Poverty, Population, Development in Historical Perspective

SUMMARY The object of the paper is to place the present issues of world poverty, development, demographic change into proper historical perspective, considering the specificities of present times concerning economic and demographic developments, as well as the international relations associated with them. Some speculations concerning possible long run developments conclude the pape RIASSUNTO Scopo dell' articolo è di porre in adeguata prospettiva storica le questioni globali relative a povertà, sviluppo e crescita demografica, considerando le specifiche circostanze del tempo presente concernenti gli sviluppi economici e demografici, così come le relazioni internazionali a questi associati. Alcune considerazioni sui possibili sviluppi futuri di lungo periodo concludono il lavoro

Semi-Annual Report to Congress for the Period of April 1, 2017 to September 30, 2017

[Excerpt] I proudly submit to Congress and the Department this Semiannual Report, which highlights the most significant activities and accomplishments of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the six-month period ending September 30, 2017. Our audits and investigations continue to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, economy, and integrity of DOL’s programs and operations, including those performed by its contractors and grantees. We also continue to investigate the influence of labor racketeering and organized crime in internal union affairs, employee benefit plans, and labor-management relations, and have partnered with other law-enforcement agencies on human trafficking matters. During this reporting period, the OIG issued 11 audits and other reports that, among other things, recommended that more than $11.2 million in funds be put to better use. Among our many significant findings, we reported the following: The Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP) needed better controls over compounded prescription drugs. OWCP was not effectively managing the use and cost of compounded pharmaceuticals in the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) program. The Employment and Training Administration violated the bona fide needs rule by using$22.1 million of Job Corps funds for program years 2012 and 2013 for services actually provided in program years 2013 and 2014. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration lacked adequate contractor information to ensure it followed up on all contract-worker fatalities and catastrophes at employers participating in its Voluntary Protection Programs. Adding 3 judges in the Office of Administrative Law Judges would reduce the time required to eliminate the current backlog of black lung case appeals by 21 percent; adding 6 judges would reduce the time by 28 percent. We continue to work on many important audits. For more details, I invite you to review our recently issued audit work plan for FY 2018, which can be found in the appendix of this report. The OIG’s investigative work also yielded impressive results, with a total of 126 indictments, 135 convictions, and more than $67.2 million in monetary accomplishments. Highlights of this work include the following: Two Texas executives were sentenced to 300 months and 120 months in prison, respectively, and were ordered to pay more than$26 million in restitution to OWCP for FECA fraud for billing fraudulent claims. An immigration consultant was sentenced to 36 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $200,000 in fines and forfeiture for smuggling more than 100 foreign nationals into the United States with a scheme to defraud DOL’s H-2A visa program. Three former nonprofit executives in Los Angeles pled guilty to stealing millions of dollars in public funding and another pled no contest to embezzlement charges involving a Workforce Innovation Act grantee nonprofit organization. A Chicago-area woman was sentenced to 48 months in prison and ordered to pay more than$6.8 million in restitution for an unemployment insurance fraud scheme. These are just a few examples of the exceptional work done by our dedicated OIG staff. I would like to express my gratitude to them for their significant achievements during this reporting period. In addition, in August 2017, the OIG and DOL’s Employment and Training Administration, Wage and Hour Division, and Office of the Solicitor developed protocols regarding the referral of criminal fraud matters in the Foreign Labor Certification (FLC) Program to the OIG in such a way as to avoid duplication of effort and ensure efficiency in combating fraud in the FLC Program. I look forward to continuing to work constructively with the Department and the Congress on our shared goals of identifying improvements to DOL programs and operations, and protecting the interests and benefits of workers and retirees

Some stochastic models for structured populations : scaling limits and long time behavior

The first chapter concerns monotype population models. We first study general birth and death processes and we give non-explosion and extinction criteria, moment computations and a pathwise representation. We then show how different scales may lead to different qualitative approximations, either ODEs or SDEs. The prototypes of these equations are the logistic (deterministic) equation and the logistic Feller diffusion process. The convergence in law of the sequence of processes is proved by tightness-uniqueness argument. In these large population approximations, the competition between individuals leads to nonlinear drift terms. We then focus on models without interaction but including exceptional events due either to demographic stochasticity or to environmental stochasticity. In the first case, an individual may have a large number of offspring and we introduce the class of continuous state branching processes. In the second case, catastrophes may occur and kill a random fraction of the population and the process enjoys a quenched branching property. We emphasize on the study of the Laplace transform, which allows us to classify the long time behavior of these processes. In the second chapter, we model structured populations by measure-valued stochastic differential equations. Our approach is based on the individual dynamics. The individuals are characterized by parameters which have an influence on their survival or reproduction ability. Some of these parameters can be genetic and are inheritable except when mutations occur, but they can also be a space location or a quantity of parasites. The individuals compete for resources or other environmental constraints. We describe the population by a point measure-valued Markov process. We study macroscopic approximations of this process depending on the interplay between different scalings and obtain in the limit either integro-differential equations or reaction-diffusion equations or nonlinear super-processes. In each case, we insist on the specific techniques for the proof of convergence and for the study of the limiting model. The limiting processes offer different models of mutation-selection dynamics. Then, we study two-level models motivated by cell division dynamics, where the cell population is discrete and characterized by a trait, which may be continuous. In 1 particular, we finely study a process for parasite infection and the trait is the parasite load. The latter grows following a Feller diffusion and is randomly shared in the two daughter cells when the cell divides. Finally, we focus on the neutral case when the rate of division of cells is constant but the trait evolves following a general Markov process and may split in a random number of cells. The long time behavior of the structured population is then linked and derived from the behavior a well chosen SDE (monotype population)

