Interaction between HIV Awareness, Knowledge, Safe Sex Practice and HIV Incidence: Evidence from Botswana

This paper makes methodological and empirical contributions to the study of HIV awareness, knowledge, incidence and safe sex practice in the context of Botswana, one of the most HIV prone countries in the world. While the focus is on Botswana, the paper presents comparable evidence from India to put the Botswana results in perspective. The results point to the strong role played by affluence and education in increasing HIV knowledge, promoting safe sex and reducing HIV incidence. The study presents African evidence on the role played by the empowerment of women in promoting safe sex practices such as condom use. The Botswana results show however that simply increasing HIV knowledge may not be effective in lowering HIV incidence unless people are also made fully aware of the lethal nature of the disease. The lack of significant association between HIV incidence and safe sex practice points to the danger of HIV infected individuals spreading the disease through multiple sex partners and unprotected sex. This danger is underlined by the result that females with multiple sex partners are at higher risk of being infected with HIV.HIV incidence, Female Empowerment, Safe Sex Methods, Finite Mixture Models, Principal Components Analysis.

Multidimensional Deprivation in China, India and Vietnam: A Comparative Study on Micro Data

This study compares living standards in China, India and Vietnam using the recent multidimensional approach. A distinguishing feature of this study is the use of unit record data sets containing household level information on a wide range of variables including access to several dimensions of living, wealth and child health. The study uses household level information on a wide variety of indicators and the methodology of Principal Component Analysis to measure household wealth. The wealth index is then used to examine the distribution of deprivation and poverty by wealth percentiles. This paper uses the Lorenz curve for wealth and the pseudo Lorenz curves for deprivation and poverty to show that wealth, used here as a proxy for income, understates deprivation and poverty in all the three countries. The paper also provides evidence on child health, which is at odds with the overall progress that is portrayed by the multidimensional measures.Multidimensional Deprivation, Wealth Index, Principal Component Analysis, Sub group Decomposability.

Strategic Release of News at the EPA

Using advances in text analysis, we examine the content and timing of 21,493 press releases issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) between 1994 and 2009. Press releases announcing enforcement actions or regulatory changes were issued more often on Fridays and before holidays, a time when news has the least impact on media coverage and financial markets. Changing the timing of press releases may increase deterrence through awareness of regulation and market reaction to environmental news. We find no evidence of regulatory capture. We compare text analysis techniques that allow data collection from sources previously too expensive to access.text analysis, computational linguistics, regulation, environment, politics, Environmental Protection Agency

The Calculation of Rural Urban Food Price Differentials from Unit Values in Household Expenditure Surveys: A new procedure and comparison with existing methods

While national and international statistical agencies spend much resource on calculating purchasing power parity (PPP) between countries, relatively little attention is given to PPP calculations within countries. Yet, for large and heterogeneous countries, such as the US and India, intra country PPP is as important as cross-country PPP. This is particularly true of the rural urban divide in such countries where the idea that one unit of currency has the same purchasing power in both sectors is clearly false. This paper addresses this limitation by proposing a demand system based methodology for calculating rural urban PPP that incorporates rural urban differences in preferences and applies it to India. The methodology is compared with conventional procedures, such as the Laspeyre’s price index and the CPD model, and shown to have several advantages over them. The result on significant rural urban price difference in India underlines the need to extend the cross-country PPP calculations to incorporate spatial differences in large, heterogeneous countries with a diverse set of preferences and prices.Rural Urban PPP, Unit Values, Quality Adjustment, CPD Model

Estimating Intra Country and Cross Country Purchasing Power Parities from Household Expenditure Data Using Single Equation and Complete Demand Systems Approach: India and Vietnam

