Adaptation of coastal communities in the Philippines to the impacts climate change

The Quedan and Rural Credit Guarantee Corporation (Quedancor) of the Philippine Department of Agriculture has the critical responsibility of providing and improving credit assistance to fishers, it also has the task of helping its beneficiaries meet the repayment obligations of their loans. One reason for defaults can be attributed to the devastating impact of natural calamities. Schemes in place are still insufficient to help safeguard lending programs and operations from non-repayment of loans due to production losses and damages to personal properties.(PDF contains 5 pages) Natural calamities include the uncertainties and vagaries of weather and climate that bring about typhoons, floods, and drought; earthquakes; volcanic eruption as well as pests and diseases that affect the productivity of fisheries. When natural calamities occur, small fishers are unable to pay their loans from Quedancor, moreover they have difficulty renewing their loan applications from Quedancor or accessing credit from other sources. Failure to access credit could disable them to continue venture on fishing activities and could eventually jeopardize the welfare of their entire household. The inability of creditors to pay their loans and meet their obligations also impair, to a large extent, the financial operation and viability of the lending institutions. Risk management schemes currently employed include price stabilization measures, targeted relief` to typhoons and drought victims, and crop insurance systems, to name a few. Some of these schemes are becoming very expensive to implement. Moreover, they fail to enable fishers regain sufficient resources so that they may continue production.

Essays on economics networks

This thesis belongs to the growing field of economic networks. In particular, we develop three essays in which we study the problem of bargaining, discrete choice representation, and pricing in the context of networked markets. Despite analyzing very different problems, the three essays share the common feature of making use of a network representation to describe the market of interest.

In Chapter 1 we present an analysis of bargaining in networked markets. We make two contributions. First, we characterize market equilibria in a bargaining model, and find that players' equilibrium payoffs coincide with their degree of centrality in the network, as measured by Bonacich's centrality measure. This characterization allows us to map, in a simple way, network structures into market equilibrium outcomes, so that payoffs dispersion in networked markets is driven by players' network positions. Second, we show that the market equilibrium for our model converges to the so called eigenvector centrality measure. We show that the economic condition for reaching convergence is that the players' discount factor goes to one. In particular, we show how the discount factor, the matching technology, and the network structure interact in a very particular way in order to see the eigenvector centrality as the limiting case of our market equilibrium.

We point out that the eigenvector approach is a way of finding the most central or relevant players in terms of the “global” structure of the network, and to pay less attention to patterns that are more “local”. Mathematically, the eigenvector centrality captures the relevance of players in the bargaining process, using the eigenvector associated to the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of a given network. Thus our result may be viewed as an economic justification of the eigenvector approach in the context of bargaining in networked markets.

As an application, we analyze the special case of seller-buyer networks, showing how our framework may be useful for analyzing price dispersion as a function of sellers and buyers' network positions.

Finally, in Chapter 3 we study the problem of price competition and free entry in networked markets subject to congestion effects. In many environments, such as communication networks in which network flows are allocated, or transportation networks in which traffic is directed through the underlying road architecture, congestion plays an important role. In particular, we consider a network with multiple origins and a common destination node, where each link is owned by a firm that sets prices in order to maximize profits, whereas users want to minimize the total cost they face, which is given by the congestion cost plus the prices set by firms. In this environment, we introduce the notion of Markovian traffic equilibrium to establish the existence and uniqueness of a pure strategy price equilibrium, without assuming that the demand functions are concave nor imposing particular functional forms for the latency functions. We derive explicit conditions to guarantee existence and uniqueness of equilibria. Given this existence and uniqueness result, we apply our framework to study entry decisions and welfare, and establish that in congested markets with free entry, the number of firms exceeds the social optimum.

Lessons from History for Transitions to a Low Carbon Economy

4 p.

Optimal Investment in Energy Efficiency under Uncertainty

41 p.

The Slow Search for Solutions: Lessons from Historical Energy Transitions by Sector and Service

28 p.

