A Development Delivery Institution for the Tribal Communities: Experience of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India

This article examines the varied impacts of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) as a development delivery institution for the tribal communities vis‐à‐vis other social groups across the Indian States, using the framework of new institutional economics. A number of State‐specific, socio‐economic institutional factors seem to be responsible for these variations. The article therefore suggests institutional reforms and convergence of the development initiatives of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs with the NREGS in order to realise the optimal potential of the scheme, and, in particular, to ensure greater livelihood opportunities for these marginalised groups and their entitlement to productive resources with greater socio‐economic and political empowerment.     

A generalised bivariate binomial distribution applicable in four-fold sampling

A bivariate generalisation of the Consul's(1974) quasi-binomial distributionCQBD) has been obtained with the help of an urn-model for eKplaining data obtained as a result of four-fold sampling, The distribution is expected to cover a very wide range of situations in four-fold sampling. The first and the second order moments of the distribution have been obtained,The distribution has been fitted to an observed set of data as an illustration and its limiting form has also been obtained.     

E‐Procurement Infusion and Operational Process Impacts in MRO Procurement: Complementary or Substitutive Effects?

The procurement of maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) goods has remained a relatively understudied topic in the literature. Though vital cost efficiencies can be extracted from procurement processes through investments in e‐procurement systems, there is little empirical work that addresses how such systems should be deployed within organizations. In this study, we focus on the role of e‐procurement systems in MRO procurement and study two critical aspects of infusion. The first dimension captures the depth of e‐procurement use within the procurement function, while the second dimension depicts the breadth of use. We argue that these two dimensions of e‐procurement use, and their interaction, will be related to the performance of the MRO procurement process. Using survey data from 193 service organizations and structural equation modeling techniques, we show that the two infusion dimensions are significantly associated with improved process performance. Additionally, we show a substantial substitutive effect between the two use dimensions on performance. Our work has significant implications for managers who seek to gain efficiencies by the deployment of Internet‐based technologies within operational processes. Our conceptualization of e‐procurement infusion along two dimensions provides a more fine‐grained analysis of performance benefits accruing from the infusion of information technologies within organizations.     

Social Policy and the Discipline of Social Administration

The last ten years have seen a spate of books analysing social policy in terms of ideologies or models of welfare. These models, which combine an explanatory or scientific and a normative or value component, offer the discipline of social administration a terrain or base of its own from which it can legitimately explore a range of normative and scientific issues. It is suggested that the central task of social policy analysis, at the highest level of generality of the discipline, is to tease out the relevant normative and factual propositions or assumptions underlying these models and subject them to close scrutiny. In this the discipline would largely be following, but also extending somewhat, the agenda for social administration outlined by Richard Titmuss in 1968.     

On measuring vulnerability to poverty

There is a growing interest on dynamic and broader concepts of deprivation such as vulnerability, which takes in to account the destitution of individuals from future shocks. We use the framework of decision making under uncertainty to arrive at a new measure of vulnerability to poverty. We highlight the importance of current standard of living to better capture the notion of vulnerability. In conceptualizing the new class of measures of vulnerability, we thus move beyond the standard expected poverty measures that is commonly found in the literature. We also axiomatically characterize the new class of measure and discuss some of its properties.     

A Framework for Assessing Uncertainty Associated with Human Health Risks from MSW Landfill Leachate Contamination

Landfilling is a cost‐effective method, which makes it a widely used practice around the world, especially in developing countries. However, because of the improper management of landfills, high leachate leakage can have adverse impacts on soils, plants, groundwater, aquatic organisms, and, subsequently, human health. A comprehensive survey of the literature finds that the probabilistic quantification of uncertainty based on estimations of the human health risks due to landfill leachate contamination has rarely been reported. Hence, in the present study, the uncertainty about the human health risks from municipal solid waste landfill leachate contamination to children and adults was quantified to investigate its long‐term risks by using a Monte Carlo simulation framework for selected heavy metals. The Turbhe sanitary landfill of Navi Mumbai, India, which was commissioned in the recent past, was selected to understand the fate and transport of heavy metals in leachate. A large residential area is located near the site, which makes the risk assessment problem both crucial and challenging. In this article, an integral approach in the form of a framework has been proposed to quantify the uncertainty that is intrinsic to human health risk estimation. A set of nonparametric cubic splines was fitted to identify the nonlinear seasonal trend in leachate quality parameters. LandSim 2.5, a landfill simulator, was used to simulate the landfill activities for various time slices, and further uncertainty in noncarcinogenic human health risk was estimated using a Monte Carlo simulation followed by univariate and multivariate sensitivity analyses.     

Bernstein–von Mises Theorem for M|M|1 Queue

The article deals with Bernstein–von Mises theorem, for the arrival process in a M | M |1 queue.     

LAW ENFORCEMENT AND WRONGFUL ARRESTS WITH ENDOGENOUSLY (IN)COMPETENT OFFICERS

Economic intuition suggests that enforcement errors incentivize crimes, therefore officers must be penalized for committing such errors. Legal scholars argue that if penalties for errors are severe, officers may become timid while policing (thereby encouraging crime). We evaluate these arguments in a model where officers invest in competence. Competence increases the officer's ability to identify criminals. Low sanctions for errors encourages bold policing by officers but may still raise the equilibrium level of crime because it also discourages investments in competence. Granting immunity to only competent officers (“qualified immunity”) reduces both errors and crimes when competence is observable. (JEL K4, K42, L5)     

Husband,sons and the fertility gap: evidence from India

Journal of Population Research - A fertility gap—the difference between a woman’s ideal number of children and her actual number of children—is prevalent in both directions. We...