gasoline demand in europe new insights abstract this study utilizes a panel data set from 14 european countries over the period 1990 2004 to estimate a dynamic model specification for gasoline demand previous studies estimating gasoline consumption per total passenger cars ignore the recent increase in the number of diesel cars in most european countries leading to biased elasticity estimates we apply several common dynamic panel estimators to our small sample results show that specifications neglecting the share of diesel cars overestimate short run income price and car ownership elasticities it appears that the results of standard pooled estimators are more reliable than common iv gmm estimators applied to our small data set

energy consumption and economic growth nexus in tanzania an ardl bounds testing approach abstract in this paper we examine the intertemporal causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in tanzania during the period of 1971 2006 unlike the majority of the previous studies we employ the newly developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach by pesaran et al 2001 bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal of applied econometrics 16 289 326 to examine this linkage we also use two proxies of energy consumption namely total energy consumption per capita and electricity consumption per capita the results of the bounds test show that there is a stable long run relationship between each of the proxies of energy consumption and economic growth the results of the causality test on the other hand show that there is a unidirectional causal flow from total energy consumption to economic growth and a prima facie causal flow from electricity consumption to economic growth overall the study finds that energy consumption spurs economic growth in tanzania

aggregate demand for electricity in south africa an analysis using the bounds testing approach to cointegration abstract electricity demand in south africa has grown at a very rapid rate over the past decade as part of reform initiatives to enhance long term sustainability of the country s electricity industry south africa s authorities have in recent years sought to develop an electricity pricing framework that is cost reflective and forms the cornerstone of demand management schemes meant to foster changes in consumption behaviour and enhance efficiency in resource use the effects of any pricing policy on aggregate electricity consumption will depend on a useful understanding of the factors that influence electricity demand and the magnitude to which electricity demand responds to changes in such factors in this context this paper applies the bounds testing approach to cointegration within an autoregressive distributed lag framework to examine the aggregate demand for electricity in south africa during the period 1960 2007 the results indicate that in the long run income is the main determinant of electricity demand with electricity prices having an insignificant effect on aggregate electricity demand future pricing policies will need to ensure that electricity prices are cost reflective and enhance efficiency of electricity supply and use

peer pressure and partnerships partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie but in organizations of any significant size the free rider effects would seem to choke off

fuel taxes an important instrument for climate policy abstract this article shows that fuel taxes serve a very important role for the environment and that we risk a backlash of increased emissions if they are abolished fuel taxes have restrained growth in fuel demand and associated carbon emissions although fuel demand is large and growing our analysis shows that it would have been much higher in the absence of domestic fuel taxes people often assert that fuel demand is inelastic but there is strong research evidence showing the opposite the price elasticity is in fact quite high but only in the long run in the short run it may be quite inelastic which has important implications for policy makers had europe not followed a policy of high fuel taxation but had low us taxes then fuel demand would have been twice as large hypothetical transport demand in the whole oecd area is calculated for various tax scenarios and the results show that fuel taxes are the single most powerful climate policy instrument implemented to date yet this fact is not usually given due attention in the debate

majority rules and incentives a club s majority rule defines the number of members that must approve a policy proposed to replace the status quo since the majority rule thus dictates the extent to which winners must compensate losers it also determines the incentives to invest in order to become a winner of anticipated projects if the required majority is large members invest too little because of a holdup problem if it is small members invest too much in order to become a member of the majority coalition to balance these opposing forces the majority rule should increase in the project s value and the club s enforcement capacity but decrease in the heterogeneity in preferences externalities can be internalized by adjusting the rule with heterogeneity in size or initial conditions votes should be appropriately weighted or double majorities required

testing for poverty dominance an application to canada the paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices this helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions the tests which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household level surveys are implemented using the canadian survey of labour and income dynamics slid for 1996 1999 and 2002 although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions the more recent years tend to dominate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines failing to take into account slid s sampling variability as is sometimes done can inflate significantly one s confidence in ranking poverty taking into account slid s complex sampling design as has not been done before can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred

ethically flexible measures of poverty this paper introduces new measures of both relative and absolute poverty using the notion of representative income of a community corresponding to the censored income distribution these new measures satisfy the monotonicity and transfer axioms proposed by sen 1976 in all cases

