What Drives Voluntary Eco-Certification in Mexico?

Advocates claim that voluntary programs can help shore up poorly performing command-and-control environmental regulation in developing countries. Although literature on this issue is quite thin, research on voluntary environmental programs in industrialized countries suggests that they are often ineffective because they mainly attract relatively clean plants free-riding on prior pollution control investments. We use plant-level data on some 59,000 facilities to identify the drivers of participation in the ISO 14001 certification program in Mexico. We find that regulatory fines spur certification: on average, a fine roughly doubles the likelihood of certification for three years. Hence, the program attracts dirty firms and at least has the potential to improve environmental performance. We also find that plants that sold their goods in overseas markets, used imported inputs, were relatively large, and were in certain sectors and states were more likely to be certified.voluntary environmental regulation, duration analysis, Mexico

What is …?: a research ethics jeopardy" game to help community partners understand human subjects protections and their importance.

Although community partners in participatory research need to understand basic principles of research ethics and human subjects protections, few tools have been designed with these partners in mind. To assist in this process, and help engage youth community partners in learning this critical material, a game was developed based on the popular television program Jeopardy(TM). Piloted with a group of 18 Mexican- American adolescents as part of a broader community-based participatory research(CBPR) project, the game begins with small group study of infamous cases of research ethics violations (eg. the Tuskegee Syphilis Study) and of the human subjects protections that resulted. The participants then play the Jeopardy game in teams, responding to “What is . . . ?” questions concerning the five infamous research studies and corresponding human subjects protections. Although observational findings revealed substantial learning and active engagement in the process, as well as strong retention of the material several months later, the tool requires further evaluation. Based on this pilot experience, however, we believe the Research Ethics Jeopardy™ Game offers promise in helping youth and other community partners in CBPR master critical information about human subjects protections and their importance in an accessible and lively manner

Do agricultural contracts affect grain prices? Evidence from Mexico

In the late 80's and early 90's Mexico eliminated minimum price policies of main agricultural commodities and substituted those policies by government operated contract markets. Contracts can help smooth price variations and facilitate risk-sharing but their impact on price levels is uncertain. We simultaneously estimate the impacts of quantity supplied sold via contracts and the cash market on cash prices for grains participating in contracts: wheat, corn, soybeans and sorghum. By doing so we estimate an inverse grain demand function using supply shifters and other exogenous variables as exclusion restrictions. Our findings show that quantity supplied sold via contracts is a more important determinant of prices than quantity supplied in the cash market. A 10% increase of volume sold via contracts is estimated to reduce cash market prices by 2.5 %. Additionally, we find no evidence that more contracts affect prices by reducing quantity supplied in the cash market

Who is selling you chiquilitros of gasoline? Evidence from a public disclosure policy

This paper estimates the impacts of disclosing information online and through the newspapers of gas stations that violate fuel supplying standards in Mexico. Using data from inspection histories, it finds that disclosing information online decreases the probability that any gas station would be found in violation in subsequent periods. Gas stations exposed in the newspapers are estimated to decrease their sales at the month of the newspaper publication. This effect fades with time and is not significant for subsequent months. The paper shows that public disclosure mechanisms can complement enforcement effort in contexts where institutions are weak

Constructing an Incidence Model for Dengue Fever applied to Paraguayan communities

Comidenco aims at constructing a predictive model, focused on (but not restricted to) incidence as response variable. The model would take local variables including anti-dengue actions, evaluate the probability of spread of the disease, and predict incidence. This will identify communities with greater danger of an increase in infection rate, helping to decide where to put resources into action.CONACYT - Consejo Nacional de Ciencias y TecnologíaPROCIENCI

A note on the diffusion of business cycles

For over five decades, diffusion indexes have been widely used by statistical and economic agencies as an instrument to summarize the dynamics of a group of disaggregated time-series economic data. In this note we revise the methods for constructing diffusion indexes, propose a novel generalized diffusion index and apply it to the U.S. State Coincident Indexes published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. We show that the proposed index is more informative and conclusive regarding the stage of the aggregate business cycle than the traditional indexes used by some statistical agencies. Moreover, one of the unique properties of the generalized diffusion index is that it allows a consistent reading of the contributions of its constituent units