tracking poverty over time in the absence of comparable consumption data following the endorsement by the international community of the millennium development goals mdg there has been an increasing demand for practical methods for steadily tracking poverty an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology is explored for doing so in the absence of regular comparable data on household consumption the minimum data requirements for this methodology are the availability of a household budget survey and a series of surveys with a comparable set of asset data also contained in the budget survey this method is illustrated using a series of demographic and health surveys for kenya

a parsimonious model for forecasting gross box office revenues of motion pictures the primary objective of this paper is to develop a parsimonious model for forecasting the gross box office revenues of new motion pictures based on early box office data the paper also seeks to provide insights into the impact of distribution policies on the adoption of new products the model is intended to assist motion picture exhibitor chains retailers in managing their exhibition capacity and in negotiating exhibition license agreements with distributors studios by allowing them to project the box office potential of the movies they plan to or currently exhibit based on early box office results it is also of interest to practitioners in other software industries e g music books cd roms where the distribution intensity is highly variable over the product life cycle and is an important determinant of new product adoption patterns the model and its extensions are of interest to academic researchers interested in modeling distribution effects in new product adoption as well as forecasters looking for ways to leverage historical data on related products to forecast the sales of new products we draw upon a queuing theory framework to conceptualize stochastically the consumer s movie adoption process in two steps the time to decide to see the new movie and the time to act on the adoption decision the parameter for the time to decide process captures the intensity of information intensity flowing from various information sources while the parameter for the time to act process is related to the delay created by limited distribution intensity and other factors our conceptualization extends existing new product forecasting models which assume that consumers act instantaneously on the motivating information they receive about the new product the resulting model is parsimonious yet it accommodates a wide range of adoption patterns in addition the stochastic formulation allows us to quantify the uncertainty surrounding the expected adoption pattern in the empirical testing we focus on the most parsimonious version of the modeling framework boxmod i a model that assumes stationarity with respect to the two shape parameters that characterize the adoption process the model produces fairly accurate early forecasts using at most the first three weeks of data for calibration and the predictive performance of the model compares favorably with benchmark models we propose extensions of the basic model that account for more realistic non stationary distribution intensity patterns including a wide release pattern that relies on intensive distribution and promotion and a platform release pattern that involves a gradual buildup of distribution intensity finally we present an adaptive weighing scheme that combines initial parameter estimates obtained from a meta analysis procedure with estimates obtained from early data to produce forecasts of box office revenues for a new movie when little or no box office data are available an important finding from the empirical testing is that motion picture box office revenue patterns display remarkable empirical regularity we find that there are only three classes of adoption patterns and these can all be represented within the basic model by using a two parameter exponential or erlang 2 probability distribution or a three parameter generalized gamma distribution we also find that cumulative box office revenues can be predicted with reasonable accuracy often within 10 of the actual using as little as two or three data points however our attempts to predict revenue patterns without any sales data meet with limited success while the scale parameter can be estimated reasonably well from a historical database of parameter values we find that it is considerably more difficult to predict the shape parameters using historical data the parsimony we seek in developing the model comes at the cost of several limiting assumptions we assume that the time to decide subprocess and the time to act subprocess are independent which may not be the case if decisions on continued exhibition by retailers are endogenously related to box office revenues over the life cycle in the basic model formulation we also assume that the time to act process can be represented by an exponential distribution which may not always be the case while we provide some empirical evidence to support these assumptions further research could relax these and other assumptions to enrich the basic model although this would entail some loss in parsimony

methods of household consumption measurement through surveys experimental results from tanzania consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards however accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions including the level of reporting the length of the reference period and the degree of commodity detail these variations occur both across countries and also over time within countries there is little current understanding of the implications of such changes for spatially and temporally consistent measurement of household consumption and poverty a field experiment in tanzania tests eight alternative methods to measure household consumption on a sample of 4 000 households there are significant differences between consumption reported by the benchmark personal diary and other diary and recall formats under reporting is particularly relevant in illiterate households and for urban respondents completing household diaries recall modules measure lower consumption than a personal diary with larger gaps among poorer households and households with more adult members variations in reporting accuracy by household characteristics are also discussed and differences in measured poverty as a result of survey design are explored the study concludes with recommendations for methods of survey based consumption measurement in low income countries

