the glass of milk subsidy program and malnutrition in peru this study of the vaso de leche glass of milk feeding program in peru looks for evidence that this in kind transfer program aimed at young children furthers nutritional objectives the study links public expenditure data with household survey data to substantiate the targeting and to model the determinants of nutritional outcomes it confirms that the social transfer program targets poor households and households with low nutritional status nevertheless the study fails to find econometric evidence that the nutritional objectives are being achieved

the economics of investor protection isds versus national treatment abstract investor state dispute settlements isds are supposed to protect foreign investors against domestic policies causing unjustified harm this paper scrutinizes the effects of isds and national treatment provisions in a two period model where foreign investment is subject to a hold up problem it shows that isds may increase welfare but comes with additional regulatory distortions in the first period a national treatment provision avoids these regulatory distortions but implies entry distortions because it makes the hold up problem also apply to domestic firms if the domestic regulatory framework applies to many domestic firms a national treatment provision welfare dominates isds

social protection food security and asset formation summary the last two decades have seen a rapid rise in social protection programs and studies that assess their impacts on a large number of domains we construct a new database of studies of these programs that report impacts on food security outcomes and asset formation our meta analysis finds that social protection programs improve both the quantity and quality of food consumed by beneficiaries the magnitudes of these effect sizes are meaningful the average social protection program increases the value of food consumed expenditure by 13 and caloric acquisition by 8 food expenditure rises faster than caloric acquisition because households use transfers to improve the quality of their diet most notably increasing their consumption of calories from animal source foods since the consumption of animal source foods in these populations is low and because there are significant nutritional benefits to increasing the consumption of these this is a positive outcome our meta analysis also finds that social protection programs lead to increased asset holdings as measured by livestock non farm productive assets farm productive assets and savings there is no impact on land holdings though the number of studies that assess these is small

is the wto passe the wto has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements ptas should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand off where the wto has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage and is now passing the baton to ptas to finish the job this paper surveys a growing economics literature on international trade agreements and argues on this basis that the wto is not passe rather and subject to some caveats this survey of research to date suggests that the wto warrants strong support while a more cautious view of ptas seems appropriate

is there persistence in the impact of emergency food aid evidence on consumption food security and assets in rural ethiopia we identify the impact of emergency food aid programs after the 2002 drought in rural ethiopia on future welfare based on a difference in differences matching estimator participation in food for work increases growth in total consumption and food consumption eighteen months after the drought separately receiving free food raises growth in food consumption but surprisingly negatively impacts food security food for work benefited households in the middle and upper tail of the consumption distribution while the better targeted free food program benefited the poorest evidence suggests these impacts demonstrate accumulated and persistent effects of food aid received in the first twelve months after the drought

matching the gold standard comparing experimental and nonexperimental evaluation techniques for a geographically targeted program abstract we compare nonexperimental impact estimates based on matching methods with those from a randomized evaluation to determine whether the nonexperimental approach can match the so called gold standard the social experiment we use was carried out to evaluate a geographically targeted conditional cash transfer antipoverty program in nicaragua the outcomes we assess include several components of household expenditure and a variety of children s health outcomes including breast feeding vaccinations and morbidity we find that using each of the following improves performance of matching for these outcomes 1 geographically proximate comparison samples 2 stringent common support requirements and 3 both geographic and household level matching variables even for a geographically targeted program in which the selection is at the geographic rather than at the individual or household level and in which it is not possible to find comparison individuals or households in the program locales m

social capital and coping with economic shocks an analysis of stunting of south african children abstract south african households live in an environment characterized by risks and many face a significant probability of experiencing economic losses that threaten their daily subsistence using household panel data that include directly solicited information on economic shocks and employing household fixed effects estimation we explore how well households cope with shocks by examining the effects of shocks on child nutritional status unlike in the idealized village community some households appear unable to insure against risk particularly when others in their communities simultaneously suffer large losses households in communities with more social capital however seem better able to weather shocks

the effect of prime age adult mortality on household composition and consumption in rural ethiopia abstract using panel data from ethiopia covering 1994 1997 we estimate the impact of prime age adult mortality on household composition household expenditures and dietary diversity we employed propensity score matching with a difference in difference estimator to control for endogeneity of mortality to the outcomes of interest households losing a productive adult did not replenish the lost labor regardless of economic status sex or status of the deceased adult with the exception of non poor households adult mortality resulted in increased dependency ratios but did not adversely affect households expenditure patterns total food and non food expenditures regardless of the sex and position of the deceased and the economic status of the households although food expenditures were protected a decline in dietary diversity especially among the poorest households reflected increased nutrition insecurity associated with adult mortality

