immigrant benefit receipt revisited sensitivity to the choice of survey years and model specification baker and benjamin 1995 analyse the receipt of unemployment insurance by immigrant men using two years of the canadian survey of consumer finances this study replicates their research on 13 of the annual surveys estimates are found to be sensitive to the choice of survey years furthermore the standard fixed effects model of assimilation is rejected when tested against a model that allows for separate year since migration effects by arrival cohort estimates from the more general model do not indicate higher incidence of benefit receipt ceteris paribus among more recent cohorts or that immigrants assimilate toward greater receipt of benefits

product and price competition with satiation effects consumers become satiated with a product when purchasing too much too quickly how much is too much and how quickly is too quickly depends on the characteristics of the product relative to the time interval between consumption periods knowing that consumers allocate their budget to products that generate less satiation effects retailers should then choose to sell products that induce minimal satiation but usually this is operationally more costly to study this trade off we provide an analytical model based on utility theory that relates customer consumption to price and satiation in the context of multiple competing retailers we determine the purchasing pattern over time and provide an explicit expression to determine the consumption level in steady state we derive market shares and show that they take the form of an attraction model in which the attractiveness depends on price and product satiation we use this to analyze the competition between firms that maximize long term average profit we characterize the equilibrium under three scenarios i price only competition ii product only competition and iii price and product competition the results reveal the interplay between a key marketing lever price and the firm s ability to offer products that generate less satiation in particular we show that when a firm becomes more efficient at reducing satiation its competitor may benefit if competition is on product only but not if it is on price and product we also find that when satiation effects are not managed a firm s profit may be significantly reduced while a strategic competitor can largely benefit this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

measuring aggregate welfare in developing countries how well do national accounts and surveys agree in a data set for developing and transition economies the author finds that private consumption per capita based on national accounts deviates on average from mean household income or expenditure based on national sample surveys growth rates also differ systematically so that the ratio of the survey mean to the national accounts mean tends to fall over time but there are revealing exceptions to these general findings the aggregate difference in the levels is due more to income surveys than to expenditure surveys and there are strong regional effects for example the severe data problems in the transition economies of eastern europe and central asia means that there is negligible correlation in that region between growth rates from national accounts and those from household surveys

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

learning experimentation and the optimal output decisions of a competitive firm this paper considers the effect of learning from experience on the output decisions of a perfectly competitive firm faced with the demand uncertainty specifically a bayesian framework for expectations formation and demand forecasting by a perfectly competitive firm is presented focusing the analysis on the determination of optimal sequential output decisions it is shown that through output experimentation the experimenting firm will select a non myopic sequential policy and will tend to overproduce the exact magnitude of the overproduction and the economic value of experimentation are contingent upon model parameters and the length of the planning horizon

dynamic assortment with demand learning for seasonal consumer goods companies such as zara and world co have recently implemented novel product development processes and supply chain architectures enabling them to make more product design and assortment decisions during the selling season when actual demand information becomes available how should such retail firms modify their product assortment over time in order to maximize overall profits for a given selling season focusing on a stylized version of this problem we study a finite horizon multiarmed bandit model with several plays per stage and bayesian learning our analysis involves the lagrangian relaxation of weakly coupled dynamic programs dps results contributing to the emerging theory of dp duality and various approximations it yields a closed form dynamic index policy capturing the key exploration versus exploitation trade off and associated suboptimality bounds in numerical experiments its performance proves comparable to that of other closed form heuristics described in the literature but this policy is particularly easy to implement and interpret this last feature enables extensions to more realistic versions of the motivating dynamic assortment problem that include implementation delays switching costs and demand substitution effects

social security eligibility and the labor supply of older immigrants the employment rate of native born men falls at a much faster rate than that of immigrants as the two groups approach the age of retirement the author draws on u s census data from 1960 2000 to examine how the eligibility requirements for social security benefits affect immigrants decisions to leave the labor market as they near retirement age because a person needs to have worked in the united states for at least ten years to qualify for benefits newly arrived immigrants may not yet have accumulated the requisite employment credits to do this and thus have greater employment rates than other comparably aged persons the probability that an older immigrant is employed falls once the ten year work rule is satisfied the implication of this finding is that immigration may affect the increase in retirement benefits that will inevitably occur as the baby boom generation retires