on shorrocks reinvestigation of the sen poverty index this paper demonstrates that the shorrocks econometrica 63 225 1230 1995 modification of the sen econometrica 44 219 231 1976 poverty index drops out as a particular case of the chakravarty canadian journal of economics 16 74 85 1983 general ethical index of poverty

sect subsidy and sacrifice an economist s view of ultra orthodox jews israeli ultra orthodox men study full time in yeshiva until age 40 on average why do fathers with families in poverty choose yeshiva over work draft deferments subsidize yeshiva attendance yet attendance typically continues long after exemption fertility rates are high tfr 7 6 and rising a social interaction approach explains these anomalies yeshiva attendance signals commitment to the community which provides mutual insurance to members prohibitions strengthen communities by effectively taxing real wages inducing high fertility historically the incursion of markets into traditional communities produces ultra orthodoxy subsidies induce dramatic reductions in labor supply and unparalleled increases in fertility illustrating extreme responses social groups may have to interventions

gasoline demand revisited an international meta analysis of elasticities meta analysis is used to determine if there are factors that systematically affect price and income elasticity estimates in studies of gasoline demand four econometric models are estimated using long run and short run price and income elasticity estimates from previous studies as the dependent variables explanatory variables include functional form lag structure time span national setting estimation technique and other features of the model structure elasticity estimates are found to be sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of some measure of vehicle ownership static models appear to overestimate short run elasticities underestimate long run price elasticities but pick up the full long run income responsiveness there is variation in the elasticity of demand across countries especially in the short run and gasoline demand appears to be getting more price elastic and less income elastic over time

poverty and inequality under income and price dispersions many policies simultaneously affect the distribution of prices and incomes in the economy moreover a bias may occur when there is a stochastic relationship between prices and incomes and this relationship is being ignored it is therefore important to dispose of an analytical framework for welfare analysis that could account for changes in this joint distribution how can the joint influences of price and income distributions on poverty and inequality indicators be analysed we offer a method to deal with this problem by using parametric formulae of poverty and inequality measures we propose statistical indicators for the levels variabilities and a statistical link of price indices and nominal living standards these indicators are consistent with an approximation of the problem based on a bivariate lognormal distribution of price indices and nominal living standards our analysis provides hints about the social welfare impact of economic shocks or policies affecting levels variabilities and correlation of prices and incomes intuitive insights are obtained while using arithmetic means and variances instead does not lead to illuminating results the role of price and income variabilities for poverty and inequality is more complex than generally expected with the possibility of several variation regimes empirical investigation of these statistics would guide social policies

revisiting the sen poverty index a modification of the official sen poverty index yields an index which is not only continous in individual incomes and consistent with the transfer axiom but also admits a geometric interpretation in terms of the area beneath a graph called the inverse generalized lorenz curve for normalized poverty gaps by jenkins and lambert 1993 or the poverty gap profile by shorrocks 1994

international comparisons of poverty intensity index decomposition and bootstrap inference this paper proposes an alternative formulation for the sen shorrocks thon sst index of poverty intensity that is appropriate for survey data with sampling weights it also decomposes the sst index into the poverty rate the average poverty gap ratio among the poor and the overall gini index of poverty gap ratios to account for sampling variation in estimates of poverty intensity this paper uses the bootstrap method to compute confidence intervals and presents international comparisons using luxembourg income study lis data from the 1970s to the 1990s cross sectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that the percentage change in poverty intensity can be approximated by the sum of percentage changes in the poverty rate and average poverty gap ratio since changes in the overall gini index of poverty gap ratios are negligible in the early 1970s poverty intensity in canada and the united states was almost indistinguishable but in the 1970s canadian poverty intensity decreased large increases in poverty intensity occurred in the 1980s in the united states the united kingdom and sweden

the fear of exclusion individual effort when group formation is endogenous to secure their membership in a popular group individuals may contribute more to the group s local public good than they would if group formation were exogenous those in the most unpopular group do not have this incentive to contribute this may result in substantial differences in individual effort level between groups our model thus provides one explanation for the existence of group specific behavioral norms a principal will prefer exogenous or endogenous group formation depending on whether he prefers high or low levels of the local public good we analyze two stylized examples social interaction in schools and multiple task teamwork