cash transfer programme productive activities and labour supply evidence from a randomised experiment in kenya this paper reports analysis of the impact of kenya s cash transfer for orphans and vulnerable children programme on the household decisions on productive activities using data from a randomized experimental design results show that the programme had a positive and significant impact on food consumption coming from home production accumulation of productive assets especially on the ownership of small livestock and on formation of nonfarm enterprise especially for females the programme has provided more flexibility to families in terms of labour allocation decisions particularly for those who are geographically isolated the programme was also found to have reduced child labour an important objective of the programme however we find very little impact of the programme on direct indicators of crop production

a model of expertise we study a model in which perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees when the decision maker consults only a single expert the expert withholds substantial information from the decision maker we ask whether this situation is improved by having the decision maker sequentially consult two experts we first show that there is no perfect bayesian equilibrium in which full revelation occurs when both experts are biased in the same direction it is never beneficial to consult both in contrast when experts are biased in opposite directions it is always beneficial to consult both indeed in this case full revelation may be induced in an extended debate by introducing the possibility of rebuttal

food aid and child nutrition in rural ethiopia abstract this paper uses a unique panel data set from ethiopia to examine the determinants of participation in and receipts of food aid through free distribution fd and food for work ffw results show that aggregate rainfall and livestock shocks increase household participation in both fd and ffw ffw also seems well targeted to asset poor households the probability of receiving fd does not appear to be targeted based on household wealth but fd receipts are lower for wealthier households the effects of fd and ffw on child nutritional status differ depending on the modality of food aid and the gender of the child both ffw and fd have a positive direct impact on weight for height households invest proceeds from fd in girls nutrition while earnings from ffw are manifested in better nutrition for boys the effects of the gender of the aid recipient are not conclusive

measuring food insecurity the frequency and severity of coping strategies abstract defining and interpreting food security and measuring it in reliable valid and cost effective ways have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks this paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurment describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short term food insecurity at the household level and discusses ways of generalizing the method the method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short term insufficiency of food this method goes beyond more commonly used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decision makers when faced with food insufficiency

optimal transmission switching sensitivity analysis and extensions in this paper we continue to analyze optimal dispatch of generation and transmission topology to meet load as a mixed integer program mip with binary variables representing the state of the transmission element line or transformer previous research showed a 25 savings by dispatching the ieee 118 bus test case this paper is an extension of that work it presents how changing the topology affects nodal prices load payment generation revenues cost and rents congestion rents and flowgate prices results indicate that changing the topology to cut costs typically results in lower load payments and higher generation rents for this network computational issues are also discussed

does nutrition sensitive aid reduce the prevalence of undernourishment abstract this paper examines the impacts of nutrition sensitive sector aid inflows on the prevalence of undernourishment we find nutrition sensitive aid can reduce undernourishment estimates suggest that a 10 increase in overall nutrition sensitive aid would approximately decrease hunger by 1 1 2 years later on average among nutrition sensitive aid inflows we find that emergency food aid reduces hunger a year later and that food aid is more effective than emergency food aid at reducing medium term hunger a 10 increase in food aid per capita would result in a 1 3 decrease in hunger 3 years later on average against 1 for a similar increase in emergency food aid per capita generally the size of the aid effects on hunger depend on the time horizon considered in the empirical analysis our findings provide supporting evidence for the prioritization of specific nutrition sensitive investments within the sdg agenda while simultaneously challenging the relative reallocation of nutrition sensitive aid that has reduced the role of food and emergency food aid inflows

sowing for food security a case study of smallholder farmers in bolivia abstract this paper explores the role that agriculture can play in the food security agenda to meet this objective this study measures the impact of the programa de apoyos directos para la creacion de iniciativas agroalimentarias rurales criar an agricultural technology adoption program implemented in highly food insecure areas of rural bolivia the paper analyzes whether changes in food security are due to improved food availability production and local sales and or greater food access income and production used for home consumption to this end data from a sample of 1287 households 817 beneficiaries and 470 controls interviewed specifically for this purpose are used to address self selection issues the program s impact is estimated using an instrumental variable model the results present evidence that program participation improved food security specifically positive impacts on agricultural productivity agricultural sales and household income are found these findings confirm the importance of considering agricultural programs as policy tools to address food insecurity