Social saliency : visual psychophysics and single-neuron recordings in humans

My thesis studies how people pay attention to other people and the environment. How does the brain figure out what is important and what are the neural mechanisms underlying attention? What is special about salient social cues compared to salient non-social cues? In Chapter I, I review social cues that attract attention, with an emphasis on the neurobiology of these social cues. I also review neurological and psychiatric links: the relationship between saliency, the amygdala and autism. The first empirical chapter then begins by noting that people constantly move in the environment. In Chapter II, I study the spatial cues that attract attention during locomotion using a cued speeded discrimination task. I found that when the motion was expansive, attention was attracted towards the singular point of the optic flow (the focus of expansion, FOE) in a sustained fashion. The more ecologically valid the motion features became (e.g., temporal expansion of each object, spatial depth structure implied by distribution of the size of the objects), the stronger the attentional effects. However, compared to inanimate objects and cues, people preferentially attend to animals and faces, a process in which the amygdala is thought to play an important role. To directly compare social cues and non-social cues in the same experiment and investigate the neural structures processing social cues, in Chapter III, I employ a change detection task and test four rare patients with bilateral amygdala lesions. All four amygdala patients showed a normal pattern of reliably faster and more accurate detection of animate stimuli, suggesting that advantageous processing of social cues can be preserved even without the amygdala, a key structure of the “social brain”. People not only attend to faces, but also pay attention to others’ facial emotions and analyze faces in great detail. Humans have a dedicated system for processing faces and the amygdala has long been associated with a key role in recognizing facial emotions. In Chapter IV, I study the neural mechanisms of emotion perception and find that single neurons in the human amygdala are selective for subjective judgment of others’ emotions. Lastly, people typically pay special attention to faces and people, but people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) might not. To further study social attention and explore possible deficits of social attention in autism, in Chapter V, I employ a visual search task and show that people with ASD have reduced attention, especially social attention, to target-congruent objects in the search array. This deficit cannot be explained by low-level visual properties of the stimuli and is independent of the amygdala, but it is dependent on task demands. Overall, through visual psychophysics with concurrent eye-tracking, my thesis found and analyzed socially salient cues and compared social vs. non-social cues and healthy vs. clinical populations. Neural mechanisms underlying social saliency were elucidated through electrophysiology and lesion studies. I finally propose further research questions based on the findings in my thesis and introduce my follow-up studies and preliminary results beyond the scope of this thesis in the very last section, Future Directions.

Efficient methods for empirical tests of behavioral economics theories in laboratory and field experiments

In the quest for a descriptive theory of decision-making, the rational actor model in economics imposes rather unrealistic expectations and abilities on human decision makers. The further we move from idealized scenarios, such as perfectly competitive markets, and ambitiously extend the reach of the theory to describe everyday decision making situations, the less sense these assumptions make. Behavioural economics has instead proposed models based on assumptions that are more psychologically realistic, with the aim of gaining more precision and descriptive power. Increased psychological realism, however, comes at the cost of a greater number of parameters and model complexity. Now there are a plethora of models, based on different assumptions, applicable in differing contextual settings, and selecting the right model to use tends to be an ad-hoc process. In this thesis, we develop optimal experimental design methods and evaluate different behavioral theories against evidence from lab and field experiments.

We look at evidence from controlled laboratory experiments. Subjects are presented with choices between monetary gambles or lotteries. Different decision-making theories evaluate the choices differently and would make distinct predictions about the subjects' choices. Theories whose predictions are inconsistent with the actual choices can be systematically eliminated. Behavioural theories can have multiple parameters requiring complex experimental designs with a very large number of possible choice tests. This imposes computational and economic constraints on using classical experimental design methods. We develop a methodology of adaptive tests: Bayesian Rapid Optimal Adaptive Designs (BROAD) that sequentially chooses the "most informative" test at each stage, and based on the response updates its posterior beliefs over the theories, which informs the next most informative test to run. BROAD utilizes the Equivalent Class Edge Cutting (EC²) criteria to select tests. We prove that the EC² criteria is adaptively submodular, which allows us to prove theoretical guarantees against the Bayes-optimal testing sequence even in the presence of noisy responses. In simulated ground-truth experiments, we find that the EC² criteria recovers the true hypotheses with significantly fewer tests than more widely used criteria such as Information Gain and Generalized Binary Search. We show, theoretically as well as experimentally, that surprisingly these popular criteria can perform poorly in the presence of noise, or subject errors. Furthermore, we use the adaptive submodular property of EC² to implement an accelerated greedy version of BROAD which leads to orders of magnitude speedup over other methods.

We use BROAD to perform two experiments. First, we compare the main classes of theories for decision-making under risk, namely: expected value, prospect theory, constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) and moments models. Subjects are given an initial endowment, and sequentially presented choices between two lotteries, with the possibility of losses. The lotteries are selected using BROAD, and 57 subjects from Caltech and UCLA are incentivized by randomly realizing one of the lotteries chosen. Aggregate posterior probabilities over the theories show limited evidence in favour of CRRA and moments' models. Classifying the subjects into types showed that most subjects are described by prospect theory, followed by expected value. Adaptive experimental design raises the possibility that subjects could engage in strategic manipulation, i.e. subjects could mask their true preferences and choose differently in order to obtain more favourable tests in later rounds thereby increasing their payoffs. We pay close attention to this problem; strategic manipulation is ruled out since it is infeasible in practice, and also since we do not find any signatures of it in our data.

