279 research outputs found
Not Available
No full textVersion: 1.0.0
Imports: utils, minimalRSD, stats
Published:2017-03-21
Author: Shwetank Lall [aut, cre], Arpan Bhowmik [ctb], Eldho Varghese [aut], Seema Jaggi [ctb], Cini Varghese [ctb]
Maintainer: Shwetank Lall
License: GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)]
NeedsCompilation: no
Citation: FMC citation info
In views: ExperimentalDesignAn R package to generate cost effective minimally changed run sequences for symmetrical as well as asymmetrical factorial designsNot Availabl
Information-based instruments for improved urban management
No full textThe task of urban managers is to ensure the provision of basic urban services, such as water, waste removal, security, transport, and an environment conducive to economic activity, while maintaining fiscal sustainability of city operations. City managers in developing countries face increasing pressure in achieving these goals because of rapid urbanization, the larger responsibilities following decentralization, and the economic challenges of globalization. Based on experience in Bangalore, India, the authors argue that effective, forward-looking urban management requires a much better information infrastructure than is currently available in most cities.Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Decentralization,ICT Policy and Strategies,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management,Banks&Banking Reform
Family altruism and incentives
No full textThe author builds on the altruistic model of the family, to explore the strategic interaction between altruistic parents, and selfish children, when children's efforts are endogenous. If there is uncertainty about the amount of income the children will realize, and if parents have imperfect information, the children have an incentive to exert little effort, and to rely on their parent's altruistically motivated transfers. Because of this, parents face a tradeoff between the insurance that bequests implicitly provide their children, and the disincentive to work prompted by their altruism. The author shows that if parents can credibly commit to a pattern of transfers, they will choose not to compensate children in bad outcomes, as much as predicted by the standard (no uncertainty, no asymmetric information) dynastic model of the family. Alternatively, parents may choose to forgo any insurance, and offer a fixed level of bequest, to elicit greater effort from their children. The optimal transfers structure that the author derives, reconciles the predictions of the altruistic family model, with much of the existing evidence on inter-generational transfers, which suggests that parents compensate only partially, or not at all, for earnings differentials among their children. Moreover, the author shows that Ricardian equivalence holds in this setup, except when non-negativity constraints are binding.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Educational Sciences,Safety Nets and Transfers
Household savings and residential mobility in informal settlements
No full textStrategies to help the one billion people worldwide who live in informal settlements have mainly focused on slum upgrading, sites and services programs, and tenure security. In contrast, there has been less attention on what enables slum dwellers to transition into the formal housingsector, which has the dual benefits of improving service access and escaping social stigma. In this paper the authors investigate residential mobility among slum dwellers in Bhopal, India. Their analysis shows that one in five households succeeds in getting out of a slum settlement, and a major determinant is the household's ability to save on a regular basis. Due to limited outreach of institutional housing finance, most slum dwellers rely solely on household savings for purchasing a house. These findings underscore the urgent need to improve savings instruments for slum dwellers and to downmarket housing finance to reach the poorest residents of rapidly growing cities in developing countries.Housing&Human Habitats,Urban Housing,Banks&Banking Reform,Urban Services to the Poor,Urban Services to the Poor
Can reforming global institutions help developing countries share more in the benefits from globalization?
No full textGlobalization could significantly expand trade, international investment, and technological advances, but the gains from global integration have been unevenly distributed across and within nations. Greater global interdependence has also brought greater macroeconomic volatility, resulting in several serious financial crises in the second half of the 1990s. The global matrix of Bretton Woods and United Nations institutions that developed starting in the 1940s, formed under a different balance of power, in a world of fixed exchange rates and limited capital mobility. Since the 1960s regional financial institutions have emerged because of the greater autonomy of different regions and the greater financial needs of development. The author reviews different proposals for reform of the international financial institutions and changes in the roles of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. He highlights the implications for developing countries of (1) Policy conditionality. (2) The countercyclical role of multilaterals'lending. (3) Greater lending to middle-income than to low-income developing countries. (3) Access to liquidity at times of crisis. (4) Mechanisms for giving low-income countries a greater voice in IMF and World Bank decisionmaking. The author streses the overlapping responsibilities of the Bretton Woods and regional financial institutions and the need to reassess the allocation of responsibilities and to develop better coordination mechanisms between these institutions. Those designing institutional reform must consider the corporate capabilities of each type of institution. The corporate cultures of global and regional institutions differ. So does the kind of knowledge they generate and disseminate, and so do patterns of interactions with, and mechanisms for representation of, client countries.Finally, the author calls attention to the need to harmonize national and global growth-oriented policies in a way that reduces volatility and promotes social equity.Environmental Economics&Policies,Governance Indicators,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform
JobPlan --- a new integrated representation and planner for batch job workflow automation