border flow rights and contracts for differences of differences models for electric transmission property rights in this paper a property rights model for electric transmission is proposed and its properties analyzed the proposed rights called border flow rights support financial hedging of transmission risk and merchant transmission expansion through associated financial rights called contracts for differences of differences these financial rights allow for forward trading of both energy and transmission by a unified exchange avoiding the bifurcation in current markets between decentralized long term energy trading and centralized long term transmission trading such long term trading can help to support the financing of both generation and transmission assets we consider incentive properties of such a right in the absence of lumpiness economies of scale and market power

food aid and household food security in a conflict situation empirical evidence from northern uganda it is well established that armed political conflict has a detrimental effect on food security and household welfare conflict induces food insecurity by reducing own food production access to food through the market and various other resources to sustain healthy and productive lives one way of mitigating these adverse effects is to provide food aid in this study we evaluate the impact of a world food programme intervention on household food security and asset protection among conflict affected households in northern uganda we employ propensity score matching to estimate the average treatment effect on food expenditure food consumption and preservation of assets using a sample of 1265 observations from a 2008 survey our results reveal that the operation s system of targeting beneficiaries was effective and in accordance with programme objectives food aid considerably reduced food expenditure of households suggesting that recipients were net buyers of food and that the food aid received was effectively consumed within the household a corresponding positive effect on non food expenditure was not found our results also indicate that food aid was effective in increasing meals consumed and in avoiding distress destocking of low value assets but surprisingly only for male headed households

a theory of managed trade this paper proposes a theory that predicts low levels of protection during periods of normal trade volume coupled with episodes of special protection when trade volumes surge this dynamic pattern of protection emerges from a model in which countries choose levels of protection in a repeated game facing volatile trade swings high trade volume leads to a greater incentive to defect unilaterally from cooperative tariff levels therefore as the volume of trade expands the level of protection must rise in a cooperative equilibrium to mitigate the rising trade volume and hold the incentive to defect in check copyright 1990 by american economic association

reconciling conflicting evidence on the performance of propensity score matching methods there is a long standing debate in the literature over whether social programs can be reliably evaluated without a randomized experiment this paper summarizes results from a larger paper smith and todd 2001 that uses experimental data combined with nonexperimental data to evaluate the performance of alternative nonexperimental estimators the impact estimates based on experimental data provide a benchmark against which to judge the performance of nonexperimental estimators our experimental data come from the national supported work nsw demonstration and the nonexperimental data from the current population survey cps and the panel study of income dynamics psid these same data were used in influential papers by robert lalonde 1986 james heckman and joseph hotz 1989 and rajeev dehejia and sadek wahba 1998 1999 we focus on a class of estimators called propensity score matching estimators which were introduced in the statistics literature by paul rosenbaum and donald rubin 1983 traditional propensity score matching methods pair each program participant with a single nonparticipant where pairs are chosen based on the degree of similarity in the estimated probabilities of participating in the program the propensity scores more recently developed nonparametric matching estimators described in heckman et al 1997 1998a b use weighted averages over multiple observations to construct matches we apply both kinds of estimators in this paper heckman et al 1997 1998a b evaluate the performance of matching estimators using experimental data from the u s national job training partnership act jtpa study combined with comparison group samples drawn from three sources they show that data quality is a crucial ingredient to any reliable estimation strategy specifically the estimators they examine are only found to perform well in replicating the results of the experiment when they are applied to comparison group data satisfying the following criteria i the same data sources i e the same surveys or the same type of administrative data or both are used for participants and nonparticipants so that earnings and other characteristics are measured in an analogous way ii participants and nonparticipants reside in the same local labor markets and iii the data contain a rich set of variables relevant to modeling the program participation decision if the comparison group data fails to satisfy these criteria the performance of the estimators diminishes greatly more recently dehejia and wahba 1998 1999 have used the nsw data also used by lalonde to evaluate the performance of propensity score matching methods including pairwise matching and caliper matching they find that these simple matching estimators succeed in closely replicating the experimental nsw results even though the comparison group data do not satisfy any of the criteria found to be important in heckman et al 1997 1998a from this evidence they conclude that matching approaches are generally more reliable than traditional econometric estimators in this paper we reanalyze the nsw data in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting findings smith department of economics university of western ontario social science centre london on n6a 5c2 canada and nber todd department of economics university of pennsylvania 3718 locust walk philadelphia pa 19104 and nber versions of the paper that is the source for this paper have been presented at a 2000 meeting of the institute for research on poverty in madison wisconsin at the western research network on employment and training summer workshop august 2000 at the canadian international labour network meetings september 2000 and at the university of north carolina we thank james heckman for comments on this paper and we thank robert lalonde for comments and for providing us with the data from his 1986 study we thank rajeev dehejia for providing us with information helpful in reconstructing the samples used in the dehejia and wahba 1998 1999 studies jingjing hsee and miana plesca provided excellent research assistance