In the second experiment, we compare the main theories of time preference: exponential discounting, hyperbolic discounting, "present bias" models: quasi-hyperbolic (α, β) discounting and fixed cost discounting, and generalized-hyperbolic discounting. 40 subjects from UCLA were given choices between 2 options: a smaller but more immediate payoff versus a larger but later payoff. We found very limited evidence for present bias models and hyperbolic discounting, and most subjects were classified as generalized hyperbolic discounting types, followed by exponential discounting.

In these models the passage of time is linear. We instead consider a psychological model where the perception of time is subjective. We prove that when the biological (subjective) time is positively dependent, it gives rise to hyperbolic discounting and temporal choice inconsistency.

We also test the predictions of behavioral theories in the "wild". We pay attention to prospect theory, which emerged as the dominant theory in our lab experiments of risky choice. Loss aversion and reference dependence predicts that consumers will behave in a uniquely distinct way than the standard rational model predicts. Specifically, loss aversion predicts that when an item is being offered at a discount, the demand for it will be greater than that explained by its price elasticity. Even more importantly, when the item is no longer discounted, demand for its close substitute would increase excessively. We tested this prediction using a discrete choice model with loss-averse utility function on data from a large eCommerce retailer. Not only did we identify loss aversion, but we also found that the effect decreased with consumers' experience. We outline the policy implications that consumer loss aversion entails, and strategies for competitive pricing.

In future work, BROAD can be widely applicable for testing different behavioural models, e.g. in social preference and game theory, and in different contextual settings. Additional measurements beyond choice data, including biological measurements such as skin conductance, can be used to more rapidly eliminate hypothesis and speed up model comparison. Discrete choice models also provide a framework for testing behavioural models with field data, and encourage combined lab-field experiments.

Households WTP for the Reliability of Gas Supply

26 p.

Cidades secas, vidas secas: A trajetória das águas e sua regulamentação no Rio de Janeiro sob uma perspectiva urbano-ambiental

Esta tese analisará a distribuição das águas na cidade do Rio de Janeiro considerando os elementos sociais, jurídicos, políticos, e seus reflexos no direito urbano e ambiental. Nesse aspecto referenciará as medidas de regulação e de organização da estrutura urbana, desde a formação da cidade até os dias atuais, assim como as consequências da exclusão e da ausência das políticas urbanas equitativas. No início, as ocupações irregulares, se distantes do centro e dos bairros elitizados, não despertavam maiores demandas do poder público, porém com o aumento das periferias e as ocupações próximas aos bairros formais, inúmeras medidas adotadas optaram pela remoção, contenção e a destruição dos espaços sem apresentar uma solução, agravando os problemas urbanos. Tais problemas, reconhecidamente sociais, passam a ser denominados urbanos e ambientais, gerando uma complexa criminalização dos moradores das periferias. As intervenções nos espaços são legalizadas pelo instrumento jurídico, as residências suburbanas são classificadas como ilegais e, por consequência, os recursos que deveriam atender a todos na cidade são direcionados apenas para cidade legalizada, criando a celeuma da desigualdade. Assim, amontoados em barracos precários, sem abastecimento de água, energia, esgoto e coleta de lixo, as periferias multiplicam as diversas formas de violência, uma vez que o direito não socorre esses moradores que, abandonados pela lei, vivem a escassez das águas e a especulação dos serviços ilegais de abastecimento. A crise do abastecimento não é causada pelas populações mais empobrecidas, mas pelo mercado que se apropria da maior parte desses recursos, dentro do sistema de uma lógica capitalista, e exclui aqueles que não podem pagar pelo abastecimento regular. Nesse sentido, este trabalho entende que o direito, ainda que tenha se tornado regulatório pode assumir um caráter revolucionário e transformador em que o direito das águas seja um direito da comunidade, por isso, um bem público não estatal, por fim objetiva esse trabalho estudar as leis das águas dentro do paradigma da solidariedade hídrica.

The Freshwater Biological Association at Wray Castle: Recollections of its first director

In 1937 the Development Commission provided an annual grant to the Freshwater Biological Association to pay for a director and secretary. The author moved to the Lake District in the same year, and at that time T.T. Macan was working on invertebrates; K.R. Allen on fish; C.H. Mortimer on chemistry and physics of the aquatic environment, and Marie Rosenberg on phytoplankton. They were backed by George Thompson as laboratory assistant and Rosa Bullen as secretary. The work of the Association continued and expanded throughout the Second World War with some far-reached discoveries made. For example, the recovery of lake sediment cores and the examination of diatom remains, so starting the discipline of archaeo-limnology. Also, a hydrological survey of the Windermere catchment area found significant traces of sulphuric acid in rain gauges. This was more than 30 years before "acid rain" became fashionable.

