estimating treatment effects from spatial policy experiments an application to ugandan microfinance abstract this paper demonstrates a method for estimating treatment effects in spatial tests utilizing a second control group to measure unexplained spatial phenomena the technique is implemented on two innovations in ugandan microfinance and we measure the ways in which concurrent shocks such as an ebola outbreak and a contentious presidential election altered outcomes differentially across regions by correcting for this spatial heterogeneity we measure the impact of the policies a program that increased borrowers control over the terms of their loans improved outcomes while the results of a program that bundled health insurance into the lending contract were more mixed

control rights in complex partnerships this paper develops a theory of the allocation of authority between two players who are in a complex partnership that is a partnership which produces impure public goods we show that the optimal allocation depends on technological factors the parties valuations of the goods produced and the degree of impurity of these goods when the degree of impurity is large control rights should be given to the main investor irrespective of preference considerations there are some situations in which this allocation is optimal even if the degree of impurity is very low as long as one party s investment is more important than the other party s if the parties investments are of similar importance and the degree of impurity is large shared authority is optimal with a greater share going to the low valuation party if the importance of the parties investments is similar but the degree of impurity is neither large nor small the low valuation party should receive sole authority we analyze an extension in which side payments are infeasible we check for robustness of our results in several dimensions such as allowing for multiple parties or for joint authority and apply our results to interpret a number of complex partnerships including those involving schools and child custody jel d02 o23 h41 l31

the effect of cash transfers to schools on voluntary contributions abstract school based management programs aim to improve education outcomes by involving parents in allocation decisions about external funds transferred to the school this paper explores the effects of two school based management programs on parental investment in schools via voluntary contributions one program provides both a cash grant and a matching scheme for privately raised funds difference in differences estimation shows that parents in richer schools increased voluntary contributions by 28 while parents in poorer schools decreased voluntary contributions by 11 this implies that a matching scheme results in higher inequality in resources available to schools the second program provides only a cash grant to poor schools based on a randomized control estimation shows that parents use 83 of the grant to substitute for voluntary contributions a cash grant alone for poor schools results in an increase in resources available to the school in less than the cash grant transfer

seasonal factors and outlier effects in rate of return on electricity spot prices in australia s national electricity market this article documents seasonal patterns and other characteristics of electricity spot prices in the australian national electricity market nem over a 7 year sample period the goal is to investigate more specifically the influence of seasonalities and outliers noted in the body of literature on electricity prices the results confirm that electricity prices exhibit significant time of day and day of week effects and monthly and yearly effects are significant to a lesser degree extremely high spikes in the price series are an important characteristic of electricity prices and are shown to be a highly significant component of returns behaviour negative prices are unusual in financial time series data but occur in australian electricity prices and are found to be influential on returns the implications of these finding are that seasonal and outlier effects should not be ignored in efforts to model electricity prices

discovering price load relationships in california s electricity market this paper reports on characterizing recent price behavior in the califomia electricity market market participants that is producers consumers and traders are highly motivated by the potential for profits to develop strategies to explore and exploit the limits of system operation these strategies should be reflected in the market as different price to load relationships we show that a number of regimes i e characteristic behaviors exist in the price time series and provide a brief analysis of each regime knowledge of the number of regimes their characteristics and switching dynamics allows insight into the market and power system performance

changes over time in multidimensional poverty methodology and results for 34 countries summary this paper sets out a systemic account of intertemporal changes in multidimensional poverty using the alkire foster adjusted headcount ratio and its consistent sub indices it uses three techniques to assess the pro poorness of multidimensional poverty reduction the analysis of changes in multidimensional poverty draws on the global multidimensional poverty index mpi and related destitution measure in 34 countries and 338 sub national regions covering 2 5 billion people for which there is a recent mpi estimation and comparable demographic and health survey dhs dataset across time first it assesses overall changes in poverty and its incidence and intensity and compares this with changes in 1 90 poverty next utilizing the property of subgroup decomposability it examines changes in the mpi and its consistent sub indices over time across urban rural regions sub national regions and ethnic groups the decomposition analysis identifies relevant national patterns including those in which the pace of poverty reduction is higher for the poorest subgroups finally the paper analyzes the dynamics of a strict subset of the poor who are identified as destitute using a more extreme deprivation cutoff vector and studies relative rates of reduction of destitution and poverty by country and region this extensive empirical analysis illustrates how to assess the extent and patterns of reduction of multidimensional poverty as well as whether it is inclusive or whether some people or groups are left behind naturally some further research questions emerge

modeling and forecasting electricity prices with input output hidden markov models in competitive electricity markets in addition to the uncertainty of exogenous variables such as energy demand water inflows and availability of generation units and fuel costs participants are faced with the uncertainty of their competitors behavior the analysis of electricity price time series reflects a switching nature related to discrete changes in competitors strategies which can be represented by a set of dynamic models sequenced together by a markov chain an input output hidden markov model iohmm is proposed for analyzing and forecasting electricity spot prices the model provides both good predictions in terms of accuracy as well as dynamic information about the market in this way different market states are identified and characterized by their more relevant explanatory variables moreover a conditional probability transition matrix governs the probabilities of remaining in the same state or changing to another whenever a new market session is opened the model has been successfully applied to real clearing prices in the spanish electricity market

