1,187 research outputs found
Aging and Death under a Dollar a Day
This paper uses household survey data form several developing countries to investigate whether the poor (defined as those living under 2 dollars a day at PPP) and the non poor have different mortality rates in old age. We construct a proxy measure of longevity, which is the probability that an adult's mother and father are alive. The non-poor's mothers are more likely to be alive than the poor's mothers. Using panel data set for Indonesia and Vietnam, we also find that older adults are significantly more likely to have died five years later if they are poor. The direction of causality is unclear: the poor may be poor because they are sick (and thus more likely to die), or they could die because they are poor.
SOCIAL CONTRACTS, MARKETS AND EFFICIENCY -- GROUNDWATER IRRIGATION IN NORTH INDIA
This paper uses primary data to analyze the institutions and informal markets that govern groundwater allocation in the principal sugarcane belt of North India. In contrast to earlier literature, we find that the observed water trades result in efficient water allocation across farms. We interpret this and other stylized facts in terms of a simple bargaining model with limited inter-player transfers. Poor functioning of the power sector leads to reduced pumping and a water supply constraint. Simulations show that power supply reform can significantly increase farm yields, be financed out of the increased farm profits, and provide an instrument to use for attaining intertemporal efficiency in water allocation.water markets, market structure, water production function.
Development of a Novel Handheld Device for Active Compensation of Physiological Tremor
In microsurgery, the human hand imposes certain limitations in accurately positioning the tip of a device such as scalpel. Any errors in the motion of the hand make microsurgical procedures difficult and involuntary motions such as hand tremors can make some procedures significantly difficult to perform. This is particularly true in the case of vitreoretinal microsurgery. The most familiar source of involuntary motion is physiological tremor. Real-time compensation of tremor is, therefore, necessary to assist surgeons to precisely position and manipulate the tool-tip to accurately perform a microsurgery. In this thesis, a novel handheld device (AID) is described for compensation of physiological tremor in the hand. MEMS-based accelerometers and gyroscopes have been used for sensing the motion of the hand in six degrees of freedom (DOF). An augmented state complementary Kalman filter is used to calculate 2 DOF orientation. An adaptive filtering algorithm, band-limited Multiple Fourier linear combiner (BMFLC), is used to calculate the tremor component in the hand in real-time. Ionic Polymer Metallic Composites (IPMCs) have been used as actuators for deflecting the tool-tip to compensate for the tremor
Study of a pair of coupled continuum equations modeling surface growth
In this communication we introduce a pair of coupled continuum equations to
model overlayer growth with evaporation-accretion due to thermal or mechanical
agitations of the substrate. We gain insight into the dynamics of growth via
one-loop perturbative techniques. This allows us to analyze our numerical data.
We conclude that there is a crossover behaviour from a roughening regime to a
very long-time, large length scale smoothening regime.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to J. Phys.: Condens. Matte
A pQCD-based description of heavy and light flavor jet quenching
We present a successful description of the medium modification of light and
heavy flavor jets within a perturbative QCD (pQCD) based approach. Only the
couplings involving hard partons are assumed to be weak. The effect of the
medium on a hard parton, per unit time, is encoded in terms of three
non-perturbative, related transport coefficients which describe the transverse
momentum squared gained, the elastic energy loss and diffusion in elastic
energy transfer. A fit of the centrality dependence of the suppression and the
azimuthal anisotropy of leading hadrons tends to favor somewhat larger
transport coefficients for heavy quarks. Imposing additional constraints based
on leading order (LO) Hard Thermal Loop (HTL) effective theory, leads to a
worsening of the fit.Comment: v2, 4 pages, 3 figure
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Limited Attention and Income Distribution
Economists have long been interested in the idea that there is a direct circular relation between poverty and low productivity, and not just one that is mediated by market failures, usually in asset markets. The nutrition-based efficiency wage model (Partha Dasgupta and
Debraj Ray, 1987) is the canonical example of models where this happens: However it
has been variously suggested (see for example T. N. Srinivasan, 1994) that the link from nutrition to productivity and especially the link from productivity to nutrition is too weak to be any more than a small part of the story. Partha Dasgupta himself acknowledges this when he writes "nutrition-productivity construct provides a metaphor,..., for ... an economic
environment harboring poverty traps" (Partha Dasgupta, 1997, page 5). We propose an alternative approach to this question based on the idea that attention
is a scarce resource that is important for productivity. Specifically, people may not be able to fully attend to their jobs if they are also worrying about problems at home and being distracted in this way reduces productivity. But not paying attention at home is also costly: early symptoms of a child's sickness may go unnoticed; water may run out at the
end of the day; kerosene for lighting lamps at home might run out and make it hard to do homework; etc. Finally, the extent to which home life distracts depends on the nature of home life. Specifically, certain goods (e.g. a good baby sitter, a 24-hour piped water supply,
a connection to a power supply grid) can reduce the extent of home life distraction. These three assumptions generate an interesting relation between income and productivity that is at the core of our model. The non-poor in this model, by virtue of owning distraction-saving goods and services at home, are able to focus more on their work. Hence
they will be more productive at work and will be able to afford more distraction-saving goods. This simple two-way relationship between income and productivity produces a discontinuity in the relation between human capital and earnings which is certain cases can lead to a poverty trap, even in the absence of any market failures.Economic
Do firms want to borrow more? : testing credit constraints using a directed lending program
May 2002. Revised: May 200
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