weeds in the ivy college admissions under preference constraints abstractin a series of cases spanning more than three decades the courts have attempted to establish boundaries on the permissible use of racial preferences in college admissions proponents of these policies believe that race based preferences are needed to create a diverse student body that facilitates effective learning and social inclusion opponents of such policies contend that racial preferences are inherently discriminatory and eliminating them would yield a more able student body whereas race based preferences have garnered the most attention elite colleges regularly employ other types of preferences including those for alumni and talented athletes to inform this important policy debate we develop a simple model comprised of a rational college administrator that maximizes a linear combination of student body ability and the college endowment through the choice of race legacy and merit admission shares we find that relaxing the racial preferences constraint can produce a less able studen

evaluating welfare reform in the united states this paper reviews the economic literature on welfare reform over the 1990s a brief summary of the policy changes is followed by a discussion of the methodological techniques that analyze the effects of these changes on outcomes the paper then critically reviews the econometric and experimental literature on caseload changes labor force changes poverty and income changes and family formation changes a growing body of evidence suggests that recent policy changes have influenced economic behavior and well being one particular set of new style welfare programs seems to show especially promising results with significantly increased work and earnings and reduced poverty

the effects of welfare and tax reform the material well being of single mothers in the 1980s and 1990s abstract the tax and welfare programs that provide income and in kind benefits to single mothers have changed dramatically in recent years these changes began as far back as the mid 1980s and culminated with the 1996 welfare law that ended welfare as we knew it these tax and welfare changes have sharply increased the employment of single mothers and cut welfare rolls however little is know about the effects of these policy changes on the material well being of single mothers and their children studies of those leaving welfare have found that a substantial percentage have problems paying rent purchasing enough food and paying utility bills other studies found a decline in income among the worst off single mothers after 1994 or 1995 the goal of this paper is to examine the material well being of single mothers and their families before and after recent welfare and tax reforms using data from two nationally representative household surveys we examine the consumption patterns of single mothers and their families from 1984 2000 we find that the material conditions of single mothers did not decline in recent years either in absolute terms or relative to single childless women or married mothers this pattern holds for the average single mother as well as for low educated single mothers at both the 15th and 25th percentiles of the consumption distribution in most cases our evidence suggests that the material conditions of single mothers have improved slightly

inverted block or lifeline rates and micro efficiency in the consumption of electricity abstract recent evidence indicates that the marginal cost of electricity exceeds average electricity rates a model is presented in this paper to investigate the conditions under which inverted block or lifeline rates could contribute to minimizing the deadweight loss associated with electricity consumption although conditions exist where inverted block rates might aggravate deadweight loss empirical evidence is presented suggesting that inverted block rates would in fact improve the efficiency of electricity consumption

reforming residential electricity tariff in china block tariffs pricing approach the chinese households that make up approximately a quarter of world households are facing a residential power tariff reform in which a rising block tariff structure will be implemented and this tariff mechanism is widely used around the world the basic principle of the structure is to assign a higher price for higher income consumers with low price elasticity of power demand to capture the non linear effects of price and income on elasticities we set up a translog demand model the empirical findings indicate that the higher income consumers are less sensitive than those with lower income to price changes we further put forward three proposals of chinese residential electricity tariffs compared to a flat tariff the reasonable block tariff structure generates more efficient allocation of cross subsidies better incentives for raising the efficiency of electricity usage and reducing emissions from power generation which also supports the living standards of low income households

can poor consumers pay for energy and water an affordability analysis for transition countries low income households spend a substantial share of their income on utility services such as electricity heating and water the difficulty of these socially vulnerable consumers to absorb further price increases is often used as an argument against tariff reform however detailed quantitative information on the affordability of tariff adjustments for low income consumers is actually quite scarce much of the available information is based on households this paper takes a more detailed look at the affordability of electricity district heating and water for low income consumers in transition countries while the available data are incomplete the paper finds that affordability is a problem for low income consumers in most countries in particular in the water sector and in the commonwealth of independent states cis the affordability consequences of tariff reform ultimately depend on the speed of tariff adjustments relative to the growth in household income the level of tariffs needed for cost recovery the level of effective tariffs at the outset tariffs adjusted for non payment and the demand response to the tariff increase the paper finds that delaying tariff reform by a few years makes little difference to affordability constraints and may therefore not be an effective way to mitigate the social impact of utility reform

