Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Access to life-saving commodities and related services for women and children is a fundamental component of universal health coverage. However, countries confront numerous intractable challenges, such as aligning regulatory practices, enhancing health workforce capacity, and effectively managing supply chains, to ensure essential reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH) commodities and services reach all communities. To address these entrenched obstacles, the UN Commission on Life Saving Commodities for Women and Children (UNCoLSC) in 2012 outlined a series of recommendations to improve access to 13 low-cost and high-impact commodities. This thesis explores the improvements and remaining barriers to accessing life-saving commodities for women and children in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. In addition, this thesis showcases how effective data-informed decision-making can support prioritized RMNCH investments and equitycentered action.

Dans ce mémoire, j’étudie trois sujets de microéconomie : le ciblage, les jeux de hasard et l’épargne-retraite. Le premier chapitre, basé sur un travail conjoint avec Francis Bloch, examine une approche du ciblage basée sur le classement par les amis. Un planificateur social a pour objectif d’extraire un classement des individus en demandant à chaque individu de classer ses amis. Nous étudions comment la structure du réseau social de la communauté détermine la capacité du planificateur à extraire un classement véridique et efficace. Notre analyse souligne l’importance des amis communs. Le deuxième chapitre, basé sur un travail conjoint avec Joshua Blumenstock, étudie les paris sportifs en ligne, qui ont gagné en popularité au Kenya et dans d’autres pays d’Afrique orientale. Nous utilisons un vaste ensemble de données sur les transactions de paris sportifs pour prouver que les joueurs peuvent devenir trop confiants dans leur capacité à prédire le résultat des matchs. Nous soutenons que l’excès de confiance persiste parce que les joueurs surestiment la fréquence à laquelle leurs amis gagnent et parce que les joueurs surpondèrent les succès passés par rapport aux échecs passés. Dans le troisième et dernier chapitre, j’utilise une expérience de terrain pour étudier l’impact de la fourniture d’une calculatrice de retraite sur l’épargne-retraite à des employés d’une grande entreprise sud-africaine. La calculatrice fournit des projections de revenu de retraite et aide à contrer les perceptions erronées de la croissance exponentielle. Même si la plupart des employés épargnent toujours au taux minimum et que l’intervention a été organisé pour coïncider avec les augmentations de salaire, le calculateur n’a pas entraîné d’importantes augmentations de l’épargne. / In this dissertation, I study three topics in microeconomics — targeting, gambling and retirement saving. The first chapter, based on joint work with Francis Bloch, studies the friend-based ranking approach to targeting. A social planner aims to extract a ranking of individuals by asking each individual to rank his or her friends. We study how the structure of the community’s social network determines the planner’s ability to extract a truthful and efficient ranking. Our analysis highlights the importance of common friends. The second chapter, based on joint work with Joshua Blumenstock, studies online sports betting, which has gained widespread popularity in Kenya and other East African countries. We use a large dataset of sports betting transactions to provide evidence that gamblers can become overconfident in their ability to predict the outcome of matches. We argue the overconfidence persists because gamblers overestimate how frequently their friends win and because gamblers overweight past success relative to past failure. In the third and final chapter, I use a field experiment to study the impact of providing employees at a large South African company with a retirement calculator on retirement saving. The calculator provides projections of retirement income and helps to counter misperceptions of exponential growth. Even though most employees save at the minimum rate and the intervention was timed to coincide with salary increases, the calculator did not lead to large increases in saving.

The purpose of this study was to assess maternal attitudes toward daylight-saving time within three stages of the family life cycle. General maternal attitudes were also assessed toward daylight-saving time. other variables such as size of family, sex of children, education of mother, occupation of father, and age of mother Here used to determine if there was any association between these variables and attitudes of mothers toward daylight-saving time. A Likert-type scale capable of measuring maternal attitudes toward daylight-saving time was developed for this study. A checklist of 41 items was also developed to determine or identify reasons why mothers either like or dislike daylight-saving time. The sample consisted of 60 mothers selected in a random fashion from those who had children enrolled in the Child Development Laboratory School at Utah State University. The findings indicated that attitudes of mothers were significantly different between Stages 3 and 4. Mothers in Stage 3 liked daylight-saving time and mothers in Stage 4 disliked daylight-saving time. There was a significant difference in general maternal attitudes; small families liked daylight-saving time, large families disliked daylight-saving time. In Stage 4, the size of family made no difference as these mothers had negative attitudes. Attitudes of mothers differed significantly between families who had a small or large number of boys, with negative attitudes when there was a large number of boys, and no difference as to number of girls. There was a significant difference between professional and skilled occupation of husband. Positive attitudes prevailed if husband was a professional; negative if husband had skilled work. Reasons as to causation of the findings were also discussed.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(エネルギー科学) / 甲第17910号 / エネ博第282号 / 新制||エネ||59(附属図書館) / 30730 / 京都大学大学院エネルギー科学研究科エネルギー社会・環境科学専攻 / (主査)教授 手塚 哲央, 教授 東野 達, 教授 宇根﨑 博信 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Energy Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第21130号 / 工博第4494号 / 新制||工||1698(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院工学研究科化学工学専攻 / (主査)教授 長谷部 伸治, 教授 大嶋 正裕, 教授 佐野 紀彰 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