household welfare effects of agricultural productivity a multidimensional perspective from ghana abstractalthough poverty reduction policies in developing countries hinge on the link between smallholder productivity and welfare micro level empirical evidence on this is limited in sub saharan africa and neglects the multidimensionality of welfare this article contributes through investigating the productivity poverty relationship using a number of welfare measures with a three period panel dataset for ghana the findings are that welfare is increasing with labour productivity irrespective of the measure used but that dramatic increases in productivity would be required to achieve meaningful poverty reduction

optimal anti poverty programmes horizontal equity and the paradox of targeting the paper examines the problem of optimal targeting when households differ in needs additively decomposable poverty measures based on the households deprivation are employed needs are modelled carefully household size and needs are reflected by equivalence scales and weights the paradox of targeting corresponds to a situation in which the benefits given to a household type could decrease if the type s needs measured by the respective scale value are increased i find that poverty programmes are horizontally equitable if and only if the weight attached to each household type equals the respective equivalence scale value the paradox cannot then occur either differences in household size and needs the present paper deals with this topic considering optimal poverty alleviation programmes two questions are investigated first are optimal programmes horizontally equitable this question is related to the second one does an increase in needs lead to an increase in benefits in view of some results in the literature it seems that the answers can be negative for instance ebert 1997 demonstrates that the living standard of different household types may be different in an optimal income distribution given a social welfare function keen 1992 describes what he calls the paradox of targeting it may be that optimal targeting requires that an increase in the needs of some group be met by a reduction in the resources allocated to it thus the answers may be troubling it is obvious that the outcome of the analysis depends on the framework chosen and the researcher s objective there are several ingredients that determine optimal programmes given different needs and sizes a distribution of household income has to be adjusted in order to reflect these differences in practice incomes are often converted to equivalent incomes measured for a reference type and weights are attached furthermore the poverty lines of different groups have to be chosen appropriately an optimal outcome also

nutrition and labor producvivity in agriculture estimates for rural south india using panel data for rural south india a fixed effects individual wage equation and farm production function are estimated that have calorie intake and nutritional status weight for height of workers as their arguments neither market wages nor farm output are observed to be responsive to changes in the daily energy intake of workers however both are highly elastic with respect to weight for height these results suggest that while the human body can adapt to inadequate nutrition in the short run it cannot adapt as readily to chronic malnutrition that eventually results in loss of weight for height copyright 1988 by mit press

poverty persistence and transitions in uganda a combined qualitative and quantitative analysis despite uganda s impressive reduction in income poverty during the 1990s recent evidence has shown there to be substantial mobility into and out of poverty this paper represents one of the first attempts to combine qualitative and quantitative information to understand the factors and processes underlying poverty transitions and persistence in some instances similar factors are identified by both qualitative and quantitative approaches including lack of key physical assets high dependency ratios and increased household size in other instances though one approach identifies additional factors not so easily identified by the other for example the impacts of excessive alcohol consumption in many cases the paper argues that there is considerable value added in combining the two approaches allowing us to provide a much richer understanding of many of the processes underlying poverty and poverty transitions

herd behavior the penguin effect and the suppression of informational diffusion an analysis of informational externalities and payoff interdependency this article analyzes a technology adoption process in which the effect of informational spillover interacts with network externalities the interplay of informational externalities and payoff interdependency induces risk averse and clustering behavior in the technology adoption process the analysis differs from the herd behavior literature in focusing on how the herd behavior of subsequent users influences the initial adoption decision moreover herd behavior in this article stems from each agent s desire to inhibit the revelation of new information that can be used in a way detrimental to her rather than from each agent s effort to free ride on information contained in the decisions made by predecessors

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

information and participation in social programs participation in social programs such as clubs and other social organizations results from a process in which an agent learns about the requirements benefits and likelihood of acceptance related to a program applies to be a participant and finally is accepted or rejected we propose a model of this participation process and provide an application of the model using data from a social program in mexico our empirical analysis illustrates that decision at each stage of the process are responsive to expectations about the decisions and outcomes at the subsequent stages and that knowledge about the program can have a significant impact on participation outcomes

measuring chronic poverty without a panel abstract a new method of decomposing cross sectional poverty estimates into chronic and transient components is demonstrated using data from a recent household survey in papua new guinea this method is simpler than previously used panel methods because it does not require data on every household in every period the only requirement is that a subset of the surveyed households have a repeat observation made on their welfare indicator some time after the initial observation in the setting considered the chronic and transient components of headcount poverty are roughly equal while three quarters of the mean poverty gap is transient in the sense of being due to within year fluctuations in expenditures