does energy poverty really exist in china from the perspective of residential electricity consumption abstract china is undergoing a market oriented reform in energy and the residential sector will be involved in the near future the analysis of energy poverty is crucial in breaking the illusion of the dilemma between enhancing energy efficiency and controlling poverty based on chinese residential energy consumption survey we firstly estimated the energy poverty in china by the 10 indicator and lihc indicators and then proposed a minimum end use method to classify the energy poor households into lifeline and consumption energy poverty results show that energy poverty exists in china at the proportion of 18 9 and 46 of the energy poor houses are in short of modern energy consumption and are sensitive to tariffs with a level of electricity consumption lower than the basic demand the energy poverty rate is highest in central china while the lifeline energy poor are relatively concentrated in the western region in terms of public policy we suggest focusing on heterogeneity by considering different groups of households when implementing energy efficiency measures and targeting more on the consumption energy poor in poverty alleviation we also suggest paying particular attention to targeting households with low income by supporting practices such as coupons for energy consumption and appliance purchasing

is welfare reform responsible for low skilled women s declining health insurance coverage in the 1990s we use data from the 1989 2001 march supplements to the current population survey to determine whether welfare reform contributed to declines in health insurance coverage experienced by low skilled women between 1988 and 2000 women with less than a high school education experienced an 8 0 percentage point decline in the probability of having health insurance against this backdrop of large declines welfare waivers and tanf are associated with modest increases in coverage for low skilled women of 2 3 and 3 6 percentage points respectively overall our findings suggest that welfare reform did not contribute to declines in coverage but rather offset them somewhat

why are households that report the lowest incomes so well off we document that households in the uk with extremely low measured income tend to spend much more than those with merely moderately low income this phenomenon is evident throughout three decades worth of microdata and across different employment states levels of education and marital statuses of the likely explanations we provide several arguments that discount over reporting of expenditure and argue that under reporting of income plays the major role in particular by using a dynamic model of consumption and saving and paying special attention to poverty dynamics we show that consumption smoothing cannot explain all the apparent dissaving

changes in the consumption income and well being of single mother headed families there is a long standing debate over how the material well being of the disadvantaged has changed over time in the united states this debate has intensified in light of notable increases in income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s and during the 1990s dramatic changes in welfare and tax policies that target poor families including expansions in the earned income tax credit eitc welfare waivers and the passage of the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act prwora while some championed these changes as catalysts for self sufficiency others predicted that these reforms would lead to severe deprivation 1 a large body of research has shown that these changes were associated with a dramatic fall in welfare receipt and increases in work and earnings 2 there is little consensus however on how material well being has changed during this period particularly for the most disadvantaged families such as those at the bottom of the income or consumption distribution in this paper we analyze changes in material well being between 1993 and 2003 for single mother headed families a group that has been the target of these recent changes in tax and wel fare policy for these families we analyze changes in income and total consumption as well as changes in disaggregated consumption time use and health insurance coverage we describe the underlying trends in well being for disadvantaged families during this dynamic period rather than identifying the causal effects of individual policies or macroeconomic conditions we begin by briefly documenting the recent trends in income and consumption for single mother headed families for income the trends differ sharply for different deciles of single moth ers for example between 1993 1995 and 1997 2000 reported income in the bottom decile falls by about 16 percent while reported income rises by more than 17 percent in the third fourth and fifth deciles the trends for reported consumption on the other hand tell a very different story these data show neither the sharp decline at low percentiles nor the large increases at the remaining percentiles in the bottom half of the distribution of single mothers rather we find a modest about 7 to 12 percent rise in consumption throughout the entire distribution while we do not examine the reasons for the sharp differences in income and consumption changes in this paper we do argue that consumption is a better measure of material well being for those at the bottom of the distribution

what mean impacts miss distributional effects of welfare reform experiments labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings transfers and income yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts we investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random assignment data from connecticut s jobs first waiver which features key elements of post 1996 welfare programs estimated quantile treatment effects exhibit the substantial heterogeneity predicted by labor supply theory thus mean impacts miss a great deal looking separately at samples of dropouts and other women does not improve the performance of mean impacts we conclude that welfare reform s effects are likely both more varied and more extensive than has been recognized

from linear fuel switching to multiple cooking strategies a critique and alternative to the energy ladder model abstract promoting sustainable development requires evaluating the technical and policy options that will facilitate the adoption and use of energy efficient and less polluting cooking stoves and practices the transition from traditional to modern fuels and devices has been explained by the energy ladder model that suggests that with increasing affluence a progression is expected from traditional biomass fuels to more advanced and less polluting fuels in this paper we evaluate the energy ladder model utilizing data from a four year 1992 96 case study of a village in mexico and from a large scale survey from four states of mexico we show that an alternate multiple fuel model of stove and fuel management based on the observed pattern of household accumulation of energy options rather than the simple progression depicted in the traditional energy ladder scenario more accurately depicts cooking fuel use patterns in rural households the multiple fuel model integrates four factors demonstrated to be essential in household decision making under conditions of resource scarcity or uncertainty a economics of fuel and stove type and access conditions to fuels b technical characteristics of cookstoves and cooking practices c cultural preferences and d health impacts this model also allows better estimates of the expected fuelwood demand and indoor air pollution in rural households

