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Humanitarian protection activities and the safety of strangers in the DRC, Syria and South Sudan
No full textMany contemporary humanitarian organisations derive their legitimacy from their claims to protect civilians. Yet, what these organisations do in its name includes a diverse and contested range of activities that are often far from what global publics and affected populations understand as constituting protection. As others have argued, this detracts from honest discussions about when and how humanitarians are well placed to keep civilians safe from violence and threats. To begin to address this gap, we review what three well-known humanitarian organisations publicly say they have done to protect strangers across three violent protracted crises. We capture how they portray their activities, the logics they attribute to them and what is left unsaid. Our findings suggest that humanitarians must, once again, collaborate over a shared protection framework that better signals what others can expect from them. We also identify an emerging convergence around the notion that peer-to-peer denunciations, conflict resolution, supporting self-protection and community protection strategies and improving state-society relations can be important forms of protection activity. There is, therefore, a need for a public stocktake over what can, cannot, should and should not be done to protect civilians in such contexts
Social processes of public sector collaborations in Kenya: unpacking challenges of realising joint actions in public administration
No full textSocial processes behind the success or failure of collaborative implementation frameworks in African public administration contexts are under-researched. This paper addresses this gap by paying particular attention to trust attributes in collaborative implementation arrangements in Kenya. It shows how implementation challenges of policy programs and interventions may be linked to these interventions’ social characteristics in the public sector. The paper draws on a threefold approach of mutual trust and administrative data on public sector collaborative implementation arrangements for Kenyan anti-corruption policy like the Kenya Leadership Integrity Forum. Findings show that despite increased efforts to realise joint actions in public sector collaborative arrangements, they remain primarily symbolic and hierarchical and feature loose social cohesion among actors, producing challenges bordering on deficiencies in social processes of implementation. These include politicised aloofness or lack of commitment, unclear governance structures, coordination deficiencies, inter-agency conflicts, layered fragmentations, and overlapping competencies among different agencies. The paper recommends identifying and nurturing socially sensitive strategies embedded in mutual trust, like informal knowledge-sharing channels, to address primarily mandated public sector collaboration challenges in Kenya. Such efforts should consider systematic training and incentivising public managers to think outside inward-looking organisational cultures, allowing them to devise sustainable collaborative implementation approaches (promote open innovation) for policy programs, particularly anti-corruption policy
Immigration and the top 1 percent
No full textUsing administrative data on the universe of U.K. taxpayers, we study the contribution of migrants to the rise in U.K. top incomes. We show that migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, with migrants twice as prevalent in the top 0.01% as anywhere in the bottom 97% of taxpayers. These high incomes are predominantly from labor, rather than capital, and migrants are concentrated in only a handful of industries, predominantly finance. All of the observed growth in the U.K. top 1% income share over the past 20 years has accrued to migrants
Posterior sampling from truncated Ferguson-Klass representation of normalised completely random measure mixtures
No full textIn this paper, we study the finite approximation of the completely random measure (CRM) by truncating its Ferguson-Klass representation. The approximation is obtained by keeping the N largest atom weights of the CRM unchanged and combining the smaller atom weights into a single term. We develop the simulation algorithms for the approximation and characterise its posterior distribution, for which a blocked Gibbs sampler is devised. We demonstrate the usage of the approximation in two models. The first assumes such an approximation as the mixing distribution of a Bayesian nonparametric mixture model and leads to a finite approximation to the model posterior. The second concerns the finite approximation to the Caron-Fox model. Examples and numerical implementations are given based on the gamma, stable and generalised gamma processes
Pairwise likelihood estimation and limited-information goodness-of-fit test statistics for binary factor analysis models under complex survey sampling
