Giffen Behavior: Theory and Evidence

This paper provides the first real-world evidence of Giffen behavior, i.e., upward sloping demand. Subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of China, we find strong evidence of Giffen behavior for rice in Hunan, and weaker evidence for wheat in Gansu. The data provide new insight into the consumption behavior of the poor, who act as though maximizing utility subject to subsistence concerns, with both demand and calorie elasticities depending significantly, and non-linearly, on the severity of their poverty. Understanding this heterogeneity is important for the effective design of welfare programs for the poor.

The Effects of Environmental Regulation on Technology Diffusion: The Case of Chlorine Manufacturing

We use a hazard model to estimate the effect of environmental regulation on the diffusion of membrane cell production technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry. We estimate the effect of regulation on both the adoption of the membrane technology at existing plants and on the exit of existing plants using older technologies. We find that environmental regulation did affect the diffusion of the cleaner technology in the chlorine industry. However, it did so not by encouraging the adoption of membrane cells by existing facilities, but by reducing the demand for chlorine and hence encouraging the shutdown of facilities using the environmentally inferior options.Regulation, Technological change, Environment, Hazard model

The Effects of Environmental Regulation On Technology Diffusion: The Case of Chlorine Manufacturing

We use a hazard model to estimate the effect of environmental regulation on the diffusion of membrane cell production technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry. We estimate the effect of regulation on both the adoption of the membrane technology at existing plants and on the exit of existing plants using older technologies. We find that environmental regulation did affect the diffusion of the cleaner technology in the chlorine industry. However, it did so not by encouraging the adoption of membrane cells by existing facilities, but by reducing the demand for chlorine and hence encouraging the shutdown of facilities using the environmentally inferior options.regulation, technological change, environment, hazard model

ORPHIC ECOLOGY: MELANCHOLY AND THE POETICS OF ROBERT DUNCAN

This paper explores the poetry of Robert Duncan and the political potential of melancholy. Relying on Judith Butler’s examination of the difference between “mourning” and “melancholy” in Precarious Lives, I argue that Robert Duncan enacts a condition of melancholia that he might respond to what Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands identifies in Queer Ecologies as “the psychically ungrievable”: homosexual desire and the environment. I contend in this thesis that one might enact an active experience of melancholy as both a preservative and rejuvenative force. In the first chapter of the thesis I explore Robert Duncan’s revisitation of a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his 1964 poem “Cyparissus,” arguing that Duncan recovers the myth from Ovid’s implicitly homophobic subtext. In the second chapter of the thesis I examine Duncan’s use of what Timothy Morton terms “ambient poetics,” arguing that in his 1968 poem “The Fire, Passages 13,” Duncan enacts an intertextual and melancholic ambience as a means to critique the environmental violence and trauma experienced as a cultural byproduct of the Vietnam War

Lessons from Central America: Action Research in an Adult English as a Foreign Language Program

Analysts of policy have hitherto not paid much attention to how policy language acts to build up representations of reality. This paper agues for the usefulness of a discursive approach to policy analysis, and illustrates it in the context of emerging policies for ‘lifelong learning’

Aspects of the New Commonwealth immigration question and its impacts: a study in policy making and elite politics, 1968-1981

[Author's synopsis]:This thesis offers an analysis of policy making on aspects of the New Commonwealth immigration issue in Britain between 1968 and 1981. It concerns three formally distinct but profoundly interlocking issues: immigration control itself, the development of race relations policy and the pursuit of nationality law reform.I argue that a populist critique of prevailing bipartisanship on the subject grew up around the notion that immigration policy, and the notion of multiracial Britain itself, was subject to a profound shortfall in political legitimacy. These arguments were introduced by Enoch Powell in 1968, but remained too controversially wedded to race issues to achieve purchase in the mainstream. A limited form of bipartisanship therefore survived this early assault, to be rephrased by Edward Heath as a managerial compromise that sought to accept stronger immigration controls (and, significantly, the reform of nationality law), justifiable in the national interest, and to remove the issues from the political sphere through strong administration and wide governmental discretion.This compromise was subsequently weakened by threats to the governing competence that underlay it in the form of problems in the control system highlighted by officials (some of which became public knowledge), the possibility of a deterioration in race relations and an increase in immigration perceived to originate in policy defects and a more liberal management of entry by the Labour government. These perceived failures permitted a restatement of the political legitimacy critique by individuals within the Conservative Party. In seeking to repudiate ideas of 'consensus' more broadly, the party under Margaret Thatcher's leadership reincorporated the populist idea that high minded and elitist bipartisanship was a failed form of governance, emphasising the redress of putatively valid public grievances through a strengthened system of immigration control, designed to cure systematic weaknesses in regulating what had become largely secondary (family) migration, and through the realisation of the 1981 British Nationality Act, intended to close off the period of post-colonial migration