The Impact of School Lunches on Primary School Enrollment: Evidence from India's Midday Meal Scheme

At the end of 2001, the Indian Supreme Court issued a directive ordering states to institute school lunches – known locally as “midday meals” – in government primary schools. In this paper we provide a large‐scale assessment of the enrollment effects of India's midday meal scheme, which offers warm lunches, free of cost, to 120 million primary school children across India, and is the largest school feeding program in the world. To isolate the causal effect of the policy, we make use of its staggered implementation across Indian states in government but not private schools. Using a panel dataset of more than 420,000 schools observed annually from 2002 to 2004, we find that midday meals result in substantial increases in primary school enrollment, driven by early primary school responses to the program. Our results are robust to a wide range of specification tests.     

The importance of firing costs and the Hosios condition in search models with endogenous job destruction

We construct a DSGE search model with endogenous job destruction, incorporating wage rigidities, firing costs and unemployment benefit. We investigate the most important factors in matching the model’s cyclical properties with empirical data, particularly those of job creation rates (JCR) and job destruction rates (JDR). Firing costs assist significantly in explaining the procyclicality of JCR, the negative correlation of JCR and JDR, and the persistence of vacancies. They also decrease the counter-cyclicality of job turnover. We also postulate that the Hosios condition helps explain the negative correlation of JCR and JDR and vacancies’ persistence. Varying wage rigidities and unemployment income, however, do not improve the results.     

6S优化检维修管理模式的实施

为提高设备检维修现场管理水平,中国石化南通石油分公司大岸桥石油机械厂钳工车间将6S现场管理理念导入钳工车间日常检维修管理中,通过对检维修现状和方式的分析,创新管理理念,制定有效的计划及措施并落到实处,使钳工现场检维修管理模式得到优化,提升了车间的管理水平。     

Are venture capitalist-backed IPOs more innovative? Evidence from an emerging market

This study examines whether venture capital (VC)-backed IPOs are more innovative than otherwise equivalent non-VC-backed IPOs. Using manually collected R&D records from annual reports and patent data from the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office (CSIPO) from 2007 to 2012, we find that VC-backed IPOs have higher R&D expenditures and more patents granted in the three years after IPOs. More specifically, they have more invention, application, and design patents in post-IPO. We use a two-stage instrumental variable, propensity score matching, difference-in-differences approach to mitigate selection biases and find our results to be consistent with our hypothesis. We conclude that VCs can positively influence IPO firms to increase R&D expenditures and innovative output levels in China. In addition, we document that the government ownership adversely affects innovation of VC-backed firms. Policy implications are discussed.     

Critical resource: An institutional economics of the Internet addressing-routing space

This paper links the analysis of IP address policy to the established vocabulary and concepts of institutional economics. Internet addressing and routing are usually discussed in technical terms, yet embedded in this highly technical discourse are a number of critical economic concepts, such as scarcity, externalities, common pool resources, tragedy of the commons, and conflict over the distribution of costs. To solve these problems, governance institutions native to the Internet have evolved. Yet despite the centrality of addressing and routing to Internet governance, there is very little research literature that bridges economic, institutional and technical discussions of IP addressing and routing. This paper connects the techno-economic discussion to analysis of institutions and governance arrangements.     

A decision method for supplier selection in multi-service outsourcing

Although supplier selection in multi-service outsourcing is a very important decision problem, research concerning this issue is still relatively scarce. This paper proposes a decision method for selecting a pool of suppliers for the provision of different service process/product elements. It pioneers the use of collaborative utility between partner firms for supplier selection. A multi-objective model is built to select desired suppliers. This model is proved to be NP-hard, so we develop a multi-objective algorithm based on Tabu search for solving it. We then use an example to show the applicability of the proposed model and algorithm. Extensive computational experiments are also conducted to further test the performance of the proposed algorithm.     

6kV～35kV电网防雷问题解决方法

文章探讨了当前6kV～35kV电网的防雷现状及存在问题,并提出相应的解决措施。     

Two Pitfalls of Linearization Methods

This paper illustrates two types of pitfalls when linearization methods are improperly applied. First, if we linearize the constraints before deriving the optimality conditions, the derived conditions are not correct up to first order. Second, even when we obtain the behavior of the economy that is correct to the first order, applying this behavior to welfare implications may lead to incorrect results. We also review different ways to avoid those pitfalls.     

氟硅酸泵的国产化实践

硅氟酸极具腐蚀性 ,考虑到经济性 ,2 0 #合金、哈氏合金、蒙乃尔等贵金属很少被选为泵材。由于橡胶、塑料等高分子材料具有很好的抗蚀性和一定的机械性能 ,且价格便宜 ,因此一般选用其作为泵体材料。我们通过分析、比较 ,成功选择国产氟硅酸泵替代国外进口泵 ,实现国产化。     

Multitask principal-agent problems: Optimal contracts, fragility, and effort misallocation

We analyze a tractable class of multitask principal-agent problems, such as the one faced by a firm with a manager overseeing several projects. We allow for tasks to be complements or substitutes. We avoid the problems associated with the first-order approach by directly characterizing the shape of the agent's indirect utility function, which exhibits a convex then concave shape in effort. We identify a new source of allocational inefficiency across tasks: excessive concentration, and its consequence, insufficient risk taking. Optimal incentive schemes in our environment are generally “fragile”: small changes in fundamentals can cause the agent's effort to collapse.