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International audience; We compare disagreement in expectations and the frequency of forecast revisions among five categories of agents: households, firms, professional forecasters, policymakers and participants to laboratory experiments. We provide evidence of disagreement among all categories of agents. There is however a strong heterogeneity across categories: while policymakers and professional forecasters exhibit low disagreement, firms and households show strong disagreement. This translates into a heterogeneous frequency of forecast revision across categories of agents, with policymakers revising more frequently their forecasts than firms and professional forecasters. Households last revise less frequently. We are also able to explore the external validity of experimental expectations.

Retirement system sustainability is defined as the ability of plan boards and managers to be responsible investors, active stewards, and allocators of capital to economic activities with desirable social and environmental outcomes. In this paper, we examine the policy frameworks and important structural variables pertinent to private retirement systems in Australia, the UK, and the US. By analyzing various reports, interviewing experts, and using data from the Principles of Responsible Investment as well as national pension and retirement authorities, we identify key structural challenges within national retirement systems. These include market fragmentation, principal-agent conflicts in personal pensions, and the role of service providers. Our results provide insight into how, or whether, retirement systems can facilitate desirable economic, social, and environmental outcomes.

This paper studies the spillover effect of home mortgage delinquencies using a discrete-choice spatial network model. In our empirical study, a main challenge in estimating this model is that mortgage repayment decisions can only be observed for a sample of all the borrowers in the study region. We show that the nested pseudolikelihood (NPL) algorithm can be readily modified to accommodate this missing data issue. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the proposed estimator works well in finite samples and ignoring this issue leads to a downward bias in the estimated spillover effect. We estimate the model using data on single-family residential mortgage delinquencies in Clark County of Nevada in 2010, and find strong evidence of spillover effects. We also conduct some counterfactual experiments to illustrate the policy relevance of the spillover effect.

Technology can help to reduce inefficiencies and inequalities in developing countries. Although whether this happens in practice often depends on the social and geographic context. Deployment of solar home systems (SHS) across Nepal provides one such example. We examine a policy to promote SHS through a subsidy for adoption and its downstream benefits - children’s education, time allocated to agricultural and household work (both unpaid), and working for a wage. We overcome the challenges of the non-random assignment of subsidies by using geographic regression discontinuity design using (cost) distance as the assignment variable. This is based on the assumption that households cannot perfectly control the assignment variable because migrating to a different region, simply to acquire an additional solar subsidy of maximum NRs4000, is challenging and unlikely in the case of Nepal. Our results show that subsidy-eligible households are about 43% more likely to adopt SHS. We find a positive effect of the SHS adoption on the grade for age and educational z-score of children’s educations with the effect being higher on girls than boys. We also find that females are 14.2% more likely to participate and spend more time (about 19 extra days in a year) in agricultural practices by reducing their engagement in family work. However, there is no effect on the participation rates across the labour market. Results also show that males increase their contribution to household work.

In traditional Chinese domestic architecture, the central, main room of the home functions as the family temple. In this room, the altar and related furniture is placed against the wall facing the entrance of the room, which opens onto the courtyard. Usually, in small houses, this room was multi-functional, serving as both living and dining rooms; in larger compounds, this room serves as family shrine and formal reception hall. With multistory dwellings, there did not seem to be a standard solution, but the altar tended to be found in the main room, often defined by the room with the television set before multiple household sets became common.

This book is, without a doubt, a major contribution in the field of Judeo-Persian Studies. Judeo-Persian literature, which extends for about eight centuries, has been severely neglected except for the work of a small number of scholars. There are only four scholars in the United States who have dealt with any aspect of this field, and not many more elsewhere. The existing Judeo-Persian texts are a vast collection of all sorts of material and deserve much more attention. Vera Basch Moreen has made a great step forward by providing translation of a wide variety of literary texts. Especially valuable are her commentaries, explanations, and bibliography.

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This paper presents the correspondences in verbal morphologies to support the existing lexical and other morphological evidence (reported elsewhere) that the Dravidian language family is closely cognate with Elamite. It uses primarily Achaemenid Elamite, for which the most detail is available, and in particular the description of the verb given by R. T. Hallock. A great deal of use is made of Dravidian Ver Morphology by P. S. Subrahmanyam. For one of the two basic tenses in both Dravidian and Elamite, the nonpast, it is shown that there is an item-for-item correspondence in the verbal morphologies for all surviving forms. This is obvious only after a reinterpretation of Proto-Dravidian verbal morphology. For the other basic tense, it is shown that significant correspondences exist in spite of major changes. Also, parallel shifts in verb classes for an intransitive/transitive contrast are shown to be cognate. Other verbal forms, including the auxiliaries, are discussed.