aid and agency in africa explaining food disbursements across ethiopian households 1994 2004 abstract we use a principal agent framework and data from the ethiopian rural household survey between 1994 and 2004 to understand biases in the distribution of food aid in ethiopia we show that even when aid is systematically misallocated aid recipients may match official classifications of needy households if agents deviate from allocation rules in ways that are difficult to monitor agent behavior is therefore best understood by comparing aid along dimensions of need that are visible to the principal with those that are difficult to observe outside the village we do this by using data on a panel of 943 households observed over six rounds of the ethiopian rural household survey in support of our model we find that while the demographics of aid recipients do match official criteria disbursements are increasing in pre aid consumption self reported power and involvement in village level organizations we conclude that the extent to which food aid insulates some of the world s poorest families from agricultural shocks depends on a nuanced interaction of policy constraints and informal structures of local power

the evolution of common law we present a model of lawmaking by appellate courts in which judges influenced by policy preferences can distinguish precedents at some cost we find a cost and a benefit of diversity of judicial views policy motivated judges distort the law away from efficiency but diversity of judicial views also fosters legal evolution and increases the law s precision we call our central finding the cardozo theorem even when judges are motivated by personal agendas legal evolution is on average beneficial because it washes out judicial biases and renders the law more precise our paper provides a theoretical foundation for the evolutionary adaptability of common law

does food aid disrupt local food market evidence from rural ethiopia the paper examines the impact of food aid on households marketing behavior based on a panel of households followed during 1994 2009 in 15 villages of ethiopia the impact of aid is examined at the intensive margin on quantities produced sold or bought by the households and at the extensive margin on the number of producers sellers and buyers food aid reduces the probability of being a producer it also increases the probability of being a seller after a reform of aid policy in 2004 from repeated emergency distributions toward a multi year program aiming at agricultural development

transmission rights and transmission expansions in this paper we propose a new method of defining rights that may be assigned to the developer of a transmission expansion project they include a right to collect the value of the capacity provided by the expansion project as well as the value arising from the admittance of the expansion project this approach not only ties the rights allocation to actual physical characteristics of the transmission project but also allows such allocation to remain independent both of the order in which the projects are treated and of any previously allocated transmission rights

food aid and adult nutrition in rural ethiopia insight into the role of safety nets that contribute to adult nutrition is an important component to understanding the dynamics of poverty in developing countries this article uses panel data from rural ethiopia on individual nutritional status to test for an effect of public transfers on adult body mass index bmi results show that among adult household members male members are the primary beneficiaries of food aid as male and female aid recipients tend to invest aid receipts in male household members these results are consistent with a theory in which additional resources are allocated to members of the household whose market returns are higher or those who engage in activities that expend higher levels of energy for high asset households female household members benefit if the aid recipient is a female women in low asset households appear to be adversely affected by aid receipts and evidence suggests that women with little bargaining power suffer the most the results suggest that aid receipts are useful in mitigating fluctuations in adult bmi over a short time period

the role of dispute settlement procedures in international trade agreements although disputes are typically treated as synonymous with concerns about enforcement in economic models of trade agreements in reality most wto disputes seem to concern the interpretation of vague provisions or instances where the agreement is silent and some have suggested that the wto s dispute settlement body dsb could usefully grant exceptions to rigid contractual obligations these activist dsb roles could help complete an incomplete contract but how activist should the dsb be should dsb rulings set precedent we address these questions by characterizing the optimal choice of contract form and dsb mandate under various contracting conditions jel codes d02 d78 d86 f13 k12 k33