when supply meets demand the case of hourly spot electricity prices we use a supply demand framework to model the hourly day ahead price of electricity the spot price based on publicly available information with the model we can forecast the level and probability of a spike in the spot price defined as the spot price above a certain threshold several european countries have recently started publishing day ahead forecasts of the available supply this paper shows this forecasted capacity is quite successful in predicting spot price movements 24 h ahead

the impact of school lunches on primary school enrollment evidence from india s midday meal scheme at the end of 2001 the indian supreme court issued a directive ordering states to institute school lunches known locally as midday meals in government primary schools in this paper we provide a large scale assessment of the enrollment effects of india s midday meal scheme which offers warm lunches free of cost to 120 million primary school children across india and is the largest school feeding program in the world to isolate the causal effect of the policy we make use of its staggered implementation across indian states in government but not private schools using a panel dataset of more than 420 000 schools observed annually from 2002 to 2004 we find that midday meals result in substantial increases in primary school enrollment driven by early primary school responses to the program our results are robust to a wide range of specification tests

construction of an efficient portfolio of power purchase decisions based on risk diversification tradeoff abstract we present a methodology based on the tradeoff between risk and diversification in order to evaluate a purchase portfolio of energy where the assets refer to purchasing strategies of a retailer generator of electricity in three markets spot regulated and non regulated markets we use two measures of diversification i entropy based on factors constructed by principal components analysis and ii entropy based on asset risk in each case weights for each strategy are estimated by using the interior point method for which monthly forecasts of returns are calculated a year ahead for each market spot prices are modeled using an arima model and bilateral contracts are modeled using growth rates we compare risk diversified portfolios with mean variance portfolio although diversification does not necessarily mean a lower risk we show that the mean variance portfolio s risk is not always lower than the risk diversified approaches also we show that diversification converges to one for the highest risk portfolio but this does not happen in the case of entropy based on factors because one asset can participate in more than one principal component clearly the mean variance approach is unable to perform a diversified allocation these results are useful for retailer generators who want combine the criteria of risk and diversification

gender and command over property a critical gap in economic analysis and policy in south asia abstract this paper focuses on a much neglected issue the links between gender inequities and command over property it outlines why in rural south asia where arable land is the most important form of property any significant improvement in women s economic and social situation is crucially tied to their having independent land rights better employment opportunities can complement but not substitute for land but despite progressive legislation few south asian women own land even fewer effectively control any why a complex range of factors social administrative and ideological are found to underlie the persistent gap between women s legal rights and their actual ownership of land and between ownership and control the necessity of collective action by women for overcoming these obstacles and the aspects needing a specific focus for policy and action are also discussed

stochastic convenience yield and the pricing of oil contingent claims this paper develops and empirically tests a two factor model for pricing financial and real assets contingent on the price of oil the factors are the spot price of oil and the instantaneous convenience yield the parameters of the model are estimated using weekly oil futures contract prices from january 1984 to november 1988 and the model s performance is assessed out of sample by valuing futures contracts over the period november 1988 to may 1989 finally the model is applied to determine the present values of one barrel of oil deliverable in one to ten years time

female headed households and female maintained families are they worth targeting to reduce poverty in developing countries controversy exists over whether to target public and private sector programs to female headed households in developing countries in the attempt to combat poverty and social disadvantage the issues related to the definition and measurement of female headship and the importance of the concept for development policy are discussed a systematic review is then presented of the empirical evidence on the relation between female headship and poverty if female headed households tend to be poorer on average than other households headship should seriously be considered as a potentially useful criterion for targeting antipoverty interventions especially in developing countries where means testing is not feasible the authors examine the potential costs and benefits of targeting female headship and review the experience of chile one of the few countries which has targeted female headship through government intervention and the only one which has evaluation data available the analysis of the project experience is used along with a review of the empirical evidence to answer the question of the desirability and efficiency of targeting female headship in order to reduce poverty in developing countries

an adaptive wavelet neural network based energy price forecasting in electricity markets in a competitive electricity market an accurate forecasting of energy prices is an important activity for all the market participants either for developing bidding strategies or for making investment decisions an adaptive wavelet neural network awnn is proposed in this paper for short term price forecasting stpf in the electricity markets a commonly used mexican hat wavelet has been chosen as the activation function for hidden layer neurons of feed forward neural network ffnn to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach day ahead prediction of market clearing price mcp of spain market which is a duopoly market with a dominant player and locational marginal price lmp forecasting in pjm electricity market are considered the forecasted results clearly show that awnn has good prediction properties compared to other forecasting techniques such as wavelet arima multi layer perceptron mlp and radial basis function rbf neural networks as well as recently proposed fuzzy neural network fnn

experimental evidence on returns to capital and access to finance in mexico a strong theoretical argument for focusing on access to finance is that financial market imperfections can result in large inefficiencies as firms with productive investment opportunities underinvest lack of access to finance is a frequent complaint of microenterprises which account for a large share of employment in developing countries however assessing the extent to which a lack of capital affects their business profits is complicated by the fact that business investment is likely to be correlated with a host of unmeasured characteristics of the owner and firm such as entrepreneurial ability and demand shocks in a randomized experiment that gave cash and in kind grants to small retail firms providing an exogenous shock to capital the shock generated large increases in profits with the effects concentrated among firms that were more financially constrained the estimated return to capital was at least 20 33 percent a month three to five times higher than market interest rates