estimates of energy subsidies in china and impact of energy subsidy reform abstract for a transitional economy such as china some energy subsidies are reasonable and sometimes even necessary for achieving social goals however with rising energy prices and environmental concerns we see conflicts emerging between energy subsidies energy demand supply fundamentals and climate change considerations energy subsidies have important implications for sustainable development through their effects on energy use efficiency and the choice of fuel source this paper applies the price gap approach to estimate china s energy subsidies results indicate that china s energy subsidies amounted to cny 356 73 billion in 2007 equivalent to 1 43 of gdp subsidies for oil products consumption are the largest followed by subsidies for the electricity and coal sectors furthermore a cge model is used to analyze the economic impacts of energy subsidy reforms our findings show that removing energy subsidies will result in a significant fall in energy demand and emissions but will have negative impacts on macroeconomic variables we conclude that offsetting policies could be adopted such that certain shares of these subsidies are reallocated to support other sustainable development measures which could lead to reducing energy intensity and favoring the environment

viewpoint further results on measuring the well being of the poor using income and consumption we evaluate the relative merits of income and consumption based measures of well being our results provide evidence that consumption better captures well being for those with few resources the bottom deciles of expenditures exceed those of income suggesting under reporting of income the under reporting rate for government transfers is high and rising overall non response is more severe in u s income data than in expenditure data furthermore a consumption data set requires fewer observations than an income data set to obtain the same level of precision for typical estimates finally very low consumption is more strongly related to other bad outcomes than very low income on evalue les merites relatifs des mesures de bien etre fondees sur le revenu et la consommation les resultats montrent que la consommation mesure mieux le bien etre de ceux qui ont peu de ressources les deciles au bas de la distribution des depenses depassent les deciles de la distribution des revenus ce qui suggere qu il y aurait des revenus non rapportes le taux de sous declaration des transferts gouvernementaux est eleve et croissant le taux global de non reponses est plus important aux etats unis pour les revenus que pour les depenses de plus les bases de donnees sur la consommation requierent moins d observations que celles sur le revenu pour obtenir le meme degre de precision des evaluations typiques finalement une tres basse consommation est plus fortement co reliee a d autres mauvaises conditions qu un tres bas niveau de revenu

energy poverty policies in the eu a critical perspective abstract once confined to the uk context where it was struggling to receive political recognition for years the concept of energy or fuel poverty is slowly entering the eu s agenda where it has crept into a number of regulatory documents and policy proposals using evidence gathered from an international workshop and semi structured interviews with decision makers experts and advocacy activists in brussels and sofia this paper explores the adoption of policies aimed at addressing energy poverty within i the organisational context of the eu and ii national state institutions in bulgaria a member state facing considerable problems at the energy affordability social inequality nexus while the former are largely nascent and poorly co ordinated the latter have already been implemented de jure to a significant extent however many unresolved issues surrounding their de facto implementation remain at the same time national policy makers remain largely unaware of the existence of direct energy poverty related initiatives at the eu level

welfare work requirements with paternalistic government preferences work requirements in means tested transfer programmes have grown in importance in the us and in some other countries the theoretical literature which considers their possible optimality generally operates within a traditional welfarist framework where some function of the utility of the poor is maximised here we consider a case where society instead has preferences over the actual work allocations of welfare recipients optimality of work requirements is shown to be possible but depends on the accuracy of the screening mechanism which assigns work requirements numerical simulations show that accuracy must be high for optimality earnings subsidies may also be optimal work requirements in means tested or welfare programmes have seen a resurgence in the last twenty years in the us and in a few european countries these requirements generally stipulate that benefit recipients must work or engage in some work like activity for some minimum number of hours each week most economists who have studied the

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

does welfare enable family expenditures on human capital evidence from china summary using the national china household income project 2007 urban survey data and a propensity score matching method this article investigates whether welfare receipt helped enable low income families to spend more on human capital we find that welfare recipient families prioritized spending in health and education relative to their non recipient peers welfare particularly helped poor families afford medical care medicine tuition and fees for noncompulsory education private tutoring for children and purchasing of textbooks we find some evidence that welfare helped recipient families pay for maintenance fees for their residence but receiving welfare also deterred families from having leisure activities

designation and influence of household increasing block electricity tariffs in china abstract electricity is the guarantee of normal life and the electricity price is widely concerned as a developing country in the transition stage abundant policy implications are included in the electricity price in china thus whether to adjust the resident electricity price is a dilemma for the government however the current single tariff system cannot cope with the complex social and environmental problems a new price mechanism is indeed needed this paper tries to design an increasing block tariffs system with the consideration of residential income and electricity consumption the result indicates that the increasing block tariffs system with four tier structure is more reasonable for china although the increasing block tariffs will result in the increase of electricity price it is still acceptable and affordable the increasing block tariffs will greatly improve the equity and efficiency and promote the electricity saving and emissions reduction moreover the power companies will increase tariffs revenue which would use to the transmission networks investment in poor area in order to the offset the limitations of the increasing block tariffs the government should adopt some complementary measures