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

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

adoption and diffusion of an innovation of uncertain profitability the argument has frequently been made that the pattern of diffusion associated with most new innovations will typically have certain characteristics a diffusion curve for an innovation is usually defined as the proportion of its potential users who have already adopted as a function of time measured from the first adoption many empirical studies by both economists and other social scientists have shown that diffusion curves nearly always have two distinct characteristics i they are s shaped the proportion adopted is an increasing function of time which is initially convex but eventually becomes concave and ii they tend to be right hand skewed the inflection point occurs at a time corresponding to a proportion adopted which is less than one half so that the function is concave over the greatest amount of time in fact this skewing is occasionally severe enough to make the diffusion curve appear concave everywhere the focus of most empirical studies of innovation diffusion has centered on identification of either the major determinants of the speed of diffusion or the characteristics of firms which determine how long they delay adoption the seminal contributions are griliches 6 study of hybrid corn and mansfield s 121 study of 12 industrial innovations these studies and most of the similar ones following conclude that diffusion is faster for innovations with higher profitability and that large firms tend to be the earliest adopters some studies e g mansfield 121 herregat 71 have attempted to ascertain

rules of thumb for social learning this paper studies agents who consider the experiences of their neighbors in deciding which of two technologies to use we analyze two learning environments one in which the same technology is optimal for all players and another in which each technology is better for some of them in both environments players use exogenously specified rules of thumb that ignore historical data but may incorporate a tendency to use the more popular technology in some cases these naive rules can lead to fairly efficient decisions in the long run but adjustment can be slow when a superior technology is first introduced

does movie violence increase violent crime laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run we analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field we exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004 and study the effect on same day assaults we find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies the effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation between 6 p m and 12 a m a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1 1 to 1 3 after exposure to the movie between 12 a m and 6 a m violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent this finding is explained by the self selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities in particular movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption the results emphasize that media exposure affects behavior not only via content but also because it changes time spent in alternative activities the substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings our estimates suggest that in the short run violent movies deter almost 1 000 assaults on an average weekend although our design does not allow us to estimate long run effects we find no evidence of medium run effects up to three weeks after initial exposure

the persistence of energy poverty a dynamic probit analysis abstract this paper contributes to the growing literature on energy poverty in developing countries we use a dynamic probit estimator on three rounds of panel data from urban ethiopia to estimate a model of the probability of being energy poor and to investigate the persistence of energy poverty we also study the impact of energy price inflation which ethiopia experienced during 2007 2009 on energy use and energy poverty we find strong evidence of state dependence in energy poverty a household that is energy poor in one round is up to 16 more likely to be energy poor in the subsequent round dynamic probit regression results also suggest that an increase in the price of kerosene the most important fuel for the urban poor drives households into energy poverty a fractional response estimator for panel data which estimates the impact of energy prices on the proportion of energy obtained from clean sources also supports the finding on the adverse impact of energy price inflation households responded to the significant rise in the price of kerosene by consuming a large amount of charcoal which has been documented to have serious environmental climate and health consequences our results have significant implications for policies formulated to reduce energy poverty conserve biomass resources and promote energy transition in developing countries

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

social learning and peer effects in consumption evidence from movie sales using box office data for all movies released between 1982 and 2000 i quantify how much the consumption decisions of individuals depend on information they receive from their peers when quality is ex ante uncertain in the presence of social learning we should see different box office sales dynamics depending on whether opening weekend demand is higher or lower than expected i use a unique feature of the movie industry to identify ex ante demand expectations the number of screens dedicated to a movie in its opening weekend reflects the sales expectations held by profit maximizing theatre owners several pieces of evidence are consistent with social learning first sales of movies with positive surprise and negative surprise in opening weekend demand diverge over time if a movie has better than expected appeal and therefore experiences larger than expected sales in week 1 consumers in week 2 update upward their expectations of quality further increasing week 2 sales second this divergence is small for movies for which consumers have strong priors and large for movies for which consumers have weak priors third the effect of a surprise is stronger for audiences with large social networks finally consumers do not respond to surprises in first week sales that are orthogonal to movie quality like weather shocks overall social learning appears to be an important determinant of sales in the movie industry accounting for 32 of sales for the typical movie with positive surprise this implies the existence of a large social multiplier such that the elasticity of aggregate demand to movie quality is larger than the elasticity of individual demand

