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    FIGHTING POVERTY AND CHILD MALNUTRITION: ON THE DESIGN OF FOREIGN AID POLICIES

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    This paper investigates how the different food aid programs affect economic development via their effect on the parental trade-off between the number of children and the investment in each child's human capital. This is done in an OLG framework where parents decide on the number of children and the nutrition and secondary schooling of each child. Primary schooling is mandatory. Providing school meals locks countries with no children attending secondary schooling into poverty by reducing the private (nutrition) cost per child. In countries where parents find it optimal to enroll children in secondary schooling, food aid increases the marginal benefit of schooling. Consequently, school feeding programs are conducive to economic development in these countries. If food aid is in the form of a food price subsidy, we show that child nutrition and thus children's human capital increase unambiguously. Although fertility and schooling are not directly affected, a sufficiently high subsidy rate will induce parents to begin to enroll children into secondary schooling by the assumed complementarity between nutrition and schooling in the human capital production function. If the food aid program provides a fixed amount of food per child, this decreases the marginal benefit of parental nutritional investments; therefore, it leads to higher fertility and to lower total provision of nutrition per child.</jats:p

    Fighting poverty and child malnutrition: on the design of foreign aid policies

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    In this paper, we have developed a two-period overlapping-generation model featuring the effects of child nutrition in developing countries. The model gives rise to multiple equilibria including a poverty trap. It shows that child nutrition status may affect the development of human capital unfavorably and leads countries into poverty. Various exogenous foreign aid policies implemented by international organizations such as the World Food Programme (WFP) are considered. School feeding programs can solve social problems like child labor. However, they do not necessarily help countries to achieve economic development. On the contrary they can lead to poverty if the initial human capital is low. Only if the subsidies are large, can they prevent a country being trapped in poverty. If the WFP provides a fixed amount of food to households, then a quality/quantity trade-off takes place: Parents decrease the nutrition of their offspring and increase the number of children they have. Consequently, total nutrition decreases and the developing country gets locked into poverty whatever its level of human capital. At the end of the paper, we estimate the changes in human capital from a sample of 66 developing countries (almost half of which are African countries), and use the estimates to explore the quantitative effects of the model. The model is then calibrated under different production functions. The results confirm the theoretical predictions.Child Nutrition; Foreign Aids; poverty traps; human capital; school meals

    The social economic impact of AIDS: Accounting for intergenerational transmission, productivity and fertility

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    In this paper we develop a model that aims to investigate the economic and demographic impacts of three effects of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in developing countries. The direct effect of the HIV epidemic is that it hits the inherited characteristics of young adults. The two indirect effects, resulting from the first, are the reduction in productivity of adults and the transmission of the disease to their offsprings. We allow these different effects to act either separately or together, and we investigate the marginal efficiency of health expenditures on the survival probability of individuals and demographics. The direct effect of the HIV virus is that it leads adults to increase their own health expenditure and to decrease that of their children. On the contrary, the transmission effect of the HIV virus leads parents to spend more on their children than on their own. We show that the reduction in productivity of young adults decreases health expenditures for themselves and their children. Furthermore, we find that the productivity effect dominates by large the two others. Moreover, when adults decide to have fewer children because of HIV, we show that the ratio of low to high skilled workers increases. This demographic impact impoverishes the economy in the short and medium run.orphans, epidemic, transmission, productivity shock, survival rate

    Massive Migration and Elections: Evidence from the Refugee Crisis in Greece

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    This article explores whether the massive arrival of refugees at Greek islands has had an impact on natives’ voting behaviour. Our results show a positive and significant effect of refugees’ presence on votes for the Greek extreme-right party Golden Dawn. More precisely, we find that a 1 per cent increase in the share of refugees is associated with an increase of 5 per cent in the share of votes for Golden Dawn. This outcome is robust under different estimation methodologies and placebo regressions

    Does talent migration increase inequality? A quantitative assessment in football labour market

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    I analyze the links between talent migration and cross-country inequality by exploiting the 1995 elimination of mobility restrictions on the European football labor market. I develop a simple model and employ an empirical dataset to estimate its parameters. Through simulation analysis, I compare actual data with a counterfactual no-mobility restriction trajectory, and conclude that the elimination of mobility barriers increases not only cross-country inequality by 25%, but also global output in the football economy by stimulating the production of new talent in Africa, Latin and Central America

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods
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