stochastic joint optimization of wind generation and pumped storage units in an electricity market one of the main characteristics of wind power is the inherent variability and unpredictability of the generation source even in the short term to cope with this drawback hydro pumped storage units have been proposed in the literature as a good complement to wind generation due to their ability to manage positive and negative energy imbalances over time this paper investigates the combined optimization of a wind farm and a pumped storage facility from the point of view of a generation company in a market environment the optimization model is formulated as a two stage stochastic programming problem with two random parameters market prices and wind generation the optimal bids for the day ahead spot market are the ldquohere and nowrdquo decisions while the optimal operation of the facilities are the recourse variables a joint configuration is modeled and compared with an uncoordinated operation a realistic example case is presented where the developed models are tested with satisfactory results

randomized evaluations of educational programs in developing countries some lessons this paper reviews recent randomized evaluations of educational programs in developing countries including programs to increase school participation to provide educational inputs and to reform education it then extracts some lessons for education policy and for the practice and political economy of randomized evaluations

women empowerment and economic development women empowerment and economic development are closely related in one direction development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women in the other direction empowering women may benefit development does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion this paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment development nexus and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self sustaining and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women

deregulated power prices comparison of diurnal patterns we examine electrical power price and in particular its daily and average weekday vs weekend pattern of change for 14 deregulated markets power price in deregulated markets shows fundamentally different patterns north american markets show a monotonic diurnal weekday price pattern while all other markets studied show more than one price peak deregulated power markets differ in maximum vs minimum daily average price and in average weekday to weekend price in turn creating a different incentive for a consumer to time shift power consuming activities markets differ in the extent to which a small fraction of the days shapes the average diurnal pattern and value of price deregulated markets show a wide variation in the correlation between load and price some deregulated markets most notably britain and spain show patterns that are predictable and consistent and hence that can encourage a customer to shape consumption behaviors other markets for example south australia have patterns that are inconsistent and irregular and hence are hard for a customer to interpret a customer in such a market will have a higher incentive to escape risk through hedging mechanisms

child labor in the global economy few issues in developing countries draw as much popular attention as child labor this paper begins by quantifying the extent and main characteristics of child labor it then considers the evidence on a range of issues about child labor fundamentally child labor is a symptom of poverty low income and poor institutions are driving forces behind the prevalence of child labor worldwide this study concludes by assessing the policy options to reduce worldwide child labor

counting and multidimensional poverty measurement this paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method k that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches and a class of poverty measures m our identification step employs two forms of cutoff one within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting the dimensions in which a person is deprived the aggregation step employs the fgt measures appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality the axioms are presented as joint restrictions on identification and the measures and the methodology satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability the identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data as is the first of our measures the adjusted headcount ratio we present some dominance results and an interpretation of the adjusted headcount ratio as a measure of unfreedom examples from the us and indonesia illustrate our methodology

a model for energy pricing with stochastic emission costs we use a supply demand approach to value energy products exposed to emission cost uncertainty we find closed form solutions for a number of popularly traded energy derivatives such as forwards european call options written on spot prices and european call options written on forward contracts our modeling approach is to first construct noisy supply and demand processes and then equate them to find an equilibrium price this approach is very general while still allowing for sensitivity analysis within a valuation setting our assumption is that in the presence of emission costs traditional supply growth will slow down causing output prices of energy products to become more costly over time however emission costs do not immediately cause output price appreciation but instead expose individual projects particularly those with high emission outputs to much more extreme risks through the cost side of their profit stream our results have implications for hedging and pricing for producers operating in areas facing a stochastic emission cost environment

on the market impact of wind energy forecasts this paper presents an analysis of how day ahead electricity spot prices are affected by day ahead wind power forecasts demonstration of this relationship is given as a test case for the western danish price area of the nord pool s elspot market impact on the average price behaviour is investigated as well as that on the distributional properties of the price by using a non parametric regression model to assess the effects of wind power forecasts on the average behaviour the non linearities and time variations in the relationship are captured well and the effects are shown to be quite substantial furthermore by evaluating the distributional properties of the spot prices under different scenarios the impact of the wind power forecasts on the price distribution is proved to be considerable the conditional price distribution is moreover shown to be non gaussian this implies that forecasting models for electricity spot prices for which parameters are estimated by a least squares techniques will not have gaussian residuals hence the widespread assumption of gaussian residuals from electricity spot price models is shown to be inadequate for these model types the revealed effects are likely to be observable and qualitatively similar in other day ahead electricity markets significantly penetrated by wind power

