A NEW APPROXIMATE GLS ESTIMATOR FOR THE REGRESSION MODEL WITH MA(1) DISTURBANCES

This paper introduces a new approximate GLS estimator for the regression model with MA(1) disturbances, which outperforms both the Balestra (1980) and the Park and Heikes (1983) approximations and which is almost as efficient as the exact GLS estimator.     

Missing in action: teacher and health worker absence in developing countries.

In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators make unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the facilities.     

Output,employment and inventories under general excess supply

The paper examines how the results of the Barro-Grossman (1971, 1976) model are modified when inventories are added to their framework. As inventories are introduced, the demand for labor becomes sensitive to the real wage even when there exists general excess supply, and it becomes less sensitive to aggregate demand than in the Barro-Grossman model. A cut in real wage can increase output and employment in this same framework a result that runs counter to the conclusion in the existing Keynesian literature. The demand multiplier comes out to be weaker than in the no-inventory case.     

AN APPROXIMATELY UNBIASED ESTIMATOR FOR THE THEORETICAL BLACK-SCHOLES EUROPEAN CALL VALUATION

Black-Scholes price estimate of a call is commonly formed by using an estimate of the stock return variance rate in the formula. This, however, produces systematic bias with respect to the model's value with the true variance rate. This paper proposes a new procedure to form Black-Scholes price estimates using Taylor series approximation. Our Monte Carlo results favour the new procedure over the common and the recently proposed Butler-Schachter approaches when bias magnitude and any systematic pattern thereof are the relevant concerns.     

Conditional cash transfers and female schooling: the impact of the female school stipend programme on public school enrolments in Punjab,Pakistan

Instead of mean-tested Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes, some countries have implemented gender-targeted CCTs to explicitly address intra-household disparities in human capital investments. This study focuses on addressing the direct impact of a female school stipend programme in Punjab, Pakistan – Did the intervention increase female enrolment in public schools? To address this question, we draw upon data from the provincial school censuses 2003 and 2005. We estimate the net growth in female enrolments in grade 6–8 in stipend eligible schools. Impact evaluation analysis, including difference-and-difference (DD), triple differencing (DDD) and regression-discontinuity design (RDD), indicate a modest but statistically significant impact of the intervention. The preferred estimator derived from a combination of DDD and RDD empirical strategies suggests that the average programme impact between 2003 and 2005 was an increase of six female students per school in terms of absolute change and an increase of 9% in female enrolment in terms of relative change. A triangulation effort is also undertaken using two rounds of a nationally representative household survey before and after the intervention. Even though the surveys are not representative at the sub-provincial level, the results corroborate evidence of the impact using school census data.