deception and misreporting in a social program we investigate empirically the extent of misreporting in a poverty alleviation program in which self reported information followed by a household visit is used to determine eligibility in the model we propose and estimate underreporting may be due to a deception motive and overreporting to an embarrassment motive we find that underreporting of goods and desirable home characteristics is widespread and that overreporting is common with respect to goods linked to social status larger program benefits encourage underreporting and discourage overreporting we also estimate the costs of lying and embarrassment for different goods and show that the embarrassment cost for lacking a good is proportional to the percentage of households who own the good jel d01 i32 i38 c25

inequality as a determinant of malnutrition and unemployment policy this paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person s productivity is an increasing function of intake in the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small certain patterns of lorenz improving asset redistributions or nutrition transfers increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment copyright 1987 by royal economic society

technology adoption in the presence of network externalities we analyze technology adoption in industries where network externalities are significant the pattern of adoption depends on whether technologies are sponsored a sponsor is an entity that has property rights to the technology and hence is willing to make investments to promote it key findings include the following 1 compatibility tends to be undersupplied by the market but excessive standardization can occur 2 in the absence of sponsors the technology superior today has a strategic advantage and is likely to dominate the market 3 when one of two rival technologies is sponsored that technology has a strategic advantage and may be adopted even if it is inferior 4 when two competing technologies both are sponsored the technology that will be superior tomorrow has a strategic advantage

estimating the scale and geography of global poverty now and in the future how much difference do method and assumptions make summary estimates of the historic and future scale and location or geography of global poverty by income expenditure have a long and contentious history in recent projections made on global poverty methods and assumptions vary so widely it is impossible to compare studies in a systematic way even on their estimates of current poverty in light of this we discuss the methodological issues arising and use a custom built model to provide a new consistent set of long run estimates of global poverty to show the impact of different methods and assumptions on the scale and location of global poverty

poverty livelihood and class in rural south africa abstract using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993 this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural south africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in south africa about poverty and its alleviation pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment this paper analyzes what might be termed the class structure of poverty after exploring the range of claiming systems and livelihood tactics available in rural south africa the paper offers a first look at who the poor are by disaggregating the rural population into discrete livelihood strategy classes non parametric regression methods are used to then estimate and graphically explore the nature of the livelihood mapping between endowments and real incomes in addition to identifying those endowment combinations that map to consumption levels below the poverty line the asset basis of poverty the topography of the estimated livelihood mapping helps identify the constraints that limit household s ability to effectively utilize their assets and endowments these results suggest that poverty is a matter of not only having few assets but also of constraints which limit the effectiveness with which those assets are used and poverty and livelihood policy needs to be designed accordingly

human development in poor countries on the role of private incomes and public services development is often taken to mean rising incomes discussions of the goals of development now often emphasize the reduction of poverty rather than raising average incomes per se the role of social services particularly basic health and education has also received greater emphasis in the 1980s viewed mainly as instruments for raising the incomes of the poor but in all these approaches income growth of one sort or another is what development is all about a rather different view of the meaning of development has recently found expression in the 1990 human development report hrd produced by the united nations development programme a conceptual underpinning for this approach can be found in the work of amartya sen the essence of this view is that human development what people can actually do and be is the overriding purpose of economic development underdevelopment is viewed as the lack of certain basic capabilities rather than lack of income per se we do not aim here to advocate one of these approaches over the other but rather to explore their implications for development policy for instance what does the human development approach imply about the role of economic growth and in particular about reducing income poverty should development priorities shift toward the provision of public services in poor countries even if such a shift is at the expense of income growth

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

do monetary and nonmonetary indicators tell the same story about chronic poverty a study of vietnam in the 1990s this paper investigates whether monetary and nonmonetary indicators tell the same story about chronic poverty using a unique panel data from vietnam in the 1990s defining chronic poverty as occurring when an individual is monetarily poor stunted malnourished or out of school in both waves of the panel the overlap and correlation between subgroups of the chronically poor are shown to be modest some but not all nonmonetary indicators are more persistent and complement monetary indicators of chronic poverty taking account of the multiple dimensions of chronic poverty cannot be a simple additive exercise

