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.

     

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues,methodology and initial results

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the World Bank’s international poverty line. In revising the line, we have sought to minimize changes to the real purchasing power of the earlier $1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs), so as to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Bank’s twin goals – which were set with respect to that line. In particular, the new line was obtained by inflating the same fifteen national poverty lines – originally used by Ravallion et al. (World Bank Econ. Rev. 23(2): 163–184 2009) to construct the $1.25 line – to 2011 prices in local currency units, and then converting them to US dollars using 2011 PPP conversion factors. With a small approximation, this procedure yields a new international poverty line of $1.90 per person per day. In combination with other changes described in the paper, this revision leads to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence for 2011: from 14.5 % using the old method to 14.1 % using the new method. In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 % of the world’s population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats and limitations of the approach taken.     

Recovery and detachment between shifts, and fatigue during a twelve-hour shift

The study investigated the role of recovery and detachment in the break period between two shifts for fatigue in the current shift. A time-based paper-and-pencil diary study was carried out observing sixty-four railway controllers over ten consecutive working shifts. The results demonstrated that fatigue in the current shift was not only affected by recovery and psychological detachment during break phases before a shift, but also by fatigue at shift onset and perceived workload during the shift.     

Stating culture: colonial matrices

Delineating the complex relationship between state, nation and culture in India, the paper examines the discourses that are produced to define what culture is in the life of the nation. Shared epistemic assumptions in colonial and postcolonial writings tend to constitute a veritable silence on structural social inequalities and marginalized identities. Articulated in a deceptively self‐evident and “neutral” framework, this silence disavows real divisions in the body politic and then, in a contradictory reversal, celebrates them as natural and inevitable. It is the discursive regularities in the movement from the colonial to the national that the paper mainly takes issue with and shows how notions of the “people” and “nation” are installed.     

Market Models and Heteroscedasticity of Residual Security Returns

Bickel's tests provide attractive robust alternatives to traditional tests of heteroscedasticity. NYSE securities have homoscedastic residuals once nonnormality of security returns is allowed. Some portfolio designs may generate some heteroscedastic residuals, but this heteroscedasticity is reduced by the Kraus-Litzenberger quadratic market model. This result suggests a misspecification in the traditional market model.     

Social change,out-migration,and exit from farming in Nepal

Population and Environment - Though international out-migration is widespread, little evidence exists regarding the consequences for economic change in sending countries, particularly in the...     

Understanding the Downshifting Phenomenon: A Case of South East Queensland,Australia

A quality of life survey of a sample of households across the Brisbane‐South East Queensland region has identified about 28 percent of people as ‘downshifters.‘ They are defined as people who voluntarily make a long‐term change in their lifestyle – other than planned retirement – which reduces income and adjusts their lifestyle conditions. A typology of downshifters is developed on the basis of their motives for downshifting and their socio‐economic and demographic characteristics using a Two Step Cluster Analysis. Results indicate that the social and economic circumstances and the reasons and methods of downshifting tend to vary substantially across the clusters.     

Computer-Aided Teaching of Probabilistic Modeling for Biological Phenomena

College students majoring in science and engineering need to learn how to model key features of the driving mechanisms of natural, scientific, and engineering phenomena. A rigorous treatment of these topics requires a thorough understanding of advanced mathematical concepts and probability theory. However, we believe that carefully designed computer simulation software offers a means of conveying fundamental ideas of probabilistic modeling, while minimizing the need for underlying mathematical analyses. Based on this premise we have initiated the development of a software system that will be incorporated into a novel, introductory course in probabilistic modeling for undergraduate students in the biological and environmental sciences. In this paper we describe the preliminary version of our system that implements simulation, real-time animation, and calculations of dynamic statistical summaries for several prototypical stochastic models for a variety of biological systems.     

The Impact of Community Context on Land Use in an Agricultural Society

As an initial step toward new models of the population-environment relationship, this paper explores the relationship between community context and local land use in an agricultural setting. In this type of setting, we argue that aspects of the community context, such as schools and transportation infrastructure, impact important environmental characteristics, such as land use. We provide hypotheses which explain the mechanisms producing these effects. We then use data from a study of 132 communities in rural Nepal to test our hypotheses. These analyses show that community characteristics are strongly associated with land use in this agricultural setting. The results point toward changes in communities as critical determinants of environmental quality. These findings are consistent with the notion that changes in community contexts may also condition the population-environment relationship.