Design Theory 1st WHAT IS THE TOWN HOUSE By Town House (the only no MD) is undoubtedly the "parterre". The parterre is meant the space where the public associates with a freelancer (the owner of the house rules), which produces original products and original services. The advantage of this arrangement is just the comfort of home owners who meet only a few steps and is in its own business. Up to then follow the floors for residential owners and floor suitable for extended family living or for rent. The building can be rented for parts. The bottom line is that at least one of the apartments will be permanently residing owner. This is achieved by real form MD. The possibility of phased construction, in principle, helps to achieve optimal distribution of project funding (see figure below), ie. There is no need to invest at a time. It is important to fill the empty land in the streets of the city the right partner, with a gradual hill floor living, creating and MD. Just like in nature and in grow houses in the same way. Live to see if any of them, it is easy to replace by a new town house in a relatively short period of time. 2nd TRANSPORT VISION January 2 The need for transport for the urban man City man living in MD would be able to travel virtually anywhere on foot. Common goals, which during the day or week Stakes should be available nearby. She would arise from the need to own a personal vehicle for city driving. So the MD automatically receives the imaginary top of the pyramid forms of housing. Living it has many advantages. I would venture to say that owning a house might be the goal of each of us. As the owner of MD do not happen to work, ie. carry him away from home. All comfort is located in the vicinity. This form of housing support retail development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. It is a healthy way of life. Basically I'm trying to point out the long years of proven experience. February 2 Future Transport When thinking about the future of transportation, I think of flying caps, with automatic navigation. Today we may seem too fantasy, but it can be assumed that this direction for the future traffic will develop. Such a concept of urban transport is therefore clear that it will be necessary to invest large sums in building road corridors and the streets will again become a pleasant place for people to meet. Just imagine the morning when you come to lift the roof of the MD and sit at sunrise in your hovercraft ... amazing! If you stay in the country, even today there are solutions that will relieve traffic in the city. Good public transport will solve many. Congestion nodes not in the inner cities, what to do. MHD What should be: efficient, clean, for an annual pass with the support price At least busy line should be abolished and congested lines strengthened, leading to migration of people into urban centers. It is a challenge for city planners. A sufficient number of seats in vehicles is a necessary condition for successful public transport. Cars with low starting edge and in good technical condition are showcase quality public transport. Bicycle hire Following the example of many EU countries, we should consider for transportation by bicycle wheels. Bike rentals should be the norm. RENTAL MOTOR UNIVERSAL MINI carts Likewise, the creation of citywide rental carts with electric motor at low speed 25 km / h would be very beneficial.

Despite of all the advances in smartphone technology in recent years, smartphones still remain limited by their battery life. Unlike other power hungry components in the smartphone, the cellular data and Wi-Fi interfaces often continue to be used even while the phone is in the idle state to accommodate unnecessary data traffic produced by some applications. In addition, bad reception has been proven to greatly increase energy consumed by the radio, which happens quite often when smartphone users are inside buildings. In this paper, we present a Short message service Push based Service (SPS) to save unnecessary power consumption when smartphones are in idle state, especially in bad reception areas. First, SPS disables a smartphone's data interfaces whenever the phone is in idle state. Second, to preserve the real-time notification functionality required by some apps, such as new email arrivals and social media updates, when a notification is needed, a wakeup text message will be received by the phone, and then SPS enables the phone's data interfaces to connect to the corresponding server to retrieve notification data via the normal data network. Once the notification data has been retrieved, SPS will disable the data interfaces again if the phone is still in idle state. We have developed a complete prototype for Android smartphones. Our experiments show that SPS consumes less energy than the current approach. In areas with bad reception, the SPS prototype can double the battery life of a smartphone.

The essay consists of three chapters. In chapter 1, I find that wages in U.S. regions have been diverging instead of converging from 1975 onward. This coincides with the period of accelerating skill-biased technological change. A decomposition of the divergence rate indicates three channels underlying the divergence: (1) an ever-widening wage gap between college graduates and high school graduates, (2) an increasing within-education group wage differential across regions, and (3) a concentration of skill composition across local labor markets. I then developed an endogenous skill-biased technology adoption model in which firms invest capital more intensively in regions with higher employment share of college graduates, explaining these three channels jointly. Finally I quantitatively assess the model by separately calibrating the regional aggregate production function; the results show that the relative skilled-labor efficiency has been persistently higher in skill-abundant regions, nevertheless the countrywide skill-biased technological change, is the main force making divergence happening. Chapter 2 studies energy-saving technological change in U.S. manufacturing sector, whose intensive margin and extensive margins are identified. I find that energy and capital are mostly complementary to each other, while labor is substitutive to energy-capital composite. However, a Cobb-Douglas nesting of labor is rejected. Quantitative exercise shows that in the post-crisis period, within in industry energy-saving technological change accounts for the largest proportion of the aggregate sectoral energy efficiency promotion in the long run. In contrast, in the short run, factor adjustment combined with sectoral shift accounts for the largest proportion of energy intensity reduction. Lastly, I provide evidence that structural change has taken place around the oil crisis in 1970s, which is consistent with the existing literature. In chapter 3, I documented the increasing dispersion of skill composition across different areas in the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. Housing Market has experienced a dramatic increase in the housing price, as well as a similarly increase in its dispersion across metropolitan areas. A set of related stylized facts are documented in this paper. First, the real wage goes similarly as real housing prices, but quantitatively different. Second, the rents and housing prices have not been going in the exactly same way, in terms of first two moments. Third, we find that local income inequality is positively correlated to the local housing price level. Based on these observations, we build a model where a dispersed skill-biased technology change can account for all the phenomena at the same time. / Ph. D.

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