Limnology in Sicily: A history of fresh waters surrounded by the sea

The aim of this short article is to trace the history of limnology in Sicily, from the end of the last century up to the present, and pay a little homage to a scientist to whom limnology is deeply indebted: G.E. Hutchinson. Due to its insular and climatic conditions, Sicily is characterised by a drainage network formed by numerous short, torrent-like rivers, and by a few small, natural lakes. The geological characteristics of the island strongly condition the quality of these small waterbodies which generally have surface areas of less than 0.2 km super(2). The earliest observations on Sicilian lentic waters go back more than a century; in particular, at the end of the 19th century, some of the issues regarding the natural lakes had already been brought into focus. Subsequent studies on natural waterbodies concentrated on the geomorphology of landslide lakes or lakes created by the dissolution of the gypsum tableland. However, many of the waterbodies no longer exist because of land reclamation which took place up to the first half of the 1950s. During the last 35 years, there has been a notable increase in limnological publications. In addition, these studies show a more careful and integrated approach to the limnological aspects of waterbodies, compared with the early studies.

Convex Relaxation for Low-Dimensional Representation: Phase Transitions and Limitations

There is a growing interest in taking advantage of possible patterns and structures in data so as to extract the desired information and overcome the curse of dimensionality. In a wide range of applications, including computer vision, machine learning, medical imaging, and social networks, the signal that gives rise to the observations can be modeled to be approximately sparse and exploiting this fact can be very beneficial. This has led to an immense interest in the problem of efficiently reconstructing a sparse signal from limited linear observations. More recently, low-rank approximation techniques have become prominent tools to approach problems arising in machine learning, system identification and quantum tomography.

In sparse and low-rank estimation problems, the challenge is the inherent intractability of the objective function, and one needs efficient methods to capture the low-dimensionality of these models. Convex optimization is often a promising tool to attack such problems. An intractable problem with a combinatorial objective can often be "relaxed" to obtain a tractable but almost as powerful convex optimization problem. This dissertation studies convex optimization techniques that can take advantage of low-dimensional representations of the underlying high-dimensional data. We provide provable guarantees that ensure that the proposed algorithms will succeed under reasonable conditions, and answer questions of the following flavor:

More specifically, i) Focusing on linear inverse problems, we generalize the classical error bounds known for the least-squares technique to the lasso formulation, which incorporates the signal model. ii) We show that intuitive convex approaches do not perform as well as expected when it comes to signals that have multiple low-dimensional structures simultaneously. iii) Finally, we propose convex relaxations for the graph clustering problem and give sharp performance guarantees for a family of graphs arising from the so-called stochastic block model. We pay particular attention to the following aspects. For i) and ii), we aim to provide a general geometric framework, in which the results on sparse and low-rank estimation can be obtained as special cases. For i) and iii), we investigate the precise performance characterization, which yields the right constants in our bounds and the true dependence between the problem parameters.

The principles involved in a factory cost system

Successful management has been defined as the art of spending money wisely and well. Profits may not be the end and all of business but they are certainly the test of practicality. Everything worth while should pay for itself. One proposal is no better than another, except as in the working-out it yields better results.

A luta das enfermeiras por um espaço na FAB: a turma pioneira de oficiais (1981-1984)