a meta analysis on the price elasticity of energy demand abstract price elasticities of energy demand have become increasingly relevant in estimating the socio economic and environmental effects of energy policies or other events that influence the price of energy goods since the 1970s a large number of academic papers have provided both short and long term price elasticity estimates for different countries using several models data and estimation techniques yet the literature offers a rather wide range of estimates for the price elasticities of demand for energy this paper quantitatively summarizes the recent but sizeable empirical evidence to facilitate a sounder economic assessment of in some cases policy related energy price changes it uses meta analysis to identify the main factors affecting short and long term elasticity results for energy in general as well as for specific products i e electricity natural gas gasoline diesel and heating oil

work environment and individual background explaining regional shirking differentials in a large italian firm the prevalence of shirking within a large italian bank appears to be characterized by significant regional differentials in particular absenteeism and misconduct episodes are substantially more prevalent in the south we consider a number of potential explanations for this fact different individual backgrounds group interaction effects sorting of workers across regions differences in local attributes different hiring policies and discrimination against southern workers our analysis suggests that individual backgrounds group interaction effects and sorting effects contribute to explaining the north south shirking differential none of the other explanations appears to be of first order importance i introduction whether individual behavior is determined by group interactions or by individual background is undoubtedly a fundamental question for the social sciences this question presented itself forcefully when we stumbled onto the following piece of evidence there appear to be significant regional differentials in the prevalence of shirking among the employees of a large italian bank in particular absenteeism and misconduct episodes are considerably more frequent in the southern branches of the bank in this paper we examine several potential explanations for this fact first individual preferences for shirking versus working may differ according to one s region of hirth we will refer to this hj othesis as one of different individual hackgrounds the second possibility is one of locational sorting low shirking types may tend to migrate to the north high shirking types may tend to migrate to the south or hoth third the northern and southern

gasoline and diesel demand in the eu implications for the 2030 emission goal abstract methodologically consistent demand estimates are necessary to analyze and forecast the effect of a common fuel policy across the eu 28 this study estimates short run and long run price and income elasticities for gasoline and diesel demands using the ardl bounds approach that also tests the existence of a long run relationship using data from 1978 to 2013 the results show that elasticity estimates between the eu 28 countries vary and the estimated long run elasticities are higher than their short run counterparts which is in line with expectations based on the existing literature the short run and long run income elasticities of gasoline and diesel demand are found to be more elastic than their price equivalents implying that if a charge on fuel is designed to decrease emissions by increasing the price the charge needs to rise at a higher rate than income an analysis of the eu s 2030 emission and fuel consumption reduction targets using the estimated long run elasticities shows that with the current tax scheme it cannot be guaranteed that emission targets will be achieved and thus a more stringent fuel tax policy is essential

catastrophic medical expenditure risk we propose a measure of household exposure to particularly onerous medical expenses the measure can be decomposed into the probability that medical expenditure exceeds a threshold the loss due to predictably low consumption of other goods if it does and the further loss arising from the volatility of medical expenses above the threshold depending on the choice of threshold the measure is consistent with a model of reference dependent utility with loss aversion unlike the risk premium the measure is only sensitive to particularly high expenses and can identify households that expect to incur such expenses and would benefit from subsidised but not actuarially fair insurance an empirical illustration using data from seven asian countries demonstrates the importance of taking account of informal insurance and reveals clear differences in catastrophic medical expenditure risk across and within countries in general risk is higher among poorer rural and chronically ill populations

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

welfare approaches to the measurement of poverty a set of poverty indices is constructed which is based on an explicit view of the loss of social welfare which results from the existence of poverty in comparison t o a society in which poverty has been eliminated the indices are based on the entire distribution of income rather than only the incomes of the poor and thus embody the concept of relative deprivation formal properties of the indices are developed together with their relationship to welfare based inequality indices both are seen as subsets of a wider choice of measures dependent on a particular choice of reference distribution copyright 1987 by royal economic society

chronic and transient poverty measurement and estimation with evidence from china abstract the paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways first it proposes a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components second it provides corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate the importance of vulnerability and transient poverty third it applies these tools to the measurement of chronic and transient poverty in china using a rich panel data set that extends over 17 years alternative measurement techniques are found to yield significantly different estimates of the relative importance of chronic and transient poverty the precision of the estimates is also considerably enhanced by simple statistical corrections

