will tighter futures price limits decrease hedge effectiveness abstract the events triggered by the global financial crisis gfc have led to calls for the regulation of financial markets given that regulation may involve opportunity costs this paper examines whether tighter futures price limits can reduce the effectiveness of a futures hedge we propose a new model that uncovers the underlying spot futures dynamics when futures prices are subject to limits we use the model to determine the maximum number of limit days that can occur before minimum variance hedging outcomes are adversely affected application of this model to the us soybean and corn markets reveals that existing limits do not reduce hedge effectiveness if the frequency of limit days increases from current levels of 1 to approximately 3 4 conventional hedging approaches will experience economically and statistically significant increases in portfolio variance these results are important for hedgers clearing houses and regulators in light of the recent calls for derivatives regulation

seasonal poverty in madagascar magnitude and solutions abstract seasonal reductions in food consumption pull about one million malagasy below the poverty line during the lean season there they join the nine million more who remain chronically undernourished throughout the year because the seasonality of food shortages coincides with the increased prevalence of diarrhea and other diseases during the rainy season the resulting lean season exacts a heavy toll in the form of increased rates of malnutrition and child mortality combining the results of recent field studies with a seasonal multi market model this paper measures the probable impacts of three common interventions aimed at combatting seasonal food insecurity we find the most promising interventions to be those that increase agricultural productivity of the secondary food crops such as cassava other roots and tubers and maize

fraudulent financial reporting and technological capability in the information technology sector a resource based perspective motivated by the disproportionately high incidence of fraudulent financial reporting in the it sector where technological capability is a major source of competitive advantage this study investigates the possible relationship between technological capability and fraud probability in the it sector technological capability is measured by a firm s technical efficiency relative to peers in transforming cumulative r d resources into innovative output which is a source of competitive advantage according to the resource based view rbv of the firm technical efficiency is estimated via data envelopment analysis a sample of fraud firms taken from accounting and auditing enforcement releases is matched with control samples of non fraud firms consistent with the rbv technological capability is found to have a negative and economically significant effect on fraud probability moreover fraud probability is insignificantly associated with the scale efficiency of innovative activities as investment in r d resources per se is not a source of sustainable competitive advantage

joint confidence intervals for income shares and lorenz curves in a recent paper beach and davidson 1983 extended the principles of statistical inference to lorenz curves and income shares by establishing the asymptotic distribution and covariance structure of a vector of lorenz curve ordinates corresponding to a set of quantile abscissae one can thus use the lorenz curve and income shares no longer just as descriptive devices for summarizing distribution information but now also as analytical tools for comparing alternative distributions and carrying out conventional statistical inference on them it would clearly be desirable however to extend and complement this work by providing a method for computing a set of joint confidence intervals about these income shares and for illustrating graphically a joint confidence band about a set of estimated lorenz curve ordinates the present paper provides a new and simple technique for doing this when analyzing differences between sets of income shares or lorenz curves one typically wants to elicit more detailed information than is provided by a standard joint chi square test on the overall set of shares that is when the hypothesis of two sets of shares being the same is rejected we generally want to know further which particular differences in shares are different from zero and of these nonzero differences which are positive and which negative savin 1980 a natural way of providing such information is through multiple comparison procedures developed in this paper in a recent work richmond 1982 has developed a general method of finding multiple comparison intervals that is particularly suited to the present problem and in this situation appears to dominate other conventional alternatives in contrast for example to scheff s s projection method richmond s approach focuses on a set of primary points of interest income shares among a more general set of points including the lorenz curve ordinates and optimizes the joint confidence interval lengths on this primary set of points since estimated lorenz curve ordinates are built up from underlying income shares these shares perhaps further supplemented are natural choices for the primary set the method however also provides a joint confidence band that geometrically bounds the set of lorenz curve ordinates and interpolated segments between them the present

inequality and the impact of growth on poverty comparative evidence for sub saharan africa abstract this study explores the extent to which inequality affects the impact of income growth on the rates of poverty changes in sub saharan africa ssa compared to non ssa based on an unbalanced panel of 86 countries over 1977 2004 for all three measures of poverty headcount gap and squared gap the impact of gdp growth on poverty reduction is a decreasing function of initial inequality the impacts are similar in direction for ssa and non ssa so that within both regions there are considerable disparities in the responsiveness of poverty to income growth depending on inequality nevertheless the income growth elasticity is substantially less for ssa implying relatively small poverty reduction response to growth