an intertemporal general equilibrium model of asset prices this paper develops a continuous time general equilibrium model of a simple but complete economy and uses it to examine the behavior of asset prices in this model asset prices and their stochastic properties are determined endogenously one principal result is a partial differential equation which asset prices must satisfy the solution of this equation gives the equilibrium price of any asset in terms of the underlying real variables in the economy in this paper we develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model for use in applied research an important feature of the model is its integration of real and financial markets among other things the model endogenously determines the stochastic process followed by the equilibrium price of any financial asset and shows how this process depends on the underlying real variables the model is fully consistent with rational expectations and maximizing behavior on the part of all agents our framework is general enough to include many of the fundamental forces affecting asset markets yet it is tractable enough to be specialized easily to produce specific testable results furthermore the model can be extended in a number of straightforward ways consequently it is well suited to a wide variety of applications for example in a companion paper cox ingersoll and ross 7 we use the model to develop a theory of the term structure of interest rates many studies have been concerned with various aspects of asset pricing under uncertainty the most relevant to our work are the important papers on intertemporal asset pricing by merton 19 and lucas 16 working in a continuous time framework merton derives a relationship among the equilibrium expected rates of return on assets he shows that when investment opportunities are changing randomly over time this relationship will include effects which have no analogue in a static one period model lucas considers an economy with homogeneous individuals and a single consumption good which is produced by a number of processes the random output of these processes is exogenously determined and perishable assets are defined as claims to all or a part of the output of a process and the equilibrium determines the asset prices our theory draws on some elements of both of these papers like merton we formulate our model in continuous time and make full use of the analytical tractability that this affords the economic structure of our model is somewhat similar to that of lucas however we include both endogenous production and

short term variations and long term dynamics in commodity prices in this article we develop a two factor model of commodity prices that allows meanreversion in short term prices and uncertainty in the equilibrium level to which prices revert although these two factors are not directly observable they may be estimated from spot and futures prices intuitively movements in prices for long maturity futures contracts provide information about the equilibrium price level and differences between the prices for the short and long term contracts provide information about short term variations in prices we show that although this model does not explicitly consider changes in convenience yields over time this short term long term model is equivalent to the stochastic convenience yield model developed in gibson and schwartz 1990 we estimate the parameters of the model using prices for oil futures contracts and apply the model to some hypothetical oil linked assets to demonstrate its use and some of its advantages over the gibson schwartz model

a feminization of vulnerability female headship poverty and vulnerability in thailand and vietnam summary this article investigates whether heterogeneous subgroups of female headed households are worse off than households headed by men it analyzes the correlates of consumption shock exposure and severity as well as vulnerability to poverty using panel data of over 4000 rural households from thailand and vietnam strong evidence of heterogeneity among subgroups of female headed households are found in particular in comparison with male headed households de facto female headed ones are found to be richer in thailand but prone to more severe shocks in both countries furthermore our results suggest that in thailand single female headed households are less vulnerable to poverty than households headed by men however in vietnam these households are particularly poor and vulnerable to poverty we show that this is mostly due to their greater poverty rather than their higher risk exposure our findings suggest that differentiation by subgroups of headship is important for policy development and targeting as well as future research

ethnic diversity social sanctions and public goods in kenya abstract this paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western kenya the identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance the theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents we relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries

low schooling for girls slower growth for all cross country evidence on the effect of gender inequality in education on economic development using cross country and panel regressions this article investigates how gender inequality in education affects long term economic growth such inequality is found to have an effect on economic growth that is robust to changes in specifications and controls for potential endogeneities the results suggest that gender inequality in education directly affects economic growth by lowering the average level of human capital in addition growth is indirectly affected through the impact of gender inequality on investment and population growth some 0 4 0 9 percentage points of differences in annual per capita growth rates between east asia and sub saharan africa south asia and the middle east can be accounted for by differences in gender gaps in education between these regions

schools skills and synapses american society is polarizing proportionately more american youth are graduating from college than ever before at the same time american born youth are graduating from high school at lower rates than 40 years ago this paper reviews and interprets these trends the origins of inequality are examined and policies to alleviate it are analyzed families play a powerful role in shaping adult outcomes the accident of birth is a major source of inequality recent research by cunha and heckman 2007a 2008b shows that about half of the inequality in the present value of lifetime earnings is due to factors determined by age 18 compared to 50 years ago relatively more american children are being born into disadvantaged families where investments in children are smaller than in advantaged families policies that supplement the child rearing resources available to disadvantaged families reduce inequality and raise productivity

application of public domain market information to forecast ontario s wholesale electricity prices this paper evaluates the usefulness of publicly available electricity market information in forecasting the hourly ontario energy price hoep in order to do so relevant data from ontario and its neighboring electricity markets namely new york new england and pjm electricity markets are investigated and a final set of explanatory variable candidates that are available before real time are selected multivariate transfer function and dynamic regression models are employed to relate hoep behavior to the selected explanatory variable candidates univariate arima models are also developed for the hoep the hoep models are developed on the basis of two forecasting horizons i e 3 h and 24 h and forecasting performance of the multivariate models is compared with that of the univariate models the outcomes show that the market information publicly available before real time can be used to improve hoep forecast accuracy to some extent however unusually high or low prices remain unpredictable and hence the available data cannot lead to significantly more accurate forecasts nevertheless the generated forecasts in this paper are significantly more accurate than currently available hoep forecasts to analyze the relatively low accuracy of the hoep forecasts comparisons are made with respect to arima models developed for locational marginal prices lmps of ontario s three neighboring markets and price volatility analyses are presented

on the watts multidimensional poverty index and its decomposition summary the multidimensional extension of the watts poverty index may be expressed as a function of five determinants measuring respectively the impacts of what are defined in the paper as the watts poverty gap ratio the theil bourguignon index of inequality among the poor the overall headcount ratio the weights of the various dimensions and some measure of correlation between the various dimensions using the shapley decomposition we apply this index to world data on the per capita gdp life expectancy and literacy rates and derive the contributions of the five determinants defined above to the variation of this index during 1993 2002