No full textThis paper discusses estimation and limited-information goodness-of-fit test statistics in factor models for binary data using pairwise likelihood estimation and sampling weights. The paper extends the applicability of pairwise likelihood estimation for factor models with binary data to accommodate complex sampling designs. Additionally, it introduces two key limited-information test statistics: the Pearson chi-squared test and the Wald test. To enhance computational efficiency, the paper introduces modifications to both test statistics. The performance of the estimation and the proposed test statistics under simple random sampling and unequal probability sampling is evaluated using simulated data
Economic growth in a cooperative economy
No full textWe develop and formalise an equilibrium concept for a dynamic economy in which production takes place in worker cooperatives. The concept rules out allocations of workers to cooperatives in which a worker in one cooperative could move to a different cooperative and make both herself and the existing workers in the receiving cooperative better off. It also rules out allocations in which workers in a cooperative would be made better off by some of the other workers leaving. We also provide a minimum-information equilibrium-selection criterion, which refines our equilibrium concept. We illustrate the application of our concept and refinement in the context of an overlapping-generation economy with specific preferences and technology. The cooperative economy follows a dynamic path qualitatively similar to the path followed by a capitalist economy, featuring gradual convergence to a steady state with constant output. However, the cooperative economy features a static inefficiency, in that, for a given aggregate capital stock, firm size is smaller than what a social planner would choose. On the other hand, the cooperative economy cannot be dynamically inefficient and could accumulate capital at a rate that is higher or lower than the capitalist economy. As a result, steady-state income per worker could be higher or lower in the cooperative economy. We also present an illustrative calibration, which quantitatively compares steady-state incomes and welfare in a cooperative and in a capitalist economy
From workfare to economic and sociopolitical stability? Evidence from a randomized trial in Eastern Congo
No full textDid a workfare program in Eastern Congo have a lasting impact on economic and sociopolitical outcomes? Men and women in Eastern Congo were randomly assigned to 2,674 four-month job offers, or to the job offer plus a savings incentive, hard-skills training, or both. Eighteen months after the program, labor market and savings outcomes have improved, but there is no change across 12 other economic and sociopolitical outcome families. Regarding labor market outcomes, the most intensive treatment—the job offer plus the savings incentive and hard-skills training—outperforms treatments with only one add-on. This indicates that the savings incentive and hard-skills training, when combined, can create a synergistic impact greater than the sum of their individual effects. The results are mainly driven by female beneficiaries, who start at much lower levels of labor market participation and earnings than men
A theory of fair CEO pay
No full textThis paper studies executive pay with fairness concerns: if the CEO's wage falls below a perceived fair share of output, he suffers disutility that is increasing in the discrepancy. Fairness concerns do not always lead to fair wages; instead, the firm threatens the CEO with unfair wages for low output to induce effort. The contract sometimes involves performance-vesting equity: the CEO is paid a constant share of output if it is sufficiently high, and zero otherwise. Even without moral hazard, the contract features pay-for-performance, to address fairness concerns and ensure participation. This rationalizes pay-for-performance even if effort incentives are unnecessary
Sustainability in a risky world
No full textHow much consumption is sustainable, if \sustainability" re- quires that welfare should not be expected to decline over time? We impose a sustainability constraint on a standard consump- tion/portfolio choice problem. The constraint does not distort portfolio choice, but it imposes an upper bound on the sustain- able consumption-wealth ratio, which must lie between the riskless interest rate and the expected return on wealth (and if risky capital evolves according to a geometric Brownian motion, it lies exactly halfway between the two). Sustainability requires an upward drift in wealth and consumption to compensate future generations for the increased risk they face
Cobblers: lawyers’ views on the quality of legislation
No full textThis article explores the question of whether there are any characteristic features of the way law is made in the UK that lead to problems of legislative quality on the basis of a survey of 559 legal professionals including practising barristers and solicitors as well as academics. The article begins by discussing how 'quality' is to be understood and outlining the nature of the survey. It goes on to set out how respondents characterize problems of quality in the legislation they are familiar with, what the consequences of any defects might be, what causes these defects, and what can be done to remedy them. The article goes on to discuss some of the broader implications of the results of the survey drawing on the observations of Sir William Dale