Being informed matters: Experimental evidence on the demand for environmental quality

A randomly selected treatment group of households in Gurgaon, India was informed whether (or not) their drinking water had tested positive for fecal contamination using a simple test costing about $0.50. Households that were not initially purifying their water, and were told that their drinking water had tested positive, were 11 percentage points (p-valueEnvironmental quality, drinking water, information, awareness, experiment

Inelastic Phonon Scattering in Graphene FETs

Inelastic phonon scattering in graphene field-effect transistors (FETs) is studied by numerically solving the Boltzmann transport equation in three dimensional real and phase spaces (x, kx, ky). A kink behavior due to ambipolar transport agreeing with experiments is observed. While low field behavior has previously been mostly attributed to elastic impurity scattering in earlier studies, it is found in the study that even low field mobility is affected by inelastic phonon scattering in recent graphene FET experiments reporting high mobilities . As the FET is biased in the saturation regime, the average carrier injection velocity at the source end of the device is found to remain almost constant with regard to the applied gate voltage over a wide voltage range, which results in significantly improved transistor linearity compared to what a simpler model would predict. Physical mechanisms for good linearity are explained, showing the potential of graphene FETs for analogue electronics applications

Household Income Dynamics in Rural China

Income dynamics, Poverty , Multiple equilibria, China

Transient poverty in rural China

The authors study transient poverty in a six-year panel dataset for a sample of 5,000 households in post-reform rural China. Half of the mean squared poverty gap is transient, in that it is directly attributable to fluctuations in consumption over time. There is enough transient poverty to treble the cost of eliminating chronic poverty when targeting solely according to current consumption - and to title the balance in favor of untargeted transfers. Transient poverty is low among the chronically poorest, and tends to be high among those near the poverty line. Using censored quantile regression techniques, the authors find that systemic factors determine transient poverty, although they are generally congruent with the determinants of chronic poverty. There is little to suggest that the two types of poverty are created by fundamentally different processes. It appears that the same things that would help reduce chronic poverty - higher and more secure farm yield and higher levels of physical and human capital - would also help reduce transient poverty.Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Safety Nets and Transfers,Services&Transfers to Poor,Poverty Assessment,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Rural Poverty Reduction

Household income dynamics in rural China

Theoretical work has shown that nonlinear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. If this is true, the potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty would be an investment with lasting benefits, and pro-poor redistribution would promote aggregate economic growth. The authors test for nonlinearity in the dynamics of household incomes and expenditures using panel data for 6,000 households over six years in rural southwest China. While they find evidence of nonlinearity in the income and expenditure dynamics, there is no sign of a dynamic poverty trap. The authors argue that existing private and social arrangements in this setting protect vulnerable households from the risk of destitution. However, their findings imply that the speed of recovery from an income shock is appreciably slower for the poor than for others. They also find that current inequality reducesfuture growth in mean incomes, though the"growth cost"of inequality appears to be small. The maximum contribution of inequality is estimated to be 4-7 percent of mean income and 2 percent of mean consumption.Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Inequality,Economic Theory&Research,Health Economics&Finance,Rural Poverty Reduction

Income gains to the poor from workfare - estimates for Argentina's TRABAJAR Program

The authors use propensity-score matching methods to estimate the income gains to families of workers participating in an Argentinian work-fare program. The methods they propose are feasible for evaluating safety net interventions in settings in which many other methods are not feasible. The average gain is about half the gross wage. Even allowing for forgone income, the distribution of gains is decidedly pro-poor. More than half the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally and 80- percent of them are in the poorest quintile --reflecting the self-targeting feature of the program design. Average gains for men and women are similar, but gains are higher for younger workers. Women's greater participation would not enhance average income gains, and the distribution of gains would worsen. Greater participation by the young would raise average gains but would also worsen the distribution.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Services&Transfers to Poor,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance,Rural Poverty Reduction,Services&Transfers to Poor