modeling real time balancing power market prices using combined sarima and markov processes this paper describes modeling of real time balancing power market prices by using combined seasonal auto regressive integrated moving average sarima and discrete markov processes the combination of such processes allows generation of price series with periods where no demand for balancing power exists the purpose of the model is simulation of prices to construct scenario trees representing possible realization of the stochastic prices such scenario trees can be used in planning models based on stochastic optimization to generate bid sequences to the balancing market the spread of the prices in the tree and the shape of the scenarios are of central importance model parameter estimation methods reflecting the demands on scenario trees have therefore been used the proposed model is also applied to data from the nordic power market the conclusion of this paper is that the developed model is appropriate for modeling real time balancing power prices

what do nongovernmental organizations do nongovernmental organizations are one group of players who are active in the efforts of international development and increasing the welfare of poor people in poor countries nongovernmental organizations are largely staffed by altruistic employees and volunteers working towards ideological rather than financial ends their founders are often intense creative individuals who sometimes come up with a new product to deliver or a better way to deliver existing goods and services they are funded by donors many of them poor or anonymous yet these attributes should not be unfamiliar to economists development ngos like domestic nonprofits can be understood in the framework of not for profit contracting it is easy to conjure up a glowing vision of how the efforts of ngos could focus on problem solving without getting bogged down in corruption or bureaucracy but the strengths of the ngo model have some corresponding weaknesses in agenda setting decision making and resource allocation we highlight three factors in explaining the increased presence of ngos in the last few decades a trend towards more outsourcing of government services new ventures by would be not for profit entrepreneurs and the increasing professionalization of existing ngos

families schools and primary school learning evidence for argentina and colombia in an international perspective this article presents evidence on the associations between family background school characteristics and student performance in primary school in argentina colombia and several comparison countries as a general pattern educational performance is strongly related to family background weakly to some institutional school features and hardly to schools resource endowments in an international perspective family background effects are relatively large in argentina and relatively small in colombia a specific argentine feature is the lack of performance differences between rural and urban areas a specific colombian feature is the lack of significant between gender performance differences nonnative students and students not speaking spanish at home perform particularly weak in both countries in argentina students perform better in schools with a centralized curriculum and ability based class formation

school subsidies for the poor evaluating the mexican progresa poverty program abstract this paper evaluates how the progresa program which provides poor mothers in rural mexico with education grants has affected enrollment poor children who reside in communities randomly selected to participate in the initial phase of the progresa are compared to those who reside in other control communities pre program comparisons check the randomized design and double difference estimators of the program s effect on the treated are calculated by grade and sex probit models are also estimated for the probability that a child is enrolled controlling for additional characteristics of the child their parents local schools and community and for sample attrition to evaluate the sensitivity of the program estimates these estimates of program short run effects on enrollment are extrapolated to the lifetime schooling and the earnings of adults to approximate the internal rate of return on the public schooling subsidies as they increase expected private wages

hmm filtering and parameter estimation of an electricity spot price model abstract in this paper we develop a model for electricity spot price dynamics the spot price is assumed to follow an exponential ornstein uhlenbeck ou process with an added compound poisson process in this way the model allows for mean reversion and possible jumps all parameters are modulated by a hidden markov chain in discrete time they are able to switch between different economic regimes representing the interaction of various factors through the application of reference probability technique adaptive filters are derived which in turn provide optimal estimates for the state of the markov chain and related quantities of the observation process the em algorithm is applied to find optimal estimates of the model parameters in terms of the recursive filters we implement this self calibrating model on a deseasonalised series of daily spot electricity prices from the nordic exchange nord pool on the basis of one step ahead forecasts we found that the model is able to capture the empirical characteristics of nord pool spot prices

option valuation of claims on real assets the case of offshore petroleum leases this paper extends financial option theory by developing a methodology for the valuation of claims on a real asset an offshore petroleum lease several theoretical and practical problems not present in applying option pricing theory to financial assets are addressed most importantly we show the necessity of combining option pricing techniques with a model of equilibrium in the market for the underlying asset petroleum reserves the advantages of this approach over conventional discounted cash flow techniques are emphasized the methodological development provides important insights for both company behavior and government policy promising empirical results are reported

widowhood and poverty in rural india some inferences from household survey data abstract this paper examines the relationship between widowhood and poverty in rural india based on national sample survey data on consumer expenditure in terms of standard poverty indices based on household per capita expenditure there is no evidence of widows being disproportionately concentrated in poor households or of female headed households being poorer than male headed households these findings also apply in terms of adult equivalent consumption for any reasonable choice of equivalence scales poverty indices for different household types however are quite sensitive to the level of economies of scale even relatively small economies of scale imply that the incidence of poverty among single widows widows living with unmarried children and female household heads all of whom tend to live in relatively small households is higher than in the population as a whole

