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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
121

Institutional effects : studies from the sterling area in the 1950s-60s

Kennedy, Francis January 2018 (has links)
The sterling area was a financial alliance of countries using sterling as their principal international reserves. Recent studies have highlighted how external assistance prolonged the international use of sterling in the 1950s-60s. This thesis explores the sterling area’s internal institutional arrangements (e.g. reserve management practices and the set-up of central banks), which had complex effects on the member countries. Three case studies examine reserve developments in Australia, Ireland and the UK. Together they reveal a currency construction that supported the persistent use of sterling, but lacked stability. The first paper presents a new account of Australia’s reserve management in 1950-68, emphasising the importance of reserve pooling. Acquisition of non-sterling assets in 1951-61 was limited to gold production and undermined by Australia’s balance-ofpayments volatility. Diversification (substituting other assets for sterling) only began in 1962, largely through the build-up of the IMF ‘gold tranche’. Diversification was gradual, hidden, and constrained by sterling area membership. The second paper examines the development of Ireland’s central bank, with its currency board arrangements, before and after the sterling devaluation of 1967. Before 1967, development was constrained, as an under-resourced central bank and independent commercial banks competed for sterling liquidity. Meanwhile government treated sterling area membership as a contract with the UK. Devaluation broke both constraints, leading to a forceful diversification, and centralisation of commercial bank reserves in the central bank in 1968-9. The third paper applies a contemporary methodology to review sterling crises during the years 1950-67, identifying balance-of-payments flows associated with each crisis. The ‘sterling balances’ of the sterling area underwent significant changes in all the crises, and notable (balance-of-payments) declines in those of 1951-2, 1955 and 1957. Sterling’s recurring problem was the balance of payments of the sterling area as a whole. The system’s limited cohesion failed to address this, contributing to instability.
122

Atmospheric precipitations, water discharge and inundations in the Moldavian plain / Les précipitations atmosphériques, l’écoulement, et les inondations dans la plaine de la Moldavie

