all groups, estimated MPC from Y('*) is close to one and greater than the MPC from transitory income. Hypothesis tests performed on several predictions of the M-A-B do not reject the predictions. If low income individuals are less willing to plan for the future (that is, they have high psychological discount rates or short time horizons) than high income individuals, they should have higher marginal consumption propensities from both permanent and transitory income throughout the life cycle. On the other hand, if all individuals tend to have the same psychological rates but low income persons are less able to borrow against future income due to market imperfections, the predicted MPC's from permanent income depend on relative variation in income across the life cycle and vary by age. For transitory income, young low income individuals will apply any variation in income to current consumption since they are consuming at less than their permanent income level, but the MPC from transitory income should decline with age. Hypothesis tests tend to reject the higher psychological discount rate assumption and favor the market imperfections assumption.

This dissertation is an attempt to measure the economic efficiency of Brazil's manufacturing sector at the two-digit level of aggregation and lower. More specifically, we investigate some of the reasons for the sizeable differences in labor productivity between the manufacturing sectors of the Northeast and the South of Brazil. We investigate how the observed differences in average labor productivity between the two regions could be explained by differences in the capital/labor ratio and economies of scale. The question we ask is: what would the Northeast's level of average labor productivity have been if either this region's capital/labor ratio and/or the average plant size were the same as the South's. One point of time, 1970, is chosen since it is the most recent year for which complete data are available. First, we estimate the effect of capital/labor ratio differences on productivity differences. For this estimation, a production function was specified. The quality of the data and the limited number of observations per sector and branch restricted our choice to the CES production function. Information on the Northeast's relative capital/labor ratio and relative factor prices was sufficient to estimate the parameters of this function. The results on the Northeast's relative efficiency, defined as the ratio of the Northeast's hypothetical labor productivity to the South's actual level, show that the capital/labor ratio by itself did not explain the observed differences in average labor productivity either at the two-digit or lower level of aggregation. Adjustment for the level of capacity utilization and/or changes in the values of the elasticity of substitution did not change this outcome much. Next, the Northeast's relative efficiency was adjusted for economies of scale. This measure was called the Northeast's adjusted relative efficiency. This adjustment indicated increasing returns to scale for some sectors and constant returns to scale for others. In either case, however, the unexplained residuals remained large for the majority of sectors. Of the two adjustments, the K/L ratio accounted for the major increase in ratio efficiency and perhaps would be more effective in reducing the sizeable across-region differences in labor productivity than would increasing the scale of plants. This suggests that medium- and small-scale plants might play a more effective role in the Northeast's economic development. Data and time limitations prevented any further analysis of this or other relevant issues.