Child schooling, child health and rainfall shocks: evidence from rural Vietnam

We study the effect of early life conditions, proxied by rainfall shocks, on schooling and height in rural Vietnam. Our measure of rainfall shock is defined as deviations from the long-run average. Many Vietnamese rural dwellers engage in rain-fed crop production, mostly irrigated paddy rice. Sufficient annual rainfall could play an important role in the harvest and thus, the household income. Nutritional deficiencies resulting from the household's income shocks may have negative consequences on health. We find that a negative rainfall shock during gestation delays school entry and slows progress through school. In addition, a negative rainfall shock in the third year of life affects adversely both schooling and height. The effects differ by region in ways that reflect differing constraints on families that are shaped by regional economic heterogeneity. We predict that policies that help rural families smooth income shocks will result in increases in human capital and in substantial cumulative returns in productivity over the life course.Vietnam, child nutrition, early childhood, school enrollment

"The Effect of Child Health on Schooling: Evidence from Rural Vietnam"

We study the relationship between long term child health and human capital. Child health may suffer if a child is inadequately nourished or is exposed to disease early in life and this may affect subsequent accumulation of human capital. We use data from rural Vietnam to examine the impact of child health on delay in starting school and schooling progress taking into account that choices of families affect children’s health and schooling. Our instrument is early life rainfall shocks that have differential effects arising from regional economic diversity. Our estimates indicate that better child health results in meaningfully improved schooling outcomes.child health, z-score, school entry delay, schooling gap, rainfall shocks, Vietnam

Joint multicast routing and channel assignment in multiradio multichannel wireless mesh networks using simulated annealing

This is the post-print version of the article - Copyright @ 2008 Springer-VerlagThis paper proposes a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm based optimization approach to search a minimum-interference multicast tree which satisfies the end-to-end delay constraint and optimizes the usage of the scarce radio network resource in wireless mesh networks. In the proposed SA multicast algorithm, the path-oriented encoding method is adopted and each candidate solution is represented by a tree data structure (i.e., a set of paths). Since we anticipate the multicast trees on which the minimum-interference channel assignment can be produced, a fitness function that returns the total channel conflict is devised. The techniques for controlling the annealing process are well developed. A simple yet effective channel assignment algorithm is proposed to reduce the channel conflict. Simulation results show that the proposed SA based multicast algorithm can produce the multicast trees which have better performance in terms of both the total channel conflict and the tree cost than that of a well known multicast algorithm in wireless mesh networks.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/1

Approximate hedging problem with transaction costs in stochastic volatility markets

This paper studies the problem of option replication in general stochastic volatility markets with transaction costs, using a new specification for the volatility adjustment in Leland's algorithm. We prove several limit theorems for the normalized replication error of Leland's strategy, as well as that of the strategy suggested by Lépinette. The asymptotic results obtained not only generalize the existing results, but also enable us to fix the underhedging property pointed out by Kabanov and Safarian. We also discuss possible methods to improve the convergence rate and to reduce the option price inclusive of transaction costs