Buruiană, Marian-Daniel 03 July 2015 (has links)
À cause du caractère torrentiel de la plupart des rivières de la Plaine de la Moldavie, on a encore des difficultés pour gérer le risque associé à l'écoulement maximal, spécialement sur les affluents des cours d'eau principaux. Constamment, il y a des risques associés à l'écoulement maximal et aux ruissellements sur les pentes, même si le bassin de Jijia, le principal cours d'eau qui traverse la Plaine de la Moldavie, a de nombreuses accumulations réalisées entre les années 60 et 90 et même s’il est un des plus aménagés rivières, avec dizaines de kilomètres de digues et régularisations. L’intention de réaliser une thèse de doctorat ayant le titre « Les aléas associées aux précipitations et les inondations dans la Plaine de la Moldavie » est apparue comme une nécessité d’identifier les risques naturels et d’évaluer les actions anthropiques de la perspective risque – bénéfice, afin de gérer de manière efficiente les ressources naturelles ou d’élaborer des projets de développement durable. Même si les crues sont des phénomènes normaux, répétables, qui font partie du processus d’écoulement dans le lit d’une rivière, les inondations représentent, à notre époque, l’une des causes principales des pertes matérielles et humaines. La Plaine de la Moldavie se situe au nord-est du Plateau de la Moldavie, entre le couloir de Prut et les plateaux de Suceava et Bârlad. Enregistrant une altitude moyenne de 125 m et une altitude maximale de 265 m dans la Colline Cozancea, la Plaine de la Moldavie a été, le long du temps, très bien étudiée par des géographes réputés. Le sens de plaine est lié à l’usage agricole, à l’altitude, aux tchernosiomes, à la végétation de forêt et de steppe, au régime d’écoulement des eaux, etc. Afin de réaliser une analyse réelle et exacte de la distribution spatiale des quantités de précipitations, on a utilisé les données issues des observations pluviométriques pendant la période 1960 – 2011 dans 32 stations météorologiques ou postes pluviométriques (9 stations météorologiques et 23 postes pluviométriques), localisées à l’intérieur de la Plaine de la Moldavie, mais aussi dans son immédiate proximité. En ce qui concerne la vulnérabilité de la Plaine de la Moldavie face à l’intensité des pluies d’été, on observe que la moitié nord de la plaine présente une vulnérabilité intermédiaire, et que la moitié sud est fortement vulnérable. Dans la Plaine de la Moldavie, le degré de vulnérabilité donné par l’intensité des pluies d’été monte sur la direction générale ONO – SSE. Les pluies torrentielles ont une grande contribution pluviométrique qui, cumulée au niveau d’un mois, nous a donné la possibilité d’enregistrer entre 172,1 mm en juillet 1991 à Botosani et 277,2 mm en juin 1985 à Iasi. L’intervalle mai – septembre reste avec les plus fortes probabilités que des pluies torrentielles déversant grandes, voire, parfois, exceptionnelles quantités de précipitations tombent. L’analyse statistique de l’écoulement maximal dans la Plaine de la Moldavie a été réalisée à base des données enregistrées dans la période 1950-2011, aux principales stations hydrométriques. La variabilité multi annuelle des débits maximaux met en évidence le fait que, au niveau des bassins hydrographiques de la zone analysée, on a enregistré des années dans lesquelles se sont produits les débits maximaux les plus élevés (1954, 1969, 1975, 1980, 2008, 2010) et, aussi des années quand les valeurs des débits maximaux ont été un peu plus basses (1959, 1963, 1964, 1986). Entre 1960 et 2011, les crues les plus significatives enregistrées dans la Plaine de la Moldavie se sont produites, généralement, pendant l’été, dans les mois de juin et juillet. Après une analyse spatiale basée sur les SIG, plus précisément, d’intersection entre les bandes d’inondabilité (à différentes probabilités de dépassement) et les contours des localités situées dans la Plaine de la Moldavie, on peut identifier les localités potentiellement affectables par les crues. / One of the major challenges of this century is represented by climatic changes and their influence upon the environment. In the case of Romania, the orographic barrier plays the most important role in the delineation of surplus or deficient areas as refered to humidity. In the western and central regions of Romania, with oceanic influences, there is an surplus of humidity, while in the southern, south-eastern and eastern regions, with continental influences, there is a deficient humidity that generates dryness phenomena and drought. Non-the-less, we notice, in the last years, contrast situations with particularities in those regions affected by dryness and drought where there is an surplus of humidity. Climatic change at global or local level represent a major problem and induce concern among researchers from various disciplines (meteorology, climatology, geomorphology, ecology, hydrology, biology, medicine, sociology etc.) in consideration of change that might produce major setbacks in all the life domains and the socio-economic activities. In this respect, knowledge, research and investigation at detailed level of local and regional meteorological conditions that induce triggering situations for atmospheric hazards generating risks, human and economic losses, sometimes hard to estimate, develop in significant and full of concern attitudes in contemporary times. In the Moldavian Plain, due to the torrential character of most of the rivers, maximum discharge risk management is still difficult for the tributary/secondary streams. Even if the Jijia watershed, with the main stream of the Moldavian Plain, dispalys numerous water storages since 1960 to 1990, being one of the most systematized hydrographic basins, with tens of kilometers of dams and enbankments, the risks of maximum channel discharge and hillside discharge is still present. The intention of realizing a doctoral study on the Atmospheric precipitations, water discharge and inundations in the Moldavian Plain comes as a result of concerns in this respect and need to identify the natural risks and to evaluate the human activities as a perspective of risk – benefit for the efficient management of natural resources or in the attempt to favour sustainable development. Although floods are natural phenomena, with time repetability, as discharge processes along riverbeds, inundations represent, in modern times, one of the main causes of human and material losses. The analyses of the obtained maps regarding annual precipitations quantities in the Moldavian Plain reveal the decreasing trend from west to east, along with the decrease in overall altitudes and lower frequencies of humid air masses to the east (drier air masses), compared to more humid, Atlantic, air masses to the west. Torrential rains are atmospheric phenomena with short duration influence but with great intensity, upon the environment via erosion and flooding. They consist in increased precipitation quantities on short time intervals, sudden change of intensity along with extension of duration. As far as the vulnerability of the Moldavian Plain to the suumer rains we notice that the northern half displays an intermediate vulnerability while the southern half diplays a higher vulnerability. We also notice that for the whole space east, south-east and south of the Carpathians is vulnerable to an apreciable extent to torrential rains with intermediate and high intensities. In figure 5.32 we also observe that in those areas where oceanic influences predominate, rains have a less violent character and in those areas where continental influence pedominate (as the case of the Moldavian Plain) torrentail rains have a more violent character. In the Moldavian Plain the degree of vulnerability of torrential summer rains increases from WNW to SSE. Torrential rains bring a great pluviometric input that can reach a monthly quantity of 172.1 mm in July at Botosani and 277.2 mm in June 1985 at Iasi.
123

