Law, economics, social sciences

Migration and its positive implications for social and economic development have increased in recognition and importance in the context of regional and national development. In addition, while international migration in the wake of globalization has received most academic attention, the World Development Report 2009 points out that the largest flows of people take place within nations. This internal migration can be an important driver of urbanization, which in turn facilitates economic growth by giving rise to agglomeration economies within cities...

This book is a collection of three essays contributing to the empirical literature on inequality and female labor force participation in developing countries. The first essay is an extension to the analysis of benefit incidence of public expenditures. Using data for Kenya it shows how different household needs for government services ought to be incorporated into the analysis to get an improved understanding of the distributional implications of public spending. The second essay revisits the hypothesis that female labor force...

Nowadays it is vital for companies to offer their products all over the world in order to be successful. The economic rise of emerging markets such as China, India or the Middle East increases the importance of those new customer segments, as their contribution towards the companies profits continuously grow. To further exploit the potential of emerging markets, it is important to understand how to acquire and retain those culturally different customers. Existing but scarce academic literature in Variety Seeking...

The lack of improved water and sanitary infrastructure still kills many people in developing countries each year. This book gives useful insights into how development projects have an impact in practice and why there is a possibility that projects fail to have positive outcomes. In this book, the national water and sanitation program in rural Benin is analyzed. A difference-in-difference analysis is combined with a phasing-in approach to a sample of 200 villages in the departments of Mono, Couffo and...

For families in poor countries, risk and shocks such as storms and floods, illness and accidents, unemployment and civil conflict are often part of everyday life. This book provides comprehensive empirical evidence of risk management strategies in developing countries and how they impact on the lives of the poor. Possible strategies include (i) reducing risk factors, (ii) mitigating the impact of risks through formal insurance and insurance substitutes, and (iii) seeking support to better cope with negative shocks. The chapters...

This thesis was written in 2008 after six months of field work and data collection in South Africa. It includes a comprehensive literature review on the theory and empirics of the behavioral response to HIV looking at: (1) the relationship between HIV incidence and sexual behaviors; (2) types of evidence resulting from observational studies, randomized controlled trials (RCTs), recent creative social experiments that go beyond conventional RCTs in testing different hypothesis in the field; (3) the socio-economic characteristics of HIV...

The World Bank put the concept of vulnerability in the spotlight of poverty research by presenting it in the World Development Report 2000/01 as an important component of combating poverty. The reason for assigning such a prominent position to vulnerability is threefold: It decreases current well-being, it determines future levels of poverty and it may be at the root of long-term hardship. Building on panel data from rural households in Thailand and Vietnam this book contributes to our knowledge and...

Strong market segmentation and rapidly changing diverse technologies, combined with increased competitive intensity, are forcing global manufacturing companies to reconsider their product development strategy. Modularization in product development is essential for these companies to compete sustainably in such an international and dynamic environment. However, companies face major challenges in the modularization of product development. This dissertation empirically analyzes the modularization of product development in global manufacturing companies with special regard given to the interrelations between product architecture and product development...

The past decade has seen the emergence of a particular sales and distribution model in which companies that manufacture products and sell them directly through proprietary distribution channels open these channels to third parties and often even to competitor products. One of the industries to pioneer this model has been financial services, where the approach is referred to as an “open architecture” offering. The author's research investigates if and how customer reactions are affected when a company sells third-party products...

Time-continuous stochastic processes have been used in numerous financial market models for decades. In this work, important aspects of application - with regard to the estimation of parameters, evaluation of financial market contracts and recording the efficiency of capital markets - are primarily illustrated using selected examples and then possible solutions or explanations are presented. Details Title: Analysis of Financial Market Models Subtitle: Estimation, Pricing, and Efficiency Author: Dr. Balazs Cserna Edition: 1st edition Published: 1st edition 05.09.2011 Subject: Economics...

The demographic change forced Germany and other industrialized countries to bring their pension systems back on a sustainable track. This development has increased the responsibility of each individual regarding old-age income. The affected individuals are forced to intensify their savings to close the increasing gap between public pension income and the standard of living experienced during one's working life. This book investigates several empirical and methodological aspects of households' saving behavior including some in relation to the background of the...

This book contributes to the empirical literature on poverty, mortality and labor supply in developing countries. Each of the three essays included in this book make use of new household data sets that were collected to innovatively address a well-defined research problem. The first chapter investigates the relationship between undernutrition and child mortality in sub-Sahara Africa and explains why children around Lake Victoria have very low chances to survive up to age 5 despite being extremely wellnourished. The second chapter...