119 research outputs found
The impact of two tier producer and consumer food pricing in India
No full textIndia's government procures agricultural products such as rice, wheat, and sugar at below-market prices and sells them in both urban and rural ration shops. The rest of such crops is sold in the open market. This creates a two-tier price system for consumers and producers. Many (including Dantwala, Mellor, and Hayami, Subbarao, and Otsuka) claim that such a policy raises the open-market price so much that it ultimately increases the average price received by farmers. Iftrue, the gainers would be the farm sector as a whole and low-income urban consumers with access to the ration shops. Losers would be the high-income urban consumers who buy at the open-market price. This view has provided an intellectual basis for the policy. The author examines a variety of cases: with and without rationing, with rationing by ration cards or by queuing, with and without the urban rich having access to the ration shops, with and without free trade, and with a marketable surplus with positive, negative, or zero price elasticity. He finds that in most cases the policy's impact on the average price is either negative or ambiguous, and it is negative in the more realistic cases. A negative impact implies that farmers on the whole lose from the procurement policy. But small farmers who are net buyers of the procured crops, and landless laborers, gain from a lower average price in the short run (especially if they have easy access to the rural ration shops). The long-run effect depends on the impact of the lower average price on rural employment and wages.Markets and Market Access,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Consumption,Access to Markets
Robust statistics over Riemannian manifolds for computer vision
No full textThe nonlinear nature of many compute vision tasks involves analysis over curved nonlinear spaces embedded in higher dimensional Euclidean spaces. Such spaces are known as manifolds and can be studied using the theory of differential geometry. In this thesis we develop two algorithms which can be applied over manifolds.
The nonlinear mean shift algorithm is a generalization of the original mean shift, a popular feature space analysis method for vector spaces. Nonlinear mean shift can be applied to any Riemannian manifold and is provably convergent to the local maxima of an appropriate kernel density. This algorithm is used for motion segmentation with different motion models and for the filtering of complex image data.
The projection based M-estimator is a robust regression algorithm which does not require a user supplied estimate of the scale, the level of noise corrupting the inliers. We build on the connections between kernel density estimation and robust M-estimators and develop data driven rules for scale estimation. The method can be generalized to handle heteroscedastic data and subspace estimation. The results of using pbM for affine motion estimation, fundamental matrix estimation and multibody factorization are presented.
A new sensor fusion method which can handle heteroscedastic data and incomplete estimates of parameters is also discussed. The method is used to combine image based pose estimates with inertial sensors.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-144)
Effect of Surface Active Agents in Boiling Heat Transfer
No full textTitle: Effect of Surface Active Agents in Boiling Heat Transfer, Author: Subbarao N. Rao, Location: ThodeThe boiling heat transfer phenomenon has presented a state o ambiguity regarding the role of solid-liquid-vapour interface in the mechanisms of heat transfer. Recent studies (S1, M1) have given an indication to the possibility of the vaporization of a micro layer at the boiling surface as a alternative to the well known theories based purely on the hydrodynamic factors. This study is an attempt to understand the boiling heat transfer mechanism at solid-liquid-vapour interface and to study the effect of interfacial properties like surface tension and contact angle on the maximum (critical) heat flux. The present studies use the technique of changing the solid-liquid-vapour interface characteristics of water through the use of surface-active agent as additive, to study the boiling heat transfer under changed interface conditions. Four different surfactants were used at three levels of concentration in water. Surface tension and contact angle measurements were carried out using the shadow photographs of pendant cops and sessile drops. Boiling heat flux measurements of these surfactant solutions in water were carried out using heat transfer surface. Experiments involving pool boiling and the boiling of thin liquid films were carried out over the transition and nucleate boiling regimes. It has been observed that the solid-liquid-vapour interface characteristics play a cry important role in the boiling heat transfer mechanism. By a suitable choice type of surfactant and concentration, the critical heat flux and heat transfer coefficients can be improved markedly. It is suggested that the spreading wetting characteristic improves the heat transfer rate whereas the increased viscosity and decreased thermal conductivity of the liquid microlayer under the vapour masses may cause the heat flux to decrease. The present study shows significant possibilities for future studies in the nucleate boiling, transition boiling and film boiling regimes using surfactant solutions.ThesisMaster of Engineering (ME
Does corruption relieve foreign investors of the burden of taxes and capital controls?