silverscreener a modeling approach to movie screens management managing the allocation of shelf space for new products is a problem of significant importance for retailers the problem is particularly complex for exhibitors the retailers in the motion picture supply chain because they face dynamic challenges given the short life cycles of movies the changing level of demand over time the scarcity of shelf space and the complex revenue sharing contract between the exhibitor and the distributor in the face of this complexity the aim of current research is to provide a structure for analyzing management problems of exhibitors in the movie industry using a mathematical programming approach and a fast but readily accessible algorithm we propose a decision support model silverscreener whose aim is to help exhibitors make effective and timely decisions regarding theater screens management the major objective is to help select and schedule movies for a multiple screens theater over a fixed planning horizon in such a way that the exhibitor s cumulative profit is maximized by treating the multiple screens as parallel machines and the movies as jobs we provide an analogy of the current problem to the parallel machine scheduling problem we formulate the resulting problem as an integer program we depart from the typical parallel machine scheduling problems by introducing the time indexed formulation that is particularly useful for solving the current problem an important distinction between the current problem and typical machine scheduling problems is that the present approach allows for the choice of which movies to play typically in machine scheduling all jobs have to be scheduled we provide various analyses of normative versus actual decision making based on publicly available data the developed model is readily implementable and appears to lead to improved profitability in different comparative cases through sensitivity analysis we demonstrate that the above results are robust to variations in various parameters of the problem the main findings and insights from the normative policy suggest the following 1 based on silverscreener s recommendations the exhibitor can achieve substantially higher cumulative profit 2 the improvement over actual decisions in terms of profitability appears to result from a combination of better selection and scheduling of the movies 3 the general structure of the exhibitor s normative decision is choose fewer right movies and run them longer we propose a two tier integrated application of the model to show how the model can be applied to realistic decisionmaking the first tier involves development of a movie selection plan to help the manager plan an entire season and bid for movies before the start of that season an ex ante revenue prediction scheme is developed based intuitively on a matching of the forthcoming movies with similar movies played in this theater previously if the forthcoming season s scheduling plan can be visualized as a two dimensional week by screen matrix then that matrix contains only empty cells before the first tier after a bid plan is developed the exhibitor can fill some of those empty cells the remaining empty cells represent slots which can be decided during the season by either extending movies the exhibitor booked before the season or by scheduling other movies which may become available later in the season this motivates the second tier adaptive scheduling approach of the integrated approach the second tier helps the exhibitor in weekly decision making during the season this application involves rolling and updating data from one time window to another the approaches followed in the two tiers of the integrated application are quite general in that they can incorporate a sophisticated demand prediction model managerial judgments or a combination of both we also propose an alternative behavioral decision rule heuristic which exemplifies relationship dilemmas in the movie industry this heuristic shows that the exhibitors need to be selective in their choice of movies and may suffer a substantial loss in profitability if they place too much emphasis on accommodating distributors

a simple test of the nutrition based efficiency wage model abstract in the nutrition based efficiency wage model wages in labor markets in developing countries are rigid because lowering them would reduce worker productivity and increase the cost per efficiency unit i evaluate this claim using data from rural india i find that contrary to what has been assumed in these models a wage cut should lower the cost per efficiency unit of labor

something to talk about social spillovers in movie consumption we exploit the randomness of weather and the relationship between weather and moviegoing to quantify social spillovers in movie consumption instrumenting for early viewership with plausibly exogenous weather shocks captured in lasso chosen instruments we find that shocks to opening weekend viewership are doubled over the following five weekends our estimated momentum arises almost exclusively at the local level and we find no evidence that it varies with either ex post movie quality or the precision of ex ante information about movie quality suggesting that the observed momentum is driven in part by a preference for shared experience and not only by social learning

success and failure of reform insights from the transition of agriculture this paper analyzes the linkages between the reform strategies in transition countries and economic performance the authors focus on agriculture because of the sharpness of the policy changes fundamental differences among countries and relative simplicity of agricultural relationships the authors document post reform performance in the transition countries of asia and europe the authors show how a pricing reform and subsidy reductions b land rights reform and policies that affect farm restructuring and c the presence institutions that facilitate exchange either markets or market substitutes affect output and productivity the paper ends with general lessons on reforms and transition

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

returns to women s education using optimal iv selection this paper investigates returns to women s education by applying an optimal iv selection approach post lasso iv estimation which improves the first stage predictive relationship between an endoge

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

vulnerability and chronic poverty in rural sichuan abstract chinese anti poverty policy stresses the long term structural nature of rural poverty this paper shows that poverty in rural sichuan during 1991 95 was both dynamic and persistent a new measure of chronic poverty is defined as a high vulnerability to being poor and compared with traditional interpretations of chronic poverty as low mean consumption households are highly vulnerable to falling into poverty even when their average consumption is some distance above the poverty line the determinants of low mean consumption and high vulnerability appear however to be similar suggesting that policies to increase mean consumption will also reduce vulnerability

