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Essays on poverty issues: microeconomic evidence from african countries
Get PDFUsing household level panel data, the thesis provides comprehensive empirical evidence on poverty issues. The thesis constructs spatial and inter-temporal utility consistent poverty lines for Uganda, which are used as inputs to study the sources of poverty, distinguish chronic poverty from transitory poverty and the mechanisms affecting poverty persistence. Based on these poverty lines which are consistent across space and time, the poverty headcount in Uganda increases by about 9% as one moves from 2005 to 2009. In contrast, the official report suggests a reduction in poverty headcount by about 4.5% which is mainly due to low food and non-food consumer price indexes and low food share. Poverty in Uganda is largely chronic. The highest burden of inter-temporal poverty ascribes to households living in the North. Households with a large number of dependent members contribute to inter-temporal poverty more than their population share. The thesis estimates the dynamic random effect probit models and endogenous switching regression. After controlling for observed and unobserved differences in individual characteristics, the thesis still finds strong evidence of state dependence, which is that past poverty actually increases the risk of future poverty. In the presence of genuine state dependence, short run polices are effective.
Since consumption in the household surveys is often measured with error, the thesis applies the mixed latent Markov model to estimate the extent of true mobility into and out of poverty. It finds that measurement error overstates the observed poverty transition probabilities or understates the true poverty persistence. Since the actual poverty persistence rate is at least 61%, the poverty in Uganda is largely permanent, not transitory. Measurement error also understates the impacts of observed individual characteristics on making poverty transition from one state to another. Land size per capita, having mobile phone and TV-radio reduce the probability of transiting into poverty as well as increase the chances of poverty exit. The empirical evidence suggests that policy makers have to target households whose consumption slightly above the poverty line and households who are very poor. Since poverty is state dependence, short run policies are effective to keep individuals not to fall into poverty in the first place because once they are poor, they are less likely to exit poverty. Since poverty is mainly chronic in Uganda, on the other hand, long term intervention through increasing human and physical capital and the returns to these assets is effective to the very poor households. Using employer- employee panel data from Ghana, the thesis also finds that poor women are disproportionately sorting into low paying firms. Even after controlling for gender difference in individuals endowments and sorting effects, firms actually pay different wage premium for comparable female and male. When wage inequality increases among the poor, chronic poverty increases. The result suggests that targeting female dominant firms to increase their productivity helps mitigate the national level chronic poverty. The thesis also identifies the type of firms that pay equal premium for comparable gender attributes
End-of-pipe or cleaner production? How to go green in presence of income inequality and pro-environmental behavior
Get PDFIn this paper we consider a vertically differentiated duopoly model in which a green producer competes
with a brown rival in a market in which consumers are environmentally concerned. In particular, consumers
are assumed to value not only the intrinsic quality of a certain product, but also its environmental
impact. This environmental valuation has a positional content: consumers attach a positive attribute to
the green product, while penalizing the brown one. In this context, we consider the choice of the green
firm between cleaner and end-of-pipe abatement efforts. We find that the interplay between the intensity
of market competition, consumers' income disparity and environmental concern can play a crucial role in
directing the green producer towards one or the other technological choice. More precisely, the adoption
of cleaner production technologies can be discouraged by low average income and by tough competition,
while it can be spurred by the moral/social incentive towards pro-environmental behavior
Globalization, environment and buy local campaigns: the role of domestication
No full textIn this contribution, we aim at describing the role of domestication in home-bias and to see how it affects the market configuration
Public Utilities: Privatization without Regulation
Get PDFIn the last decades, transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe have engaged in strong privatization programs of public utilities. However, a large part of them did not meet legal and economic conditions needed for a market economy to take place. In this paper, we study how a firm producing a public utility and moving from a public ownership to privatization and thus adopting a profit-maximizing criterion defines its production plans, when an appropriate regulatory environment is still lacking.Privatization, public utilities, dynamic programming
Preemptive acquisition and downgrading innovation.
Get PDFResearch papers on innovation activity share the view that whenever an invention is made available by a startup innovator, getting its ownership by acquisition is beneficial for incumbent firms. In this note, I show by means of an example that there are some circumstances in which accomodating entry and competing with the innovator in the product market can be substantially more profitable than blocking her entry via acquisition.INNOVATION, VERTICAL DIFFERENTIATION, NATURAL DUOPOLY
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Timing of Investment and Dynamic Pricing in Privatized Sectors.
Get PDFFirms in equipment-intensive sectors, where investment in production is performed at diminishing marginal cost, spend billions of dollars in equipment and production capacity. Typically, this expenditure is induced by either the replacement of existing equipment, which deteriorates with age and can result in higher operating costs and lower production capacity, or further investment, to benefit from any technological improvement embedded in new equipment. We identify the optimal price policy, and the ensuing optimal sequence of investment timing a privatized firm selects through time and compare them with choices made at the time when such a type of firm was under public-ownership.planning investment; dynamic programming; economic behavior; privatization
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