lone inventors as sources of breakthroughs myth or reality are lone inventors more or less likely to invent breakthroughs recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcome distributions it has implicitly assumed a symmetric thickening or thinning of both tails i e that a greater probability of breakthroughs comes at the cost of a greater probability of failures in contrast we propose that collaboration can have opposite effects at the two extremes it reduces the probability of very poor outcomes because of more rigorous selection processes while simultaneously increasing the probability of extremely successful outcomes because of greater recombinant opportunity in creative search analysis of over half a million patented inventions supports these arguments individuals working alone especially those without affiliation to organizations are less likely to achieve breakthroughs and more likely to invent particularly poor outcomes quantile regressions demonstrate that the effect is more than an upward mean shift we find partial mediation of the effect of collaboration on extreme outcomes by the diversity of technical experience of team members and by the size of team members external collaboration networks supporting our meta argument for the importance of examining each tail of the distribution separately experience diversity helps trim poor outcomes significantly more than it helps create breakthroughs relative to the effect of external networks

the colorblind crowd founder race and performance in crowdfunding the dearth of minority entrepreneurs has received increasing media attention but few academic analyses in particular the funding process creates challenges for either audit or correspondence methods making it difficult to assess the role or type of discrimination influencing resource providers we use a novel approach that combines analyses of 7 617 crowdfunding projects with an experimental design to identify whether african american men are discriminated against and whether this reflects statistical taste based or unconscious bias on the part of prospective supporters we find that african american men are significantly less likely than similar white founders to receive funding and that prospective supporters rate identical projects as lower in quality when they believe the founder is an african american male we conclude that the reduction in perceived quality does not reflect conscious assumptions of differences in founder ability or disamenity but rather an unconscious assumption that black founders are lower quality in two additional experiments we identify three means of reducing this bias through additional evidence of quality via third party endorsements i e awards evidence of prior support through evidence that african american founders have succeeded previously and by removing indicators of the founder s race the online appendix is available at https doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2017 2774 this paper was accepted by toby stuart entrepreneurship and innovation

innovation outcomes in a distributed organization intrafirm mobility and access to resources prior research has established a relation between intrafirm mobility and innovation outcomes at distributed organizations the literature has also uniformly agreed on the mechanism underlying this relationship the sharing of tacit knowledge and recombination of ideas that occurs because of intrafirm mobility but a second mechanism may also be at work intrafirm mobility might help distant employees secure access to resources for their innovative projects using unique data on travel employment and patenting for 1 315 inventors at the indian research and development r d center of a fortune 50 multinational i find that intrafirm mobility in the form of short duration business trips from a distant r d location to headquarters is positively related to higher subsequent patenting at the individual level i also find mobility immediately prior to meetings at which r d funds are most likely to be disbursed to be related to higher subsequent patenting this study sheds new light on how intrafirm mobility a

chronic poverty in the united states this paper proposes a method of measuring chronic and transitory poverty using an axiomatically sound additively decomposable index of aggregate poverty our approach is contrasted with alternative methods of measuring poverty persistence we use our method to measure chronic and transitory poverty in the united states during the 1980s and late 1970s and find that chronic poverty is a more serious problem than previously thought between the late 1970s and mid 1980s poverty not only increased it became more chronic and less transitory in nature this is true for the population as a whole and for some but not all of the subpopulations we considered the latter were defined according to race type of social unit and educational qualifications of the head of the social unit all empirical analyses are based on data from the panel study of income dynamics

tests of unbiasedness in the foreign exchange futures markets an examination of price limits and conditional heteroscedasticity daily price limits an institutional feature of futures markets truncate the distribution of price changes and dampen the variance previous tests of the unbiasedness hypothesis using daily foreign exchange futures prices have accounted for the observed conditional heteroscedasticity in the data but have neglected to adequately incorporate the additional effects of daily price limits this article examines both time variation and truncation of futures price changes empirical results suggest that previous rejections of the unbiasedness hypothesis in the foreign exchange futures market are not substantively altered by inclusion of price limits but may be attributed to potentially biased testing procedures copyright 1993 by university of chicago press

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

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

the statistical properties of daily foreign exchange rates 1974 1983 abstract this paper examines the statistical properties of daily rates of change of five foreign currencies from 1974 to 1983 the main purpose is to discriminate between two competing explanations for the observed heavy tails of the distribution that the data are independently drawn from a heavy tail distribution which remains fixed over time and that the data come from distributions which vary over time evidence point to the rejection of the first hypothesis further investigations show that the rejection can be attributed to changing means and variances in the data which can be described by a simple statistical model

china s uneven progress against poverty while the incidence of extreme poverty in china fell dramatically over 1980 2001 progress was uneven over time and across provinces rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor though migration to urban areas helped the pattern of growth mattered rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth agriculture played a far more important role than the secondary or tertiary sources of gross domestic product gdp rising inequality within the rural sector greatly slowed poverty reduction provinces starting with relatively high inequality saw slower progress against poverty due both to lower growth and a lower growth elasticity of poverty reduction taxation of farmers and inflation hurt the poor external trade had little short term impact