China's reform of the Hukou system and consequences for workers and firms

Jin, Zhangfeng January 2018 (has links)
This thesis contains three interconnected studies on China’s reform of the Household Registration System, or the Hukou System, which regulates internal migration. In Chapter 1, we describe the general institutional background of the Hukou System, look into a reform of the Hukou System adopted by local governments since 2002, and give the outline of each core chapter. In Chapter 2, we explain how the Hukou reform was gradually adopted by local governments in China. We propose a theoretical framework to describe local governments’ incentives to adopt the Hukou reform. By collecting information on the reform date at the prefecture level as well as a number of prefecture-level explanatory variables, we use two different approaches to empirically study local governments’ decisions to adopt the Hukou reform. First, we use a simple logit model to estimate how local economic factors in the pre-reform year affect the probability of early reform adoption. We group prefectures into “early reform” prefectures and the remaining prefectures based on a threshold point in time. Second, we use a complementary log-log model to model the duration of time until reform adoption. We transform our data into discrete-time duration data for the period 2002-2007 given that the reform was adopted by local governments at different points in time. Prefecture which did not adopt the reform until after 2007 are treated as censored. Our estimates indicate that prefectures with a higher degree of labour misallocation and higher demand for labour are adopting the reform earlier, and prefectures with a higher level of expenditures involving public services and social welfare are adopting the reform later. In Chapter 3, we examine whether the Hukou reform increases migration into the prefecture. Because information on migrant stocks and flows by prefecture is not consistently available to us, we construct three different indicators to capture prefecture-level migrations in China from 2000 to 2010. The first indicator refers to the number of non-agricultural Hukou holders registered at the prefecture level, which is available from 2000 to 2008. We use this indicator to capture whether the reform makes it easier for migrants to convert to a local Hukou. The second indicator refers to migration inflows from other prefectures, which is available in 2000 and 2005. We use this indicator to capture whether the reform induces new migration inflows from other prefectures. The third indicator refers to the size of total urban population, which is available in 2000, 2005 and 2010. We use this indicator to capture whether the reform increases the net migration inflows (migration inflows minus migration outflows). We use a difference-in-differences framework with prefecture-level fixed effects to estimate the reform effect on migration. Our estimates indicate that the Hukou reform increases the number of non-agricultural Hukou holders, increases migration inflows from other prefectures, and increases the total urban population in the long term, suggesting that the reform is effective in increasing migration. Also, we find heterogeneous effects of the reform for different skill groups. We find that the reform effect is larger for unskilled workers relative to skilled workers. In Chapter 4, we study how local manufacturing firms react to the Hukou reform. To be exact, we study whether manufacturing firms are growing faster in reform prefectures relative to non-reform prefectures. We focus on firm employment using the Chinese Annual Survey on Industrial Firms (CASIF) from 2000 to 2007. We use a difference-in-differences framework with firm-level fixed effects to estimate the reform effect on firm employment. We also use a propensity score matching approach to deal with the reform endogeneity suggested by the Chapter 2. Our estimates indicate that the reform increases local manufacturing firms’ employment on average. In addition, the reform impact on firm employment is larger for firms located in labour intensive industries and for firms located in industries that use migrant workers more intensively. Finally, we find that the reform also affects state-owned firms. In contrast to the non-state-owned firms that expand after the reform adoption, the state-owned firms downsize. Chapter 5 summarizes the main findings of the thesis and discusses our future research directions.
124