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

canadian economics research on immigration through the lens of theories of justice we assess the current state of knowledge in the economics of immigration and consider how economic theories of knowledge can be used to further the goal of developing a just immigration policy in the process we highlight the contributions of economists working in canada and canadian economists internationally in furthering our understanding of this important research area we identify research gaps such as the need for more research on the underlying causes of the poor returns to foreign work experience for immigrants from non traditional source countries and the effect of immigrants on stimulating innovation more research is also needed on the implications of temporary foreign worker tfw programs and the growing importance of employers in immigrant selection systems la recherche canadienne en economie de l immigration a travers la lentille des theories de la justice on jauge l etat present des connaissances en economie de l immigration et on examine comment les theories economiques de la connaissance peuvent etre utiles dans la poursuite d un objectif qui serait de mettre en place une politique d immigration juste dans ce processus on souligne les contributions des economistes travaillant au canada a notre comprehension de ce chantier de recherche on identifie certaines zones d ombre comme la recherche pour comprendre les causes sous jacentes aux pauvres rendements de l experience de travail des immigrants en provenance des pays qui ne sont pas des sources d immigration traditionnelles et celle pour comprendre les effets des immigrants sur la stimulation de l innovation il faudra aussi davantage de recherches sur les implications des programmes pour attirer et accueillir les travailleurs etrangers temporairement et sur l importance croissante des employeurs dans les systemes de selection d immigrants

immigrant assimilation and welfare participation do immigrants assimilate into or out of welfare this paper analyzes differences in welfare utilization between immigrants and natives in sweden using a large panel data set for the years 1990 to 1996 we find that immigrants use welfare to a greater extent than natives and that differences cannot be explained by observable characteristics welfare participation decreases with time spent in sweden refugees assimilate out of welfare at a faster rate than nonrefugee immigrants but neither group is predicted to reach parity with natives increases in unemployment and immigration as well as the change in the composition of immigrants contributed to the increase in welfare utilization in sweden

affluence and food a simple way to infer incomes accurate and timely measures of cross country real incomes are still a rarity as the share of expenditure devoted to food is readily available we use engel s law in reciprocal form to measure affluence analysis of real income data for over 100 countries indicates that this approach is viable to recognize the role of uncertainty in the analysis we present the results in the form of stochastic cross country income comparisons

the dynamics of immigrant participation in entitlement programs evidence from canada 1993 2007 using uniquely rich canadian administrative data from the 1993 2007 period i find no evidence of rising employment insurance ei participation across recent immigrant cohorts and no evidence of rising ei participation with number of years spent in canada beyond the short period following entrance into the canadian labour market i also find little evidence of the rising immigrant participation in social assistance sa either across recent arrival cohorts or with years in canada the results do not appear to be seriously affected by emigration and attrition within each immigrant cohort while the immigrant participation in traditional welfare programs such as social assistance has generally declined from 1993 to 2007 i show that canada child tax benefit and other federal and provincial programs aimed at providing financial assistance to families with children have become a major source of transfer income to immigrant families a l aide de donnees administratives canadiennes particulierement riches pour la periode 1993 2007 on decouvre qu il n y a pas d evidence de participation plus elevee au programme d assurance emploi ae d une cohorte d immigrants recents a l autre dans le temps non plus que d evidence de participation accrue a l ae des immigrants recents avec le nombre d annees passees au canada si ce n est pour la courte periode qui suit l entree dans le marche du travail canadien on ne trouve que peu de support pour l hypothese de participation accrue a l assistance sociale as tant d une cohorte a la suivante qu avec le nombre d annees passees au canada ces resultats ne semblent pas affectes par l emigration ou l attrition a l interieur de chaque cohorte alors que la participation des immigrants aux programmes de bien etre traditionnels comme l assistance sociale ont generalement decline entre 1993 et 2007 on montre que la prestation fiscale canadienne pour enfants et autres programmes federaux et provinciaux visant a fournir de l assistance financiere aux familles avec enfants sont devenus une source majeure de revenus de transfert pour les familles d immigrants

predicting within country household food expenditure variation using international cross section estimates there is a long and distinguished literature involving demand analysis using international cross section data such models are widely used for predicting national per capita consumption however there is nothing in this literature testing the performance of estimated models in predicting demands across the income spectrum within a single country this paper fills the gap we estimate an aidads model using cross section international per capita data and find that it does well in predicting food demand across the income distribution within bangladesh this suggests that there may be considerable value in using international cross section analysis to study poverty and distributional impacts of policies

the censored newsvendor and the optimal acquisition of information this paper investigates the effect of demand censoring on the optimal policy in newsvendor inventory models with general parametric demand distributions and unknown parameter values we show that the newsvendor problem withobservable lost sales reduces to a sequence of single period problems while the newsvendor problem withunobservable lost sales requires a dynamic analysis using a bayesian markov decision process approach we show that the optimalin ventory level in the presence of censored demand ishigher than would be determined using a bayesian myopic policy we explore the economic rationality for this observation and illustrate it with numerical examples