reducing electricity price forecasting error using seasonality and higher order crossing information commodity prices are volatile and their volatility changes over time electricity prices are even more volatile in general because customers cannot easily switch to other energy source when the electricity prices fluctuate electricity prices also have strong seasonal behavior because the demand of electricity depends on the season to address these characteristics a time series forecasting model with seasonality and higher order crossing information for electricity prices is proposed the model measures the similarity between two time series by using their higher order crossing information the model can predict not only day ahead prices short term forecasting but also a series of prices for one week ahead or even longer simultaneously medium term price curve forecasting the model is tested on both high and low volatile data sets to evaluate its robustness and generality it is also shown that the model can produce more accurate prediction than some well known models

unequal opportunities and human capital formation abstract this paper develops a tractable heterogeneous agents general equilibrium model where individuals have different endowments of the factors that complement the schooling process the paper explores the relationship between inequality of opportunities inequality of outcomes and aggregate efficiency in human capital formation using numerical solutions we study how the endogenous variables of the model respond to two different interventions in the distribution of opportunities a mean preserving spread and a change in the support the results suggest that a higher degree of inequality of opportunities is associated with lower average level of human capital a lower fraction of individuals investing in human capital higher inequality in the distribution of human capital and higher wage inequality in particular the model does not predict a trade off between aggregate efficiency in human capital formation as measured by the average level of human capital in the economy and equality of opportunity

is democracy good for the poor many scholars claim that democracy improves the welfare of the poor this article uses data on infant and child mortality to challenge this claim cross national studies tend to exclude from their samples nondemocratic states that have performed well this leads to the mistaken inference that nondemocracies have worse records than democracies once these and other flaws are corrected democracy has little or no effect on infant and child mortality rates democracies spend more money on education and health than nondemocracies but these benefits seem to accrue to middle and upper income groups

wheeling of power under deregulated environment of power system a bibilographical survey the power industry is moving rapidly from regulated conventional setup to a deregulated environment there is an urgent need to keep a track of international experiences and activities taking place in this emerging field this paper gives a bibliographical survey and general backgrounds of research and development in the field of power system wheeling under deregulated environment based on over 170 published articles wheeling in general and the establishment of wheeling rate in particular are subjects of extensive debate today this will be very much useful for all countries especially those developing countries which are moving toward the unbundling of electricity supply industry esi the collected literature have been divided into many section so that new researchers do not face any difficulty for obtaining literature particularly in the area of wheeling of power under deregulated environment

electricity market price forecasting based on weighted nearest neighbors techniques this paper presents a simple technique to forecast next day electricity market prices based on the weighted nearest neighbors methodology first it is explained how the relevant parameters defining the adopted model are obtained such parameters have to do with the window length of the time series and with the number of neighbors chosen for the prediction then results corresponding to the spanish electricity market during 2002 are presented and discussed finally the performance of the proposed method is compared with that of recently published techniques

structural estimates of the intergenerational education correlation using a structural dynamic programming model we investigate the relative importance of family background variables and individual specific abilities in explaining cross sectional differences in schooling attainments and wages each type of ability is the sum of one component correlated with family background variables and a residual orthogonal component which is purely individual specific household background variables especially parents education account for 68 of the explained cross sectional variations in schooling attainments while ability correlated with background variables accounts for 17 and pure individual specific ability accounts for 15 interestingly individual differences in wages are mostly explained by pure individual specific abilities as they account for as much as 73 of the explained variations in wages family background variables account for only 19 while ability endowments correlated with family background account for 8 copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

economic impact of electricity market price forecasting errors a demand side analysis several techniques have been proposed in the literature to forecast electricity market prices and improve forecast accuracy however no studies have been reported examining the economic impact of price forecast inaccuracies on forecast users therefore in this paper the application of electricity market price forecasts to short term operation scheduling of two typical and inherently different industrial loads is examined and the associated economic impact is analyzed using electricity market price forecasts as the expected next day electricity prices optimal operating schedules and the associated costs are determined for each load these costs are compared with those of a perfect price forecast scenario in which actual prices are used to determine the operating schedules numerical results and discussions are provided based on price forecasts with different error characteristics

classification of future electricity market prices forecasting short term electricity market prices has been the focus of several studies in recent years although various approaches have been examined achieving sufficiently low forecasting errors has not been always possible however certain applications such as demand side management do not require exact values for future prices but utilize specific price thresholds as the basis for making short term scheduling decisions in this paper classification of future electricity market prices with respect to pre specified price thresholds is introduced two alternative models based on support vector machines are proposed in a multi class multi step ahead price classification context numerical results are provided for classifying prices in ontario s and alberta s markets

a hybrid system econometric model for electricity spot prices considering spike sensitivity to forced outage distributions with the current trend in deregulation all electricity markets have been subject to volatile electricity prices typically in peak season as markets mature new financial and operational risk management instruments are becoming available in order to price such instruments a model for the underlying price process is required in this paper a hybrid model is described that contains aspects of the power system as well as the historical time series of spot prices observed in the market by including both aspects of the problem a model with both economic and system based aspects is created its modular design allows easy adaptation to different markets based on generating system reliability load patterns and price histories the spot price histories are manifest in two probability distributions for these prices whereas the system specifics are included via load and generation models which are calibrated to the climate and system of interest