India's membership of the sterling area

Varma, Jai Dev January 1957 (has links)
No description available.
125

Internecine discord : party, religion, and history in Hanoverian Britain, c. 1714-65

Skjönsberg, Max January 2018 (has links)
This thesis is a study of the place of ‘party’ and different ways of understanding this phenomenon in eighteenth-century British political discourse, especially between 1714 and 1765. Party is one of the most basic concepts of politics. If we are looking for party in any form, the idea of partisan division may be at least as old as the earliest societies where there was competition for office. But what did ‘party’ mean in the eighteenth century? While ancient factions usually denoted interest groups representing different orders in the state, party in the eighteenth century had a range of meanings, some general and others more specific. Broadly speaking, it could either mean a parliamentary constellation vying for power, or carry the more sinister connotation of civil war-like division, with roots in the Reformation and its aftermath. In spite of the fact that the emphasis was on principles and beliefs rather than organisation in both cases, modern historians have tended to focus on the latter. The party debate was considered by political writers at the time to be profoundly important, and political life in the period simply cannot be understood without reference to party. Although ‘party spirit’ waxed and waned, ‘party’ was consistently a key word in political debate. By concentrating on the writings of Rapin, Bolingbroke, David Hume, John Brown, and Edmund Burke, in the context of political developments, this thesis presents the first sustained examination of the idea of party in eighteenth-century Britain. It demonstrates that attitudes towards party were more diverse, penetrating and balanced than previous research has managed to capture.
126

Essays in poverty and household analysis in Africa

Khan, Rumman January 2017 (has links)
This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters on issues relating to the empirics of poverty and household analysis in Africa. The first analyses poverty at the country level, highlighting the diversity of experience in poverty reduction performance over the last few decades and assessing its causes. The other two studies are more methodological in their content, exploring how poverty and related issues can be analysed at the household level using existing survey data that pose difficulties as they do not track the same set of households over time. Chapter 2 highlights the fact that although growth has improved substantially in most African countries in recent years, poverty across the continent has fallen very little in the aggregate. Poverty reduction performance has varied across countries: there are apparently ‘two Africas’, one with an ability to reduce poverty and one without. The main argument is that one reason for this difference is rooted in colonial times. Countries with strong smallholder cash crop sectors emerged into independence with broad-based labour-intensive economies supporting a more equitable income distribution conducive to inclusive growth and poverty reduction compared to initially more inequitable mineral resource and large farm based economies. This did not necessarily determine the post-colonial path: many peasant export economies achieved no poverty reduction (often because of little growth), and some mine/plantation economies did achieve poverty reduction. The key reasons for this evolution lie in the motivation and ability of African elites to form pro-poor coalitions, which in some cases were then able to implement policies supporting a pro-poor pattern of growth. Chapter 3 focuses on pseudo-panel estimation and how it enables the estimation of panel models when only repeated cross-sections rather than panel data are available. It involves the grouping of individual into cohorts and using the cohort means as if they are observations in a genuine panel. The usual assertion is that as long as there are enough individuals within cohorts so that the cohort sample means are a good approximation of the cohort population means then pseudo-panel estimates are consistent, otherwise they may suffer from measurement error bias. We show that there can be substantial bias arising from the grouping process itself due to the loss of variation and heterogeneity as one moves from the individual to the cohort level. Thus we find many of the common methods used for grouping into cohorts produces inconsistent estimates. We develop some measures for assessing whether the cohort level data contains sufficient variation for pseudo-panel estimates to be consistent, focusing on the variation across cohort means, over time and within cohort groups. We then test the measures empirically and with Monte Carlo simulations, providing useful thresholds that can be used to accept or reject the cohort construction method. Chapter 4 assesses four different estimation methods of binary response models with individual effects where the data is a time-series of independent cross-sections. We compare Deaton’s (1985) linear fixed effects estimator, which is most often used in applied work, to three non-linear estimators. The first is a simplified version of Collado’s (1998) Minimum Distance estimator. The other two are based on the fractional response estimators developed by Wooldridge and Papke (2008) which, unlike Collado’s estimator, can be used for dynamic models as well. Results from Monte Carlo simulations and from an empirical application indicate the linear estimator is just as good as the other non-linear estimators and is generally more robust to problems arising from the process of creating the pseudo-panel.
127

