Conventional glycoconjugate vaccines are prepared with polysaccharides isolated from bacterial fermentation, an approach with some significant drawbacks such as handling of live bacterial strains, the presence of biological impurities, and inter-batch variations in oligosaccharide epitope structure. However, it has been shown in many cases that a synthetic fragment of appropriate structure conj...

This paper develops ideal estimators to causally estimate the effect of two education reforms in India that expanded the access to schooling. These policies differed in their levels of decentralization in decision making. The different administrative levels decided which inputs the funds were allocated for and where the school-building was targeted. Comparing the two policies, I find evidence t...

We evaluate the effectiveness of regional targeting in China’s large-scale poverty alleviation program begun in 1986 by analyzing a panel data set of all counties in China for the period 1981-95. Estimates of models of poor county designation and poverty fund allocation and newly defined targeting gap and targeting error measures show that political factors have affected targeting and that leak...

As a complement to the literature, this paper studies the effects of changes in demographic structures on China’s growth from 1957 to 2007. A general equilibrium overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility is employed in order to measure the contribution of demographic changes. The main findings are (1) the demographic change (a sharp decline in fertility) was the main engine of Chi...

As opposed to the Veblen-Gerschenkron catching-up hypothesis, the recent literature allows for technological divergence in backward economies. We extend a non-linear adoption function to include openness and interact with capital accumulation in an intertemporal general equilibrium framework. The threshold gap necessary to catch-up is endogenously determined by the economy’s absorptive capacity...

OnApril 1, 2002, the Japanese government lifted a blanket guarantee of all deposits and began limiting the coverage of time deposits. This paper uses this deposit insurance reform as a natural experiment to investigate the relationship between deposit insurance coverage and market discipline. I find that the reform raised the sensitivity of interest rates on deposits, and that of deposit quanti...

In a competitive and dynamic market, financial institutions must forecast the proportion of mortgages that will become delinquent, default or prepay. This paper develops a novel forecasting model with nonstationary Markov chain and Grey forecasting, capable of predicting the likelihood of delinquency, default and prepayment. Home mortgage data, obtained by a major Taiwan financial institution f...

A new, systematic and integrated way of building a national information and communication technology (ICT) frontier is proposed for countries specialized in ICT for export. Using patent citation as a proxy of interaction between technologies, a national ICT network is developed. Local core ICTs are identified by using two centrality measures and five brokerage measures. The importance in terms ...

Compared with its ASEAN neighbors, Vietnam appears to have weathered the Asian crisis quite well. Official statistics indicate a GDP growth rate of 6.6 per cent for the first half of 1998; export growth remains positive, and the dong has depreciated by only 20 per cent against the USD. But the relatively favorable picture has more to do with controls than with sound economic fundamentals. In th...

This paper presents an analytic framework with empirical evidence aiming to improve our understanding of the roles of foreign direct investment (FDI) in shaping productivity growth. Specifically, the study empirically examines the effects of FDI on China’s regional productivity growth. Our analyses based on two versions of our model, one excluding and one including human capital, show that FDI ...