the quality of employment qoe in nine latin american countries a multidimensional perspective abstract this paper proposes a methodology for measuring the quality of employment from a multidimensional and public policy perspective in latin american developing countries argentina bolivia brazil chile colombia ecuador mexico paraguay peru and uruguay using household and labour force survey data from 2015 the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the qoe can be measured using a multidimensional methodology that can inform policy makers about the state of their labour markets in a way that complements traditional variables such as participation or unemployment rates which are not always good indicators of labour market performance in developing countries with large informal sectors building on the framework of the capability approach as well as on previous work on multidimensional poverty we use the alkire foster af method to construct a synthetic indicator of the quality of employment qoe at an individual level we select three dimensions that must be considered as both instrumentally and intrinsically important to workers and the functions and capabilities generated by their employment situation income job security and employment conditions job security is then divided into two sub dimensions occupational status and job tenure as is employment conditions social security affiliation and excessive working hours a threshold is then established within each dimension and sub dimension to determine whether a person is deprived or not within each dimension before establishing an overall cut off line and calculating composite levels of deprivation the results generated by this indicator are first highly relevant to policy makers as they allow for the precise identification of groups of vulnerable workers as well as of dimensions and indicators which contribute to deprivation in the labour market second they extend the debate about employment in developing countries to variables not commonly considered by the literature as being critical to the well being of workers and their dependents such as occupational status and job tenure third this paper highlights important difference between latin american countries both in terms of the overall qoe index result as well as its component dimensions while chile presents the best results in the region paraguay presents the worst followed by mexico bolivia and peru however chile peru columbia and brazil for example have the biggest problem with job rotation finally the paper highlights that low rates of unemployment are not necessarily related to low rates of deprivation in terms of the qoe in fact in some countries analysed e g mexico the opposite is true

a novel approach to forecast electricity price for pjm using neural network and similar days method price forecasting in competitive electricity markets is critical for consumers and producers in planning their operations and managing their price risk and it also plays a key role in the economic optimization of the electric energy industry this paper explores a technique of artificial neural network ann model based on similar days sd method in order to forecast day ahead electricity price in the pjm market to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model publicly available data acquired from the pjm interconnection were used for training and testing the ann the factors impacting the electricity price forecasting including time factors load factors and historical price factors are discussed comparison of forecasting performance of the proposed ann model with that of forecasts obtained from similar days method is presented daily and weekly mean absolute percentage error mape of reasonably small value and forecast mean square error fmse of less than 7 mwh were obtained for the pjm data which has correlation coefficient of determination of 0 6744 between load and electricity price simulation results show that the proposed ann model based on similar days method is capable of forecasting locational marginal price lmp in the pjm market efficiently and accurately

electricity price curve modeling and forecasting by manifold learning this paper proposes a novel nonparametric approach for the modeling and analysis of electricity price curves by applying the manifold learning methodology locally linear embedding lle the prediction method based on manifold learning and reconstruction is employed to make short term and medium term price forecasts our method not only performs accurately in forecasting one day ahead prices but also has a great advantage in predicting one week ahead and one month ahead prices over other methods the forecast accuracy is demonstrated by numerical results using historical price data taken from the eastern u s electric power markets

forecasting next day electricity prices by time series models in the framework of competitive electricity markets power producers and consumers need accurate price forecasting tools price forecasts embody crucial information for producers and consumers when planning bidding strategies in order to maximize their benefits and utilities respectively this paper provides two highly accurate yet efficient price forecasting tools based on time series analysis dynamic regression and transfer function models these techniques are explained and checked against each other results and discussions from real world case studies based on the electricity markets of mainland spain and california are presented

do it service centers promote school enrollment evidence from india abstract globalization has changed job opportunities in much of the developing world in india outsourcing has created a new class of high skill jobs which have increased overall returns to schooling existing evidence suggests education may broadly respond to this change we use microdata to evaluate the impact of these jobs on local school enrollment in areas outside of major it centers we merge panel data on school enrollment from a comprehensive school level administrative dataset with detailed data on information technology enabled services ites center location and founding dates using school fixed effects we find that introducing a new ites center causes a 5 increase in the number of children enrolled in primary school this effect is localized to within a few kilometers we show the effect is driven by english language schools consistent with the claim that the impacts are due to changes in returns to schooling and is not driven by changes in population or income resulting from the ites center supplementary survey evidence suggests that the localization of the effects is driven by limited information diffusion

health and wealth among the poor india and south africa compared health and wealth are the two most important components of well being rankings of well being based on income will differ from more comprehensive rankings depending on the way that income and health are related there are strong bidirectional causal links between income and health so that we cannot understand either without understanding both what we call the wealthier is healthier hypothesis asserts both that income is the main determinant of health and that the international correlation between income and health is sufficiently tight for income rankings to indicate well being more broadly

intrahousehold inequalities in child rights and well being a barrier to progress this paper uses unicef s multiple indicators cluster surveys cross country data to shed light on unequal investments in the wellbeing of children boys and girls within the household the paper proposes a new methodology to measure the extent of gender intrahousehold inequality and its contribution to overall levels of inequality using an l theil index decomposition the individual and joint distribution of inequality in four key indicators of child wellbeing is analyzed stunting birth registration school attendance and time spent on work and chores working hours in the search for evidence of gender bias evidence from various separate county studies had shown that the direction of the gender bias is not universal such conclusion holds when using a consistent methodology and comparable cross country datasets this paper shows that disparities inside households do not follow the same bias toward one or the other gender in all countries and the direction of the bias is not the same across indicators of wellbeing while progress in improving child wellbeing has occurred in many countries inequalities remain intrahousehold inequalities might still be considered a priority in an agenda focused on closing these progress gaps