Price change and households' welfare in Ghana (1991-2013)

Wassiuw, Abdul Rahaman January 2017 (has links)
Given the growing world population and income in emerging economies, increased demand for food and feed crops for the production of bio-fuels, and greater frequency and intensity of weather-related disasters in different parts of the world due to climate change, global food prices are expected to increase. Food importing developing countries are vulnerable to these price increases and associated price volatility as poor households would be the most severely affected. While there are extensive empirical studies on the effect of food price increases and volatility on household welfare in developed and developing countries, little is known about African countries. This thesis contributes to the literature on Africa, specifically Ghana using three waves of the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) to measure the effect of food price increases on household welfare between 1991 and 2013 and addressing the effect of price volatility with a measure of households’ willingness to pay for price stability. A number of contributions are made in this thesis. First, an application of both a parametric and non-parametric analysis to the GLSS shows that budget share equations require including a higher expenditure term to appropriately explain consumer behaviour; the non-linear Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System expenditure model is the best fit for the GLSS data. Second, an analysis of the consumption patterns of cereal and cereal products shows variation in consumption patterns across time and different groups of households. For example, bread is considered a necessity while maize was a luxury in 1991/92 and 1998/99 but a necessity in 2012/13, showing a case of where a commodity is a luxury at some point and a necessity at another time. Commodity groups such as root, tubers & plantain, meat, fish and oil & fat products are considered luxuries while bread & cereals are considered necessities. Third, welfare effects calculated for three periods of price changes show there are differences in magnitude for each period, and in all periods a higher proportion of poorer household food expenditure is needed to compensate for observed price increases than for non-poor households. However, within poorer households, we find that rural poor households suffered more from price increases than urban poor households. There are also significant regional differences in welfare effects across periods, with households in the Savannah zone suffering more from observed price changes in all periods. Finally, while the average rural household is a net producer of maize and millet but a net purchaser of rice, rural households are more price risk averse with respect to the price of rice. If substitution between the prices of maize, rice and millet are ignored, 13 per cent of income of the average rural household is required to stabilise prices of all three commodities. However, if substitution is allowed for, the average rural household will be willing to pay 9 per cent of income to stabilise the price of all three commodities at the same time. This suggests that ignoring substitution between prices lead to overestimation of household Willingness-To-Pay (WTP) to stabilise prices of maize, rice and millet in Ghana.
128