land contingent poverty alleviation schemes abstract target groups for rural poverty alleviation schemes in south asia and elsewhere have often been identified in terms of their landholding class with landless or near landless households being the intended beneficiaries this paper offers a quantitative approach to the analysis and design of land contingent poverty alleviation schemes an application to bangladesh suggests that when income is generally unobserved landholding class is a good instrument for targeting poverty relief in that it is strongly correlated with the informationally feasible allocations which minimize aggregate poverty for a given budget it is however far from being a perfect instrument even under otherwise ideal conditions the maximum feasible reduction in poverty which is attainable by relying solely on land based targeting is substantially less than that attainable with perfect income information indeed the poverty alleviation impact of domestically financed and revenue neutral transfers across 10 landholding classes in rural bangladesh could also be achieved without targeting by simply giving every household a lump sum payment equivalent to 10 of mean rural income political restrictions on tax powers or errors made in administration will further reduce the gains from land contingent targeting greater impact on poverty for a given budgetary cost will require more precise targeting within landholding classes

how well do static indicators identify the chronically poor abstract we investigate how well the most widely used static welfare indicators perform in identifying the chronically poor we propose a normative measure of performance the cost of a given impact on chronic poverty when transfers are contingent upon a purely static indicator using longitudinal household data from rural india we find that current consumption is not always a better indicator of chronic poverty than current income both however perform much better than other common indicators such as food share and access to land

are children worse off evaluating well being using a new and improved measure of poverty although child poverty rates continue to surpass those of others there is growing consensus that current official poverty measure has become outdated and flawed using data from the current population survey and the survey of income and program participation we implement an experimental poverty measure based on recommendations by a national academy of sciences panel we find that while child poverty rates continue to surpass those of others the gap between child and adult poverty rates is smaller under the experimental measure results highlight the impact of noncash government benefits and the earned income tax credit in reducing child poverty

microfinance and poverty a macro perspective we test the hypothesis that microfinance reduces poverty at the macro level using cross country and panel data which are constructed by the microfinance information exchange data on microfinance institutions mfis and the world bank data taking account of the endogeneity associated with mfis loans we show that a country with higher mfis gross loan portfolio per capita tends to have lower levels of poverty indices contrary to recent micro evidence our results suggest that microfinance significantly reduces poverty at macro level and thus reinforce the case for channeling funds from development finance institutions and governments of developing countries into mfis

the social welfare implications decomposability and geometry of the sen family of poverty indices in this paper we propose a unified framework for the sen indices of poverty intensity that shows an explicit connection between the indices and the common underlying social evaluation function we also identify the common multiplicative decomposition of the indices that allows simple and similar geometric interpretations and easy numerical computation jel classification c000 h000 o150 implications en termes de bien etre collectif decomposabilite et geometrie de la famille d indices de pauvretea la sen dans ce memoire les auteurs proposent un cadre d analyse integre des indices d intensite de pauvretea la sen qui souligne la relation explicite entre ces indices et la fonction sociale d evaluation commune qui les soustend les auteurs identifient aussi la decomposition multiplicative commune de ces indices qui permet d en donner des interpretations geometriques simples et idoines et de faire des calculs numeriques faciles

the welfare cost of means testing pensioner participation in income support we estimate parametric and semi parametric binary choice models of benefit take up by british pensioners and use a revealed preference argument to infer the cash equivalent value of disutility arising from stigma or complexity of the claims process these implicit costs turn out to be relatively small averaging about 3 4 per week across income support recipients using the foster greer thorbecke measure of poverty among pensioners we find that allowing for implicit claim costs incurred by benefit recipients raises the measured degree of poverty by not more than 13 copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

time varying risk premia volatility and technical trading rule profits evidence from foreign currency futures markets abstract this paper re examines the efficiency of foreign currency futures markets by evaluating the role of time varying risk premia and volatility in explaining technical trading rule profits the results show that large parts of the technical rule profits can be explained by the time varying risk premia estimated from a general model for the conditional capm the bootstrap distributions for the profits under the null model average one third to one half of the actual profits and enclose the actual profits well within the 90 confidence intervals time varying conditional volatility explains an additional 10 of the profits

why have urban poverty and income inequality increased so much argentina 1991 2001 abstract this article analyzes the trends in income inequality and poverty among argentine households during the nineties we assess the effect of changes in labor force participation unemployment educational levels and returns to individual characteristics on income inequality and poverty by using a microsimulation approach we found that unemployment accounts for a large part of the increase in income inequality and poverty experienced in the past decade changes in labor force participation had an equalizing effect over the whole period while changes in the returns to workers sociodemographic characteristics could be associated with a small increase in income inequality with respect to poverty unemployment affected negatively the proportion of households below the poverty line amplified the poverty gap and increased the severity of poverty in contrast changes in labor force participation are associated with a reduction in the poverty rate

