Health Spending and Decentralization in Indonesia

Using a panel dataset of 320 Indonesian districts we examine the impact of district budgets on public health spending, utilization patters in the public and private sector, and private health spending in the four years after decentralization. We exploit the panel structure of the data and the fact that district budgets are largely driven by central government transfers to determine causal patterns. We find that the elasticity of public health spending with respect to district budgets is around 0.9 with a higher elasticity for development spending than for routine spending. District splits reduce public health spending. We find a positive effect of public district health spending on public sector utilization, with the strongest effects in the poorest two quintiles. We find no significant effects on private sector utilization and out of pocket health expenditures. --public spending,health,decentralization

HINT: Hierarchical Invertible Neural Transport for Density Estimation and Bayesian Inference

A large proportion of recent invertible neural architectures is based on a coupling block design. It operates by dividing incoming variables into two sub-spaces, one of which parameterizes an easily invertible (usually affine) transformation that is applied to the other. While the Jacobian of such a transformation is triangular, it is very sparse and thus may lack expressiveness. This work presents a simple remedy by noting that (affine) coupling can be repeated recursively within the resulting sub-spaces, leading to an efficiently invertible block with dense triangular Jacobian. By formulating our recursive coupling scheme via a hierarchical architecture, HINT allows sampling from a joint distribution p(y,x) and the corresponding posterior p(x|y) using a single invertible network. We demonstrate the power of our method for density estimation and Bayesian inference on a novel data set of 2D shapes in Fourier parameterization, which enables consistent visualization of samples for different dimensionalities

Implications of the 2002 U.S. Farm Act for World Agriculture

This paper discusses the implications of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 for U.S. agriculture and its subsequent impact on world agricultural prices and world trade

Trend Yield Analysis and Yield Growth Assumptions

Discusses the formulation of assumptions pertaining to yield growth in the crop sector used in developing market projections

Testimony on the Value of the Mississippi River for U.S. Agriculture: Presented to the Mississippi River Caucus Washington D.C.

Presented to the Mississippi River Caucus Washington D.C.The Mississippi River is the most critical artery of the inland waterway system, supporting between 50 and 60 percent of total U.S. corn exports and 30 to 45 percent of total U.S. soybean exports. In calendar year 2002, 1.1 billion bushels of corn, 389 million bushels of soybeans, and 32 million bushels of wheat were transported to the Gulf via the Mississippi River

Doctor Anderson!

Fiction by John Keane and Robert Krus

Motivating Employee-Owners in ESOP Firms: Human Resource Policies and Company Performance

What enables some employee ownership firms to overcome the free rider problem and motivate employees to improve performance? This study analyzes the role of human resource policies in the performance of employee ownership companies, using employee survey data from 14 companies and a national sample of employee-owners. Between-firm comparisons of 11 ESOP firms show that an index of human resource policies, nominally controlled by management, is positively related to employee reports of co-worker performance and other good workplace outcomes (including perceptions of fairness, good supervision, and worker input and influence). Within-firm comparisons in three ESOP firms, and exploratory results from a national survey, show that employee-owners who participate in employee involvement committees are more likely to exert peer pressure on shirking co-workers. We conclude that an understanding of how and when employee ownership works successfully requires a three-pronged analysis of: 1) the incentives that ownership gives; 2) the participative mechanisms available to workers to act on those incentives; and 3) the corporate culture that battles against tendencies to free ride.

Experimental determination of the stable-trim attitudes of two proposed, general-purpose, heat-source modules

Ballistic range tests have been conducted to determine the aerodynamically stable trim attitudes of two proposed general-purpose heat-source module configurations. Tests were conducted at speeds of 4.6 km/sec for the concept module, and at both 4.6 km/sec and 1.4 km/sec for the MOD II. Test results indicated that both configurations were stable when launched in the face-on attitude. When launched in the side-on attitude, the MOD II configuration was found to be stable, while tests of the concept module did not give definitive results

Evolution of an equatorial coronal hole structure and the released coronal hole wind stream: Carrington rotations 2039 to 2050

The Sun is a highly dynamic environment that exhibits dynamic behavior on many different timescales. In particular, coronal holes exhibit temporal and spatial variability. Signatures of these coronal dynamics are inherited by the coronal hole wind streams that originate in these regions and can effect the Earth's magnetosphere. Both the cause of the observed variabilities and how these translate to fluctuations in the in situ observed solar wind is not yet fully understood. During solar activity minimum the structure of the magnetic field typically remains stable over several Carrington rotations (CRs). But how stable is the solar magnetic field? Here, we address this question by analyzing the evolution of a coronal hole structure and the corresponding coronal hole wind stream emitted from this source region over 12 consecutive CRs in 2006. To this end, we link in situ observations of Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) onboard the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) with synoptic maps of Michelson Doppler imager (MDI) on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) at the photospheric level through a combination of ballistic back-mapping and a potential field source surface (PFSS) approach. Together, these track the evolution of the open field line region that is identified as the source region of a recurring coronal hole wind stream. We find that the shape of the open field line region and to some extent also the solar wind properties are influenced by surrounding more dynamic closed loop regions. We show that the freeze-in order can change within a coronal hole wind stream on small timescales and illustrate a mechanism that can cause changes in the freeze-in order. The inferred minimal temperature profile is variable even within coronal hole wind and is in particular most variable in the outer corona