an imbalanced development of coal and electricity industries in china china s coal and electricity industries have a strong reliance on each other however because of excessive invasion of government it is difficult for these two industries to form a stable reasonable and transaction cost saving relationships but long run disputes and quarrels this paper discusses the pricing policies and transaction relationship between these two industries from the historical perspective it begins with the discussion of coal coal market has become competitive since 1980 due to the system of dual track approach but coal sold to electricity was still tightly controlled by government guided pricing then the paper examines electricity investment and tariff reform unlike coal entry to electricity generation sector was gradually relaxed but generation and retailing tariffs are still strictly regulated as energy demand and prices soared after 2002 coal and electricity enterprises are all unsatisfied with the rule of price setting of coal sold to electricity industry this paper concludes that the deliberate low coal price policy does protect electricity industry from fuel cost fluctuation but harm coal industry allocative and productive efficiency are difficult to achieve in the long run

energy poverty in rural bangladesh energy poverty is a well established concept among energy and development specialists international development organizations frequently cite energy poverty alleviation as a necessary condition to reduce income poverty several approaches used to measure energy poverty over the past 20 years have defined the energy poverty line as the minimum quantity of physical energy needed to perform such basic tasks as cooking and lighting this paper uses a demand based approach to define the energy poverty line as the threshold point at which energy consumption begins to rise with increases in household income at or below this threshold point households consume a bare minimum level of energy and should be considered energy poor this approach was applied using cross sectional data from a comprehensive 2004 household survey representative of rural bangladesh the findings suggest that some 58 percent of rural households in bangladesh are energy poor versus 45 percent that are income poor the findings also suggest that policies to support rural electrification and greater use of improved biomass stoves might play a significant role in reducing energy poverty

estimating the value of an in kind transfer the case of food stamps the value of one in kind transfer food stamps is estimated by evaluating the experience of an actual conversion from stamps to cash in puerto rico in 1982 the evidence indicates that the cashout of the stamps had no detectable influence on food expenditures the explanation partly lies in the distribution of expenditures for the stamps were inframarginal for most recipients however some evidence indicates that trafficking in stamps was widespread as well including indirect evidence from estimation of the piecewise linear constraint model copyright 1989 by the econometric society

electricity regulation and electricity market reforms in china the electricity industry of china has been in a process of reforms since the 1980s this paper gives a review on the three main stages of reforms in china so as to trace out key features of various reform measures including those for power investment financing the separation between government and power enterprises and the division between power generation firms and power grids the findings suggest that further regulatory change in china s electricity market reform is necessary when integration of the electricity markets and increased competition are paving the way ahead for a market oriented structure prospective electricity regulation in the form of a strong legal system and effective institutions that protect market competition and promote appropriate incentives for efficiency are suggested in the paper

the determinants of household energy demand in rural beijing can environmentally friendly technologies be effective with the recent rapid economic growth total energy demand in rural china has increased dramatically and the energy structure is in the transition from non commercial to commercial sources simultaneously it is expected that households in rural areas will face energy shortages and additional environmental problems unless they have more access to renewable energy technologies however little is known about i the transition of energy use patterns and ii whether introduced technologies have been effective to analyze these issues we estimated the energy demands of rural households by using survey data taken from beijing s ten suburban districts the data contain information on both non commercial and commercial energy use key characteristics of the households and several renewable energy technologies our empirical analysis yielded three main results first the per capita income is a key factor in the per capita energy consumption more specifically the marginal increase or marginal change in per capita coal consumption strongly diminishes or declines as per capita income increases second coal and liquefied petroleum gas lpg prices do not exhibit substitution effects but an increase in these prices has strong negative effects on the use of these energy resources third renewable energy technologies are identified to reduce coal consumption and to improve energy efficiency overall these findings suggest a positive perspective if the chinese government were to design appropriate policies associated with renewable energy technologies and related energy prices then coal consumption can be reduced in the near future and the substitution to cleaner energy use will accelerate therefore a smooth energy transition in rural china could be made in a more environmentally sustainable manner

measuring the well being of the poor using income and consumption we examine the relative merits of consumption and income as measures of the material well being of the poor consumption offers several advantages over income because consumption is a more direct measure of well being than income and is less subject to underreporting bias measurement problems with income are problematic for analyses of changes in well being of the poor because the biases appear to have changed over time and are correlated with government policies on the other hand income is often easier to report and is available for much larger samples providing greater power to test hypotheses we begin by considering the conceptual and pragmatic reasons why consumption might be better or worse than income then we employ several empirical strategies to examine the quality of income and consumption data first we compare income and consumption reports for those with few resources as well as their assets and liabilities to examine measurement errors and under reporting second we examine other evidence on the internal consistency of reports of low income or consumption third we compare how well micro data in standard datasets weight up to match aggregates for classes of income and consumption that are especially important for low resource families fourth we validate income and consumption measures by comparing them to other measures of hardship or material well being although the evidence tends to favor consumption measures our analyses suggest that both measures should be used to assess the material well being of the poor