catching up by hiring the case of huawei hiring experts in centers of state of the art technology is an important way in which a multinational enterprise mne can gain competitive advantage and yet use of this mechanism remains under researched this study uses the case of a chinese mne that recently achieved a leading position in the telecommunications market huawei technologies taking the perspective of huawei s offshore hires i find that greenfield investments contributed to overcoming liabilities of origin and outsidership in the global telecommunications industry nevertheless even now that huawei has caught up with industry incumbents its output capabilities remain dependent on the innovation capabilities of its offshore experts

limit moves as censored observations of equilibrium futures price in garch processes we develop an algorithm for estimating generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models for time series containing some censored observations motivation for the algorithm comes from those futures markets and some equity markets that have limits constraining the maximum allowable movement in price in a day when a limit is reached trading stops and the equilibrium price is not observed we maximize the likelihood function by replacing the unobservable squared error terms with their expected values we evaluate the algorithm performance by extensive simulation and apply it to treasury bill futures data from a period of high volatility and frequent limit moves

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

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 role of relative performance in inter firm mobility of inventors abstract prior research has emphasized the influence of inter firm mobility on knowledge flows and innovation yet we have an incomplete picture of the antecedents of inventor mobility building on theoretical traditions related to decision making based on limited asymmetric bounded information and economic and other incentives our paper suggests that after controlling for individual performance and other variables previously shown to affect inter organizational mobility an inventor s performance relative to his co patenting group alters his likelihood of mobility our analysis of 2648 inventors in the pharmaceutical industry shows that for those performing above their reference group of past and current co inventors in patenting an increase in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility and for those performing below the reference group a decrease in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility we also find that when inventors have more external scientific collaborations their likelihood of mobility increases and this variable moderates the relationship between the performance gap and mobility but only for those performing above their peers

matchmaker matchmaker the effect of old boy networks on job match quality earnings and tenure firms often view job applicant referrals from current employees as more informative than direct applications or referrals through formal labor market intermediaries such as placement firms we argue that old boy networks reduce employers uncertainty about worker productivity using jovanovic s job matching model we show that workers hired through the old boy network should 1 earn higher initial salaries 2 experience lower subsequent wage growth on the job and 3 stay on the job longer than otherwise comparable workers hired from outside the network we find considerable support for this theory using data from the 1972 survey of natural and social scientists and engineers

uncertain intellectual property conditions and knowledge appropriation strategies evidence from the genomics industry innovating science and technology based firms often endure a sustained period of uncertain intellectual property rights ipr protection before patents could be granted to their valuable knowledge assets this problem is exacerbated as firms increasingly develop their innovations or operate in countries with weak ipr institutional environments but how does ipr uncertainty affect firms strategy toward knowledge appropriation capturing of economic value from their knowledge assets and toward providing access to these knowledge assets drawing on research from the economics of science and intellectual property strategy we examine this question using a novel panel data covering 362 firms and organizations in the knowledge intensive genomics industry based on all genomics patents and matching papers from 1988 to 2005 we find that under uncertain ipr conditions firms reveal and accumulate more knowledge through open science follow on publishing but shift to knowledge appropriation through commercial science follow on patenting when ipr uncertainty is narrowed this effect is most salient when firms develop their knowledge assets or operate under strong ipr institutional regime for highly science based knowledge assets firms continue tapping into open science for access and reciprocity in knowledge acquisition from the scientific community these findings highlight the role of patent grant as a potential lever to shape firms knowledge processes and long term innovative capacity and the emergence of a concerted science strategy employed by firms

the effects of a large discrete maize price increase on the distribution of household welfare and poverty in rural kenya1 this study estimates the effects of a large discrete maize price increase on the welfare of a sample of rural kenyan households the usual first order welfare approximation formula is extended to a second order formula that allows for supply and demand responses to the price change results show that many rural households are not affected greatly by the price change and there are about as many gainers as losers however these full sample results mask important differences across regions welfare gains generally take place in major production areas while losses are in areas where most households are net buyers of maize semiparametric methods are used to investigate the relationship between income and the size of the welfare effect and poverty dominance techniques are applied to study the impacts of the maize price increase on rural poverty

research productivity over the life cycle evidence for academic scientists the relationship between age and the publishing productivity of ph d scientists is analyzed using data from the survey of doctorate recipients national research council and the science citation index the longitudinal nature of the data allows for the identification of pure aging effects in five of the six areas studied life cycle aging effects are present only in particle physics where scientists often speak of being on a religious quest is the indication that scientific productivity is not investment motivated vintage effects are also considered the expectation that the latest educated are the most productive is not generally supported by the data copyright 1991 by american economic association