No full textThis dissertation presents a new representation and action logic for integrated planning, scheduling, execution monitoring and sensing. These features were motivated by the problem of computer batch job management but are applicable to any domain entailing these forms of reasoning. The existing planning literature has primarily focussed on providing highly efficient representations and algorithms which address specific aspects of planning and sensing. However no single planning framework currently combines the requisite integrated abilities of managing durative triggered actions in an open world environment. The dissertation's contributions are a multi-purpose planning and sensing representation and an associated partial order action logic to support these features. Plans and beliefs are represented as a workflow state machine governed by a clearly defined dynamics. Time based goals are handled by treating time as a fluent. The implementation and evaluation of a prototype planner ``JobPlan" on key domain scenarios illustrating these features is presented.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Tracey D. Lal
Satiric Fable in English: A Critical Study of the Animal Tales of Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden and Orwell
No full textThis is a comparative study of five works: Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale; Spenser's Mother Hubberds Tale; Dryden's The Hind and the Panther; Gay's fables; and Orwell's Animal Farm. In the preface, the author admits that Gay does not really belong in this study, but his fables are too important to omit him. What is satiric fable? We may define the satiric fable as a humorous allegorical tale of varying length in prose or verse, having animal characters, whose actions serve as a basis for satirizing existing persons, policies or institutions. If in the tale the narrator slyly points the finger of scorn and ridicule at the world as it too often is, the world of self-interest, greed and cunning, the result is a satiric fable (4). Satiric fables, like the stories about Brer Rabbit, are to be distinguished from moral fables, like the fables of Aesop. Some will have questions to raise here about the length of some of the fables that Lall considers.This is a hardbound book (hard cover)This book has a dust jacket (book cover)By Rama Rani Lal
Location, concentration, and performance of economic activity in Brazil
No full textWhat are the prospects for economic development in lagging sub-national regions? What are the roles of public infrastructure investments and fiscal incentives in influencing the location and performance of industrial activity? To examine these questions, the authors estimate a spatial profit function for industrial activity in Brazil that explicitly incorporates infrastructure improvements and fiscal incentives in the cost structure of individual firms. The authors use firm level data from the 2001 annual industrial survey along with spatially disaggregated regional data and find that there are considerable cost savings from being located in areas with relatively lower transport costs to reach large markets. In comparison, fiscal incentives, such as tax expenditures, have modest effects in terms of influencing firm level costs. Although the results suggest that firms benefit from being in locations with good access to markets, the authors do not suggest that improving interregional connectivity would necessarily assist lagging regions. In the short run, improving interregional connectivity implicitly reduces a natural tariff barrier so firms currently serving large markets and benefiting from economies of scale can more easily expand into new markets in competition with local producers. Therefore, producers in the leading regions can crowd out local producers, which would be detrimental for local production and employment in the lagging region.Decentralization,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Municipal Financial Management
Protein and energy nutrition of marine gadoids, Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua L.) and haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus L.)
No full text Primary goals of this thesis were to: 1) examine the in vivo digestion of macronutrients from conventional or alternative feed ingredients used in practical diets of juvenile gadoids (Atlantic cod and haddock), 2) document growth potential of fish at the juvenile grower phase given varying levels of dietary protein and energy and 3) assess the potential of in vitro pH-Stat methods for rapid screening protein quality of feed ingredients, specifically for gadoids. All primary research questions were linked to and built upon one another with the goal of gaining a better understanding of protein and energy utilization of juvenile grower phase gadoids. Studies showed that cod and haddock have a high capacity to utilize a wide range of dietary feed ingredients, such as fish meals, zooplankton meal, soybean products (meal, concentrate and isolate) and wheat gluten meal. New dietary formulations for gadoids may also utilize pulse meals, corn gluten meal, canola protein concentrate and crab meal. Digestibility data in this thesis is currently the only research that examined both in vivo and in vitro macronutrient digestibility of a large number and wide range of individual ingredients, specifically for gadoids. This is essential to gain new knowledge on protein and energy utilization as well as for least-cost ration formulations and effective substitution of ingredients into new formulations. Data has demonstrated a dietary digestible protein/digestible energy (DP/DE)ratio of 30 g DP/MJ DE is required for gadoids during the juvenile phase (in vitro closed-system pH-Stat assay for rapid screening protein quality of test ingredients that is ‘species-specific’ to gadoids. It is demonstrated that in vitro results generally reflected results obtained through conventional in vivo protein digestibility methods. Studies resulted in the first generation of a ‘gadoid-specific’ proteolytic enzyme extraction method and in vitro closed-system pH-Stat assay which may be useful to investigate protein digestion, absorption and metabolism of gadoids and further development of their feeds. </p
Title : Video Assisted Thoracoscopy Surgery(VATS) in unidentified Interstitial Lung disease: a six year retrospective study in India
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