5,446 research outputs found
Essays in Earnings, Academic Productivity, and School Competition
No full textThis thesis consists of three self-contained essays evaluating current issues in earnings, academic productivity, and school competition.
The first chapter, coauthored with Anindya Sen, looks at returns to post-secondary education and the gender gap in Ontario. We construct a unique individual level panel dataset consisting of earnings of public sector employees of the Government of Ontario, facilitated by the Ontario Salary Disclosure Act which reveals earnings of $100,000 or more. Individual earnings from 2005-2013 were merged with publicly available profiles on www.linkedin.com, which contains details on educational attainment, field of study, job experience, and specific occupation. There are significant field specific differences in returns to post-secondary education. In terms of graduate education, on average, while Ph.D.'s earn a premium relative to undergraduates, there is a modest gender gap in earnings of doctoral degree holders, which is not present among undergraduates. The sample period also experienced significant salary increases for female undergraduates. However, there are significant gender differences in the proportion of individuals who are managers and also in earnings of senior managers belonging to early cohorts.
By creating and utilizing a unique panel data from several different sources including the Ontario Ministry of Finance, EconLit, Web of Science, Online CVs, and so forth on all tenured and tenure track professors in 16 Ontario economic departments over 1996 to 2012, the second chapter intends to analyze the pay and position of those professors to see how co-authorship affect an economist's research productivity and how research productivity impacts pay and promotion. The study demonstrates that there is a significant return to co-authored publications relative to solo-authored publications in Ontario universities. The investigation of the relationship between co-authorship and productivity reveals that co-authored publications are associated with higher citation counts. Our research has also demonstrated that higher quality publications have a greater effect on salary, and the likelihood of promotion is positively associated with past performance. The estimates also suggest that some gender differences exist concerning the impact of co-authored publications on the likelihood of promotion. Finally, we find that in Ontario, economists are more likely to co-author with their colleagues,who have the similar ability, experience, and research interest. We found no gender-sorting effect among Ontario economists.
In the last chapter, I use a data set obtained from the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Educational Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) to estimate whether average school performance is affected by competition from other nearby schools. The availability of data on a panel of schools allows me to control for the potentially confounding effects of unobserved school specific attributes. I employ fixed effects, random trend and Instrumental Variables estimation to eliminate the potential simultaneity bias associated with competition between schools. Following Gibbons, Machin and Silva (2008), I use proximity
to school board boundaries as an instrumental variable for local school competition. IV estimates suggest a statistically insignificant association between school competition and school performance. Another important finding is that the estimated coefficient is stronger when the sample is restricted to the Toronto District School Board, which may suggest that
competition may improve school performance where students are given more freedom to choose their school. This finding may lend support to the current policy which is designed to improve public school performance in Ontario
Sen-Lab-LMS/Senescence_nuclear_features: Publication_version_2.0
No full text<p>Author checklist.</p>
The Contributions of Professor Amartya Sen in the Field of Human Rights
No full textThis paper analyses the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Professor Amartya Sen from the perspective of human rights. It assesses the ways in which Sen's research agenda has deepened and expanded human rights discourse in the disciplines of ethics and economics, and examines how his work has promoted cross-fertilisation and integration on this subject across traditional disciplinary divides. The paper suggests that Sen's development of a 'scholarly bridge' between human rights and economics is an important and innovative contribution that has methodological as well as substantive importance and that provides a prototype and stimuli for future research. It also establishes that the idea of fundamental freedoms and human rights is itself an important gateway into understanding the nature, scope and significance of Sen's research. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of the challenges to be addressed in taking Sen's contributions in the field of human rights forward.Amartya Sen, human rights, poverty, freedom, obligation, capability approach, meta-rights, entitlements, opportunity freedom, liberty-rights
Inequalities, Agency, and Well-being: Conceptual Linkages and Measurement Challenges in Development
No full textdevelopment, inequality, gender, well-being, agency, capability, distribution, Sen
Price Dynamics in a Markovian Limit Order Market
No full textWe propose and study a simple stochastic model for the dynamics of a limit order book, in which arrivals of market order, limit orders and order cancellations are described in terms of a Markovian queueing system. Through its analytical tractability, the model allows to obtain analytical expressions for various quantities of interest such as the distribution of the duration between price changes, the distribution and autocorrelation of price changes, and the probability of an upward move in the price, conditional on the state of the order book. We study the diffusion limit of the price process and express the volatility of price changes in terms of parameters describing the arrival rates of buy and sell orders and cancelations. These analytical results provide some insight into the relation between order flow and price dynamics in order-driven markets.limit order book, market microstructure, queueing, diffusion limit, high-frequency data, liquidity, duration analysis, point process
Recovering Indian Third Cinema practice : a study of the 1970s films of Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray
