Domestic water pricing with household surveys : a study of acceptability and willingness to pay in Chongqing, China

In determining domestic water prices, policy makers often need to use information about the demand side rather than only relying on information about the supply side. Household surveys have frequently been employed to collect demand-side information. This paper presents a multiple bounded discrete choice household survey model. It discusses how the model can be utilized to collect and analyze information about the acceptability of different water prices by different types of households, as well as households'willingness to pay for water service improvement. The results obtained from these surveys can be directly utilized in the development of water pricing and subsidy policies. The paper also presents an empirical multiple bounded discrete choice study conducted in Chongqing, China. In this case, domestic water service quality was seriously inadequate, but financial resources were insufficient to improve service quality. With a survey of about 1,500 households in five suburban districts in Chongqing Municipality, this study shows that a significant increase in the water price is feasible as long as the poorest households can be properly subsidized and certain public awareness and accountability campaigns can be conducted to make the price increase more acceptable to the public. The analysis also indicates that the order in which hypothetical prices are presented to respondents systematically affects their answers, and should be taken into account when designing survey instruments.Town Water Supply and Sanitation,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Water Supply and Systems

Prosodic challenges faced by English speakers reading Mandarin

This study compares the prosodic characteristics of L2-Mandarin as spoken by L1-English speakers using L1-Mandarin utterances. The acoustic correlates examined include individual tonal realizations, interactions of tones in sequence, durational features and intensity envelopes. L2-Mandarin users realize the contour tones RISE and FALL with both rising and falling pitch, and produce the second tone of disyllabic words with more varied pitch. L2-users employ larger vowel durations, syllable durations and larger variation over vowel intervals in sequential pairs than L1-Mandarin users. Both user groups show similar intensity envelopes. Implications of this study include tailoring language training programs that counterbalance L1 influences

Resummation prediction on top quark transverse momentum distribution at large pT

We study the factorization and resummation of t-channel top quark transverse momentum distribution at large pT in the SM at both the Tevatron and the LHC with soft-collinear effective theory. The cross section in the threshold region can be factorized into a convolution of hard, jet and soft functions. In particular, we first calculate the NLO soft functions for this process, and give a RG improved cross section by evolving the different functions to a common scale. Our results show that the resummation effects increase the NLO results by about 9%-13% and 4%-9% when the top quark pT is larger than 50 and 70 GeV at the Tevatron and the 8 TeV LHC, respectively. Also, we discuss the scale independence of the cross section analytically, and show how to choose the proper scales at which the perturbative expansion can converge fast.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures, version published in Phys.Rev.

Determinations of form factors for semileptonic D→KD\rightarrow K decays and leptoquark constraints

By analyzing all existing measurements for $D\rightarrow K \ell^+ \nu_{\ell}$ ( $\ell=e,\ \mu$ ) decays, we find that the determinations of both the vector form factor $f_+^K(q^2)$ and scalar form factor $f_0^K(q^2)$ for semileptonic $D\rightarrow K$ decays from these measurements are feasible. By taking the parameterization of the one order series expansion of the $f_+^K(q^2)$ and $f_0^K(q^2)$, $f_+^K(0)|V_{cs}|$ is determined to be $0.7182\pm0.0029$, and the shape parameters of $f_+^K(q^2)$ and $f_0^K(q^2)$ are $r_{+1}=-2.16\pm0.007$ and $r_{01}=0.89\pm3.27$, respectively. Combining with the average $f_+^K(0)$ of $N_f=2+1$ and $N_f=2+1+1$ lattice calculaltion, the $|V_{cs}|$ is extracted to be $0.964\pm0.004\pm0.019$ where the first error is experimental and the second theoretical. Alternatively, the $f_+^K(0)$ is extracted to be $0.7377\pm0.003\pm0.000$ by taking the $|V_{cs}|$ as the value from the global fit with the unitarity constraint of the CKM matrix. Moreover, using the obtained form factors by $N_f=2+1+1$ lattice QCD, we re-analyze these measurements in the context of new physics. Constraints on scalar leptoquarks are obtained for different final states of semileptonic $D \rightarrow K$ decays