dynamic poverty decomposition analysis an application to the philippines summary in this paper we propose a new method of poverty decomposition our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time reversion consistency and subperiod additivity our decomposition integrates the existing methods of growth redistribution decomposition and sector based decomposition because it allows us to decompose the change in poverty into growth and redistribution components for each group e g regions or sectors in the economy our decomposition works well in cases where only partial data are available for some periods it is also flexible and can be extended to have the following six components population shift within region redistribution between region redistribution nominal growth inflation and methodological change components the empirical application of the six way decomposition to the philippines for the period 1985 2009 shows that important policies for poverty reduction may differ across regions for example the autonomous region in muslim mindanao would need growth enhancing policies whereas eastern visayas would need policies to improve the income distribution our decomposition method has a wide applicability and may complement the poverty profile approach

gasoline demand and car choice estimating gasoline demand using household information in recent years calls for carbon taxes as a policy tool to combat global warming have kept a discussion of the price and income elasticities of gasoline demand alive to date gasoline demand elasticity estimates are almost exclusively based on aggregate data that are subject to aggregation problems and make distributional concerns impossible to address by using household level data from the panel study of income dynamics psid and imputed fuel efficiency measures and gasoline prices i estimate household demand for gasoline and the corresponding price and income demand elasticities an attempt is made to include data on the car stock in the estimation since car portfolio and gasoline demand decisions are closely related empirical results from a selection corrected gasoline demand regression suggest low short run price and income elasticities and clear differences in gasoline demand across the population these results suggest that a gasoline tax is not likely to result in large decreases in gasoline consumption while potentially imposing hardship on identifiable segments of the population

assessing deprivation with an ordinal variable theory and application to sanitation deprivation in bangladesh the challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable this paper first proposes a class of simple intuitive and policy relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables these measures are sensitive to depth of deprivations unlike the headcount ratio moreover under appropriate restrictions the measures ensure that priority is given to the poorest among the poor while targeting monitoring and evaluating poverty alleviation programs to assess the robustness of poverty comparisons to alternative choices of parameters various stochastic dominance tests are developed some of which are themselves novel contributions to the stochastic dominance literature the empirical illustration documenting changes in sanitation deprivation in bangladesh showcases the measures ability to identify instances in which overall sanitation deprivation improved while leaving the poorest behind

gasoline demand in the oecd an application of pooling and testing procedures abstract this study utilizes a pooled inter country data set finding the long run price elasticity falls in the range 0 55 to 0 9 depending on the choice of pooled estimators the estimators included the ols within and between country estimators plus five feasible gls estimators even allowing for a ten year distributed lag on price to reflect changes in auto efficiency characteristics the within country estimator yields appreciably more inelastic estimates than did the o s estimator which was heavily influenced by the between or inter country variation this difference raises intriguing questions for future research

issues in measuring and modeling poverty economists have relied heavily on household incomes or expenditures normalized for differences in household specific prices and demographics in their research and policy advice related to poverty and inequality recognizing the conceptual and empirical problems that confound such measures does not mean that they should be ignored instead it indicates the need for supplementary measures to capture the missing items implementing a genuinely multidimensional approach will often make the welfare rankings of social states more difficult but that fact points to the nonrobustness of low dimensional rankings this may have its own policy ramifications with the possibility of correspondence between policy instruments and welfare objectives the model types used to understand the poverty and inequity determination processes will be affected not only will there be more dependent variables to consider but variables will have potentially complex relationships these relationships will often be hard to empirically disentangle despite richer integrated and longitudinal data sets such data open rich and relevant agenda for research into the dynamics of poverty along multiple dimensions a simultaneous attack on these issues from all three fronts measurement modeling and data offers hope of establishing a credible empirical foundation for public action in fighting poverty

