The Response of Consumption in Russian Households to Economic Shocks

This paper examines the extent to which consumption in Russian households responds to exogenous income shocks. During the time period studied in this paper (1994 - 1998), Russia experienced two major economic crises. Both featured extreme movements in the real ruble-dollar exchange rate. The price of oil, which is typically thought to have a strong effect on the Russian economy, was also quite volatile during this time period. This paper exploits these large changes in oil prices and exchange rates, as well as community-level variations in wage and pension arrears, to identify exogenous shocks to household income. Using representative panel data on urban households from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, I find that a household which experiences an exogenous shock of 10% of its total income changes both its food and total non-durable expenditure by 7-11%. Most evidence indicates that these shocks are transitory in nature and thus the traditional Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis model is firmly rejected as describing the behavior of Russian households. Additional results indicate that changes in household savings are negatively related to exogenous income shocks, with this relationship strongest for low wealth households. Only models of consumption which include precautionary savings motives can explain why poorer households both reduce their consumption and increase their savings in response to an exogenous decline in income.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39796/3/wp412.pd

Polarographic carbon dioxide transducer amplifier

Electronic amplifier contains matched pair of metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor devices which have high input impedance and long-term stability. Thermistor in feedback loop provides temperature compensation for large drifts in the sensor

Full Immersion\u27s Effects on Students\u27 Scores in a Secondary German Classroom

With this action research project I intend to improve the scores of my German II: Pre-IB students through the gradual introduction of full immersion instruction. Students’ project scores, quiz scores, and journal entries were evaluated and compared to previous scores and to the control group’s scores in order to determine if full immersion days, in which only the target language is spoken, ultimately helped my students to score higher on their graded work. I hoped to not only improve test scores, but also to improve the fluency and grammatical accuracy of my students

The rescue, reform and restoration of childhood : a hundred years of child labour in Britain (1780-1880) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Over the past twenty years, child labour has drawn heightened attention from the global community, especially through debates over labour standards and international trade. The plight of these working children in the present-day Third World is however not unlike the plight of those children who were once employed in the fields, factories, mines and workshops of Britain. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was the industrialisation of the British economy that intensified the exploitation of children and normalised their labour. Today, it is globalisation and the World Market that assumes this role, overwhelming the lives of millions of children in the Third World. The interests of working children in Britain were clearly of low priority in the years prior to the 1840 s, just as they are today in many underdeveloped countries around the globe. This thesis aims to draw attention to these similarities by revisiting the past and by trying to unravel the interconnected narratives that have produced the countless theories that seek to explain this phenomenon. This study also analyses the relationships between child labour on the one hand, and economic development and the socioeconomic structures of a society on the other and challenges the simplistic common belief that poverty is the cause of child labour and that child labour can be reduced only through economic development. One important conclusion of this study is that child labour is affected by the transformation of the economic and social structure rather than merely dictated by the economic necessities of households that supply child labourers. Thus the one thing that becomes abundantly clear from this study is that when it comes to understanding and evaluating child labour - regardless as to whether it is the spinning of cotton in a British mill of the nineteenth century or the weaving of carpets in a Pakistani factory of the twenty-first century - childhood and adulthood are interdependent and the ways in which children are treated are in turn a reflection of the values and priorities of adult society

Working to Learn: Skills Development Under Work First

For the thirty years, participants in most employment programs first got training then went to work. Work First has turned that model upside down, as practitioners find that public funding now often requires that people are in jobs before they can get training. At the same time, participants still need new skills to get living-wage jobs, and employers need more skilled workers to stay competitive. This report provides practitioners and policy makers with an opportunity to benefit from the experience of nonprofit organizations, public agencies, community colleges and employers that have been able to meet Work First requirements and provide needed training. The report describes their experiences and sets out the organizational strategies and operating principles that underlie these effective programs

Review of Generalized Estimating Equations by Hardin and Hilbe

The new book by Hardin and Hilbe (2003) is reviewed. Copyright 2003 by Stata Corporation.generalized estimating equations, generalized linear models

High rank linear syzygies on low rank quadrics

We study the linear syzygies of a homogeneous ideal I in a polynomial ring S, focusing on the graded betti numbers b_(i,i+1) = dim_k Tor_i(S/I, k)_(i+1). For a variety X and divisor D with S = Sym(H^0(D)*), what conditions on D ensure that b_(i,i+1) is nonzero? Eisenbud has shown that a decomposition D = A + B such that A and B have at least two sections gives rise to determinantal equations (and corresponding syzygies) in I_X; and conjectured that if I_2 is generated by quadrics of rank at most 4, then the last nonvanishing b_(i,i+1) is a consequence of such equations. We describe obstructions to this conjecture and prove a variant. The obstructions arise from toric specializations of the Rees algebra of Koszul cycles, and we give an explicit construction of toric varieties with minimal linear syzygies of arbitrarily high rank. This gives one answer to a question posed by Eisenbud and Koh about specializations of syzygies.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

Geometric properties derived from generic initial spaces

For a vector space V of homogeneous forms of the same degree in a polynomial ring, we investigate what can be said about the generic initial ideal of the ideal generated by V, from the form of the generic initial space gin(V) for the revlex order. Our main result is a considerable generalisation of a previous result by the first author.Comment: Improved presentation, 8 pages, to appear in Proceedings of AM

The impact of immigration on geographic mobility of New Zealanders

This paper uses data from the New Zealand Census to examine how the supply of recent migrants in particular skill groups affects the geographic mobility of the New Zealand-born and earlier migrants. We identify the impact of recent migration on mobility using the ‘area-analysis’ approach, which exploits the fact that immigration is spatially concentrated, and thus a change in the local supply of migrants in a particular skill group should have an impact on the mobility of similarly skilled nonmigrants in that local labour market. Overall, our results provide little support for the hypothesis that migrant inflows displace either the NZ-born or earlier migrants with similar skills in the areas that new migrants are settling. If anything, they suggest that there are positive spillovers between recent migrants and other individuals that encourage individuals to move to or remain in the areas in which similarly skilled migrants are settling. Thus, it appears unlikely that internal mobility moderates any potential impacts of immigration on labour or housing markets in New Zealand

The importance of heterogeneity when examining immigrant education-occupation mismatch: evidence from New Zealand

Many immigrants are overqualified in their first job after arrival in the host country. Education-occupation mismatch can affect the economic integration of immigrants and the returns to education and experience. The extent of this problem has been measured in recent years by means of micro level data in Australia, North America and Europe. However, these papers have typically ignored the importance of allowing for heterogeneity, in particular by qualification level and years in the destination country. In this paper, we use data from the 1996, 2001 and 2006 New Zealand censuses to examine differences between each migrant’s actual years of education and the estimated typical years of education in the narrowly defined occupation in which they work. We find that migrants living in New Zealand for less than 5 years are on average overeducated, while earlier migrants are on average undereducated. However, once accounting for heterogeneity, we find that both overeducated and undereducated migrants become, with increasing years of residence in New Zealand, more similar to comparable native born. Convergence from overeducation is stronger than from undereducation