91 research outputs found
"The Financial Requirements of Achieving Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment"
Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been ratified in global and national forums, they have not yet been incorporated into operational planning within governments or international organizations. The weak link between the policies and the investments needed for their implementation is one barrier to progress. An assessment of the resources required is a critical first step in formulating and implementing strategies to achieve the MDGs. This is especially true for policies to promote gender equality and empower women. Although enough is known about such policies to implement them successfully, the costs of such interventions are not systematically calculated and integrated into country-level budgeting processes. Using country-level data, the paper estimates the costs of interventions aimed at promoting gender equality and women's empowerment in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda. It then uses these estimates to calculate the costs of such interventions in other low-income countries. Finally, the paper projects the financing gap for interventions that aim directly at achieving gender equality, first for the five countries, and subsequently for all low-income countries.
Goods Prices and Availability in Cities
This paper uses detailed barcode data on purchase transactions by households in 49 U.S. cities to calculate the first theoretically-founded urban price index. In doing so, we overcome a large number of problems that have plagued spatial price index measurement. We identify two important sources of bias. Heterogeneity bias arises from comparing different goods in different locations, and variety bias arises from not correcting for the fact that some goods are unavailable in some locations. Eliminating heterogeneity bias causes 97 percent of the variance in the price level of food products across cities to disappear relative to a conventional index. Eliminating both biases reverses the common finding that prices tend to be higher in larger cities. Instead, we find that price level for food products falls with city size
Goods Prices and Availability in Cities
This paper uses detailed barcode data on purchase transactions by households in 49 U.S. cities to overcome a large number of problems that have plagued spatial price index measurement. We identify two important sources of bias. Heterogeneity bias arises from comparing different goods in different locations, and variety bias arises from not correcting for the fact that some goods are unavailable in some locations. Eliminating heterogeneity bias causes 97 percent of the variance in the price level of food products across cities to disappear relative to a conventional index. Eliminating both biases reverses the common finding that prices tend to be higher in larger cities. Instead, we find that price level for food products falls with city size.
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Essays on Prices and Variety Across Cities
In Krugman (1991), agglomeration is driven by consumption externalities related to differences in the average price across locations. Variety plays a central role here: the price index is lower in larger cities because more varieties are produced there, but all products are available everywhere, so there are no direct consumption gains from variety. Chapter 1 extends this model to allow for these variety differences across cities via an extensive margin of intercity trade. In this model, scale economies yield more production variety in larger cities so that, with positive trade costs, consumers in these locations can benefit from two consumption advantages - lower average prices and more varieties of products. This model sets the stage for the empirical chapters that measure the impact of these consumption benefits on consumer utility. The urban economics literature has paid relatively little attention to these consumption externalities for two reasons. First, the fact that wages are higher in larger cities indicates, in the context of a spatial equilibrium model, that purchasing power must be lower in these locations, which is inconsistent with the NEG theoretical predictions that price indexes are lower in larger cities. Second, there are reasons to believe that intranational trade frictions are much smaller than those across international borders. While there is a large body of work documenting that these frictions yield significant variation in the prices charged and varieties offered across different countries, we know relatively little about the spatial variation of price and variety in a domestic context. Chapter 2, co-authored with David E. Weinstein, addresses both of these issues. We first show that, controlling for purchaser demographics and store amenities, the prices of tradable products do, in fact, vary across cities as predicted by Krugman (1991). Additionally, we find that there are significant differences in the variety of products offered in large as opposed to small cities. We finally measure the extent to which this variation in prices and variety lowers price indexes for tradable products in large cities relative to small cities. This low price index over tradables in large cities is consistent with nominal wages being higher there, as long as there are congestion costs that equalize real income across locations. A major assumption in the work described above is that the consumption benefits of cities do not vary systematically across consumer types. The final chapter of my dissertation considers how systematic differences in prices and variety across space might impact different individuals differently. Previous research has tested whether firms vary prices and product offerings in order to cater local tastes in a market. I extend this analysis to structurally estimate how this behavior of individual firms differentially affects the price indexes faced by consumers with systematically heterogeneous tastes. I allow for tastes to vary with income and find that poor consumers face lower costs in low-income cities, while the opposite holds for wealthy consumers, whose tastes are better-suited to the variety of products available in high-income cities. In conclusion, this dissertation finds that there is significant variation in prices and variety across U.S. cities. In particular, the spatial distributions of prices, variety, and consumers in the U.S. are correlated in a manner consistent with there being consumption externalities. Consumers in larger cities have access to more varieties of products at a lower average price and, conditional on city size, consumers have access to varieties better-suited to the tastes of they share with their income group in cities with per capita incomes closer to their own. These patterns are reflected in the variation in the tradables price indexes that consumers face across large and small and across wealthy and poor cities. This evidence on the existence of the pecuniary consumption externalities hypothesized in early NEG papers supports a growing literature exploring the role of consmption externalities in generating the aggregate and skill-biased agglomeration patterns that the more recent NEG literature associates with production externalities