transmission switching in expansion planning transmission switching ts is introduced to add flexibility to the transmission and generation capacity expansion planning problem ts could improve the performance of the capacity expansion planning model and reduce the total planning cost the capacity expansion planning problem is decomposed into a master problem and two subproblems the master problem utilizes the candidate set for additional generating unit and transmission capacity investments to find the optimal plan throughout the planning horizon the subproblems use the optimal plan apply transmission switching to relieve any transmission flow violations and calculate the optimal dispatch of generating units the transmission network contingencies are also considered in the subproblems the case studies exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed expansion planning approach

tractable transmission topology control using sensitivity analysis the standard economic generation dispatch ed minimizes generation costs subject to transmission constraints where the status of each line i e open or closed is fixed recent research shows that by optimally dispatching the network topology along with generation resources significant congestion costs may be avoided optimal topology control i e appropriate changes of transmission line status for real sized power networks requires the solution of a computationally intractable mixed integer linear program however it appears that much of the cost savings may be attained by changing the status of just a few lines this paper proposes tractable transmission topology control policies which employ sensitivity information readily available from the ed to select candidate lines to change status while maintaining system connectivity implementation on the ieee 118 bus test system found that our best performing policy captured an average of 96 of the potential cost savings moreover the limited computational effort required suggests that these policies could be employed in real system operations

food aid and poverty barrett e kirwan and margaret mcmillan one of the primary objectives of food aid is poverty alleviation this is true independent of the type of food aid see barrett 2007 for an excellent overview of the various types of u s food aid advocates of food aid argue it is an effective means of reducing hunger when used for food for work programs it stimulates development and by reducing the need for food imports it has prevented large cumulative deficits in poor countries critics of food aid argue it has increased the dependence of developing countries on food imports the dumping of surplus production for free or nearly no cost to poorer nations means that the farmers from such countries either cannot produce at competitive prices or lose the incentive to produce entirely leading over time to the deterioration of the infrastructure of production they also claim that food aid is inefficient it often fails to reach the most needy and has high administrative costs however credible empirical evidence on the role of food aid in combating poverty is limited levinsohn and mcmillan 2006 use nationally representative household survey data from ethiopia to identify the relationship between household

tariff binding and overhang theory and evidence abstract most market access commitments under the wto are in the form of bindings on applied tariff rates we observe two important regularities in the data first applied tariffs are often lower than the bound tariffs providing governments with substantial policy flexibility second the extent of flexibility varies substantially across sectors and countries in a sharp contrast to the prediction of standard trade agreement models we observe a strong negative correlation between tariff commitments and measures of import market power we model the trade off between discipline and flexibility in the design of trade agreements and argue that recognizing this trade off is the key to explain the observed patterns in the tariff binding commitments and applied tariffs under the wto

an analysis of the marginal value of electricity transmission lines in the dispatch possible applications the marginal value of transmission lines in the dispatch is widely used in the literature and has relevant practical applications related to planning the expansion of the transmission grid and computing the remuneration of merchant lines this paper presents a general formulation of the marginal value of a line in the dispatch that highlights the dependence of this value on the link between line admittance and capacity we discuss the value of a line according to marginal principles following a general approach and prove that only if the admittance of a line can be expressed as a linear function of its capacity or when admittance and capacity can be deemed independent is this value equal to the product of the difference between marginal electricity prices at both ends of the line and the flow through this line afterwards we show that under a set of stylized conditions the remuneration of efficient network investments according to their marginal value in the dispatch should result in an exact recovery of their cost finally we compute the marginal value of lines in a stylized though representative system for several relationships between line capacities and admittances to illustrate the theoretical results obtained

transfer capability improvement through market based operation of series facts devices traditionally electric system operators have dispatched generation to minimize total production costs ignoring the flexibility of the transmission system implementation of smart grid systems could allow operators to co optimize flexible transmission alongside generation dispatch the technologies that would enable such co optimization are still regulated as part of the monopoly transmission system one particular flexible transmission asset is variable impedance flexible ac transmission system facts this paper 1 points out the positive externality problem existing in a recent market design proposal with active transmission participation and 2 proposes a sensitivity based method to estimate the marginal market value of facts adjustments to overcome this positive externality problem the marginal value would suggest efficient impedance adjustments to the operator and provide the right financial incentives for the facts owners to operate their assets in a socially optimal way revenue adequacy is demonstrated under specific conditions and more broadly investigated through simulation studies an analytical example on a two bus system as well as a numerical study on the ieee 118 bus system are presented the results suggest that inclusion of a price signal for facts devices would lead to significant social welfare improvements in competitive power markets

