Non-farm Income and Consumption Expenditures in Rural Bangladesh: Empirical Evidence from Multilevel Regression Modelling

This study examines the effects of non-farm income on household consumption expenditures in rural Bangladesh. A two-stage endogenous treatment effect model is built on data from a nationally representative Household Income Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2010 to control selection bias. The HIES follows a hierarchical data structure because the survey is based on two-stage stratified sampling. A multilevel mixed-effects linear regression model is used to capture the unobserved heterogeneity between clusters (PSUs) along with revealing important factors. Results reveal that non-farm income has a significant positive effect on household’s consumption expenditures and non-farm income recipient households spend about 29% more than their counterparts. In addition, higher level of per capita income, education, smaller family size and lower dependency ratio are found to be more effective in increasing consumption expenditures of rural households. Significant cluster-level variations are observed in the analyses. This study recommends that non-farm income generating activities should be encouraged among rural households as this would raise their consumption expenditures and hence, improve welfare and living standards among them.

     

The Influence of Political Regime on State-Level Disciplinary Actions of CPAs Sanctioned by the PCAOB

Journal of Business Ethics - We investigate whether enforcement is influenced by politics by comparing the severity of PCAOB sanctions of individual CPAs to the severity of related state-level...     

Workers’ Rights in the QIZs in Jordan

Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal - This study is an in-depth analysis of workers’ rights in the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs) in Jordan. More specifically, it aims to discover...     

Business process management in hotels: with a focus on delivering quality guest service

Quality & Quantity - In this study business process management as a tool of improvement service quality is introduced and it is examined that how it can be used to improve service quality in...     

Volatility Spillover Effects in Interregional Equity Markets: Empirical Evidence from Brazil and Turkey

We investigate volatility spillovers between two stock markets: Turkey and Brazil. Using a misspecification-robust causality-in-variance test, we find evidence supporting volatility spillovers from the São Paulo Stock Exchange to the Istanbul Stock Exchange. Moreover, the results imply that financial crises may change the nature of volatility spillovers between the two markets by adding an additional channel of volatility transmission from Turkey to Brazil.     

Conflicting Bifuzzy Multi-attribute Group Decision Making Model with Application to Flood Control Project

We propose a group decision making model based on conflicting bifuzzy sets (CBFS) where evaluation are bi-valued in accordance to the subjective assessment obtained from the experts for the positive and negative views. This paper discusses the weighting methods for particular attribute and subattribute with emphasis given to the unification of subjective and objective weights. The integration of CBFS in the model is naturally done by extending the fuzzy evaluation in parallel with the intuitionistic fuzzy. We introduce a new technique to compute the similarity measure, being the degree of agreement between the experts. We end up the paper by demonstrating the applicability of the proposed model to the empirical case of flood control project, one of the project selection problems.     

Death from drowning: defining a new challenge for child survival in Bangladesh

The study focuses on children less than 5 years old and explores the epidemiological profile and correlates of drowning as a challenge to child survival in Bangladesh. Two data sources from Bangladesh, a cohort of 8,070 children followed for 2 years in a rural area and a nation-wide survey conducted in 1996–97 have been used. In addition, a systematic review of the literature has been conducted spanning the past two decades for analysis of drowning in children. Seventy drowning deaths were reported in the cohort and 726 deaths were reported in the national survey. Verbal autopsy and semi-structured interviews were conducted on all deaths. Drowning accounted for 43% of deaths in the cohort and 20% of deaths in 1–4-year-old children in the national survey. Most drowning deaths were in 12–23 month old children from falling into ditches and ponds. Communities provided valuable insights on possible interventions to reduce deaths due to drowning. Drowning is a newly recognized challenge for Bangladesh. Considerable research and programmatic work is required to understand the nature of the problem and develop appropriate interventions. This paper calls on aid agencies to create opportunities for drowning research and action in their work plans for the country.     

Trading volume,time-varying conditional volatility,and asymmetric volatility spillover in the Saudi stock market

Despite the well known importance of volatility–volume relationship, there is a paucity of research on this topic in emerging markets. We attempt to partially fill this gap by investigating volatility–volume relationship in the most important exchange market in the Middle East. We test the effect of trading volume on the persistence of the time-varying conditional volatility of returns in the Saudi stock market. Overall our results support the mixture of distribution hypothesis at the firm level. We also use two different proxies for information arrival, intra-day volatility, and overnight indicators. We find that these are good proxies for information and are important as contemporaneous volume in explaining conditional volatility. We also test for the volatility spillover direction between large- and small-cap portfolios. Our results show that the spillover effect is larger and statistically significant from large to small companies.