Impact Analysis of a Small-Scale Irrigation Project in Manicahan District, Zamboanga City

This article is a product of a nine-month training and application program implemented by the micro component of the Economic and Social Impact Analysis/Women in Development (ESIA/WID) and the Food Systems Program of the East-West Center Resource Systems Institute (RSI). It focuses on the 300-hectare, small-scale irrigation system in Manicahan District and its impact on the employment levels on farms within the irrigated area.infrastructure, irrigation system, rural sector, farm lands, infrastructural development, impact analysis

Disclination-mediated thermo-optical response in nematic glass sheets

Nematic solids respond strongly to changes in ambient heat or light, significantly differently parallel and perpendicular to the director. This phenomenon is well characterized for uniform director fields, but not for defect textures. We analyze the elastic ground states of a nematic glass in the membrane approximation as a function of temperature for some disclination defects with an eye towards reversibly inducing three-dimensional shapes from flat sheets of material, at the nano-scale all the way to macroscopic objects, including non-developable surfaces. The latter offers a new paradigm to actuation via switchable stretch in thin systems.Comment: Specific results for spiral defects now added. References to Witten, Mahadevan and Ben Amar now added

Impact Analysis of a Small-Scale Irrigation Project in Manicahan District, Zamboanga City

This article is a product of a nine-month training and application program implemented by the micro component of the Economic and Social Impact Analysis/Women in Development (ESIA/WID) and the Food Systems Program of the East-West Center Resource Systems Institute (RSI). It focuses on the 300-hectare, small-scale irrigation system in Manicahan District and its impact on the employment levels on farms within the irrigated area.infrastructure, irrigation system, rural sector, farm lands, infrastructural development, impact analysis

Capital forbearance and thrifts: an ex post examination of regulatory gambling

This paper estimates the losses embedded in the capital positions of the 996 FSLIC-insured savings and loan institutions that did not meet capital standards at the end of the 1970s. We compare the estimated cost of resolving the insolvencies of these institutions at the end of the 1970s with the actual failure-resolution costs for those that were closed by July 3 1, 1992, and the projected resolution costs for the remaining thrifts that are likely to be closed. Our results show that even when one considers only the direct costs associated with delayed closure of economically failed thrifts, these costs significantly exceed reasonable estimates of the cost of prompt failure resolution.Savings and loan associations

A generalized method for detecting abnormal returns and changes in systematic risk

The authors generalize traditional event-study techniques to allow for event-induced parameter shifts, shifting variances, and firm-specific event periods. Their method, which nests traditional methods, also permits systematic risk to change gradually during the event period and exit the period at higher or lower levels. The authors use their approach to study 132 banks that acquired other institutions between 1989 and 1995. The authors find a significant change in the systematic risk of the acquiring firms, significant ARCH effects, and an event period that ends before the date of the announcement. None of these results is detectable using conventional methods. These results imply that (1) event studies that cannot account for information leakage may be biased, and (2) changes in systematic risk can occur in the absence of abnormal returns, and (3) regulators, investors and bank managers must evaluate each acquisition on its own merits; reliance on averages can mask important distinctions across acquisitions.Bank mergers ; Econometric models ; Risk

Anticipating bailouts: the incentive-conflict model and the collapse of the Ohio Deposit Guarantee Fund

An examination of the effect of the collapse of the Ohio Deposit Guarantee Fund on insured financial institutions in the context of the incentive-conflict model developed by Edward Kane, finding that differences in abnormal returns of FDIC and FSLIC firms tend to reaffirm that taxpayer-funded bailouts are a natural outgrowth of the moral-hazard problem that taxpayers face.Ohio Deposit Guarantee Fund ; Bank stocks

Troubled savings and loan institutions: voluntary restructuring under insolvency

Regulatory agencies are unwilling or unable to close thrift institutions immediately upon insolvency. Instead, they have progressively reduced the thrift capital requirement, refrained from enforcing that requirement, and allowed thrifts to hold more nonmortgage loans in the hope that the industry would recover. According to this study, only 13 percent of the largest 300 firms eventually recovered between the end of 1979 and the end of 1989. When the thrift crisis surfaced in the early 1980s, the firms that ultimately recovered operated in a fashion similar to those that eventually failed. But in the mid-1980s, recovered thrifts pursued a risk-minimizing strategy, while nonrecovered thrifts pursued a risky, high-growth strategy. We find no evidence that managers of unsuccessful firms consumed more perquisites than their successful counterparts.Savings and loan associations

A generalized method for detecting abnormal returns and changes in systematic risk

The authors generalize traditional event-study techniques to allow for event-induced parameter shifts, shifting variances, and firm-specific event periods. Their method, which nests traditional methods, also permits systematic risk to change gradually during the event period and exit the period at higher or lower levels. The authors use their approach to study 132 banks that acquired other institutions between 1989 and 1995. The authors find a significant change in the systematic risk of the acquiring firms, significant ARCH effects, and an event period that ends before the date of the announcement. None of these results is detectable using conventional methods. These results imply that (1) event studies that cannot account for information leakage may be biased, and (2) changes in systematic risk can occur in the absence of abnormal returns, and (3) regulators, investors and bank managers must evaluate each acquisition on its own merits; reliance on averages can mask important distinctions across acquisitions

Stochastic theory of large-scale enzyme-reaction networks: Finite copy number corrections to rate equation models

Chemical reactions inside cells occur in compartment volumes in the range of atto- to femtolitres. Physiological concentrations realized in such small volumes imply low copy numbers of interacting molecules with the consequence of considerable fluctuations in the concentrations. In contrast, rate equation models are based on the implicit assumption of infinitely large numbers of interacting molecules, or equivalently, that reactions occur in infinite volumes at constant macroscopic concentrations. In this article we compute the finite-volume corrections (or equivalently the finite copy number corrections) to the solutions of the rate equations for chemical reaction networks composed of arbitrarily large numbers of enzyme-catalyzed reactions which are confined inside a small sub-cellular compartment. This is achieved by applying a mesoscopic version of the quasi-steady state assumption to the exact Fokker-Planck equation associated with the Poisson Representation of the chemical master equation. The procedure yields impressively simple and compact expressions for the finite-volume corrections. We prove that the predictions of the rate equations will always underestimate the actual steady-state substrate concentrations for an enzyme-reaction network confined in a small volume. In particular we show that the finite-volume corrections increase with decreasing sub-cellular volume, decreasing Michaelis-Menten constants and increasing enzyme saturation. The magnitude of the corrections depends sensitively on the topology of the network. The predictions of the theory are shown to be in excellent agreement with stochastic simulations for two types of networks typically associated with protein methylation and metabolism.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures; published in The Journal of Chemical Physic