disability earnings income and consumption using longitudinal data for the period 1968 2005 for a sample of male household heads we determine the prevalence of disability during the working years and examine how the extent of disability affects a range of outcomes including earnings income and consumption we have seven main findings first disability rates are high we divide the disabled along two dimensions based on the persistence and severity of their work limiting condition we estimate that a person reaching age 56 has a 53 percent chance of having been disabled at least once during his working years and a 19 percent chance that he has begun a chronic and severe disability second the economic consequences of disability are frequently profound ten years after disability onset a person with a chronic and severe disability on average experiences a 68 percent decline in earnings a 32 percent decline in after tax income a 22 percent decline in food and housing consumption and a 21 percent decline in food consumption third the various economic consequences differ sharply across disability groups the outcome declines for those with a chronic and severe disability are often more than twice as large as those for the average disabled fourth our findings show the partial and incomplete roles that individual savings family support and social insurance play in reducing the consumption drop that follows disability only about half of this most disabled group reports receiving social security disability insurance or supplemental security income fifth we find a noticeable fall in earnings and income prior to the onset of a reported disability consumption also falls somewhat suggesting that future disability is partially but incompletely predictable in the short run sixth time use and detailed consumption data further indicate that disability is associated with a decline in well being seventh the quantities we have estimated combined with elasticities from the literature allow us to examine the optimality of current compensation for the disabled we find that the current compensation for our most disabled group appears to be lower than is optimal

market driven coal prices and state administered electricity prices in china this paper analyzes how the chinese government adjusts electricity prices for both industrial and residential users in response to changes in coal prices using an asymmetric error correction model our results show that there is a long term relation between the coal price and electricity prices but the relationship is weak especially for residential pricing in the short run we find electricity prices are adjusting faster upwards than downwards price adjustment towards long run equilibrium is faster for residential users upwards than downwards on the other hand we find no evidence of asymmetric equilibrium adjustment in the electricity price for industrial use the weak long term relationship reflects the rigidity in electricity pricing and government s reluctance to subject end users to fluctuations of raw materials cost shifts

china s large scale power shortages of 2004 and 2011 after the electricity market reforms of 2002 explanations and differences abstract since the electricity market reforms of 2002 two large scale power shortages one occurring in 2004 and one in 2011 exerted a tremendous impact on the economic development of china and also gave rise to a fierce discussion regarding electricity system reforms in this paper the background and the influence scale of the two power shortages are described second reasons for these two large scale power shortages are analyzed from the perspectives of power generation power consumption and coordination of power sources and grid network construction investments characteristics of these two large scale power shortages are then summarized by comparatively analyzing the performance and the formation of the reasons behind these two large scale power shortages finally some effective measures that take into account the current status of electricity market reforms in china are suggested this paper concludes that to eliminate power shortages in china both the supply and the demand should be considered and these considerations should be accompanied by supervisory policies and incentive mechanisms

a theory of affirmative action in college admissions i introduction race conscious preferential admissions have been widely practiced by selective colleges and universities to enhance minority representation in higher education for example the college of arts and sciences at the university of michigan automatically added 20 points out of a possible 150 points to a minority applicant s score in its rating system harvard university has an unofficial lift scheme which also targets minority applicants however controversy has surrounded affirmative action ever since its inception for instance california texas and florida have already terminated the use of race conscious admissions at state funded institutions this debate culminated in the recent supreme court ruling regarding admissions procedures at the university of michigan which endorsed admissions rules that took into account race as a qualifying characteristic unfortunately positive studies on this issue have been scarce relative to the high profile of the debate according to holzer and neumark 1999 theoretical studies of the efficiency of affirmative action on education are virtually nonexistent some have argued that affirmative action is merely a patronage program and necessarily results in mediocracy rather than meritocracy in the debate on affirmative action practices in college admissions a major criticism is that affirmative action designed to create diversity comes at the cost of academic quality a competing view offered by those opposed to affirmative action is that it weakens school applicants incentives to achieve academic excellence for instance justice thomas wrote in his opinion in grutter v bollinger that there is no incentive for the black applicant to continue to prepare for the lsat once he is reasonably assured of achieving the requisite score supporters of this practice tend to emphasize the importance of diversity and the positive influence of diversity on the pedagogical environment steele 1990 these views however do not fully recognize the incentive structure behind affirmative action admissions rules it is unclear how a college admissions rule affects high school students incentives to achieve academic excellence which adds to their human capital stock and future productivity the process of college admissions by and large resembles a contest in which contestants exert costly effort in order to win a limited number of prizes in the context of college admissions to compete for a limited number of seats in the incoming class college candidates have to present their academic credentials such as gpa and sat score to the admissions officer to win the seat high school students have to invest in their human capital which improves the academic performance whereas the academic investments are costly and nonrefundable regardless of the outcome for example the tuition the money spent on books the salary paid to tutors the time and energy and so on all of these features may be approximated by an all pay auction mechanism we propose a simple theoretical framework that models the process of college admissions as an all pay auction to investigate two major questions is there any theoretical rationale for an affirmative action admissions rule how do such rules affect college candidates incentives to invest in academic effort two candidates one a minority and the other a nonminority simultaneously choose their academic efforts human capital investments to compete for a seat in a college we show that an academic quality oriented college prefers to adopt an admissions rule that scales up the test score of the minority relative to the nonminority although this rule is designed purely to maximize the expected academic quality of the incoming class it turns out to favor the minority and create ethnic diversity we show that the unique equilibrium affirmative action admissions rule creates a positive cross group interaction between college candidates incentives to make educational effort