No full textIn a sample of fourteen source countries making bilateral investments in forty five countries, the author finds that taxes, capital controls, and corruption, all have large, statistically significant negative effects on foreign investment. Moreover, there is no robust support in the data for the"efficient grease"hypothesis - that corruption helps attract foreign investment by reducing firms'tax burden and the irritant of capital controls.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Capital Markets and Capital Flows,Decentralization,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Governance Indicators,National Governance,Capital Flows
Incentivizing intelligent customer behavior in smart-grids: a risk-sharing tariff & optimal strategies
No full textCurrent electricity tariffs for retail rarely provide incentives for intelligent demand response of flexible customers. Such customers could otherwise contribute to balancing supply and demand in future smart grids. This paper proposes an innovative risk-sharing tariff to incentivize intelligent customer behavior. A two-step parameterized payment scheme is proposed, consisting of a prepayment based on the expected consumption, and a supplementary payment for any observed deviation from the anticipated consumption. Within a gametheoretical analysis, we capture the strategic conflict of interest between a retailer and a customer in a two-player game, and we present optimal, i.e., best response, strategies for both players in this game. We show analytically that the proposed tariff provides customers of varying flexibility with variable incentives to assume and alleviate a fraction of the balancing risk, contributing in this way to the uncertainty reduction in the envisioned smart-grid
Microfinance Impact Evaluation: A Managerial Perspective
No full textThe objective of this concept note was to introduce Impact Evaluation and highlight its need and importance during these turbulent times. As it turns out that Impact Evaluation holds promise to a host of benefits to the MFIs ranging from consumer insights to launching of new products and services and from better reporting standards to performance measurement. It will gain further prominence in coming days as focus of various stakeholders undergoes drastic shift towards social performance and understanding the consumer behavior. Not only it will be a strategic exercise but it will be adopted as a risk mitigation tool for identifying loopholes and appropriate measures to plug them.Microfinance, Impact Evaluation,
Arithmetic Functions Satisfying a Congruence Property
No full textThis note proves (in the theorem below) a conjecture made by the author last year through the pages of the Departmental Problem Book. This arose in connection with some other investigations of arithmetic functions.</jats:p
Money, politics and a future for the international financial system
No full textIn developing the architecture for a financial system, the challenge is to combine deregulation and safety nets against systemic failure with effective prudential regulation and oversight. The author analyzes three approaches to choosing an adequate regulatory framework for a financial system. a) Those most worried about panic and herd behavior tend to favor relatively extensive controls on financial institutions'activities, including controls on interest rates and on the volume and direction of lending. b) Those most concerned about moral hazard advocate abolishing controls and safety nets, seeing the solution is stronger market discipline and reduced powers and discretion for regulators. c) Mainstream opinion advocates a mix of measures, to both strengthen market discipline and improve regulatory oversight. The approach a county opts for depends on 1) which monetary and exchange rate regime it chooses, 2) whether it is more concerned about moral hazard or about panic and herd behavior, and 3) how the politics of reform shape its solutions. The author suggests a scenario for development of the global financial system over the next two or three decades that assumes that the final outcome will resemble the market solution - not because that is the optimal policy choice but because of how political weakness will interact with advances in settlement technology. In the author's scenario, the world moves toward a monetary system in which fixed exchange rate systems or de facto currency competition limit the power of central banks. This limits options for discretionary and open-ended liquidity support to help deal with systemic financial crises. The costs of inflexible exchange rates are moderated by new types of wage contracts, using units of account that are correlated with the shocks a particular industry or kind of contract faces -- thus maintaining the positive aspects of monetary systems with flexible nominal exchange rates. Mistrust in monetary authorities and the emergence of private settlements lead to a return of asset-backed money as the means of payment. The disciplines on financial systems come to resemble somewhat those of historical"free banking"systems, with financial institutions requiring high levels of equity and payments systems protected only by limited, fully funded safety nets.Banks&Banking Reform,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Financial Intermediation,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Macroeconomic Management,Financial Intermediation,Financial Economics
A study to improve the life of high speed steel tools with ion plated refractory compounds
No full textDissertation made openly available per email from author, 6/13/2016.Ph.D
Development of the Zimbabwe family planning program
No full textFamily planning was introduced in Zimbabwe as a voluntary movement in the 1950s. Volunteers formed a Family Planning Association in the mid-1960s. The government became interested in family planning in the late 1960s after analysis of the 1961 population census. It gave the Family Planning Association an annual grant, allowed contraceptives to be available through Ministry of Health facilities, and allowed nonmedical personnel to initiate and resupply family planning clients with condoms and pills. But before Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, family planning was viewed with great suspicion by the black majority, so the program's effectiveness was limited to the urban few. A new era began after independence. The new government took over theFamily Planning Association and changed its outlook completely. Through government and international donor support, the family planning program was restructured and expanded. The number of family planning personnel more than doubled in some units. More service delivery points were set up - particularly in rural areas. And the information, education, and communication and evaluation and research units were established. Through a World Bank-assisted project (with grant funding from Norway and Denmark), the Ministry of Health began strengthening its family planning capabilities. These efforts helped increase the contraceptive prevalence rate from about 14 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 1988. But the program's growth is beginning to stall. More effort and resources are needed if the program is to grow or even maintain its present status. Particularly important are the following: designing innovative strategies to reach hard-to-reach populations; giving more emphasis to information, education, and communication, especially for men and youths, using multimedia; involving other sectors in the delivery of family planning services; broadening the mix of contraceptive methods (especially promoting long-term and permanent methods); making use of alternative family planning delivery systems, such as the use of depot holders, volunteers, and government extension workers; establishing a national population policy; and considering cost recovery and other measures for self-sustainment and program growth.Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,ICT Policy and Strategies,Gender and Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Adolescent Health
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