recruitment knowledge integration and modes of innovation abstract this paper investigates how the strength and intrinsic characteristics of firms knowledge bases and processing routines have evolved with the past inflow of employees the empirical analysis is based on linked public register and innovation survey data for norway it finds that recruitment from universities research institutes and higher education institutions has increased the capacity of firms to generate technical inventions yet the organizational knowledge bases and processing routines on which commercial innovation output depends have been strengthened only by the recruitment that has occurred from related industries implications for research management and policy are drawn

a conditional distribution model for limited stock index returns abstract when a price limit regime exists for all of the stocks involved in an index the index return is an aggregate of limited variables and thereby it is restricted to the same limits we argue that neither a censored nor a truncated distribution model is appropriate for the aggregate return the proposed mixed beta distribution allows for varying conditional mean and volatility and with increasing volatility it changes from leptokurtic to platykurtic densities the model is illustrated and statistically evaluated with an empirical application to the shanghai stock market index returns under a 10 price change limit regime

adopting knowledge from reverse innovations transnational patents and signaling from an emerging economy is there knowledge adoption of innovations from emerging economies we theorize that to help overcome information asymmetry across countries granting patents to technology in the emerging economy of china can serve as a signal of technology potential and market opportunity to enhance technological knowledge adoption in a developed economy such as the united states the effect may be greater in a complex technology sector with high information asymmetry than in a discrete technology sector and in regions with less developed market intermediaries where information asymmetry is high our difference in differences estimates using 4226 china u s patent dyads and comparable u s patents support our hypotheses

statistical inference and the sen index of poverty statistical inference procedures are developed for a k sen s distribution sensitive index of poverty and each of its components the headcount ratio income gap ratio and the gini index of the poor using results from u statistics the authors show that estimates of the index and its components all have a jointly asymptotically normal distribution and the variance covariance structure can be consistently estimated the inference tests are illustrated by applying them to the same microeconomic data set used in estimating official u s poverty statistics the application reveals that the sen index increased significantly in each of the three periods considered copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

optimal non linear income taxation for the alleviation of income poverty there has been much discussion recently of structuring tax and transfer programs to ensure that resources go to the poor with minimal leaks to the nonpoor the poor have no incentive to earn income with 100 percent marginal tax rates but how high or low the marginal rate of taxation should be and how they should vary with income is a complex issue and opinions vary social security schemes that withdraw benefits represent an extremely high effective marginal tax rate other schemes call for relatively low marginal tax rates at the bottom of the income distribution which tax transfer schedule does most to reduce poverty the issue is one of optimal nonlinear income taxation the authors show that one of the key theoretical results of the welfarist literature is overturned if it is desirable for everybody to work the optimal marginal tax rate on the very poorest individuals is strictly negative they argue that the nonwelfarist perspective points toward lower marginal tax rates in the lower part of the income distribution than does the welfarist perspective but numerical simulations suggest that the effect is of limited quantitative significance using conventional functional forms and parameter values optimal marginal tax rates on the poor are in the 60 70 percent range

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

does child undernutrition persist despite poverty reduction in developing countries quantile regression results abstract the eradication of child undernutrition and extreme poverty are important objectives for most societies countries with higher national incomes usually improve in both dimensions but not always at the same rate using quantile regression we show that poverty rates tend to decline with increased income at a roughly constant elasticity in contrast while the prevalence of child wasting declines at that same elasticity where it is most widespread the elasticity becomes smaller as wasting becomes less prevalent this finding suggests a greater need for increasingly targeted interventions to achieve a given reduction in undernutrition as its prevalence declines

poverty and basic needs fulfilment in africa during structural change evidence from cote d ivoire abstract much attention is given in the literature to the evolution of social indicators during periods of structural adjustment and economic reform this paper argues that these processes are not distribution neutral from the point of view of basic needs fulfilment and that hence the focus should not be on aggregate indicators but on the distribution of beneficiaries of social services and changes in this distribution evidence is presented for cote d ivoire during the second half of the 1980s a period of intense structural change which shows that the poorest absorbed the bulk of the decline in basic needs fulfilment as a result of structural change this was the case for almost all aspects of basic needs and occurred regardless of the overall trend in the social indicators

a theory of price limits in futures markets abstract the existence of price limits in certain futures markets is explained by demonstrating that price limits may act as a partial substitute for margin requirements in ensuring contract performance their effectiveness is a decreasing function of the amount of information available to traders about the equilibrium futures price which is unobservable in the event of a limit move and the theory predicts that no limits will exist in the markets for financial futures actual limits are broadly consistent with the theory his interpretation plausible as it was was totally misleading with the dangerous verisimilitude of a theory which will fit all or nearly all the facts and yet more entirely miss the truth by a mere accident then would a frank perplexity heritage v sackville west

concepts of poverty and the poverty line abstract various approaches adopted in developed economies to distinguishing between the poor and non poor to setting a poverty line are reviewed these include the budget standard food ratio official subjective and relative poverty line methods as well as the analysis of indicators of deprivation there has been significant progress in recent years in the degree of sophistication involved and a movement away from approaches with a quasi absolute background however all the methods face formidable problems at conceptual and empirical levels and no single approach is likely to dominate