Essays on aid allocation and effectiveness in developing countries

Mbu Enow Tagem, Abrams January 2018 (has links)
No description available.
129

Essays on macroeconomics in Africa

Roger, Lionel Joshua January 2018 (has links)
This thesis comprises three self-contained essays on topics surrounding economic growth and macroeconomic performance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The first two address aspects of measurement error in macroeconomic data from SSA: the first essay (Chapter 2) explores the potential of nighttime luminosity as a means of improving GDP estimates, the second (Chapter 3) assesses the potential impact of changes in the data on empirical results from time series analysis. The third essay (Chapter 4) investigates exchange rate dynamics in Zambia, and how these pass through to consumer prices. The first essay (Chapter 2) explores heterogeneity in the nexus between nighttime light emissions and economic activity, a relationship that is increasingly exploited with the aim of reducing measurement error in growth estimates of countries where the data is considered weak. I show that the elasticity between nighttime lights and economic activity varies substantially across countries, and that this variation has a systematic component which could have implications for empirical results. Using the elastic net method in order to isolate the relevant factors, I find that 55% of the variation can be explained by observable factors. When tracing economic growth in Africa since 1992 using luminosity and accounting for the explained share of parameter heterogeneity, I find no evidence of an 'African Growth Miracle' as described by, e.g., Young (2012). However, I do find evidence that countries that recently revised their GDP figures (like Nigeria and Ghana) had a tendency to report inflated growth rates for recent years. This is consistent with Jerven (2014)'s hypothesis of purely 'statistical growth'. The second essay (Chapter 3) explores the inconsistencies across different versions and sources of national accounts data (three versions of the Penn World Table and the World Development Indicators), and their impact on macroeconomic inference from time series analysis. I use the statistical framework developed by Juselius et al. (2014) and assess the robustness of their conclusions regarding the long-run impact of foreign aid on economic growth in 36 SSA countries that are generally considered to have low statistical capacity, and where sources on macroeconomic variables sometimes disagree strongly. The results of this exercise are mixed: When I apply the Cointegrated VAR models precisely as developed by JMT to the new datasets, results remain robust for about two thirds of the countries. Once I re-specify the time series models based on the respective data (as different data will sometimes imply different lag lengths, cointegration ranks, etc.), using the same statistical methodology as JMT, this often leads to more substantial changes in the conclusions. The third essay (Chapter 4) investigates the dynamics between the exchange rate and consumer prices in a resource-rich setting in a case study of Zambia. Using a combination of short-run sign- and zero-restrictions, I identify relevant global and domestic shocks in a structural VAR (SVAR). The results suggest that the pass-through of the exchange rate to consumer prices (ERPT) depends greatly on the shock that originally caused the exchange rate to fluctuate. While, for instance, the price of copper is the most important driver of the exchange rate, the fluctuations caused by it tend to affect prices only moderately (an ERPT of ca. 7%). On the other hand, exchange rate fluctuations caused by monetary shocks come with a much higher pass-through of up to 25%.
130

Cerebral : visualizing multiple experimental conditions on a graph with biological context

Barsky, Aaron 11 1900 (has links)
Systems biologists use interaction graphs to model the behaviour of biological systems at the molecular level. In an iterative process, such biologists observe the reactions of living cells under various experimental conditions, view the results in the context of the interaction graph, and then propose changes to the graph model. These graphs represent dynamic knowledge of the biological system being studied and evolve as new insight is gained from the experimental data. While numerous graph layout and drawing packages are available, these tools did not fully meet the needs of our immunologist collaborators. In this thesis, we describe the data display needs of these immunologists and translate these needs into visual encoding decisions. These decisions led us to create Cerebral, a system that uses a biologically guided graph layout and incorporates experimental data directly into the graph display. Our graph layout algorithm uses simulated annealing with constraints, optimized with a uniform grid to have an expected runtime of o(E/V). Small multiple views of different experimental conditions and a measurement-driven parallel coordinates view enable correlations between experimental conditions to be analyzed at the same time that the measurements are viewed in the graph context. This combination of coordinated views allows the biologist to view the data from many different perspectives simultaneously. To illustrate the typical analysis tasks performed, we analyze two datasets using Cerebral. Based on feedback from our collaborators, we conclude that Cerebral is a valuable tool for analyzing experimental data in the context of an interaction graph model. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

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