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

Inequality, Fiscal Capacity and the Political Regime: Lessons from the Post-Communist Transition

Using panel data for twenty-seven post-communist economies between 1987-2003, we examine the nexus of relationships between inequality, fiscal capacity (defined as the ability to raise taxes efficiently) and the political regime. Investigating the impact of political reform we find that full political freedom is associated with lower levels of income inequality. Under more oligarchic (authoritarian) regimes, the level of inequality is conditioned by the state’s fiscal capacity. Specifically, oligarchic regimes with more developed fiscal systems are able to defend the prevailing vested interests at a lower cost in terms of social injustice. This empirical finding is consistent with the model developed by Acemoglu (2006). We also find that transition countries undertaking early macroeconomic stabilisation now enjoy lower levels of inequality; we confirm that education fosters equality and the suggestion of Commander et al (1999) that larger countries are prone to higher levels of inequality.income inequality, democracy, oligarchy, fiscal capacity, economic reform, transition

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.Russia, economics, vulnerability, consumption smoothing, quantile regression

Vulnerability to welfare change during economic shocks: Evidence from the 1998 Russian crisis

Using changes in consumption as a proxy for "vulnerability" we identify the characteristics associated with vulnerability around the time of the 1998 Russian financial crisis. In addition, we examine the role of formal and informal safety nets in preserving individual well being. We apply quantile regression techniques in order to identify the characteristics associated with vulnerability across the two periods. Amongst those most vulnerable during the crisis were, less educated individuals living in urban areas, in households containing greater numbers of pensioners. Furthermore, we found that increases in home production and help from relatives acted to decrease vulnerability, especially amongst those suffering the largest changes in consumption. Following the crisis, amongst the least vulnerable were, better educated individuals, resident in urban areas, able to increase home production, and in receipt of improved pension payments and child benefits.

Super-Resolving Quantum Radar: Coherent-State Sources with Homodyne Detection Suffice to Beat the Diffraction Limit

There has been much recent interest in quantum metrology for applications to sub-Raleigh ranging and remote sensing such as in quantum radar. For quantum radar, atmospheric absorption and diffraction rapidly degrades any actively transmitted quantum states of light, such as N00N states, so that for this high-loss regime the optimal strategy is to transmit coherent states of light, which suffer no worse loss than the linear Beer's law for classical radar attenuation, and which provide sensitivity at the shot-noise limit in the returned power. We show that coherent radar radiation sources, coupled with a quantum homodyne detection scheme, provide both longitudinal and angular super-resolution much below the Rayleigh diffraction limit, with sensitivity at shot-noise in terms of the detected photon power. Our approach provides a template for the development of a complete super-resolving quantum radar system with currently available technology.Comment: 23 pages, content is identical to published versio

The Gender Wage Gap and Wage Arrears in Russia: Evidence from the RLMS

Using the RLMS, this paper re-examines the gender wage gap in Russia from 1994 to 1998. We find that the average gender wage gap was fairly stable during 1994-1996 but that it became wider following the financial crisis of 1998. In particular, low-income female employees were hardest hit by the financial crisis. Furthermore, we find that wage arrears and payment in kind acted as compensating mechanisms to reduce losses stemming from higher wage discrimination, suggesting that the allocation of wage arrears and payment in kind was driven by equity considerations for female workers. Yet the relationship between wage arrears and the gender wage gap was not linear: female employees suffering wage arrears at low levels of the wage distribution failed to enjoy such compensation.

Nonlocal entanglement of coherent states, complementarity, and quantum erasure

We describe a nonlocal method for generating entangled coherent states of a two-mode field wherein the field modes never meet. The proposed method is an extension of an earlier proposal [C. C. Gerry, Phys. Rev. A 59, 4095 (1999)] for the generation of superpositions of coherent states. A single photon injected into a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with cross-Kerr media in both arms coupling with two external fields in coherent states produces entangled coherent states upon detection at one of the output ports. We point out that our proposal can be alternatively viewed as a which path experiment, and in the case of only one external field, we describe the implementation of a quantum eraser

Gender, education and Russia’s tobacco epidemic: a life-course approach

While a number of studies, based on cross-sectional data for Russia, have documented strong increases in female smoking during the past two decades, the analysis of longer-term trends in smoking prevalence is hampered by the lack of representative data for the Soviet era. In this paper we create life-course smoking histories based on retrospective data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of HSE (RLMS-HSE) and the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) which allow us to examine the dynamics of smoking patterns over the past 7 decades. We find that smoking rates differ most strongly by gender within all cohorts, but that this differential has decreased over time, driven by increases in female smoking and more recently by decreases in smoking among men. For both genders we observe that the education gradient has become steeper over time, with smoking rates having increased at a higher rate among those with the lowest educational attainment. These findings suggest that the development of smoking in Russia mirrors that described in the model of the tobacco epidemic and observed in Western high-income countries

The parity operator in quantum optical metrology

Photon number states are assigned a parity of if their photon number is even and a parity of if odd. The parity operator, which is minus one to the power of the photon number operator, is a Hermitian operator and thus a quantum mechanical observable though it has no classical analog, the concept being meaningless in the context of classical light waves. In this paper we review work on the application of the parity operator to the problem of quantum metrology for the detection of small phase shifts with quantum optical interferometry using highly entangled field states such as the so-called N00N states, and states obtained by injecting twin Fock states into a beam splitter. With such states and with the performance of parity measurements on one of the output beams of the interferometer, one can breach the standard quantum limit, or shot-noise limit, of sensitivity down to the Heisenberg limit, the greatest degree of phase sensitivity allowed by quantum mechanics for linear phase shifts. Heisenberg limit sensitivities are expected to eventually play an important role in attempts to detect gravitational waves in interferometric detection systems such as LIGO and VIRGO.Comment: to be published in Contemporary Physic