a meta analysis of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a sur approach abstract automobile gasoline demand can be expressed as a multiplicative function of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership this implies a linear relationship between the price elasticity of total fuel demand and the price elasticities of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership in this meta analytical study we aim to investigate and explain the variation in empirical estimates of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a methodological novelty is that we use the linear relationship between the elasticities to develop a meta analytical estimation approach based on a seemingly unrelated regression sur model with cross equation restrictions this approach enables us to combine observations of different elasticities and thus increase our sample size furthermore it allows for a more detailed interpretation of our meta regression results the empirical results of the study demonstrate that the sur approach leads to more precise results i e lower standard errors than a standard meta analytical approach we find that with mean short run and long run price elasticities of 0 34 and 0 84 respectively the demand for gasoline is not very price sensitive both in the short and the long run the impact of a change in the gasoline price on demand is mainly driven by responses in fuel efficiency and mileage per car and to a slightly lesser degree by changes in car ownership furthermore we find that study characteristics relating to the geographic area studied the year of the study the type of data used the time horizon and the functional specification of the demand equation have a significant impact on the estimated value of the price elasticity of gasoline demand

poverty dominant program reforms the role of targeting and allocation rules we propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs the methods are based on program dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps these curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting dominance curves and allocation dominance ones and can serve to verify whether the assessment of marginal program reforms is sensitive to the choice of poverty lines and poverty measures as well as to differences across programs in revenue sources and incentive effects

identity and schooling some lessons for the economics of education abstract this review culls noneconomic literature on education by sociologists anthropologists and practitioners to present a new economic theory of students and schools this theory elaborates two themes that have eluded economic analysis first is the student as decision maker whose primary motivation is her identity second is a conception of the school as a social institution this framework suggests a new perspective on questions such as resource allocation and school reform it explains why some educational policies succeed and others fail we show how sociological variables may affect outcomes and suggest ways economists can incorporate them into theoretical and empirical research

equity regarding poverty measures differences in needs and the role of equivalence scales the paper investigates the definition of equity regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population it demonstrates the implications of a between type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures for the choice of poverty lines and for the measurement of living standard the role of equivalence scales which are popular in empirical work on poverty measurement is clarified ce memoire examine la definition de mesures de pauvrete fondees sur l equite quand existent differents types de menages dans la population on montre les implications d un principe de transfert regressif entre types de menages pour les mesures de pauvrete pour la definition des seuils de pauvrete et pour la mesure du niveau de vie on clarifie le role des echelles d equivalence qui sont d un usage generalise dans les travaux sur la mesure de la pauvrete

a re count of poverty in us central cities just who and where are the urban poor poverty remains a persistent problem in central cities across the us and the government s approach to measuring it is not without shortcomings this paper applies recently developed innovations in poverty measurement and presents improved estimates of central city poverty across time a broader and more comprehensive income concept is employed to measure family resources and important distributional aspects of poverty are incorporated by using the sen index in general sen indexes for the central city are significantly reduced when comprehensive income is used to evaluate poverty motivating these changes are the substantial reductions that occur in the depth of poverty and the relative income inequality among poor central city residents regionally the results suggest that the elements of comprehensive income have their greatest impact on estimates of poverty in southern central cities while the central cities of the west are least affected

measuring global gasoline and diesel price and income elasticities abstract price and income elasticities of transport fuel demand have numerous applications they help forecast increases in fuel consumption as countries get richer they help develop appropriate tax policies to curtail consumption help determine how the transport fuel mix might evolve and show the price response to a fuel disruption given their usefulness it is understandable why hundreds of studies have focused on measuring such elasticities for gasoline and diesel fuel consumption in this paper i focus my attention on price and income elasticities in the existing studies to see what can be learned from them i summarize the elasticities from these historical studies i use statistical analysis to investigate whether income and price elasticities seem to be constant across countries with different incomes and prices although income and price elasticities for gasoline and diesel fuel are not found to be the same at high and low incomes and at high and low prices patterns emerge that allow me to develop suggested price and income elasticities for gasoline and diesel demand for over one hundred countries i adjust these elasticities for recent fuel mix policies and suggest an agenda of future research topics

subjective economic welfare beyond growth it is common that economists are used to establish a direct relationship between growth and welfare nevertheless the link among these variables not always is so virtuous this suspicion went in the last years to investigating about the perception of people on your proper welfare the slogan was to know if the positive variations in the growth the revenue or the employment generate earnings of welfare it is necessary to consult the individuals the subjective studies of welfare increased substantially since then confirming the suspicions improvements in the objective indicators of welfare not always are perceived as such by the individuals the intention of this work will be to develop an index of economic welfare that allows measure the welfare perceived by the population the results obtained in the argentine economy between 2005 and 2008 will be presented and his results will be compared with the evolution of the objective indicators