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

a class of generalized sen poverty indices utilizing results from partial poverty orderings we characterize a class of generalized sen poverty indices a generalized sen poverty index is defined as the weighted area between the line of zero poverty and the censored generalized lorenz curve unlike the original sen index the generalized sen index can satisfy the key axioms for poverty measurement

a note on pro poor growth this paper proposes a poverty growth curve that measures whether economic growth is pro poor or not propoor our methodology is developed based on atkinson s theorem linking the generalized lorenz curve and changes in poverty this methodology is applied to both thailand s unit record household surveys and international cross country data empirical study illustrates that our approach to measuring pro poor growth provides conclusive results in the majority of cases d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the econometric analysis of models with risk terms summary in this paper we have attempted to provide an integrated approach to the estimation of models with risk terms it was argued that there exist orthogonality conditions between variables in the information set and higher order moments of the unanticipated variable density these could be exploited to provide consistent estimators of the parameters associated with the risk term specifically it was recommended that an iv estimator should be applied with instruments constructed from the information set four existing methods commonly used to estimate models with risk terms are examined and applications of the techniques are made to the estimation of the risk term in the us c exchange market and the effects of price uncertainty upon production

measuring social tension from income class segregation we develop an index that effectively measures the level of social tension generated by income class segregation we adopt the basic concepts of between group difference or alienation and within group similarity or identification from the income bi polarization literature but we allow for asymmetric degrees of between group antagonism in the alienation function and construct a more effective identification function using both the relative degree of within group clustering and the group size to facilitate statistical inference we derive the asymptotic distribution of the proposed measure using results from u statistics as the new measure is general enough to include existing income polarization indices as well as the gini index as special cases the asymptotic result can be readily applied to these popular indices evidence from the panel study of income dynamics data suggests that while the level of social tension shows an upward trend over the sample period of 1981 to 2005 government s taxes a

poverty and inequality in java examining the impact of the changing age educational and industrial structure abstract this paper uses the method of dinardo et al dinardo j fortin n m lemieux t 1996 labor market institutions and the distribution of wages 1973 1992 a semiparametric approach econometrica 64 5 sept 1001 1044 to examine the distribution of the benefits of growth in java dinardo et al s method presents the decompositions visually rather than in the form of opaque summary statistics in this paper it was modified so that changes in the cumulative distribution functions lorenz curves and generalized lorenz curves are decomposed the change in the distribution of per capita income between 1984 and 1990 is related to the aging of the population decreased reliance on agriculture increased educational attainment and changes in incomes within industry and age education categories

the impact of coffee certification on small scale producers livelihoods a case study from the jimma zone ethiopia what is the impact of product certification on small scale farmers livelihoods to what extent does the participation of ethiopian small scale coffee farmers in certified local cooperative structures improve their socioeconomic situation to answer these questions this article employs household data of 249 coffee farmers from six different cooperatives collected in the jimma zone of southwestern ethiopia in 2009 findings show that the certification of coffee cooperatives has in total a low impact on small scale coffee producers livelihoods mainly due to 1 low productivity 2 insignificant price premium and 3 poor access to credit and information from the cooperative differences in production and organizational capacities between the local cooperatives are mirrored in the extent of the certification benefits for the smallholders good cooperatives have reaped the benefits of certification whereas bad ones did not fare well in this regard the cooperative effect overlies the certification effect

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

recruiting for ideas how firms exploit the prior inventions of new hires when firms recruit inventors they acquire not only the use of their skills but also enhanced access to their stock of ideas but do hiring firms actually increase their use of new recruits prior inventions our estimates suggest they do quite significantly in fact by approximately 219 on average however this does not necessarily reflect widespread learning by hiring in fact we estimate that a recruit s exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect with much of the diffusion to others being limited to the recruit s immediate collaborative network furthermore although one might expect the recruit s role to diminish rapidly as her tacit knowledge diffuses across her new firm our estimates indicate that her importance is surprisingly persistent over time we base these findings on an empirical strategy that exploits the variation over time in hiring firms citations to the recruits premove patents specifically we employ a difference in differences approach to compare premove versus postmove citation rates for the recruits prior patents and corresponding matched pair control patents our methodology has three benefits compared to previous studies that also examine the link between labor mobility and knowledge flow 1 it does not suffer from the upward bias inherent in the conventional cross sectional comparison 2 it generates results that are robust to a more stringently matched control sample and 3 it enables a temporal examination of knowledge flow patterns this paper was accepted by kamalini ramdas entrepreneurship and innovation

