107159 research outputs found
Sort by
Intergenerational educational mobility during the twentieth century
No full textIntergenerational educational mobility, capturing the extent to which children's education is associated with their parents’ education, has become a major global policy discussion. Studying its long‐term patterns across countries remains difficult, especially in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), due to limited early twentieth‐century data. Analyzing about 53.7 million observations from 92 countries, using mainly IPUMS census data, we find that recent cohorts exhibit increasing educational mobility across various world regions, with post‐Soviet countries as exceptions. This increase is more prominent for daughters, resulting in a narrowed gender‐based mobility gap in many LMICs, while reversing this pattern in high‐income countries (HICs), with daughters being more mobile in recent decades. Nevertheless, mobility remains higher in HICs than in LMICs. Moreover, we identify a significant association between the expansion of schooling and intergenerational mobility. This expansion is associated with a more substantial rise in intergenerational mobility for daughters, especially in relation to their mothers’ education compared to that of their fathers. Our results demonstrate strong external and internal validity through a series of robustness checks, including data triangulation across multiple sources
Introduction: towards a reassessment of food deprivation in Africa
No full textWhy do images and reports of starving and malnourished Africans pop up so often in the media? What are the actual dimensions of the problem? What has trade and climate got to do with it? These are among the questions this book seeks to answer, in an effort to explain why Africa struggles with food availability and stability that are the essential pillars of food security, and what can be done about it. The intersection between trade and agriculture policies and a changing climate is fundamental to the enquiry. This introductory chapter to How Africa Eats sets out the scale of the problem, how to define, measure and monitor food deprivation and hunger and the challenges of the food system, and outlines the research focus of the book
Africa’s trade, food security and climate risks
No full textThis chapter aims to anchor the book in exactly what we mean when we consider Africa’s agricultural trade – from grains and legumes through to fertilisers and tractors – and to establish a model for thinking about the interaction between trade, food security and climate risks in subsequent chapters. It does this by examining Africa’s agricultural exports in the broader context of its trade history. It then focuses on specific commodities such as maize, rice, wheat and fertilisers, which drive agricultural trade
Policy, resources, actors and capacities
No full textAgricultural policies are important determinants of food security outcomes. Finance, investment, institutions, actors and capacities interact with policies in playing a key role in resource allocation along the food value chain, from production to consumption, from supply to demand. Such policies are most effective when they are evidence-based and adapt to changing realities. To coordinate agricultural policies across the continent, a common framework for such initiatives has long been an objective of the member states of the African Union and its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity. The 2003 African Union (AU) Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) compact responded to this collective aspiration. This chapter discusses how effective Africa’s agricultural policies are, as well as how far countries have implemented the framework set out in CAADP
The constitutive role of law in sustainable finance
No full textThe sustainability transition requires a fundamental change in the way economies function to align socioeconomic systems with planetary boundaries. From a legal perspective, such a shift should entail a transformation of the prevailing legal coding of economic relations to enable consistent integration of social and environmental considerations. Within the emerging sustainable finance trend, shoots of change are visible: new financial instruments, such as green or sustainability-linked bonds and loans, appear to be reorienting the market relationships around sustainability impact issues. A sociolegal and legal institutionalist analysis of this trend reveals how such instruments shape and are shaped by different facilitative, regulatory and constitutive facets of law. Using EU green bond issuances as a case study, the article highlights how law expands and limits the transformative potential of such novel financial instruments. The analysis is revealing of the co-constitutive dynamics of law and sustainable finance. In this context, the article makes three contributions. Firstly, it offers a comparative case study of law’s co-constitutive dynamics in the case of financial innovation designed for environmental and social impact. Secondly, it identifies the co-constitutive dynamics of law and (sustainable) finance relating to differentiation and expansion.Thirdly, it finds variance in the law’s co-constitutive role at the micro-level of financial interactions, and in meso-structures that emerge in the context of sustainable finance specifically. To the extent that sustainable debt instruments are increasingly linked to a company’s overall performance and corporate governance, the article’s findings have implications for the integration of social concerns in financial instruments
Response to Karie Cross Riddle’s review of fixing gender: the paradoxical politics of training peacekeepers
No full textEuropean capitalisms in sustainability transition: the case of green bonds
No full textThe EU’s sustainable finance agenda aims to accelerate the sustainability transition through the ‘greening’ of finance. How such greening may trigger institutional transformation in Member States is not well understood. However, the political economy literature has elevated the importance of non-market coordination and institutional complementarity in sustainability transitions. The article investigates sustainable finance uptake in four distinct Member States (the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden). Green bond legal documentation is analysed for three dimensions of firm-finance coordination: exchange of information, monitoring and sanctioning. The micro-level analysis identifies local adaptations that relate to how actors incorporate sustainability commitments and the EU sustainable finance rules into financial transactions and whether they conceive these as a source of risk (the Netherlands and Sweden) or a guarantee of profit (Poland and Spain). One jurisdiction (Poland) is further differentiated by a strong legal sanctioning mechanism resulting from legal factors and the presence of international financial institutions. Notwithstanding local adaptations, several micro – and meso-level transformations are identified, such as the consistent emergence of new forums for both market and non-market coordination. The political economy impacts and micro-level tensions identified in the article highlight how comparative legal analysis can anticipate the sites of broader political struggles
Insider trading with penalties in continuous time
No full textThis paper addresses the question of how insiders internalize the additional penalties to trade in a continuous time Kyle model. The penalties can be interpreted as non-adverse selection transaction costs or legal penalties due to illegal insider trading. The equilibrium is established for general asset distribution. In equilibrium, the insider does not disseminate her private information fully into the market prices. Moreover, she always trades a constant multiple of the discrepancy between her own valuation and her forecast of market price right before her private information becomes public. In the particular case of normally distributed asset value, the trades are split evenly over time for sufficiently large penalties, with trade size proportional to the return on the private signal. Although the noise traders lose less when penalties increase, the insider’s total penalty in equilibrium is non-monotone since the insider trades little when the penalties surpasses the value of the private signal. As a result, a budget-constrained regulator runs an investigation only if the benefits of the investigation are sufficiently high. Moreover, the optimal penalty policy is reduced to choosing from one of two extremal penalty levels that correspond to high and low liquidity regimes. The optimal choice is determined by the amount of noise trading and the relative importance of price informativeness
An instrument constituency of data science—the case of Data for Good initiatives in the UK nonprofit sector
No full textData science is a new link in the long chain of quantitative measurement in public policy. The article analyses the promotion of data science as a tool of public policy by operationalizing the instrument constituency framework. The article expands research on instrument constituencies to two new areas: measurement instruments and the nonprofit sector. The empirical analysis focuses on “Data for Good” initiatives in the UK nonprofit sector and is based on 37 interviews with nonprofit data professionals participating I the initiatives. The analysis focuses on actors, instruments, and promises. The findings show that the innovative potential of digital data and data science is central to the initiatives, but the actual practices promoted by the participants are much more varied. The analysis shows blurred boundaries between different promotional coalitions and underscores the collaboration and competition between initiatives. The article confirms that the instrument constituency framework is applicable to the analysis of measurement techniques in the nonprofit sector. It invites further empirical and conceptual work on the unique elements of instrument constituencies that focus on promoting measurement techniques