how robust is a poverty profile comparison of poverty such as when poverty is greatest typically matter far more for policy choices than do aggregate measures of poverty such as how many people are deemed poor the authors examine alternative methods for constructing poverty profiles focusing on their internal consistency and appropriateness for guiding policy none is perfect but some methods appear to be preferable to others when the aim is to inform policies for fighting absolute consumption poverty a case study on indonesia reveals that the country s regional and sectoral poverty profile is highly sensitive to some aspects of measurement but quite robust to others

do snap participants expand non food spending when they receive more snap benefits evidence from the 2009 snap benefits increase this study examines the expenditure response to the largest increase in supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits instituted in april 2009 investigating the effects in both food and non food spending categories i find that the rise in snap benefits increased not only food at home expenditures but also housing transportation and education expenditures of snap households relative to those of non snap households specifically the snap benefit increase leads to the reduced out of pocket spending on food for infra marginal snap recipients and the freed up resources allowed households with bounded budgets to fund other essential needs such as paying mortgage rent utility fee transportation expenses as well as tuition examining non food expenditures provides a more complete picture of the impact of the snap benefit increase by shedding light on the spillover effect of the policy change the result also derives policy implication on ongoing debate about snap allotment generosity

changes in the distribution of children s family income over the 1990 s while the 1990 s were a good decade for many u s families there has been an ongoing debate about how children particularly poor children have been faring child poverty rates did not fall substantially in the economic expansion of the 1980 s and rose to the very high rate of 23 percent in 1993 furthermore substantial changes in public assistance programs were implemented over this decade major legislative reform in 1996 increased work mandates on welfare recipient families and gave states much greater discretion to enforce these mandates and actually terminate assistance these changes could make at least some poor families worse off if they lost public assistance and were unable to find steady employment we propose to investigate changes in the entire distribution of children s family income over the 1990 s which allows us to observe the relative changes in income experienced among children in higherand lower income families we are particularly interested in two questions i how has the economic status of children changed at different points in the income distribution ii is there any evidence that welfare reform contributed to the observed changes some evidence on changes in child wellbeing over the 1990 s suggests good news child poverty rates fell to 16 percent by 2001 and poverty rates among black children hit a historical low of 30 percent in that year blank 2002 and jeffrey grogger et al 2002 provide a complete set of citations to the growing literature that looks at changes in income and consumption over the past decade at least some of this research indicates that not all low income families experienced economic gains in this paper we use data on children s household income from the march current population survey cps and average together information from 1992 1995 and 1997 2000 by averaging four years of data we have an adequate number of observations to observe income reliably at each centile 1 100 in the distribution we focus on these comparison years because they both bracket the economic expansion of the 1990 s and they bracket the 1996 legislative changes in welfare programs to account for differences in family size across families our focus is on the income to needs ratio defined as the income level of the child s family divided by the official poverty line for that family rather than on actual income levels we compare data from two samples one that includes all children and another that includes only children in families without both parents present this latter sample is largely composed of children in single parent families but also includes children who live with neither parent about 3 percent of all children in the mid 1990 s

taxes and time allocation evidence from single women and men the classic model of becker 1965 suggests that labor supply decisions should be analyzed within the broader context of time allocation and market good consumption choices but most empirical work on policy has focused exclusively on measuring impacts on market work this paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation during the entire day and how these time allocation decisions interact with expenditure patterns using the panel study of income dynamics from 1975 to 2004 we analyze the response of single women s housework labor supply and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels number of children states and time we find that when the economic reward to participating in the labor force increases market work increases and housework decreases with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two thirds of the increase in market work analysis of repeated cross sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that home production decreases substantially when market hours of work increase in response to policy changes data on expenditures from the consumer expenditure survey from 1980 to 2003 show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labor force the baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2 61 the results are consistent with the becker model meanwhile single men show little response to changes in tax policy and we are able to rule out an elasticity of substitution between home and market goods for this group of more than 1 52