social learning neighborhood effects and investment in human capital evidence from green revolution india abstract this paper empirically identifies social learning and neighborhood effects in schooling investments in a new technology regime social learning implies that learning is most efficient when observed heterogeneity in schooling is greatest the estimates of learning investment rule from farm household panel data at the onset of the green revolution in india show that i agents learn about schooling returns from income realizations of their neighbors and ii the speed of learning is high when the variation of schooling is large thus schooling distribution of the parents generation in a community has externalities to schooling investments in children simulations show that the variations in schooling within and across communities generate variations in child enrollment rate and average household income

child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia conducted between 1995 and 1996 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of food aid on child growth and shocks in communities on the child level food aid has a positive significant impact on the growth in height of children the total amount of food aid appears on average to be sufficient to offset the negative effects of plot damage on child growth given the fact there remains a massive amount of child stunting there must be large amounts of mis targeting of aid girls seem to be more resilient to shocks than boys

suspiciously timed trade disputes abstract this paper shows that electoral incentives crucially affect the initiation of trade disputes focusing on wto disputes filed by the united states during the 1995 2014 period we find that u s presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re election moreover u s trade disputes are more likely to involve industries that are important in swing states to explain these regularities we develop a theoretical model in which re election motives can lead an incumbent politician to file trade disputes to appeal to voters motivated by reciprocity

the economics and nutritional impacts of food assistance policies and programs recent evidence on malnutrition and poverty raise important questions on the role of food assistance policies and programs in this review article we examine evidence on the economic and nutritional impacts of international food assistance programs faps and policies the returns on investments in faps are on average high but depend considerably on the targeting and cost structures as well as on food quality and role of complementary activities we disaggregate findings into four classes of recipients returns to faps are highest for children under two but faps oriented towards early childhood interventions are less well funded than are interventions aimed at school age children or at the broader largely adult population even though available evidence indicates that these latter classes of interventions offer considerably lower average returns in economic health and nutrition terms nonetheless fap effectiveness in achieving any of several objectives varies with a range of key factors including targeting additionality seasonality timeliness incentive effects social acceptability and political economy considerations

the impacts of transmission topology control on the european electricity network the european union is targeting a 20 share of energy from renewable resources by 2020 and this increase is in turn expected to lead to operational challenges that will require various congestion management actions by system operators in this paper we deal with topology control of the transmission network as a congestion management resource and evaluate the impacts of topology control on the european electricity network to do this we co optimize unit commitment and transmission switching over 24 h and we use a decomposition scheme to tackle the resulting large scale problem our analysis is conducted on different scenarios of load and renewable power generation we find that topology control results in significant cost savings within europe which tend to be inversely related to net load the robustness of our results is supported by an extensive sensitivity analysis

how accurate is food for work self targeting in the presence of imperfect factor markets evidence from ethiopia effective targeting of transfers is a key issue in public policy to combat poverty much faith is presently placed in self targeting mechanisms such as public employment schemes supported by food for work transfers where targeting errors have been observed these are usually attributed to mismanagement of key operational details such as the project s wage rate using a unique data set from rural ethiopia we demonstrate that targeting errors may also have structural causes in some low income countries we hypothesise that imperfect factor markets generate a predictable dispersion across households in reservation wage rates that breaks down the unconditionally positive relation between income and shadow wages on which the theory of self targeting public employment programmes rests our results confirm that the inaccuracy of ffw targeting stems from the fact that in rural ethiopia higher income households are endowed with more labour per unit of land or animal due to poor factor markets in land and liv

smart flexible just in time transmission and flowgate bidding there is currently a national push to create a smarter grid currently the full control of transmission assets is not built in network optimization models with more sophisticated modeling of transmission assets it is possible to better utilize the current infrastructure to improve the social welfare co optimizing the generation with the network topology has been shown to reduce the total dispatch cost in this paper we propose the concept of just in time transmission this concept is predicated on the fact that transmission that is a detriment to network efficiency can be kept offline when not needed and with the proper smart grid advanced technology can be switched back into service once there is a disturbance we determine which lines to have offline based on the optimal transmission switching model previously proposed a secondary topic of this paper focuses on flowgate bidding approved by the federal energy regulatory commission and implemented within the spp and nyiso networks flowgate bidding is defined as allowing a line s flow to exceed its rated capacity for a short period of time for a set penalty i e price we demonstrate the effectiveness of these models by testing them on large scale iso network models

