ADVERSE SELECTION IN THE MARKET FOR CROP INSURANCE

This paper examines the potential for adverse selection when farmers are offered a portfolio of insurance policies. We analyze the risk characteristics farmers who bought alternative insurance instruments in 1996-97. Inability to differentiate farmers according to risk types results in pooling equilibrium which may implicitly subsidize high risk farmers.Risk and Uncertainty,

Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in the Food-Processing Industry: A Comparative Analysis of Developed and Developing Economies

This paper analyzes the determinants of foreign direct investments by the U.S. food-processing industry in developed and developing countries. We find that market size, per-capita income, and trade openness significantly affect U.S. food-processing firmsÂ’' decisions to invest abroad, but their influence differs between developed and developing countries. Economic development is positively associated with FDI in developing countries but negatively associated in developed countries. Market size is a major determinant of FDI only in developed economies. Trade openness seems to be important for sales by U.S. foreign affiliates in both developed and developing countries and for exports to developed country markets.International Relations/Trade,

The importance of design characteristics in walking from student's perspective: a case study in Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Walking is a common form of physical activity, which has a lot of both social and recreational impacts. It is studied as a way of achieving sustainability. Many researchers recommend that walking can increase mental and physical health. Spectators of new urbanism recommend that the good design will encourage walking. There are several characteristics for designing walkable communities, which were frequently described in researches by many authors. In this paper, the four criteria noticed for making walkable university campus include connectivity, accessibility, safety/security and comfort. These criteria have been assessed by gathering survey in the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia to find out if these criteria can cause or affect walkability in university campus and it has been supported by previous studies. The result of the survey shows that these criteria are important from students’ perspective as high numbers of the students consider these characters as important for walking activity. The conclusion is to achieve walkable university campus as it will be necessary to evaluate present walking conditions, research walking behavior in different settings and consider these four criteria in designing campus for improving walking condition

Sharp Response Microstrip LPF using Folded Stepped Impedance Open Stubs

A novel microstrip lowpass filter with high selectivity and wide stopband is proposed that comprises two lateral folded open stubs and a central mirrored semi-circle ended suppressing cell. The proposed filter has cut-off frequency of 2.28 GHz and is very compact. The stopband width with attenuation level more than -20 dB is equal to 5.47 fc and the transition band is only 0.14 GHz. This filter is designed, fabricated and measured and the simulated and measured results are in good agreemen

Decentralised renewable energy: a pathway to prosperity for Lebanon?

This chapter reviews the current state of play on energy and prosperity in Lebanon. The focus is on opportunities for decentralised renewable energy (RE) to not only address Lebanon’s insufficient energy supply but to incite whole systems change in Lebanon to address the compounding challenges of mass displacement, changing climate and economic crises. In recent years Lebanon has made great progress in RE despite the ongoing regional turbulence but more could be done to utilise the country’s abundance of renewable resources, growing population and entrepreneurial acumen. Using empirical findings from communities living and working in two neighbourhoods in Lebanon, Hamra and El Mina, we argue that energy policy from a prosperity perspective must be informed by the role public services play in people’s self-defined aspirations of what it means to live a good life. With the policy support from above, locally managed and decentralised RE supply has potential to not only address the energy crisis and mitigate the impacts of climate change, but also setting Lebanon on a path to a sustainable and prosperous future

Automated Operational Modal Analysis of a Cable-Stayed Bridge

© 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers. Automated techniques for analyzing the dynamic behavior of full-scale civil structures are becoming increasingly important for continuous structural health-monitoring applications. This paper describes an experimental study aimed at the identification of modal parameters of a full-scale cable-stayed bridge from the collected output-only vibration data without the need for any user interactions. The work focuses on the development of an automated and robust operational modal analysis (OMA) algorithm, using a multistage clustering approach. The main contribution of the work is to discuss a comprehensive case study to demonstrate the reliability of a novel criterion aimed at defining the hierarchical clustering threshold to enable the accurate identification of a complete set of modal parameters. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated to work with any parametric system identification algorithm that uses the system order n as the sole parameter. In particular, the results from the covariance-driven stochastic subspace identification (SSI-Cov) methods are presented

On Optimizing Compatible Security Policies in Wireless Networks

This paper deals with finding the maximum number of security policies without conflicts. By doing so we can remove security loophole that causes security violation. We present the problem of maximum compatible security policy and its relationship to the problem of maximum acyclic subgraph, which is proved to be NP-hard. Then we present a polynomial-time approximation algorithm and show that our result has approximation ratio for any integer with complexity