Climate change and human migration: managing the cascade effects initiated by natural disasters

The potential links between climate change, human migration and conflict have been receiving an increasing amount of attention since the turn of the century. Up-to-date reports that address the most recent understanding of climate change and environmental hazards indicate that humans have undeniably contributed to the rising global temperature and will continue to do so if lower pollution thresholds are not maintained. While this enacts a multitude of physical, biological, chemical, and societal changes, it is imperative to analyze and address the impact of climate change on human migration trends. Human migrants face several types of problems ranging from environmental issues related to climate change (sea-level rise, more frequent and intense storms and floods, drought, wildfires, etc.), to conflicts from physical migration into neighboring towns, cities, regions, or countries. These types of physical migration that are climate change driven, which can be referred to as “adaptation migration” can be capable of snowballing from a human-to-environment issue into a human-to-human conflict; usually involving some type of violence or political discrimination/persecution. The aim of this study is to analyze how climate change is impacting human migration trends, the possible percolating effects that can result from human migration, and how these factors have influenced and will continue to influence governments and governance in the coastal area. The information in this report will be able to provide a greater understanding of adaptation migration through the use of differential equations, how these trends can be modeled, and how Game Theory can be used as a strategic tool for policymakers moving forward.I would like to thank the WACOMA program and all of its coordinators, past and present, as they have all played an essential role in helping not only myself, but all of the students develop into the people we are today. Thank you all for everything you have done throughout this entire process

ON NEW MECHANIMS LEADING TO HEAVY-TAILED DISTRIBUTIONS RELATED TO THE ONES OF YULE-SIMON

International audienceScientists reinvent stochastic mechanisms leading to the emergence of a distribution discovered by H.A. Simon, in the context of the study of word frequencies occurring in a textbook. Simon distributions are heavy-tailed as a result of a reinforcement mechanism that produced them, related to the modern notion of preferential attachment. The Simon distribution is a particular case of a distribution recently introduced, itself extending the Sibuya distribution. We exhibit some of the remarkable statistical properties of such a family of distributions, in particular the one of being discrete self-decomposable. Using this and after placing this problem in context, additional stochastic processes where such distributions naturally arise are investigated, in particular a Markov chain model with catastrophes. "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas." (Virgil, Georgics, II)

Pricing in new markets

In this thesis we consider recent developments in insurance and electricity financial products. In particular, we investigate the interplay between insurance and finance, and therein the problem of pricing catastrophe insurance options written on a loss index as well as electricity products. Catastrophe insurance options are standardized exchange-traded financial securities based on an underlying index, e.g. a PCS index, that encompasses insurance losses due to natural catastrophes. The PCS index is provided by the Property Claim Services (PCS), a US independent industry authority which estimates catastrophic property damage. The advantages of the catastrophe options in comparison to other capital market insurance solutions are lower transaction costs relative to the re-insurance and minimal credit risk, because of the guarantee of the exchange. The main results of the thesis are fairly realistic models for catastrophe loss indexes and electricity futures markets, where by employing Fourier transform techniques we are able to provide analytical pricing formulas for European type options traded in the markets. For the catastrophe loss index we specify a model, where the initial estimate of each catastrophe loss is re-estimated immediately by a positive martingale starting from the random time of loss occurrence. Significant advantage of this methodology is that it can be applied to loss distributions with heavy tails -- the appropriate tail behavior for catastrophe modeling. The case when the re-estimation factors are given by positive affine martingales is also discussed and a characterization of positive affine local martingales is provided. For electricity futures markets we derive a model, where we can simultaneously model evolution of futures and spot prices. At the same time we have an explicit connection between electricity futures and spot price processes. Furthermore, an important achievement is that the spot price dynamics in this model becomes multi-dimensional Markovian. The Markovian structure is crucial for pricing of path dependent electricity options

How democratic and effective are the UK’s civil service and public services management systems?

Citizens and civil society have most contact with the administrative apparatus of the UK state, whose operations can powerfully condition life chances and experiences. In an article from our forthcoming book, The UK’s Changing Democracy: The 2018 Democratic Audit, Patrick Dunleavy considers the responsiveness of traditionally dominant civil service headquartered in Whitehall, and the wider administration of key public services, notably the NHS, policing and other administrations in England. Are public managers at all levels of the UK and England accountable enough to citizens, public opinion and elected representatives and legislatures? And how representative of, and in touch with, modern Britain are public bureaucracies