what moves and works broadening the consideration of energy poverty greater detail on the specific technological and planning challenges facing energy deprived developing economies is required to improve energy policy making and development assistance practice the current literature tends to highlight electricity services and to a lesser extent clean cooking this article calls for a closer look at mobility and mechanical power as essential energy services in addition to a refinement of the specific institutional arrangements needed to reduce energy poverty and deprivation this article augments and refines arguments made by morgan bazilian and his colleagues in their viewpoint more heat and light

estimation of urban residential electricity demand in china using household survey data abstract this paper uses annual urban household survey data of sichuan province from 2007 to 2009 to estimate the income and price elasticities of residential electricity demand along with the effects of lifestyle related variables the empirical results show that in the urban area of sichuan province the residential electricity demand is price and income inelastic with price and income elasticities ranging from 0 35 to 0 50 and from 0 14 to 0 33 respectively such lifestyle related variables as demographic variables dwelling size and holdings of home appliances are also important determinants of residential electricity demand especially the latter these results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests the research findings imply that urban residential electricity demand continues to increase with the growth of income the empirical results have important policy implications for the multistep electricity price which been adopted in some cities and is expected to be promoted nationwide through the installation of energy efficient home appliances

does banning affirmative action lower college student quality banning affirmative action from college admissions cannot prevent an admissions office that cares about diversity from achieving it in ways other than explicitly considering race we model college admissions where candidates from two groups with different average quali cations compete for a xed number of seats under affirmative action an admissions office that cares both about quality and diversity admits the best quali ed candidates from each group under a ban it may promote diversity by partially ignoring candidates quali cations and therefore not admitting the best quali ed candidates from either group a ban always reduces diversity and may also lower quality jel j71 j 15 i28

a critical review of china s rapidly developing renewable energy and energy efficiency policies renewable energy and energy efficiency reee policies have far reaching implications for energy security climate change economic competitiveness pollution and human livelihood for these reasons reee has become a national priority for the chinese government particularly since 2005 this paper aims to critically review china s reee policies in six sectors electricity industry transportation buildings and local government in addition to examining the progress china has made in the development and implementation of reee policies this review also identifies limitations and room for improvement finally five policy recommendations are presented

how does the implementation of the policy of electricity substitution influence green economic growth in china abstract to promote the level of electrification reduce environmental pollution and achieve the goal of clean energy usage and green economic growth in china the national development and reform commission and other eight departments jointly issued and implemented the policy of electricity substitution in 2016 electricity substitution aims to replace traditional fossil fuels such as coal and fuel oil with clean electric energy in different fields e g industry transportation and construction and deal with the pollutants at power generation however we still need to find out the exact impact of the policy of electricity substitution on energy saving and emission reduction in this paper we estimate the economically feasible increment of electricity demand according to different classifications in electricity substitution technology furthermore based on the input output model we discuss the relative influence of the policy of lectricity substitution the main conclusions are first the policy of electricity substitution alone is not adequate to reduce the dependence on fossil energy and environmental pollution under china s current power generation structure we should also increase the use of renewable energy second the power sector plays a leading role in stimulating economic output and the increasing electricity consumption due to the policy of electricity substitution can boost the green development of china s economy

electricity demand and basic needs empirical evidence from china s households an increasing block tariff ibt has been implemented nationwide in the residential sector in china since 2012 however knowledge about ibt design is still limited particularly how to determine the electricity volume for the first block of an ibt scheme assuming the first block should be set based on some measure of electricity poverty we attempt to model household electricity demand such that the range of basic needs can be established we show that in chinese households there exists a threshold for electricity consumption with respect to income which could be considered a measure of electricity poverty and the threshold differs between rural and urban areas for rural urban families electricity consumption at the level of 7th 5th income decile households can be considered the threshold for basic needs or a measure of electricity poverty since household electricity demand in rural urban areas does not respond to income changes until after 7th 5th income decile accordingly the first ibt block for some provinces e g beijing appears to have been set at a level that is too high over time however given continued rapid growth the ibt will begin to better reflect actual basic needs

does human capital matter for energy consumption in china this article investigates the dynamic relationship between human capital and energy consumption using chinese provincial data over the period 1990 2010 considering for cross sectional dependence and parameter heterogeneity across space and over time we identify a significant and negative human capital energy consumption relationship in china specifically we find that a 1 increase in human capital reduces energy consumption by a range between 0 18 and 0 45 furthermore this negative relationship can be attributed to stronger accumulation of post school human capital in eastern china this finding suggests that energy conservation in china could be achieved by improving post school human capital components such as on the job training experience and learning by doing