on the censored newsvendor and the optimal acquisition of information we have read ding et al 2002 referred to hereafter as dpb with great interest dpb con ains two main results theorem a claims that the myopic inventory level is a lower bound on the optimal inventory level and theo rem b attempts to quantify the marginal expected value of information however there are mistakes in the proof of theorem a the result itself is correct a proof is given in lu et al 2004 furthermore one of the erroneous expressions in dpb s proof leads to an error in the marginal expected value of information in theorem b we now provide more details the equation numbers unless specified otherwise refer to the appendix of dpb available at the operations research home page http or pubs informs org the main error in the proof of theorem a is the follow ing if a x and b x are two functions of the variable jc then the derivative of a x b x with respect to x is d r x m da x db x a x b x b x a x dpb s mistake in essence is to omit the second term more specifically a key step in proving theorem a is inequality 35

the assortment packing problem multiperiod assortment planning for short lived products motivated by retailers frequent introduction of new items to refresh product lines and maintain their market shares we present the assortment packing problem in which a firm must decide in advance the release date of each product in a given collection over a selling season our formulation models the trade offs among profit margins preference weights and limited life cycles a key aspect of the problem is that each product is short lived in the sense that once introduced its attractiveness lasts only a few periods and vanishes over time the objective is to determine when to introduce each product to maximize the total profit over the selling season even for two periods the corresponding optimization problem is shown to be np complete as a result we study a continuous relaxation of the problem that approximates the problem well when the number of products is large when margins are identical and product preferences decay exponentially its solution can be characterized it is optimal to introduce products with slower decays earlier the structural properties of the relaxation also help us to develop several heuristics for which we establish performance guarantees we test our heuristics with data on sales and release dates of women s handbags from an accessories retailer the numerical experiments show that the heuristics perform very well and can yield significant improvements in profitability this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

evaluating food plans and poverty thresholds 1987 evaluating food plans and poverty thresholds applied economics vol 19 no 10 pp 1341 1352

demand estimation and ordering under censoring stock out timing is almost all you need retailers facing uncertain demand can use observed sales to update demand estimates however such learning is limited by the amount of inventory carried when demand exceeds inventory i e when a stock out event occurs a retailer in general cannot observe actual demand we propose using observations on the timing of sales occurrences in a bayesian fashion to learn about demand and we analyze this learning method for a multiperiod newsvendor setting we find that as previously shown with the use of only stock out event observations the optimal order quantity with timing observations is greater than the optimal order quantity with full demand observations we prove this result using a novel methodology from the statistics literature on comparison of experiments although the optimal over ordering with timing observations tends to be less than that with only stock out event observations in most cases we do observe cases where the opposite is true such cases correspond to high demand uncertainty and low margins where marginal learning from timing observations is significantly higher than using only a stock out event in an extensive numerical study we find that on average and with respect to uncensored demand observations the use of timing observations eliminates 76 1 of the loss in expected profit from using only stock out event observations we show that for poisson and normal demand with unknown mean the proposed learning method is tractable as well as intuitively appealing the information contained in the timing of sales occurrences is fully captured by a single number the timing of stock out we also investigate checkpoint models in which the newsvendor can make observations only at predetermined times in a period and illustrate its convergence to the models with timing and stock out event observations

the concept and measurement of subsistence a survey of the literature abstract subsistence is a widely used concept but most of the time its precise meaning is not property stated this study attempts to provide an appropriate exposition of the concept by examining the manner in which it is used and the role it plays in different theoretical analyses and policy formulations it has been shown that contrary to the conventional notion of a minimum standard of physical needs only subsistence is an absolute minimum standard of physical and mental survival and productive efficiency the lowest standard of social desirability is given by the needs of physical and mental survival in addition to these the standard of subsistence includes the needs of physical and mental efficiency for productive living in the society the attainment of a certain minimum of physical mental and social magnitudes provides the standard of subsistence commodities or their characteristics are the needs of this standard income by providing the command over these needs affords an individual the capability to attain it hence income is used to characterize subsistence three different methods of subsistence determination have been identified the most commonly used methods the social and the scientific ones are found to be arbitrary the determination of subsistence from the analysis of the agents declaration or behavior seems to be a better method while the declaration or expenditure based studies suffer from various limitations studies based on the behavior of income earning offer a better direction

a behavioural analysis of the subsistence standard of living subsistence is analysed as an endogenous variable contrary to its conventional exoge nous treatment it is postulated that the subsistence livers perceive their own standard of subsistence direct their earnings behaviour towards attaining maintaining or exceeding this standard and thus reveal the standard through this behaviour the labour supply function of the working poor which displays a forward falling segment at low wages and an upward rising segment at higher wages is hypothesised to offer measures of subsistence and survival standards the concepts are rationalised using sen s concept of freedom of choice and arrow s concept of freedom as flexibility it is argued that at below subsistence living individuals lack freedom of flexibility in choosing their preferences and thus suffer the loss of freedom of choice while subsistence offers a reasonable minimum of this freedom the freedom is completely lost at the lowest survival standard

