Friday, February 24, 2012

28 February 2012: Participatory Planning and Informality in Indonesian Cities

Michael J. Haggerty
Pratt Institute, New York

Abstract:
In the almost fifteen years since decentralization in Indonesia –
known locally as the “big bang” – municipal governments have become
increasingly responsible for spatial planning and infrastructure
development in cities. One legacy of the “big bang” is new
participatory structures implemented by local agencies and NGOs in
cities that are dealing with rapid growth, climate change, and
informalization. In what ways does participation acquire salience in
the formulation of development strategies in Indonesian cities? How
does participation shape a role for the informal sector to influence
development? This presentation will share recent projects and research
from a group of urban planners, designers, and NGO-workers in
Indonesia known collectively as Solo Kota Kita (Our City Solo). Their
work aims to enable citizens and government officials alike to
understand the complexities of the built environment so they can
better take on the problems and opportunities that come with rampant
urbanization. Through independent initiatives and consultancies, this
group has investigated the role of both participation and informality
in a range of contexts including participatory budgeting,
transportation, post-disaster planning, and cities development
strategies.

Date: February 28, 2012
Time: 03:45 P.M.

Venue:
Conference Hall
Centre for Policy Research,
Dharma Marg, Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi–110021(INDIA)

Location:

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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

24 February 2012: Breaking the Caste Barrier: Intergenerational Mobility in India

Sourabh Bikas Paul
University of British Columbia

Abstract:
Amongst the various inequities typically associated with the caste
system in India, probably one of the most debilitating is the
perception that one is doomed by birth, i.e., social and economic
mobility across generations is difficult. We study the extent and
evolution of this lack of mobility by contrasting the
intergenerational mobility rates of the historically disadvantaged
scheduled castes and tribes (SC/ST) in India with the rest of the
workforce in terms of their education attainment, occupation choices
and wages. Using household survey data from successive rounds of the
National Sample Survey between 1983 and 2005, we find that
inter-generational education and income mobility rates of SC/STs have
converged to non-SC/ST levels during this period. Moreover, SC/STs
have been switching occupations relative to their parents at
increasing rates, matching the corresponding switch rates of
non-SC/STs in the process. Interestingly, we have found that a common
feature for both SC/STs and non-SC/STs is that the sharpest change in
intergenerational income mobility has been for middle income
households. This is consistent with the effects of easing credit
constraints, a phenomenon that did characterize this period. We
conclude that the last twenty years of major structural changes in
India have also coincided with a breaking down of caste-based
historical barriers to socio-economic mobility.

Date: February 24, 2012
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room 2
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (INDIA)

Location:

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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

21 March 2012: Stability and Competition in UK Banking

Sir John Vickers
All Souls College, University of Oxford

Date: March 21, 2012
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
NIPFP Auditorium, Ground Floor
National Institute of Public Finance and Policy,
18/2 Satsang Vihar Marg, Special Institutional Area,
New Delhi-110067(INDIA)

Location:

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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

23 February 2012: Cooperative Provision of Indivisible Public Goods

Pierre Dehez
University of Louvain

Abstract:
A community faces the obligation of providing an indivisible public good that each member is able to provide at a certain cost. The solution is to rely on the player who can do it at the lowest cost with due compensations from the other players. We model this problem as a cost sharing game. It turns out to be a kind of reverse airport game whose core has a regular structure. This is the main result of the paper. It enables an easy calculation of the nucleolus that defines compensations that are more appropriate than those derived from the Shapley value. Furthermore, they correspond to the solution derived from the auction procedures proposed by Kleindorfer and Sertel (1994).