the effect of irrigation on poverty reduction asset accumulation and informal insurance evidence from northern mali summary the impact of small scale irrigation investments on household consumption assets and informal insurance is estimated from a panel of northern malian households 1998 2006 access to irrigation increases household consumption by 27 30 relative to water recession and rain fed cultivators the paper also investigates whether irrigation has secondary impacts on risk mitigating strategies by reducing covariate risk and reinforcing informal food sharing networks that allow households to insure against idiosyncratic risk we find that households with irrigation save between 4 5 and 6 4 more tropical livestock units and are 20 more likely to engage in informal food sharing with non irrigators this finding suggests that impact estimates that rely on consumption may underestimate welfare gains by ignoring the household s savings behavior and informal insurance network

shocks and asset dynamics in ethiopia abstractthis article uses household survey panel data of 416 rural households to study asset dynamics in the northern highlands of ethiopia and the response of assets to shocks the period under examination 1996 2003 was marked by severe environmental shocks including a series of droughts the article empirically studies the nature of household asset paths over time using as the point of departure the theory on precautionary savings behavior results indicate that the response of assets to weather shocks the differential effect of these shocks on liquid and less liquid forms of wealth holdings and the nature of asset dynamics are all consistent with the implications of a precautionary motive for holding wealth

vulnerability seasonality and poverty in ethiopia most studies examining the dynamics of welfare have found large fluctuations in consumption over relatively short periods suggesting substantial short run movements in and out of poverty the consequence is that cross section poverty research may not be able to identify the poor in this study we explore this short run variability further we use a data set on a panel of 1450 households in different communities in rural ethiopia surveyed thrice over 18 months on average year to year poverty is very similar however we find high variability in consumption and poverty over the seasons and year by year econometric analysis suggests that consumption is affected by idiosyncratic and common shocks including rainfall and household specific crop failure while households respond to seasonal incentives related to changing labour demand and prices the results imply that a larger number of households are vulnerable to shocks than implied by the standard poverty statistics while some of the non poor in the

performance of an agro forestry based payments for environmental services project in mozambique a household level analysis there has been a paucity of research on the impacts of small scale payments for environmental services pes projects in developing countries the aim of this paper is to evaluate the household level impacts of a small scale agro forestry based carbon sequestration project in rural mozambique in 2006 questionnaire based interviews were conducted quarterly of 290 randomly selected households in the buffer zone of the gorongosa national park in mozambique we used the propensity score matching technique to assess the pes project impacts on household cash income consumption expenditure forest resource use and crop yields we found that in contrast to nonparticipant households pes participant households earned more cash income incurred more consumption expenditure collected less forest products and harvested lower quantities of agriculture crops in addition we found through decomposition analysis that there was a differential in pes income both male headed and high income households were being favoured as project benefit recipients future pes projects should focus on a payment scheme that can better ensure the benefit to all the participant households and also pay extra attention on the benefits distribution to the vulnerable households

trade disputes and settlement we develop a model of trade agreements with renegotiation and imperfectly verifiable information in equilibrium trade disputes can occur and can be resolved in a variety of ways governments may settle early or trigger a court ruling and in the latter case they may implement the ruling or reach a post ruling settlement the model yields predictions on how the dispute outcome depends on the contracting environment and how it correlates with the optimal contract form we find support for a key prediction of our model using data on the outcomes of actual trade disputes in the general agreement on tariffs and trade world trade organization

political connections and social networks in targeted transfer programs evidence from rural ethiopia abstractdespite increasingly large scale social protection programs in africa we have limited evidence on the local political economy of their allocation we investigate community based processes for food aid allocation and the role of political and social networks using the case of ethiopia in the aftermath of a serious drought in 2002 local political authorities are in charge of food transfers in terms of free food aid or food for work programs we find that although targeting is clearly imperfect free food aid is responsive to need as well as targeted to households with less access to support from relatives or friends we also find a strong correlation with political connections households with close associates in official positions have more than a 12 higher probability of obtaining free food than households that are not well connected this effect is large someone without political connections has the same probability of getting food aid as someone more than twice as rich but with these conne

