Human Capital Investments in Pakistan: Implications of Micro Evidence from Rural Households

A number of cross-country studies suggest that the Pakistani aggregate human capital investments, measured by educational performance, are low relative to other countries of similar per capita income levels. This paper investigates the implications of micro evidence on schooling from rural Pakistan for an understanding of the cases of low human capital investments. The results of school-entrant and dropout regressions using household panel data indicate that the permanent and transitory income movements affect children’s schooling behaviour, indicating credit market imperfections. Hence, the human capital investments in rural Pakistan may be discouraged by poverty, combined with incompletely insured income volatility. Moreover, our analysis points out that there is a distinct gender difference in education.

Family networks and household outcomes in an economic crisis

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThis thesis theoretically and empirically analyzes the nature and consequences of interactions between family members. The first chapter tests whether children's human capital accumulation was significantly affected by earnings shocks to their nonresident kin in the context of the 1997-8 financial crisis in Indonesia. The crisis produced sudden, heterogeneous shocks that facilitate the construction of an exogenous measure of earnings changes. Results indicate that earnings shocks to nonresident kin - including extended family and relatives living in other districts- significantly affected children's human capital accumulation between 1997 and 2000, and ultimate educational attainment measured nearly a decade after the crisis hit. Supplementary results point to intra-family transfers, underpinned by ex post altruism, as an important channel of causation. The second chapter develops a theoretical model of private transfers underpinned by ex post altruism among members of a network. I use this model to analyze equilibrium transfer patterns and inequality under alternative income distributions and network structures. I demonstrate the general intuition that transfers obtain in equilibrium when the amount of altruism is sufficiently strong relative to income inequality. Within the networks that I analyze, every equilibrium involving transfers takes the same form: unique income thresholds separate senders from receivers. Effective risk sharing takes place among senders and receivers, while those at intermediate incomes remain in autarky. Every equilibrium gives rise to the same set of allocations. I contrast these predictions with insurance-based theories of transfers in which risk sharing is operative for small in come differences and may fall apart at large income differences. The third chapter uses longitudinal data spanning nearly fifteen years to test whether transfers among family members within Indonesia are consistent with ex post altruism, against the alternative of insurance. I use the predicted effects of permanent versus transitory income on transfers, as well as theoretical predictions from the second chapter regarding the shape of transfer functions , to carry out this test. The results provide some evidence that transfer motives are inconsistent with insurance but consistent with ex post altruism

The role of ontologies in creating and maintaining corporate knowledge: a case study from the aero industry

The Designers’ Workbench is a system, developed to support designers in large organizations, such as Rolls-Royce, by making sure that the design is consistent with the specification for the particular design as well as with the company’s design rule book(s). The evolving design is described against a jet engine ontology. Currently, to capture the constraint information, a domain expert (design engineer) has to work with a knowledge engineer to identify the constraints, and it is then the task of the knowledge engineer to encode these into the Workbench’s knowledge base (KB). This is an error prone and time consuming task. It is highly desirable to relieve the knowledge engineer of this task, and so we have developed a tool, ConEditor+ that enables domain experts themselves to capture and maintain these constraints. The tool allows the user to combine selected entities from the domain ontology with keywords and operators of a constraint language to form a constraint expression. Further, we hypothesize that to apply constraints appropriately, it is necessary to understand the context in which each constraint is applicable. We refer to this as “application conditions”. We show that an explicit representation of application conditions, in a machine interpretable format, along with the constraints and the domain ontology can be used to support the verification and maintenance of constraints

Consumption smoothing and vunerability in Russia

Applying bootstrapped quantile regression to the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) data, we examine the channels through which individuals experience and seek to cope with changes in consumption. We find that married individuals living in small households, with educated heads in urban areas are better equipped to smooth consumption. Investigating the impact of idiosyncratic shocks, we find that the labour market is an important transmission mechanism allowing households to smooth their consumption but also exposing them to risk, mainly through job loss. Outside of pension payments the formal social safety net does not facilitate consumption smoothing, thus heightening the importance of informal coping institutions. It transpires that both support from relatives/friends and home production act as important insurance mechanisms for the most vulnerable

Consumption Smoothing and Vulnerability in Russia

Applying bootstrapped quantile regression to the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) data, we examine the channels through which individuals experience and seek to cope with changes in consumption. We find that married individuals living in small households, with educated heads in urban areas are better equipped to smooth consumption. Investigating the impact of idiosyncratic shocks, we find that the labour market is an important transmission mechanism allowing households to smooth their consumption but also exposing them to risk, mainly through job loss. Outside of pension payments the formal social safety net does not facilitate consumption smoothing, thus heightening the importance of informal coping institutions. It transpires that both support from relatives/friends and home production act as important insurance mechanisms for the most vulnerable.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64415/1/wp885.pd

Program participation under means-testing and self-selection targeting methods

"Using data that enables us to distinguish between the different components of program participation (i.e., knowledge, application, and acceptance), we investigate the determinants of household behavior and program implementation in a social safety-net program that combines administrative and self-selection targeting methods. High undercoverage of eligible households primarily reflects lack of knowledge and binding budget constraints in poor areas. High leakage to ineligible households reflects the combination of their high levels of knowledge, application, and acceptance. Lowering undercoverage will require greater program awareness among the poor living in nonpoor areas and this is likely to come at the expense of substantial leakage to the nonpoor unless improvements are made to the verification process. Our results also suggest that in the presence of a budget constraint, the administrative selection process gives priority to the poorest households and those with children." Authors' AbstractMeans testing ,Targeting performance ,Social safety nets ,Oportunidades ,households ,

Some Challenges of Specifying Concurrent Program Components

The purpose of this paper is to address some of the challenges of formally specifying components of shared-memory concurrent programs. The focus is to provide an abstract specification of a component that is suitable for use both by clients of the component and as a starting point for refinement to an implementation of the component. We present some approaches to devising specifications, investigating different forms suitable for different contexts. We examine handling atomicity of access to data structures, blocking operations and progress properties, and transactional operations that may fail and need to be retried.Comment: In Proceedings Refine 2018, arXiv:1810.0873

The Importance of Sample Attrition in Life Cycle Labor Supply

We examine the importance of possible non-random attrition to an econometric model of life cycle labor supply including joint nonlinear taxation of wage and interest incomes and latent heterogeneity.We use a Wald test comparing attriters to nonattriters and variable addition testing based on formal models of attrition.Results from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are that non-random panel attrition is of little concern for prime-aged male labor supply estimation because the effect of attrition is absorbed into the fixed effects.Attrition is less econometrically influential than research design decisions typically taken for granted; the wage measure or instrument set has a much greater impact on the estimated labor supply function of prime-aged men than how one includes panel attrition.panel data;labour supply;econometric models;income tax;GMM