Refugee Family Voices: Shelter Needs in Iraqi Kurdistan

The shelter needs of refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan were documented by local government and humanitarian organizations. However, official narratives do not include the “voices” of those directly affected by inadequate shelter: the refugee families themselves. This study uses a mixed‐methods approach to understand the shelter issues experienced by 53 refugee families in Iraqi Kurdistan. Refugee families disclosed seven common shelter problems: water infiltration, lack of public services and schools, inadequate access to water, poor roads, extreme temperatures, need for larger living space and erratic electricity. These families faced an average of three shelter issues, with some dealing with up to five problems at the same time. Families with the highest concentration of shelter issues had higher occurrences of water infiltration, inadequate access to water, extreme temperatures and need for larger living space. The evidence suggests that refugee families are living in worse conditions than those outlined in official narratives.     

For Whom the Bell Tolls: Rural Engagement During the French Wars of Religion: the Case of Brittany

In 1589, French rural communities in Brittany committed themselves in the last of the wars of Religion. Their community reality, officering, weaponry and forms of action showed that the integration of rural parishes into the “political body” of the kingdom was then both active and militarily functional. They had no specific agenda on the socio-economic level. Their choice of a political camp in that civil war seemed to be a mere consequence of their defensive engagement against a direct aggression. The main purpose of that rural mobilization, as many others, was then reestablishing order and security in their country.     

Multiple Kernel Procedure: an Asymptotic Support

ABSTRACT. This paper deals with kernel non-parametric estimation. The multiple kernel method, as proposed by Berlinet (1993), consists in choosing both the smoothing parameter and the order of the kernel function. In this paper we follow this general idea, and the selection is carried out by a combination of plug-in and cross-validation techniques. In a first attempt we give an asymptotic optimality theorem which is stated in a general unifying setting that includes many curve estimation problems. Then, as an illustration, it will be seen how this behaves in both special cases of kernel density and kernel regression estimation.     

The Quality of the Urban Environment Around Public Housing Buildings in Montréal: An Objective Approach Based on GIS and Multivariate Statistical Analysis

The question of the “insertion” in space of public housing into the surrounding urban environment is not new. It has often been examined from the perspective of the social environment, but more rarely from that of the physical environment and the accessibility of public and private services and facilities. To qualify the immediate urban environment around Montréal’s public housing buildings in its complexity, we are proposing a methodological approach based on the use of several spatial databases in GIS: (1) the Montréal public housing database, (2) individual census data for the Montréal CMA, (3) a satellite image, (4) a land use map, and (5) location data on a series of public and private services and facilities. Use of these spatial data enables us to identify various combinations of advantages and disadvantages within the urban living environment in which Montréal’s public housing buildings have been located, according to three dimensions: the social environment, the physical environment, and the accessibility of services and facilities. Our final results show that only a small proportion of public housing tenants (7%) live in residual spaces, that is, in quite unattractive areas of the city which combine a number of urban disadvantages: a degraded physical environment, a high level of social deprivation, and few or no services and facilities.

PARTY AFFILIATION AND PUBLIC SPENDING: EVIDENCE FROM U.S. GOVERNORS

This paper investigates whether the party affiliation of governors (Democrat or Republican) has an impact on the allocation of state expenditures. Exploiting gubernatorial election results from 1960 to 2012 and a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), we find that Democratic governors allocate a larger share of their budget to health/hospitals and education sectors. We find no significant impact of the political party of governors on total spending, only on the allocation of funds. The results are robust to a wide range of controls and model specifications. (JEL D72, H75, H72)     

A distribution-sensitive examination of the gender wage gap in Germany

This paper provides a new examination of the gender pay gap for Germany based on a family of distribution-sensitive indicators. Wage distributions for men and women do not only differ by a fixed constant; differences are more complex. We show that focusing on the bottom of the wage distribution reveals a larger gender gap. Our distribution-sensitive analysis can also be used to study whether the statistical disadvantage of women in average pay might be ‘offset’ by lower inequality. Over a broad range of plausible preferences over inequality, we show however that ‘inequality-adjusted’ estimates of the gap can be up to three times higher than standard inequality-neutral measures in Eastern Germany and up to fifty percent higher in Western Germany. Using preference parameters elicited from a hypothetical risky investment question in our sample, inequality-adjusted gender gap measures turn out to be close to those upper bounds.     

On the Role of Outside Options in Bargaining with Obstinate Parties

The presence of obstinate types in bargaining has been shown to alter dramatically the bargaining equilibrium strategies and outcomes. This paper shows that outside options may cancel out the effect of obstinacy in bargaining. When parties have access to stationary outside options, we show that when opting out is preferable to accepting the inflexible demand of the other party, there is a unique Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium in which each party reveals himself as rational as soon as possible. A similar conclusion holds when outside options may only be available at a later date or when only one party has access to an outside option.     

Education funding and regional convergence

The aim of this paper is to discuss the process of regional convergence within the framework of an overlapping generations model in which the engine of growth is the accumulation of human capital. In particular, we consider different education funding systems and compare their performance in terms of growth rates and pace of convergence between two heterogeneous regions. The analysis suggests that the choice of a particular education system incorporates a possible trade-off between long run growth rate and short run convergence. In such choice, the initial capital stock and the extent of regional human capital discrepancy appear as central variables. Received: 27 January 1999/Accepted: 16 April 1999