The mark of man on the surface of the earth is as old as the early beginning of mankind. The history of humanity may be envisaged as a struggle against its environment, involving a progressive liberation from the local, natural conditions and the gradual enslavement of the living world by man’s own inventions. Biological motivations explain this tendency. But, as in every human activity, cultural traditions and beliefs encourage us to modify our simple actions and reactions. A philosophical attitude is the primary determining factor of any human attitude. Western philosophies emphasize the supremacy of man over the rest of the world, which only exists to serve him— or so they contend. Since the time of Francis Bacon and Descartes early in the seventeenth century, we have been convinced that we are the masters and possessors of nature. The prodigious progress of the sciences seems to give us the right to do what we want and so to confirm this philosophical attitude. Therefore, it is no wonder that protection of wildlife and sound management of the surface of the earth according to biological laws, did not receive any support from this western philosophy.

This Conference is to be about the global environment in the future, which implies that we are not entirely satisfied with it in the present and that we have some inkling of what it was like in the past. The geologists have told us the story of the aeons before there was life, of the spread and recessions of oceans, of the appearance of life, and the rise and fall of great forests in the days long before man came. The palaeontologists have mapped for us the development of living organisms in the past as manifested in the fossil record. The early history of man is still obscure, but we have some notion of his activities as a hunter and fire-raiscr-positive environment-influencing activities, but probably very slow-acting ones, conducted with complete unconcern for, and lack of knowledge of, any influence of change.

Wondering recently in London how to present this enormous subject to an enlightened but very mixed audience, I strolled out into St James’s and then through Green and Hyde Parks. The grass was still short and the trees were bare, but here and there fine clumps of daffodils and flashes of crocuses were in full bloom, and the ‘lakes’ were alive with all manner of waterfowl. In quiet corners I met more blackbirds than one generally sees in a long walk in the country—not to mention the hordes of pigeons and sparrows. Some early-flowering Prunus trees added a delicate tinge of pink. The entire prospect was delightful in early spring, though almost entirely artificial: not at all typical of the biosphere, but an impressive display of what man has created—and can do even better—when the will, knowledge, and money, are available. Given these last three prerequisites, it is also a portent of what we may expect to see more and more of in future, as human population burgeons and great cities multiply, extend, and ultimately coalesce.

I had seriously thought of beginning this global account of freshwater supplies and pollution with a porcine analogue to the human population explosion. Projection of the latest fifteen-year period for which figures are available, indicating a pig population doubling-time of about twenty years up to 1967–68, suggests that the global balance in numbers between pigs and men will shift in favour of pigs by the year 2060 (cf. United Nations, 1970). Each pig being more or less equivalent to two humans in terms of food consumption and physiological waste production, a still more meaningful shift in these terms will take place approximately one pig doubling-time earlier, namely about the year 2040. These facts prepare the ground for a question posed at the end of this paper—namely, are we really solving our problems today? They also help to establish a proposition pertaining to human populations that, for some reason or other, seems acceptable only when applied to some animal other than man, namely: that the world population explosion of pigs will persist on its seemingly inevitable course only as long as humans want to have more and more pigs around them. In a like manner, the world population explosion of humans will persist on its seemingly inevitable course only as long as humans want to have more and more humans around.

Ecologists who have attempted in recent years to look into the crystal ball to find out what is likely to be the biosphere-to-come, will surely, sooner or later, have reached the conclusion that the future depends almost entirely on how man handles the biosphere within the coming decades. Such forecasting also involves a series of problems, such as the following: (a) How can we circumscribe our vision to make it operational? Should a specific date be set, for instance the year 2000? Or should there be a continuous or periodic appraisal over a definite period of time, as obviously we cannot foresee indefinitely into the future? (b) How far and how reliably can present trends be projected into the future? In this connection an evaluation should be made of the extent to which current trends will generate reactions by mankind, and there- by deflect some of the curves which we have drawn on the basis of past experiences. Some of these problems were admirably illustrated in a recent paper by Peccei (1971), who included part of the accompanying diagram (Fig. 1). This diagram, resulting from the use of computer simulation models, is one example of what has been obtained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team working under the direc- tion of Professor Jay W. Forrester and aiming at studying the dynamic behaviour of interacting systems and how they would react to certain policy changes (C. L. Wilson, 1971).

Santayana tells us that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. Disraeli defined the practical man as one who can be counted on to repeat the errors of his ancestors. But for this moment in time there is no history or precedent, and we have no handbooks, charts, or maps; nor have we any pharmacopoeia, or vaccine for the world epidemic of which we see the initial symptoms.