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

discontinuous losses from poverty generalized pα measures and optimal transfers to the poor abstract this paper examines the distributional properties of poverty measures which are discontinuous at the poverty line it is shown that among all the additive poverty measures only those measures with some discontinuous jump at the poverty line are such that it is optimal to allocate a given antipoverty budget either to the richest of the poor or to the poorest of the poor or to both a special class of such poverty measures is an extension of the well known p the properties of which are investigated

what s an oscar worth this article examines the impact of an academy award nomination and award for best picture best actor actress and best supporting actor actress on a film s i market share of theaters ii average revenue per screen and iii its probability of survival the model is estimated using weekly box office data for a matched sample of nominated and non nominated films the results indicate substantial financial benefits for a nomination and award for best picture and best actor actress the structure of rewards is consistent with that found in two stage single elimination tournaments

identifying vulnerability to poverty a critical survey in the economic literature on poverty various methods have been proposed for measuring a phenomenon known as vulnerability however after more than a quarter century of research no consensus has been reached on how to identify such vulnerable individuals within a given population some misunderstandings have also arisen from the overlapping of other closely related concepts such as the expectation of being poor expected poverty multi period poverty and risk exposure this paper offers a detailed conceptual discussion on vulnerability to poverty and its related elements reviewing a wide range of identifying criteria provided in the literature it is found that according to the state of the art in this field of research two key elements stand out in identifying vulnerable individuals an expected well being below the poverty line and a relevant risk of falling into poverty due to downside deviation from a reference level of well being the traditional classification of vulnerability approaches has been updated into four groups i those that stress the element of exposure to risk ii those that emphasize the element of expected poverty iii those that define vulnerability through a utility gap and iv those that are supported by a mean risk dominance criterion

poverty rankings using noisy data on living standards abstract a consistent and robust poverty ranking will be unaffected by the omission of random and identically distributed idiosyncratic determinants of individual welfare however ambiguities in ranking due to heterogeneity in error distributions are difficult to resolve on a priori grounds

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

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

poverty in egypt modeling and policy simulations abstract poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society but they are limited by the bivariate nature of their informational content using the 1997 egypt integrated household survey eihs this article estimates models of household consumption in the first stage and then predicts poverty rates corresponding to changes in potential policy variables the key results of the study point to the important instrumental role of education parental background land redistribution and access to health facilities in alleviating poverty in egypt

demand and supply dynamics for sequentially released products in international markets the case of motion pictures we develop an econometric model to study a setting in which a new product is launched first in its domestic market and only at a later stage in foreign markets and where the product s performance demand and availability supply are highly interdependent over time within and across markets integrating literature on international diffusion success breeds success trends and the theatrical motion picture industry the focus of the empirical analysis we develop a dynamic simultanenous equations model of the drivers and interrelationship of the behavior of consumers audiences and retailers exhibitors our findings emphasize the importance of considering the endogeneity and simultaneity of audience and exhibitor behavior and challenge conventional wisdom on the determinants of box office performance which is predominantly based on modeling frameworks that fail to account for the interdependence of performance and availability specifically we find that variables such as movie attributes and advertising expenditures which are usually assumed to influence audiences directly mostly influence revenuesindirectly namely through their impact on exhibitors screen allocations in addition consistent with the idea that the buzz for a movie is perishable we find that the longer is the time lag between releases the weaker is the relationship between domestic and foreign market performance an effect mostly driven by foreign exhibitors screen allocations

reasonable expectations on the prospects for documenting the impact of agricultural research on poverty in ex post case studies abstract the increasing emphasis on poverty alleviation as a motivation for investing in public sector international agricultural research is discussed from the perspective of practitioners engaged in ex post impact evaluation context is largely provided from the experience of the international potato center cip in impact assessment of improved potato and sweet potato technologies the poverty content of 10 cip related success stories of technological change was qualitatively assessed with a checklist of key questions with this admittedly crude method the size of project net present value npv appears to be an informative guide to the magnitude of poverty effects hence projects that generate widespread benefits to many people particularly to net consumers of food crops remain likely to be the most effective vehicles to contribute to poverty alleviation from public sector investments in the improvement of food crops in developing countries

global poverty estimates a sensitivity analysis summary current estimates of global poverty vary substantially across studies we undertake a sensitivity analysis to highlight the importance of methodological choices by measuring global poverty using different data sources parametric and nonparametric estimation methods and multiple poverty lines our results indicate that estimates of global poverty vary significantly when they are based alternately on data from household surveys versus national accounts but are relatively consistent across estimation methods the decline in poverty over the past decade is found to be robust across methodological choices