analysis of the probability distribution of lmp by central limit theorem the main goal of this paper is to provide an analytical study on the statistical behaviors of the electricity price at various conditions of the load and the network in order to achieve this goal a novel two step modeling is proposed for the electricity price at the first step it is proved that there is a linear relationship between the locational marginal prices lmp and the strategies of generating companies gencos in this linear relationship the lmp is decomposed to the weighted summation of the strategies of marginal units plus constant value at the second step the lmp is modeled by classic central limit theorem clt using this model an analytical relationship is derived between the price discovery mechanism and characteristics of its probability density function pdf as a result this paper shows analytically that increasing system load causes the price pdf deviates from the normal distribution on the other hand by decreasing system load the electricity price distribution tends toward the normal distribution the statistical studies on the real power markets data confirm these analytical results furthermore the simulation results of the ieee 300 bus test system illustrate the efficiency of the proposed model

do solar lamps help children study contrary evidence from a pilot study in uganda abstractover half a billion children lack adequate lighting and use dim smoky and dangerous kerosene based lighting for their evening studies this article examines the conventional wisdom that the brighter clean safe and zero marginal cost light of solar lamps enhances children s learning outcomes in a randomised experiment unexpectedly solar lamps lowered test scores by five points out of 100 0 25 standard deviation but increased reported study time by approximately 30 minutes per day this may be due to flickering from lack of full charge lowering their productivity the nationwide learning assessment suggests that solar lamps likely have an insignificant effect on educational attainment

electricity price short term forecasting using artificial neural networks this paper presents the system marginal price smp short term forecasting implementation using the artificial neural networks ann computing technique the described approach uses the three layered ann paradigm with backpropagation the retrospective smp real world data acquired from the deregulated victorian power system was used for training and testing the ann the results presented in this paper confirm considerable value of the ann based approach in forecasting the smp

vouchers for private schooling in colombia evidence from a randomized natural experiment colombia used lotteries to distribute vouchers which partially covered the cost of private secondary school for students who maintained satisfactory academic progress three years after the lotteries winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8th grade primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades and scored 0 2 standard deviations higher on achievement tests there is some evidence that winners worked less than losers and were less likely to marry or cohabit as teenagers benefits to participants likely exceeded the 24 per winner additional cost to the government of supplying vouchers instead of public school places

gender and multidimensional poverty in nicaragua an individual based approach most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the household as the unit of analysis so that the multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all its members this assumption ignores intra household inequalities additionally households containing both a female and a male cannot contribute to a gender gap in poverty so gender differentials in poverty cannot be estimated but the sustainable development goals have put special emphasis on gender equality therefore new measures able to capture the gender differences are needed consequently in this paper we propose an individual based multidimensional poverty measure in order to estimate the three i s of multidimensional poverty incidence intensity and inequality in nicaragua as well as the gender differentials we also estimate logit regressions to better understanding the determinants of multidimensional poverty in this country overall we find that there are statistically significant gender differences in multidimensional poverty in nicaragua but they are estimated to be small and lower than 5 however the gender differential in inequality is larger than 10 and it suggests that multi dimensionally poor women are living in very intense poverty when compared with multi dimensionally poor men we also find that the elderly and children are the most vulnerable people in terms of multidimensional poverty in this country furthermore when information on employment domestic work and social protection is considered in the analysis the gender gaps become more substantial and women are more likely to be poor than men

valuing oil properties integrating option pricing and decision analysis approaches there are two major competing procedures for evaluating risky projects where managerial flexibility plays an important role one is decision analytic based on stochastic dynamic programming and the other is option pricing theory or contingent claims analysis based on the no arbitrage theory of financial markets in this paper we show how these two approaches can be profitably integrated to evaluate oil properties we develop and analyze a model of an oil property either a developed property or a proven but undeveloped reserve where production rates and oil prices both vary stochastically over time and at any time the decision maker may terminate production or accelerate production by drilling additional wells the decision maker is assumed to be risk averse and can hedge price risks by trading oil futures contracts we also describe extensions of this model that incorporate additional uncertainties and options discuss its use in exploration decisions and in evaluating a portfolio of properties rather than a single property and briefly describe other potential applications of this integrated methodology

day ahead price forecasting of electricity markets by mutual information technique and cascaded neuro evolutionary algorithm in a competitive electricity market price forecasts are important for market participants however electricity price is a complex signal due to its nonlinearity nonstationarity and time variant behavior in spite of much research in this area more accurate and robust price forecast methods are still required in this paper a combination of a feature selection technique and cascaded neuro evolutionary algorithm cnea is proposed for this purpose the feature selection method is an improved version of the mutual information mi technique the cnea is composed of cascaded forecasters where each forecaster consists of a neural network nn and an evolutionary algorithm ea an iterative search procedure is also incorporated in our solution strategy to fine tune the adjustable parameters of both the mi technique and cnea the price forecast accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated by means of real data from the pennsylvania new jersey maryland pjm and spanish electricity markets the method is also compared with some of the most recent price forecast techniques