tracing the impact of large minimum wage changes on household welfare in indonesia abstract minimum wage legislation has been introduced and expanded in many developed and developing countries in the hope that it would improve the living standards of the poor and reduce inequality this study examines the impact of large minimum wage changes in indonesia the results indicate serious limitations of the minimum wage for improving living standards and reducing inequality

gaining ground poverty in the postwar united states official measures of poverty in the united states are compiled by the bureau of the census by comparing a household s income level to a prespecified threshold from a theoretical perspective it is more appropriate to evaluate the level of poverty using a consumption based measure of household welfare in this paper i evaluate the level of poverty using expenditure data from the consumer expenditure survey i find that consumption based poverty rates are much lower than those based on income the trend in the poverty rate in the united states is sensitive to the price index and equivalence scales used to adjust the poverty thresholds

identifying the impacts of human capital on carbon emissions in pakistan abstract at present carbon emissions reduction is a very important challenge all over the world improvement of human capital helps to reduce carbon emissions this paper studies the long and short term effects of human capital on carbon emissions in pakistan from 1971 to 2014 we employ an autoregressive distributed lag model and the vector error correction model to analyze the co integration and direction of causalities between human capital and carbon emissions respectively results show that a significant long term relationship exists between human capital and carbon emissions improvement of human capital will reduce carbon emissions without decreasing economic growth granger causality test results describe the bidirectional causality that exists between human capital and carbon emissions in the long term and no causality in the short term human capital and economic growth have feedback effects in the long term and no effect in the short term the results of this study show that improvement in human capital through education will help carbon emissions reduction in the long term this study will help policymakers devise a comprehensive strategy to reduce carbon emissions through improvement of human capital

viewpoint measuring the well being of the poor with income or consumption a canadian perspective there is a long tradition of using consumption measures derived from statistics canada s household expenditures surveys to study material well being inequality and poverty we offer an introduction to this research income and consumption measures give different pictures of the patterns of material well being in canada but the differences are not as large as in the us we also provide a comparison to meyer and sullivan s results on data quality canadian expenditure surveys are of high quality unique aspects of these surveys variation in quality control measures over time and the possibility of comparing to income tax data provide important insights into the quality of survey data on income and consumption il existe une longue tradition d utilisation de mesures de consommation derivees de l enquete des depenses des menages de statistiques canada pour mesurer le bien etre materiel l inegalite et la pauvrete les auteurs presentent ces recherches les mesures de revenus et de consommation donnent des portraits differents des patterns de bien etre materiel au canada mais les differences ne sont pas aussi importantes qu aux etats unis on presente une comparaison avec les resultats de meyer et sullivan sur la qualite des donnees les enquetes sur les depenses sont de haute qualite au canada certains aspects uniques de ces enquetes variation dans les mesures de controle de qualite dans le temps et possibilite de comparer les donnees derivees des rapports d impot sur le revenu fournissent des apercus importants sur la qualite des donnees d enquetes sur le revenu et la consommation canadian economics association

measuring energy poverty focusing on what matters abstract the provision of modern energy services is recognised as a critical foundation for sustainable development and is central to the everyday lives of people effective policies to dramatically expand modern energy access need to be grounded in a robust information base metrics that can be used for comparative purposes and to track progress towards targets therefore represent an essential support tool this paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses the adequacy and applicability of existing instruments to measure energy poverty drawing on those insights it proposes a new composite index to measure energy poverty both the associated methodology and initial results for several african countries are discussed whereas most existing indicators and composite indices focus on assessing the access to energy or the degree of development related to energy our new index the multidimensional energy poverty index mepi focuses on the deprivation of access to modern energy services it captures both the incidence and intensity of energy poverty and provides a new tool to support policy making

consumption versus expenditure previous authors have documented a dramatic decline in food expenditures at the time of retirement we show that this is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent shopping for and preparing meals using a novel data set that collects detailed food diaries for a large cross section of u s households we show that neither the quality nor the quantity of food intake deteriorates with retirement status we also show that unemployed households experience a decline in food expenditure and food consumption commensurate with the impact of job displacement on permanent income these results highlight how direct measures of consumption distinguish between anticipated and unanticipated shocks to income whereas measures of expenditures obscure the distinction

welfare the earned income tax credit and the labor supply of single mothers during 1984 1996 welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers the earned income tax credit was expanded welfare benets were cut welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated medicaid for the working poor was expanded as were training programs and child care during this same time period there were unprecedented increases in the employment and hours of single mothers we show that a large share of the increase in work by single mothers can be attributed to the eitc and other tax changes with smaller shares for welfare benet cuts welfare waivers training programs and child care programs