the migration of technical workers using panel data on the danish population we estimated the revealed preferences of scientists and engineers for the places in which they choose to work our results indicate that these technical workers exhibit substantial sensitivity to differences in wages but that they have even stronger preferences for living close to family and friends the magnitude of these preferences moreover suggests that the greater geographic mobility of scientists and engineers relative to the population as a whole stems from more pronounced variation across regions in the wages that they can expect these results remain robust to estimation on a sample of individuals who must select new places of work for reasons unrelated to their preferences those who had been employed at establishments that discontinued operations

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

why have some indian states done better than others at reducing rural poverty the unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of india since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty they modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state level data for 1957 91 they found that poverty was reduced by higher agricultural yields above trend growth in nonfarm output and lower inflation rates but these factors only partly explain relative success and failure in reducing poverty initial conditions also mattered states that started the period with better infrastructure and human resources with more intense irrigation greater literacy and lower infant mortality rates had significantly greater long term rates of consumption growth and poverty reduction by and large the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty the effects on poverty measures were partly redistributive in nature after controlling for inflation the authors found that some of the factors that helped reduce absolute poverty also improved distribution and none of the factors that reduced absolute poverty had adverse impacts on distribution in other words there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro poor distribution

poverty transition and persistence in ethiopia 1994 2004 summary this study analyzes the persistence of poverty in both rural and urban areas in ethiopia during 1994 2004 the key finding is that households move frequently in and out of poverty but the difficulty of exiting from poverty like the chance of avoiding slipping back increases with the time spent in that state and varies considerably between male and female headed households our results imply that it is important to design anti poverty policies both to hinder households from slipping into extreme poverty and to minimize the length of the poverty spell for households once they have fallen into it

one kind of freedom poverty dynamics in post apartheid south africa abstract a 1993 south african living standards survey documented the legacy of apartheid in the form high levels of inequality and human insecurity drawing on a 1998 re survey of households in the 1993 study this paper explores whether this legacy has been superseded or whether apartheid s end has been only one kind of freedom that has left households in a poverty trap from which they cannot escape after proposing a theoretically grounded dynamic poverty typology that distinguishes stochastic from structural poverty transitions the paper goes on to estimate that significant numbers of the south african poor are potentially trapped in a structural poverty trap and lack the means to escape poverty over time

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

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

measuring welfare poverty and inequality a class of poverty measures is identified the members of which satisfy strong monotonicity and transfer conditions these measures are closely related to indices of income inequality based on the notion of a mean equivalent income a restriction on the class of admissible measures allows poverty to be interpreted in terms of the loss in mean equivalent income resulting from the fact that some people are poor copyright 1987 by royal economic society

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

general education versus vocational training evidence from an economy in transition abstract this paper examines the relative benefits of general education and vocational training during romania s transition to a market economy we examine a 1973 educational reform that shifted a large proportion of students from vocational training to general education using census and household survey data we analyze the effect of this policy with a regression discontinuity design we find that men affected by the policy are significantly less likely to work in manual or craft related occupations but have similar levels of labor market participation and earnings compared to their counterparts unaffected by the policy we conclude that differences in labor market returns between graduates of vocational and general schools are largely driven by selection

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

the relation between forward prices and futures prices abstract this paper consolidates the results of some recent work on the relation between forward prices and futures prices it develops a number of propositions characterizing the two prices these propositions contain several testable implications about the difference between forward and futures prices many of the propositions show that equilibrium forward and futures prices are equal to the values of particular assets even though they are not in themselves asset prices the paper then illustrates these results in the context of two valuation models and discusses the effects of taxes and other institutional factors