This study departs from the previous literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) by proposing a demand system based methodology for calculating the PPP that takes account of consumer preferences and allows for the substitution effect of price changes. The methodology is applied to provide evidence on PPP between the Indian Rupee and the Vietnamese Dong. The study is conducted within a framework that allows for regional variation in preferences and price changes both inside the country and between countries and proposes and applies a methodology for constructing prices from unit values after adjusting them for quality and demographic effects. Using these prices the intra-country PPPs for India and Vietnam are calculated using the single equation (Engel curve based) procedure of Coondoo, Majumder and Chattopadhyay (2011). The cross country PPPs are calculated between sectors and across expenditure classes, apart from PPP at aggregate country to country level, using both the single equation and system based procedures. The paper contains evidence that the incorporation of price effects leads to a significant change in the PPP rates obtained from using cross section data (single equation procedure) ignoring price changes. The demand system based methodology yields PPP rates that are consistent with those obtained from conventional procedures such as the CPD method, yields standard errors of the PPPs and has the additional advantage of testing for invariance of inter-country PPP across expenditure classes. The disaggregated PPP rates question the conventional practice of using a single economy wide PPP in inequality and poverty comparisons.Purchasing Power Parity, QAIDS, CPD method, Spatial Prices, TCLI.

ESSAYS ON NEWS AND ASSET PRICES

The first essay examines news and the cross section of returns. Using a sentiment score provided by Thomson Reuters to measure the tone of news articles, this paper examines monthly portfolio returns constructed from information about past news articles. The sentiment score is obtained from the kind of words and phrases that are used in the news article. Positive tone in news articles in the past months predicts positive returns. Similarly, negative tone in the past months predicts negative returns. Past sentiment predicts future returns even for large stocks. The predictive ability of past sentiment dominates the predictive ability of past returns. After controlling for past sentiment, the predictive ability of past returns (in predicting future return) disappears. The findings are robust to multiple specifications. The predictive ability of past sentiment can be used profitably. When applied to the largest decile of stocks, a strategy that takes a long position in stocks with past positive sentiment score and a short position in stocks with past negative sentiment score generates a statistically significant alpha of 34 basis points per month. The resulting portfolio is also positively correlated with a long-short momentum portfolio. Within the same time period, a trading strategy using the sentiment scores from the subset of news articles citing analysts is not profitable. The news items that cite analysts have economically significant contemporaneous returns. The findings suggest that (i) the market underreacts to information contained in news articles, (ii) momentum might be related to underreaction to the sentiment information, and (iii) market participants pay attention to sentiment score information in analyst news. The findings are consistent with a model where one trader has private information and others are trading based on past returns and volume information. The paper also shows that after adjusting for firm size, stocks with abnormally high counts of news articles underperform stocks with normal counts of news. Stocks with abnormally low newscounts also underperform. The second essay examines the relationship between news and trading activity. The theory of trading game invariance of Kyle and Obizhaeva(2009) predicts that for every one percent increase in trading activity, the frequency of news articles should increase two-thirds of one percent. Using news data from 2003 to 2008, we show that the cross-sectional variation in news articles across stocks is related to the trading activity in a manner consistent with the trading game invariance. The relationship is robust to various estimation procedures including models of count data. The relationship is also robust to multiple ways of counting news and excluding various type of firm specific news

Green retailing: Environmental strategies of organized retailers and competitive advantage

Green Movement is becoming the buzzword of today’s business world.Across the world businesses are developing green strategies and thereby are working towards developing a low carbon landscape. Retailing is as old as business, trade and commerce and currently has revolutionized into new forms and formats.As the retail sector is quite energy intensive, retailers are left with no choice but to consider and adopt eco-friendly practices.The retailers serve as strategic touch point between producers and consumers and own the responsibility of offering green products and the greening of consumption.Green Retailing (GR) refers to the management approach that pursues environmental protection to improve the retail value chain through eliminating waste, increasing efficiency and reducing costs.Therefore, it is very important for the retailers to understand the perception and attitude of customers regarding the green image of the retailers.It aims to understand the factors that influence green buying behavior of customers under the green retail settings and how these green cues of store environment can influence consumer behavior as are their non-green counterparts in Indian context