aggregate poverty measures the way poverty is measured is important for an understanding of what has happened to poverty as well as for anti poverty policy evaluation sen s 1976 pathfinding work has motivated many researchers to focus on the way poverty should be measured a poverty measure argued by sen should satisfy certain properties or axioms and the desirability of a poverty measure should be evaluated by these axioms during the last two decades many researchers have adopted the axiomatic approach pioneered by sen to propose additional axioms and develop alternative poverty measures the objective of this survey is to provide a clarification on the extensive literature of aggregate poverty measures in this survey we first examine the desirability of each axiom the properties of each poverty measure and the interrelationships among axioms the desirability of an axiom cannot be evaluated in isolation and some combination of axioms may make it impossible to devise a satisfactory poverty measure some axioms can be implied by other axioms combined and so are not independent some others are ad hoc and are disqualified as axioms for poverty measurement based on the interactions among axioms we identify the core axioms which together have a strong implication on the functional form of a poverty measure we then review poverty measures that have appeared in the literature evaluating the interrelationships among different measures and examining the properties of each measure the axioms each measure satisfies violates are also summarized in a tabular form several good poverty measures which have not been documented by previous surveys are also included

equity and policy effectiveness with imperfect targeting abstract we propose a general approach that jointly integrates horizontal and vertical equity criteria in the assessment of poverty alleviation programs with the strength of each criterion being captured through its own inequity aversion parameter this contrasts with the assessment of poverty alleviation programs done with simple under coverage and leakage ratios or with other methods that do not take into account the heterogeneity of the poor and that do not address directly the social benefits of achieving normative criteria our methodology is illustrated using tunisian data and two alternative poverty alleviation policies we find inter alia that the social ranking of commodity and socio demographic targeting in tunisia depends on the policymaker s comparative preference for vertical and horizontal equity

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

poverty in canada and the united states measurement trends and implications although canada and the united states are two of the richest countries in the world many canadians and americans perceive themselves and are perceived by others to be poor which raises the issue of how best to measure poverty within canada there are widespread worries that the self image of canada as a place with relatively little poverty somewhat kinder and gentler than the united states may be a bit outdated see graves dugas and beauchamp 1999 angus reid 1999 poverty in canada has been rising while in the united states it has been falling in recent years which raises the issues of why that has been happening and what it will mean in the longer term for canada and the united states as a whole in this paper therefore i begin by asking how poverty in affluent countries should be measured before examining recent evidence on poverty intensity and its social significance in section 1 the use of the sen shorrocks thon index of poverty intensity is advocated and the poverty box is introduced as a summary graphical representation in section 2 recent data are presented on poverty in europe and north america and it is noted that between 1994 and 1997 canadian provinces became quite similar to many u s states in poverty intensity a fixed effects model is used in section 3 to examine whether changes in trade exposure the unemployment rate unemployment insurance and social assistance are significant determi

rat race redux adverse selection in the determination of work hours in law firms this paper describes an organizational setting in which professional employees are required to work inefficiently long hours the focus of the authors investigation is large law firms the income sharing that characterizes legal partnerships creates incentives to promote associates who have a propensity to work very hard law firms use indicators of this propensity especially an associate s record of billable hours in promotion decisions reliance upon work hours as an indicator leads to a rat race equilibrium in which associates work too many hours the authors find evidence in support of this conclusion with data they collected from two large law firms copyright 1996 by american economic association

the saving and investment nexus for china evidence from cointegration tests the saving and investment nexus as postulated by feldstein and horioka fh 1980 is revisited the saving investment correlation for china is estimated over the periods 1952 1998 and 1952 1994 the latter culminating in a period of fixed exchange rate regime amongst the key results it is found that saving and investment are correlated for china for both the period of the fixed exchange rate and the entire sample period with high saving investment correlation the results suggest that the chinese economy is in conformity with the fh hypothesis this is a valid outcome for in china capital mobility was fairly restricted over the 1952 1994 period as indicated by the relatively low foreign direct investment