economic consequences of alternative solution methods for centralized unit commitment in day ahead electricity markets many wholesale electricity markets call on the independent system operator iso to determine day ahead schedules for generators based on a centralized unit commitment up until recently the lagrangian relaxation lr algorithm was the only practical means of solving an iso scale unit commitment problem and it was the solution technique used by most isos johnson et al 1 demonstrate however that equity incentive and efficiency issues will arise from use of lr solutions because different commitments that are similar in terms of total system costs can result in different surpluses to individual units recent advances in computing capabilities and optimization algorithms now make solution of the mixed integer programming mip formulation by means of branch and bound b b tractable often with optimality gaps smaller than those of lr algorithms which has led some isos to adopt b b algorithms and others proposing to do so with the move towards b b one obvious question is whether the use of mip will eliminate or reduce the issues with lr raised by johnson et al using actual market data from an iso we demonstrate that both lr and mip solutions will suffer the same equity issues unless the iso unit commitment problems can be solved to complete optimality within the allotted timeframe which is beyond current computational capabilities our results further demonstrate that the size of the payoff deviations are not monotone in the size of the optimality gap meaning smaller optimality gaps from b b will not necessarily mitigate the issues johnson et al raise we show that the use of make whole payments which ensure units recover any startup and no load costs not recovered by inframarginal energy rents can help to reduce surplus volatility and differences to some extent

the interdependence between transmission switching and variable impedance series facts devices high congestion costs and new congestion patterns formed by intermittent renewable generation demand for more efficient utilization of the transmission system transmission switching ts and variable impedance series facts devices are two technologies that provide such efficiency gains through controlling the power flows as the system operators begin to utilize these tools it is essential to understand the interdependence between them at various stages such as planning and operation this paper develops an optimal power flow framework that incorporates both facts and ts to study the link between the two power flow control technologies the simulation results on an rts 96 bus system suggest that 1 substantial economic savings can be achieved through utilization of both ts and facts beyond the independent capabilities of each technology 2 performing ts actions affect the optimal location and set point of facts devices and 3 operation of facts devices affect the location and frequency of ts actions it is thus essential to acknowledge the interdependence between the two technologies both at the planning and operation stage failure to do so will lead to economic inefficiencies that can be avoided through co optimization of generation dispatch ts and facts

stochastic unit commitment with topology control recourse for power systems with large scale renewable integration in this paper we model topology control through transmission switching as a recourse action in the day ahead operation of power systems with large scale renewable generation resources we prove that transmission switching could only reduce the linear objective value of direct current optimal power flow when congestion exists however we also show through a simple example that unit commitment cost could be reduced by transmission switching even in the absence of congestion to solve the stochastic unit commitment with topology control within reasonable computational time we proposed a heuristic that first decomposes a practical system into zones and then solves the problem for each zone in parallel the benefit of topology control recourse is demonstrated on a network representing the central european system we compare the costs of the network with different loading and renewable generation conditions the cost reduction of the test system can reach 3 34 with heavy load and large scale renewable generation while in a single zone the cost reduction can be above 7

international agreements economic sovereignty and exit abstract we develop a model in which realisations of an ex ante uncertain domestic policy environment can make it attractive to a sovereign nation to renege on an international agreement we show in a fairly general setting in which the likelihood of exit is affected by the degree of cooperation that the possibility of exit reduces the optimal degree of initial cooperation full cooperation will never be optimal and the optimal degree of cooperation will never be such as to squeeze out any possibility of exit however an increase in global uncertainty may imply an increase in cooperation when exit risks are already large to begin with

can social protection work in africa the impact of ethiopia s productive safety net programme abstractthis study evaluates a large social protection program in rural ethiopia the productive safety net programme psnp the effectiveness of the psnp is of interest because the program was implemented at scale in one of africa s poorest countries which has limited physical and communications infrastructure and scarce administrative resources using longitudinal survey data collected in 2006 2008 and 2010 at the household and locality levels we employ an extension of the propensity score matching method to continuous treatments to estimate the impact of transfers from the psnp and a separate program on household food security against the formidable background of rising food prices and widespread drought participation in the public works component of the psnp has modest effects the psnp reduced the length of the last hungry season by 1 29 months among households that received transfers for 5 years compared to eligible households that received almost nothing five years of participation raises l