No full textIn this thesis I focus on the cultural politics and film practices of Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray in the long 1960s, with the aim of recovering Indian political cinema as Third Cinema practice. I posit the contexts that motivated the radicalisation of their cinema in the 1970s, as an act of counter-Establishment political resistance itself. I use Third Cinema, as a practice and framework, to contextualise and understand Indian political cinema. The prevalence of an auteurist approach in scholarly work has overshadowed the political, intellectual, collective, and emancipatory aspects of these filmmakers’ practices, which my thesis foregrounds. The thesis further argues that Third Cinema is not just an aesthetic choice or film style, but also a praxis and critical framework driven by decolonisation, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. Based on this hypothesis, I argue that Third Cinema can potentially be practiced in any context across geopolitical boundaries, given its emancipatory nature focusing on decolonising culture. However, this connection has so far been critically disregarded both by scholars of Indian cinema and Third Cinema across the world. Most discussions of Third Cinema are restricted to Latin America with occasional reference to African and other ‘minor’ cinemas. The objective of my research is to extend both the canon and discourse of Third Cinema beyond Latin America to engage with contexts previously unnoticed. My thesis does this by situating Indian political cinema in the milieu of Transnational Third Cinema and by including critical writings and film manifestoes from India. Restoring Ghatak, Sen, and Ray’s filmmaking practices within Third Cinema discourse not just recovers them as Third Cinema practitioners but also strengthens Third Cinema as a rigorous critical framework."My research was supported by Postgraduate Research Scholarship offered by the School of
Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies, University of St Andrews; St Leonard’s
Scholarship; Scotland’s Saltire Scholarship. The field work was supported by the Travel Grant
from the Russell Trust Postgraduate Scholarship 2016-17."-- Fundin
Empirical Essays in Water and Electricity Use
No full textThis thesis consists of three self-contained essays evaluating the impacts of educational attainment and average income at the community level on water consumption, the effects of different sources of energy on wholesale electricity rates and the effects of eliminating coal-fired electricity generation on air quality.
The first chapter looks at the impacts of educational attainment and average income at the community level on water consumption. The focus of this paper is on the three cities of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo. In this chapter, we construct a unique household-level panel dataset that has monthly water consumption data of 22,000 households from 2012-2014. Our study shows that water consumption decreases as income at the Dissemination Area (DA) level increases. Our findings also show that educational attainment affects water use in a different way at different education levels in the following sense: increasing educational attainment at lower levels of education (from no certificate to high school certificate) increases water consumption, but the effect reverses when people receive post-secondary education. In addition, our study suggests that although education at different geographical levels affects household water consumption in different ways, there is a turning point where the explained relationship changes direction.
By creating and utilizing a unique panel data from the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) and Statistics Canada, over 2009 to 2014, the second chapter intends to analyze the effects of different sources of energy on wholesale electricity rates to see how the considerable shifts in electricity fuel mix since have impacted the Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) and Global Adjustment (GA). The study demonstrates that while less reliance on coal has resulted in an upward pressure on the HOEP, the increase in other sources of energy such as nuclear, hydro and wind power generations outweighed the effects of eliminating coal, which explains why the average HOEP fell from 26.4 in 2012 to in 2014. On the other hand, the GA in terms of , rose by almost . Although less coal is significantly associated with higher GA payments, we do not find that more wind and nuclear power generation have resulted in higher GA payments. In addition, our results show that more gas power is correlated with a reduction in GA.
Lastly, the third chapter uses the hourly air pollutant data associated with four cities of Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa and Sarnia in addition to the data on hourly electricity generation from coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, wind and other (solar and biofuel) type of power plants for the period of to . The pollution data are obtained from the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change and the data on fuel mix are obtained from the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO). We estimate the effects of hourly changes in fuel mix on Ozone (), Nitrogen Oxide (), and Particulate Matter () over a period in which coal-fired electricity generation was gradually eliminated from the electricity market. The paper also estimates the impacts of fuel mix on the probability of smog days. The results suggest that relative to coal, more nuclear and wind energy is correlated with decreased levels of and . In addition, an increase in nuclear powered generation is associated with reduced levels. On the other hand, the results suggest that in general, the correlation between different types of fuel mix and the elimination of smog days are not statistically significant
OVERCOMING POSITIVISM IN ECONOMICS: AMARTYA SEN'S PROJECT OF INFUSING ETHICS INTO ECONOMICS
No full textLogical Positivism, which arose in philosophy early in the twentieth century, proclaimed the sharp distinction between facts and values. Despite objections at the time, positivism was imported into economics in the 1930s. Over time, objections lessened; economics was transformed and ethical considerations were driven out of its core. In the 1950s, debates about positivism arose within the discipline which had exported it. According to the American philosopher Hilary Putnam, the fact/value distinction is now discredited in philosophy. If that is so, the methodological foundations of contemporary economics are also discredited. In this article I examine Amartya Sen’s moral science of economics. First, I will present his historical account of the connections between economics and ethics. Sen claims that there was a close connection between the two until positivism was imported. Second, I will sketch some of Sen’s ethical objections to modern economics, which is still suffering from positivism. Finally, I will lay out some of his ideas on how economics can be returned to an ethical path. Once the ground has been cleared of positivism, ethics can re-emerge in economics in various ways. One path has been marked out by Sen.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,
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