Date: February 23, 2012
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
AMEX Conference Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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Thursday, February 9, 2012

13 February 2012: Urban Water Conflicts

Bernard O. BarraquƩ
National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)

Date: February 13, 2012
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Conference Hall
Centre for Policy Research,
Dharma Marg, Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi–110021(INDIA)

Location:

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10 February 2012: Exposure Problem in Multi-Unit Auctions

Hikmet Gunay
University of Manitoba

Abstract:
We characterize the optimal bidding strategies of local and global bidders for two heterogenous licenses in a multi-unit simultaneous ascending auction. The global bidder wants to win both licenses to enjoy synergies; therefore, she bids more than her stand-alone valuation of a license. This exposes her to the risk of losing money even when she wins all licenses. We determine the optimal bidding strategies in the presence of an exposure problem. By using simulation methods, first, we show the frequency of inefficient allocation in the simultaneous ascending auction. Then, we show that the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism may generate more revenue than the simultaneous ascending auction.

Date: February 10, 2012
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room 2
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (INDIA)

Location:

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Wednesday, February 8, 2012

16 February 2012: Systemic Flight to Quality from Emerging Economies, and Enabled International Credit Lines

Gurbachan Singh
Indian Statistical Institute

Abstract:
This paper builds a simple but new model to highlight a puzzle.
Commercial banks routinely extend credit lines to rms, which need to
be effectively backed by some reserves. In contrast, international
credit lines for emerging economies to take care of flight to quality
hardly need to be backed by reserves. This is because the so-called
systemic outflow from emerging economies is accompanied by inflow into
developed economies. So funding liquidity need not be a problem even
if reserves are small. This suggests that ceteris paribus the market
for credit lines to take care of flight to quality ought to exist more
easily than the market for usual credit lines for business
investments. It is actually the opposite. Why? One explanation can lie
in the dual agency perspective (Tirole, 2002). Central banks and the
IMF can then act as mediators and provide enabling conditions. We also
discuss possible extensions of the model to analyse some related
issues.

Date: February 16, 2012
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
AMEX Conference Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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9 February 2012: Implementation in Multi-dimensional Dichotomous Domains

Debasis Mishra
Indian Statistical Institute

Abstract:
We study multidimensional mechanism design in private value and
quasi-linear environments, e.g. auction domains, matching problems
with transfers, choosing a public good among multiple public goods
with transfers etc. We restrict attention to deterministic
implementation in dominant strategies. Our focus is on domains where
agents have dichotomous preferences over alternatives. A dichotomous
type of any agent is characterized by a positive real number, which we
call the value of the agent at this type, and a non-empty subset of
alternatives, which we call the acceptable alternatives. The
interpretation is that an agent of dichotomous type gets (the same)
utility equal to his value from each alternative in his acceptable
set, but gets zero utility on any alternative that is not acceptable.
Note that both the value and the set of acceptable alternatives are
private information of the agent. This makes such type spaces
multidimensional. We call a type space a dichotomous domain if every
type belonging to it is a dichotomous type. We characterize the set of
implementable allocation rules in dichotomous domains using a
condition called ``generation monotonicity". Generation monotonicity
is a new (non-trivial) simplification of the ``cycle monotonicity"
condition of Rochet in dichotomous domains.

Our most striking result comes in a particular class of dichotomous
domains. We show that for a large class of dichotomous domains, which
we refer to as ``rich dichotomous domains", a significantly weaker
condition than generation monotonicity characterizes implementability.
We refer to this weaker condition as 2-generation monotonicity, and
show it to be equivalent to 3-cycle monotonicity. 3-cycle monotonicity
is significantly weaker than cycle monotonicity but stronger than
2-cycle monotonicity, a condition used to characterize
implementability in convex domains. A dichotomous domain is not
convex, but still multidimensional. While most of the earlier results
in the literature found domains where 2-cycle monotonicity is
necessary and sufficient for implementability, to our knowledge, this
paper is the first to identify multidimensional domains where we see
K-cycle monotonicity (K > 2) is necessary and sufficient for
implementation. We show, by way of an example, that 2-cycle
monotonicity is not sufficient for implementability in rich
dichotomous domains. We demonstrate the usefulness of our
characterizations by deriving a revenue maximizing mechanism for the
one-sided matching problem where agents have dichotomous preferences
over alternatives.

Date: February 9, 2012
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
AMEX Conference Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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