Moving up the energy ladder: does socio-religious status matter?

This paper investigates the role played by socio-religious categories in determining primary cooking fuel choices among Indian households. We study this role in the broader context of climbing up the energy ladder. Our estimates based on a sample of 601,509 households and using multinomial probit regression suggest that socio-religious status along with economic status is critical in the choice of modern eco-friendly fuels. We find that belonging to a marginalized community in Hindu religion significantly dampens a households’ likelihood to move up the ladder when compared with upper caste households. While intra-religion differences among Hindu castes in terms of their probability of using modern fuels are wider, differences among Muslims appear smaller. Also, though Muslims perform worse than Hindu upper castes in terms of probability of using modern fuels they are much better off in comparison with other Hindu castes. Our results remain robust to alternative specifications and several robustness checks.

     

Towards Enhancement of the Economy of a Thermal Power Generating System through Prediction of Plant Efficiency

The plant ‘Heat Rate’ (HR) is a measure of overall efficiency of a thermal power generating system. It depends on a large number of factors, some of which are non-measurable, while data relating to others are seldom available and recorded. However, coal quality (expressed in terms of ‘effective heat value’ (EHV) as kcal/kg) transpires to be one of the important factors that influences HR values and data on EHV are available in any thermal power generating system. In the present work, we propose a prediction interval of the HR values on the basis of only EHV, keeping in mind that coal quality is one of the important (but not the only) factors that have a pronounced effect on the combustion process and hence on HR. The underlying theory borrows the idea of providing simultaneous confidence interval (SCI) to the coefficients of a p-th p(≥1) order autoregressive model (AR(p)). The theory has been substantiated with the help of real life data from a power utility (after suitable base and scale transformation of the data to maintain the confidentiality of the classified document). Scope for formulating strategies to enhance the economy of a thermal power generating system has also been explored.     

A Framework for Analyzing the Economic Tradeoffs Between Urban Commerce and Security Against Terrorism

This article presents a framework for economic consequence analysis of terrorism countermeasures. It specifies major categories of direct and indirect costs, benefits, spillover effects, and transfer payments that must be estimated in a comprehensive assessment. It develops a spreadsheet tool for data collection, storage, and refinement, as well as estimation of the various components of the necessary economic accounts. It also illustrates the usefulness of the framework in the first assessment of the tradeoffs between enhanced security and changes in commercial activity in an urban area, with explicit attention to the role of spillover effects. The article also contributes a practical user interface to the model for emergency managers.     

Rape culture,misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink

One of the most pervasive aspects of Delhi’s post-liberalization psychopathology has been everyday violence against women. The city’s rape culture was given an exceptionally sharp global focus after the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Recent Hindi cinema has begun to engage with some aspects of the capital’s misogynist urban ethos. In this paper, I look at how the Delhi subgenre of the “multiplex film” has engaged with rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety through a close textual and discursive analysis of two recent films—NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) and Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016). Specifically, I identify how the December 16 “trigger event” and Delhi’s notorious misogyny are finding newer modes of representation through the interplay of genre and exhibition space. In what ways do these films position and imagine the “multiplex viewer”? New engagements with the figure of the consuming middle-class woman and the public discourses that surround her sexual safety and navigation of space have taken a central position in understanding the present urban psychosis of the capital. I suggest that these films and the forms of spectatorial identification that they privilege are intricately linked to the gendered spatial politics of the multiplex.     

Inference in a Binary Response Model with Applications to Data Analysis*

Standard errors of the coefficients of a logistic regression (a binary response model) based on the asymptotic formula are compared to those obtained from the bootstrap through Monte Carlo simulations. The computer intensive bootstrap method, a nonparametric alternative to the asymptotic estimate, overestimates the true value of the standard errors while the asymptotic formula underestimates it. However, for small samples the bootstrap estimates are substantially closer to the true value than their counterpart derived from the asymptotic formula. The methodology is discussed using two illustrative data sets. The first example deals with a logistic model explaining the log-odds of passing the ERA amendment by the 1982 deadline as a function of percent of women legislators and the percent vote for Reagan. In the second example, the probability that an ingot is ready to roll is modelled using heating time and soaking time as explanatory variables. The results agree with those obtained from the simulations. The value of the study to better decision making through accurate statistical inference is discussed.     

Who Among the Elderly Owns Stocks? The Role of Cognitive Ability and Bequest Motive

Conventional advice is to reduce risky investments as one ages. Such a generalized focus on risk avoidance may be inappropriate for elderly with longer life spans and those with financial goals that extend beyond their lifetime. To better understand risky asset holdings among the elderly, we investigated the effect of cognitive ability and bequest motive on stock ownership and stock purchase. Using the 2004 wave of the Health and Retirement Study, we found that one-third of elderly households held stocks and 36% of those elderly stockowners had recently acquired stocks. The respondent??s cognitive ability and bequest motive were strongly related to stock ownership. Among those who owned stock, a bequest motive was positively related to a recent purchase of stocks.     

Concepts,Theory, and Techniques ROBUST METHODS: AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH FOR ANALYZING DATA SETS CONTAINING INFLUENTIAL DATA POINTS

Recent advances in statistical estimation theory have resulted in the development of new procedures, called robust methods, that can be used to estimate the coefficients of a regression model. Because such methods take into account the impact of discrepant data points during the initial estimation process, they offer a number of advantages over ordinary least squares and other analytical procedures (such as the analysis of outliers or regression diagnostics). This paper describes the robust method of analysis and illustrates its potential usefulness by applying the technique to two data sets. The first application uses artificial data; the second uses a data set analyzed previously by Tufte [15] and, more recently, by Chatterjee and Wiseman [6].     

An alternative approach to variable selection for prediction

A procedure for selecting a subset of predictor variables in regression analysis is suggested. The procedure is so designed that it leads to the selection of a subset of variables having an adequate degree of informativeness with a directly specified confidence coefficient. Some examples are considered to illustrate the application of the procedure.     

Generalized E(s 2) Criterion for Multilevel Supersaturated Designs

Several extensions of the popular E(s ²) criterion of Booth and Cox (1962 Booth , K. H. V. , Cox , D. R. ( 1962 ). Some systematic supersaturated designs . Technometrics 4 : 489 – 495 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to multilevel supersaturated designs have been advanced in literature. These extensions are not unique due to different ways they measure overall nonorthogonality between all pairs of the columns of the model matrix. We exploit the connection of the E(s ²) criterion with A- and D-optimality that naturally lends itself to a generalized criterion for the multilevel situation in a unified way. The extensions provided in literature follow as special cases of the generalized criterion. A lower bound to the generalized criterion is derived for a wide class of designs, and a method of construction for the symmetrical case is discussed.