Determinants of age at marriage in Karnataka during 1971-1981: a district level analysis

"In this paper we examined the interdistrict variations in mean age at marriage of males and females in Karnataka [India] in two points of time, 1971 and 1981, and also the possible factors influencing this variation....A multivariate analysis of the determinants of mean age at marriage in Karnataka showed that literacy rate, sex ratio of the population and percentage of villages electrified are important in explaining the regional and time variation in age at marriage of both sexes.... Our regression results indicated that a 10 per cent increase in female literacy rate is associated with approximately one-year increase in female age at marriage. However, neither the increase in female literacy nor the changes in the sex ratio of the population could explain all the increase in female age at marriage during 1971-81. This indirectly suggests that there was an increase in female age at marriage among all socio-economic groups."     

Integrating ecosystem services into conservation assessments: A review

A call has been made for conservation planners to include ecosystem services into their assessments of conservation priority areas. The need to develop an integrated approach to meeting different conservation objectives and a shift in focus towards human wellbeing are some of the motivations behind this call. There is currently no widely accepted approach to planning for ecosystem services. This study contributes towards the development of this approach through a review of conservation assessments and the extent to which they include ecosystem services. Of the 476 conservation assessments identified by a set of search terms on the Web of Science, 100 were randomly selected for this review. Of these only seven had included ecosystem services, while another 13 had referred to ecosystem services as a rationale for conservation without including them in the assessment. The majority of assessments were based on biodiversity pattern data while 19 used data on ecological processes. A total of 11 of these 19 assessments used processes, which could be linked to services. Ecosystem services have witnessed an increase in attention received in conservation assessments since the year 2000, however trends were not apparent beyond this date. In order to assess which types of ecosystem services and how they have been accounted for in conservation assessments, we extended our review to include an additional nine conservation assessments which included ecosystem services. The majority included cultural ecosystem services, followed by regulatory, provisioning and supporting services respectively. We conclude with an analysis of the constraints and opportunities for the integration of ecosystem services into conservation assessments and highlight the urgent need for an appropriate framework for planning for ecosystem services.     

Trading for the future: Signaling in permit markets

Permit markets are celebrated as a policy instrument since they allow (i) firms to equalize marginal costs through trade and (ii) the regulator to distribute the burden in a politically desirable way. These two concerns, however, may conflict in a dynamic setting. Anticipating the regulator's future desire to give more permits to firms that appear to need them, firms purchase permits to signal their need. This raises the price above marginal costs and the market becomes inefficient. If the social cost of pollution is high and the government intervenes frequently in the market, the distortions are greater than the gains from trade and non-tradable permits are better. The analysis helps to understand permit markets and how they should be designed.     

The effects of the international-domestic interest rate gap on US output

This paper examines how the relationships linking money to real output are altered when an international-domestic interest rate gap is included in the model. The results indicate that both the international-domestic interest rate gap and term structure exert a statistically significant effect on real economic activity. In addition, fluctuations in these variables contain significant information about future changes in real output. An interesting finding is that while the term structure dominates the international-domestic interest rate gap when estimating the entire time period, 1970:1–1996:4, the international-domestic interest rate gap clearly dominates in the more recent time period, 1985:1–1996:4.     

Representing interval orders by a single real-valued function

Let > be an interval order on a topological space X, and let $\text{x > 1 y}$ if and only if there exists x′ with $\text{x?x′>y}$. Then >1 is a preference relation with transitive indifference, which, under suitable conditions, can be represented by a utility function v of the usual sort. In that case, maximisation of v (subject to contraints) leads to a most preferred point relative to >. Following both the Debreu-Rader and the Arrow-Hahn approaches, we discuss the existence and continuity of such a function v.     

Ambient Taxes Under m-Dimensional Choice Sets, Heterogeneous Expectations, and Risk-Aversion

We consider the design of ambient taxes forrisk-neutral and risk-averse polluters whenpolluters and the regulatory agency haveasymmetric information about environmentalrelationships and probabilities associatedwith random events. Unlike prior work, we showthat under these conditions, optimal ambienttaxes must be firm-specific, and accompaniedby additional incentives to influencepolluters' choices of abatement techniques.     

PRODUCTIVE RECESSIONS AND JOBLESS RECOVERIES

We explore international variation in business cycle dynamics to gain insights into the recent pattern of robust productivity growth during downturns (productive recessions) and weak employment growth during recoveries (jobless recoveries) seen in some advanced economies. We find that sectoral change is associated with productive recessions but that labor market rigidity can impede reallocation and reduce the probability of a productive recession. We also find evidence of a link between productive recessions and jobless recoveries and that recessions dominated by reductions to employment, rather than changes in average employee hours, are more likely to be associated with jobless recoveries. (JELF44, E32)