the definition and measurement of poverty both poverty research and social policy employ a variety of poverty definitions the choice of one specific definition has major consequences for the resulting poverty population this paper uses eight different definitions of poverty to determine who is poor using a 1983 dutch sample of more than 12 000 households poverty according to each of these definitions is compared over different subgroups the relevance of the choice between definitions for social policy is shown by the presentation of poverty percentages according to the various definitions which vary widely

learning consumer tastes through dynamic assortments how should a firm modify its product assortment over time when learning about consumer tastes in this paper we study dynamic assortment decisions in a horizontally differentiated product category for which consumers diverse tastes can be represented as locations on a hotelling line we presume that the firm knows all possible consumer locations comprising a finite set but does not know their probability distribution we model this problem as a discrete time dynamic program each period the firm chooses an assortment and sets prices to maximize the total expected profit over a finite horizon given its subjective beliefs over consumer tastes the consumers then choose a product from the assortment that maximizes their own utility the firm observes sales which provide censored information on consumer tastes and it updates beliefs in a bayesian fashion there is a recurring trade off between the immediate profits from sales in the current period exploitation and the informational gains to be exploited in all future periods exploration we show that one can partially order assortments based on their information content and that in any given period the optimal assortment cannot be less informative than the myopically optimal assortment this result is akin to the well known stock more result in censored newsvendor problems with the newsvendor learning about demand through sales when lost sales are not observable we demonstrate that it can be optimal for the firm to alternate between exploration and exploitation and even offer assortments that lead to losses in the current period in order to gain information on consumer tastes we also develop a bayesian conjugate model that reduces the state space of the dynamic program and study value of learning using this conjugate model

world food demand long term projections of global food demand are heavily dependent on which functional form of the food demand equation is used given that real incomes can change substantially over the long term key elements are the dependence of the income elasticity on income which ensures that the food budget share always lies within the 0 1 range and the role of income inequality this article analyzes these issues proposes a new functional form that deals with them and presents estimates of income and price elasticities for food in 138 countries copyright 2012 oxford university press

measurement of deprivation and poverty based on the proportion pent on food an exploratory exercise this paper attempts to broaden the scope of poverty measurement first a brief review of measurements based on nutritional and monetary norms is presented then it is suggested that data on the proportion spent on food psf by per capita expenditure can be exploited to measure the incidence of deprivation and the incidence of poverty it is postulated that until the food needs are satisfied people spend relatively more of their incremental income on food and this behavior reveals itself as increasing or invariant psf as income increases up to a critical level the proportion of people up to that critical level is deprived of the required food and the proportion constitutes the incidence of deprivation the average expenditure at the deprivation point can be used to develop an arbitrary poverty line data for rural india are used to illustrate the measurement of deprivation and poverty

experienced poverty and income poverty in mexico a subjective well being approach summary this paper uses a life satisfaction conception of well being to define experienced poverty based on a domains of life approach it shows that experienced poverty is a broader concept than income poverty and that they lead to substantial dissonance in the classification of persons as poor it is argued that experienced poverty better captures the complexity of being human it is shown that raising the income received by persons does not automatically translate into greater well being it states that public policy should be concerned not only about getting people out of income poverty but also about placing them in a life satisfying situation

a comparison between the food ratio poverty line and the leyden poverty line as the cross sectional characteristics of that process which most other studies have not been able to undertake we find that on average the price of a stock moves in a negative direction significantly and within 4 days in response to the filing of an antitrust suit by the department of justice or the federal trade commission further the magnitude of the response is related to variables that indicate the likely effects of the suit on future earnings

estimating real income in the united states from 1888 to 1994 correcting cpi bias using engel curves this paper provides the first estimates of overall cpi bias prior to the 1970s and new estimates of bias since the 1970s it finds that annual cpi bias was 0 1 percent between 1888 and 1919 and rose to 0 7 percent between 1919 and 1935 annual cpi bias was 0 4 percent in the 1960s and then rose to 2 7 percent between 1972 and 1982 before falling to 0 6 percent between 1982 and 1994 the findings imply that we have underestimated growth rates in true income in the 1920s and 1930s and in the 1970s

assortment planning and inventory decisions under a locational choice model we consider a single period assortment planning and inventory management problem for a retailer using a locational choice model to represent consumer demand we first determine the optimal variety product location and inventory decisions under static substitution and show that the optimal assortment consists of products equally spaced out such that there is no substitution among them regardless of the distribution of consumer preferences the optimal solution can be such that some customers prefer not to buy any product in the assortment and such that the most popular product is not offered we then obtain bounds on profit when customers dynamically substitute using the static substitution for the lower bound and a retailer controlled substitution for the upper bound we thus define two heuristics to solve the problem under dynamic substitution and numerically evaluate their performance this analysis shows the value of modeling dynamic substitution and identifies conditions in which the static substitution solution serves as a good approximation