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

forward and futures prices evidence from the foreign exchange markets empirical studies of the treasury bill markets have revealed substantial differences between the futures price and the implied forward price these differences have been attributed to taxes transaction costs and the settling up procedure employed in the futures market this paper examines the forward and futures prices in foreign exchange in an attempt to distinguish between the competing explanations empirical studies of the treasury bill market have revealed differences between the futures price or rate and the implicit forward price derived from the term structure of interest rates 1 these differences have generally been attributed to market imperfections such as taxes and transaction costs see for example arak 1 capozza and cornell 2 and rendelman and carabini 6 recently however cox ingersoll and ross 3 henceforth cir derived a model in which forward and futures prices need not be equal even in perfect markets without taxes as long as interest rates are stochastic the significance of the cir effect may be hard to investigate using only data from the bill market because of the potentially complicating effects of taxes and transaction costs unique to this market by using data from the foreign exchange market we are able to eliminate the tax effect and reduce the impact of transaction costs the question we address is whether the discrepancies observed in the treasury bill market are also observed in the foreign exchange market if they are then we have evidence that the differences are due to a combination of the cir effect and the transaction costs common to both markets if they are not then either the magnitude of the cir effect is much less in the foreign exchange market or the treasury bill results are due to the unique tax treatment and transaction costs of that market this paper is organized as follows in section i the trading mechanics of the forward and futures markets in foreign exchange are discussed section ii reviews the explanations for the discrepancies between the forward and futures prices for treasury bills the institutional differences between the foreign exchange and bill markets are also summarized to show which of these explanations cannot apply to the foreign exchange market in section iii the data are decribed and the empirical results are presented the conclusions are summarized in the final section

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

model free evaluation of directional predictability in foreign exchange markets we examine directional predictability in foreign exchange markets using a model free statistical evaluation procedure based on a sample of foreign exchange spot rates and futures prices in six major currencies we document strong evidence that the directions of foreign exchange returns are predictable not only by the past history of foreign exchange returns but also the past history of interest rate differentials suggesting that the latter can be a useful predictor of the directions of future foreign exchange rates this evidence becomes stronger when the direction of larger changes is considered we further document that despite the weak conditional mean dynamics of foreign exchange returns directional predictability can be explained by strong dependence derived from higher order conditional moments such as the volatility skewness and kurtosis of past foreign exchange returns moreover the conditional mean dynamics of interest rate differentials contributes significantly to directional predictability we also examine the co movements between two foreign exchange rates particularly the co movements of joint large changes there exists strong evidence that the directions of joint changes are predictable using past foreign exchange returns and interest rate differentials furthermore both individual currency returns and interest rate differentials are also useful in predicting the directions of joint changes several sources can explain this directional predictability of joint changes including the level and volatility of underlying currency returns copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

minimum distribution sensitivity poverty aversion and poverty orderings abstract this paper introduces a measure of distribution sensitivity which is similar to arrow pratt s measure of risk aversion for a poverty index the measure also gauges poverty aversion and has a clear and straightforward interpretation using this measure we can define various classes of minimum distribution sensitive poverty indices we show that the ordering condition for such a class of poverty indices is simply a generalized poverty deprivation profile dominance properties and implications of this dominance condition are analyzed and poverty orderings by different classes of poverty measures are compared journal of economic literature classification number i32

the rejuvenation of inventors through corporate spinouts this article focuses on corporate spinouts as a strategy that can rejuvenate the inventive efforts of inventors with a long tenure in the same company we rely on an unbalanced panel of 5 604 inventor year observations to study a matched sample of 431 inventors employed by the xerox corporation and find evidence in support of three predictions first inventors who join a spinout increase the extent of exploration in their inventive activities second they decrease the extent to which they rely on the parent organization s knowledge third because long tenured employees through socialization tend to progressively adopt more exploitative behavior than short tenured members they benefit relatively more from the spinout experience these results are robust to several econometric specifications that try to account for the endogeneity of the inventors decision to join the spinout for the fact that spinouts inventive activity may be intrinsically different from that of the parent company and for the possible presence of novel external stimuli for those who join spinouts the data provide large sample evidence consistent with the idea that socialization reduces opportunities for organizational learning we discuss the implications for theory and practice

poverty measurement research using the consumer expenditure survey and the survey of income and program participation the most recent comprehensive examination of poverty measurement in the united states was conducted by the national academy of sciences nas panel on poverty and family assistance constance f citro and robert t michael 1995 in their report the panel recommended changing the definition of both the poverty thresholds and the resources that are used to measure poverty in this paper we implement a number of the panel s basic procedures with slight modifications to obtain experimental poverty rates for 1991 to 1996 this paper presents poverty estimates using thresholds derived from the 1989 1991 consumer expenditure survey cex and using family resources based on the 1991 panel of the survey of income and program participation sipp and the march 1992 current population survey cps the resulting experimental poverty rates are compared to those based on the official measure while most previous work has examined the new poverty measure exclusively using the cps this paper presents for the first time estimates from the sipp the survey that the panel recommended should become the official source of poverty resource measurement additional estimates from the cps from 1992 1996 are presented in order to examine the behavior of these experimental poverty rates over time our findings reveal that changes in the poverty rates based on the official and the experimental measures are similar over time we show that poverty rates using sipp data are below those using the cps we also show that using the experimental poverty measure yields a poverty population that looks more like the total population in terms of various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics than does the poverty population based on the current official measure