Este estudo, de cunho histórico-social, tem como objeto a inserção de enfermeiras como oficiais da Força Aérea Brasileira (FAB) por meio do pioneiro Quadro Feminino de Oficiais (QFO). O marco inicial do estudo refere-se ao início do Estágio de Adaptação militar, em 02 de agosto de 1982 no Centro de Instrução Especializada da Aeronáutica (CIEAR), localizado na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. O marco final do estudo diz respeito ao término do período inicial obrigatório de dois anos de cumprimento de serviço ativo dessas enfermeiras, que culminou com a promoção das mesmas ao posto de 1Tenente (1984). Os objetivos do estudo são: descrever as circunstâncias de inserção das enfermeiras no processo seletivo do QFO, analisar o processo de incorporação do habitus militar durante o Estágio de Adaptação, e discutir as estratégias de luta das enfermeiras militares para ocuparem seus lugares devidos nos hospitais da FAB. A técnica de coleta de dados utilizada foi a entrevista e ocorreu no período de abril a maio de 2009 em hospitais da FAB da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Foram entrevistadas cinco enfermeiras militares da primeira turma do QFO. O estudo foi cadastrado no SISNEP e aprovado pelo Comitê de Ética da FAB. Todos os sujeitos assinaram o Termo de consentimento livre e esclarecido e o Termo de doação de depoimento oral. O método utilizado foi o da História oral temática o referencial teórico do estudo foi baseado no pensamento do sociólogo francês Pierre Bourdieu, cujos conceitos de poder simbólico, habitus, campo, espaço social e violência simbólica sustentaram a construção desta dissertação. Para a análise e interpretação dos dados, seguimos os passos propostos por Maria Cecília Minayo de ordenação de dados, que compreendeu a transcrição na íntegra dos depoimentos; classificação cronológica e temática dos documentos escritos; classificação dos dados e a análise final. Evidenciou-se que diversos motivos incentivaram as enfermeiras a almejarem sua inserção na FAB como a boa remuneração, estabilidade financeira, progressão profissional, desbravamento de um novo campo de trabalho, clientela diferenciada, aposentadoria com salário integral e pioneirismo na FAB. O objetivo do Estágio de Adaptação militar foi inculcar do habitus militar nas candidatas a partir de ensinamentos baseados na hierarquia, disciplina, ética, dever e compromisso militar. Ao se inserirem nos hospitais da FAB, as enfermeiras receberam diversos cargos e funções, galgando um poder simbólico sobre a equipe de enfermagem. As inevitáveis lutas simbólicas dessas enfermeiras ocorreram com os médicos militares, com a equipe de enfermagem, com as enfermeiras civis e com a própria administração do hospital, e revelaram aspectos característicos de violência simbólica desencadeada por lutas de gênero e pela manutenção do poder, visto que as enfermeiras, dotadas de status de chefe e de militar, se inseriram num campo eminentemente masculino.

A Previdência Social no estado contemporâneo Fundamentos, financiamento e regulação

A previdência social brasileira, apesar de constituir um dos modelos mais antigos e tradicionais de proteção social da América Latina, não muito distante dos modelos europeus quanto a sua gênese, passa por momentos difíceis. Em um contexto de rápido envelhecimento populacional, acelerada redução de natalidade e novas realidades de trabalho, nas quais a mão-de-obra assalariada perde seu espaço, o modelo tradicional de cobertura, nos moldes bismarckianos, carece de revisão, de forma a não somente adequar-se às novas premissas demográficas, mas permitir uma universalidade de cobertura efetiva. Para tanto, adota-se, como fundamento de um novo modelo, a justiça social em três dimensões necessidade, igualdade e mérito. A necessidade visa atender e assegurar a qualquer pessoa, dentro das necessidades sociais cobertas, um pagamento mínimo de forma a assegurar o mínimo existencial. A dimensão da igualdade, no viés material, visa preservar nível de bem-estar compatível, em alguma medida, com o usufruído durante a vida ativa. Já o mérito individual implica fornecer prestações mais elevadas aos que, conscientemente, reduziram o consumo presente, preservando parte de suas receitas para o futuro. As duas primeiras dimensões são, na proposta apresentada, organizadas pelo Estado, em pilares compulsórios e financiados, preponderantemente, por repartição simples. O modelo de financiamento adotado, no longo prazo, tem se mostrado mais seguro e isonômico frente a modelos capitalizados. As variantes demográficas podem ser adequadas mediante novos limites de idade para aposentadorias e, em especial, estímulo a natalidade, como novos serviços da previdência social, incluindo creches e pré-escolas. O terceiro pilar, fundado no mérito individual, é a previdência complementar, organizado de forma privada, autônoma e voluntária. Aqui, o financiamento sugerido é a capitalização, de forma a priorizar o rendimento e a eficiência, com as externalidades positivas para a economia e a sociedade, com risco assumido e aceitável em razão do papel subsidiário deste pilar protetivo. Os pilares estatais, no modelo proposto, serão financiados, exclusivamente, por impostos, pondo-se fim às contribuições sociais, que perdem a importância em um modelo universal de proteção. Troca-se a solidariedade do grupo pela solidariedade social e, como conseqüência, saem as contribuições e ingressam os impostos. Mesmo o segundo pilar, que visa prestações correlacionadas com os rendimentos em atividade, será financiado por adicional de imposto de renda. Sistema mais simples, eficaz, e com estímulo à formalização da receita por parte das pessoas. A gestão do modelo previdenciário, em todos os segmentos, contará com forte regulação estatal, mas com efetiva participação dos interessados, afastadas, dentro do possível, as ingerências políticas e formas de captura. A regulação previdenciária, desde adequadamente disciplinada e executada, permitirá que os pilares propostos funcionem em harmonia.