Measuring Movement and Social Contact with Smartphone Data: A Real-time Application to COVID-19
Tracking human activity in real time and at ïŹne spatial scale is particularly valuable during episodes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of smartphone data for quantifying movement and social contact. We show that these data cover broad sections of the US population and exhibit movement patterns similar to conventional survey data. We develop and make publicly available a location exposure index that summarizes county-to-county movements and a device exposure index that quantiïŹes social contact within venues. We use these indices to document how pandemic-induced reductions in activity vary across people and places
Formation of terrestrial planet cores inside giant planet embryos
Giant planet embryos are believed to be spawned by gravitational instability
in massive extended (R ~ 100 AU) protostellar discs. In a recent paper we have
shown that dust can sediment inside the embryos, as argued earlier by Boss
(1998) in a slightly different model. Here we study numerically the next stage
of this process -- the formation of a solid core. If conditions are conducive
to solid core formation, the centre of the gas cloud goes through the following
sequence of phases: (i) becomes grain (and metal) rich; (ii) forms a
terrestrial mass solid core via a rapid collapse driven by self-gravity of the
grains; (iii) starts to accrete a gaseous atmosphere when the solid core
reaches mass of a few to 10 Earth masses. This sequence of events may build
either terrestrial planet cores or metal rich giant planets inside the larger
gas reservoir of the giant planet embryo. In a companion Letter we argue that
tidal and irradiation effects from the parent star should disrupt the outer
metal poor layers of the embryo, releasing nearly "ready to use" planets. We
propose this as an alternative way to build planets.Comment: 20 pages, submitted to MNRAS, referred to as "paper II" in serie
A numerical simulation of a "super-Earth" core delivery from ~ 100 AU to ~ 8 AU
We use SPH simulations with an approximate radiative cooling prescription to
model evolution of a massive and large ( AU) very young
protoplanetary disc. We also model dust growth and gas-grain dynamics with a
second fluid approach. It is found that the disc fragments onto a large number
of Jupiter mass clumps that cool and contract slowly. Some of the
clumps evolve onto eccentric orbits delivering them into the inner tens of AU,
where they are disrupted by tidal forces from the star. Dust grows and
sediments inside the clumps, displaying a very strong segregation, with the
largest particles forming dense cores in the centres. The density of the dust
cores may exceed that of the gas and is limited only by the numerical
constraints, indicating that these cores should collapse into rocky planetary
cores. One particular giant planet embryo migrates inward close enough to be
disrupted at about 10 AU, leaving a self-bound solid core of about 7.5
\mearth mass on a low eccentricity orbit at a radius of 8 AU. These
simulations support the recent suggestions that terrestrial and giant planets
may be the remnants of tidally disrupted giant planet embryos.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS. Animations of the simulation are available at
http://www.astro.le.ac.uk/~shc14/Movie
Dispersal of protoplanetary disks by central wind stripping
We present a model for the dispersal of protoplanetary disks by winds from
either the central star or the inner disk. These winds obliquely strike the
flaring disk surface and strip away disk material by entraining it in an
outward radial-moving flow at the wind-disk interface which lies several disk
scale heights above the mid-plane. The disk dispersal time depends on the
entrainment velocity at which disk material flows into this turbulent shear
layer interface. If the entrainment efficiency is ~10% of the local sound
speed, a likely upper limit, the dispersal time at 1 AU is ~6 Myr for a disk
with a surface density of 10^3 g cm^{-2}, a solar mass central star, and a wind
with an outflow rate 10^{-8} Msun/yr and terminal velocity 200 km/s. When
compared to photoevaporation and viscous evolution, wind stripping can be a
dominant mechanism only for the combination of low accretion rates (< 10^{-8}
Msun/yr) and wind outflow rates approaching these accretion rates. This case is
unusual since generally outflow rates are < 0.1 of of accretion rates.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Simulations of spiral galaxies with an active potential: molecular cloud formation and gas dynamics
We describe simulations of the response of a gaseous disc to an active spiral
potential. The potential is derived from an N-body calculation and leads to a
multi-armed time-evolving pattern. The gas forms long spiral arms typical of
grand design galaxies, although the spiral pattern is asymmetric. The primary
difference from a grand-design spiral galaxy, which has a consistent 2/4-armed
pattern, is that instead of passing through the spiral arms, gas generally
falls into a developing potential minimum and is released only when the local
minimum dissolves. In this case, the densest gas is coincident with the spiral
potential, rather than offset as in the grand-design spirals. We would there
fore expect no offset between the spiral shock and star formation, and no
obvious co-rotation radius. Spurs which occur in grand-design spirals when
large clumps are sheared off leaving the spiral arms, are rare in the active,
time-evolving spiral reported here. Instead, large branches are formed from
spiral arms when the underlying spiral potential is dissolving due to the
N-body dynamics. We find that the molecular cloud mass spectrum for the active
potential is similar to that for clouds in grand design calculations, depending
primarily on the ambient pressure rather than the nature of the potential. The
largest molecular clouds occur when spiral arms collide, rather than by
agglomeration within a spiral arm.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
The Empirics of Agglomeration Economies
We propose an integrated framework to discuss the empirical literature on the local determinants of agglomeration effects. We start by presenting the theoretical mechanisms that ground individual and aggregate empirical specifications. We gradually introduce static effects, dynamic effects, and workers' endogenous location choices. We emphasise the impact of local density on productivity but we also consider many other local determinants supported by theory. Empirical issues are then addressed. Most important concerns are about endogeneity at the local and individual levels, the choice of a productivity measure between wage and TFP, and the roles of spatial scale, firms' characteristics, and functional forms. Estimated impacts of local determinants of productivity, employment, and firms' locations choices are surveyed for both developed and developing economies. We finally provide a discussion of attempts to identify and quantify specific agglomeration mechanisms
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