Lester A. Zeager

Strategic Behavior in Refugee Repatriation A Game-Theoretic Analysis

The authors present a game-theoretic analysis of negotiations involving two players: the government of a country of origin and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in which the latter represents refugees, countries of asylum, and donor countries at the negotiating table. Ordinal preference orderings of outcomes allow the authors to represent the attitudes of governments in countries of origin toward their refugees as well as the urgency of repatriation for countries of asylum and donor countries. For alternative configurations of preference orderings, the authors analyze repatriation negotiations using classical game theory and the theory of moves, which assume different rules of play. They find the theory of moves is better suited for understanding efforts to achieve repatriation agreements in actual refugee crises and conclude with reflections on the difficulties of reaching repatriation agreements in recent years.

Negotiations for Refugee Repatriation or Local Settlement: A Game‐Theoretic Analysis

This paper uses a model developed by Brams and Doherty (1993) to examine negotiations among a country of origin, a country of asylum, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a refugee crisis. A unique feature of the paper is its treatment of the country of asylum as a separate player in the negotiations, which makes the choice to permit or deny settlement in the asylum country endogenous. The model is applied to two groups of Rwandese refugees: Tutsis living in exile in Burundi for three decades and Hutus in Zaire during the 1990s. The contrasting circumstances surrounding these two refugee crises provide an opportunity to study asylum countries that were sympathetic and unsympathetic, and to model changing attitudes in the country of origin and the international community toward the refugees. For both crises, the predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the unfolding of the negotiation process and the opportunities that eventually became available to the refugees.

The Impact of Food Stamps on US Poverty in the 1980s: A Marginal Dominance Analysis

The relative effectiveness of the U.S. Food Stamp Program in reducing the incidence and depth of poverty is compared at a number of poverty lines across time. The analysis is based upon an extension of dominance methods for ordering poverty, recently developed statistical inference procedures, and a merged data-set that permits an unusually comprehensive measure of income. The comparative effectiveness of the Food Stamp Program in reducing headcount poverty over time is contingent on the poverty line selected. However, the reduction in poverty gaps is greater in 1990 than in 1982, regardless of the poverty line chosen. The sensitivity of the results to the income concept, equivalence scale and time period used for measuring income are also considered. Copyright 1996 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.

The effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition

Abstract We investigate the effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition using household data from cashout experiments in Alabama and San Diego, California. We apply dominance methods to test for differences in nutrient distributions at or below the recommended dietary allowances.

Nutrition and nonparticipation in the US food stamp programme

Microdata from the National Food Consumption Survey are used to test for differences in caloric and protein intake distributions. We compare poor households that participate in the US food stamp programme to eligible households that do not participate. Tests for stochastic dominance provide unambiguous evidence that eligible nonparticipants suffer from relative undernutrition compared to participating households. Probit analysis is used to identify characteristics of participating and nonparticipating households.

The distributional impact of unification and the 1992–93 recession on West German households

The 1992-93 recession in the western states of Germany has been attributed, in substantial measure, to the macroeconomic consequences of policies to finance unification. Studies of the costs of unification have not attempted to measure the burden of the recession. We estimate a dynamic, panel model of household incomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and use it to forecast what these incomes would have been in 1992-94 without a recession. Using a ratio of actual to forecast incomes, we compare the relative burden of the recession across households. Our findings suggest that western households below the median income bore the brunt of the combined impact of unification and the recession of 1992-93.

Relative undernutrition in Puerto Rico under alternative food assistance programmes

In the early 1980s, Puerto Rico experienced a conversion from the Food Stamp Program (FSP) to the Nutrition Assistance Program (NAP) and a severe recession. To compare relative undernutrition in Puerto Rico in 1977 and 1984 stochastic dominance methods and statistical inference procedures are applied to nutrient distributions. To separate the effect of the recession from the effect of converting food coupons to cash benefits, a multiple regression model of nutrient consumption is also estimated. In the dominance comparisons, every improvement in nutrition status between 1977 and 1984 is statistically significant at the lowest quintile, while no case of worsening undernutrition is significant at the lowest quintile. The multiple regression model provides some evidence that the conversion from food coupons to cash might have reduced nutrition status in the lowest quintile. But a larger proportion of food assistance was allocated to low-income households under the NAP than under the FSP. No evidence of signi...

Evaluating a neglected dimension of economic development: Mortality, risk aversion and uncertainty

Abstract Mortality and longevity are important but neglected dimensions of economic well-being. This paper develops a general method for applying stochastic dominance ranking procedures to evaluate mortality distributions across populations and among major regions of the world. The dominance approach is shown to have a number of important advantages, which are illustrated with applications using data from standard life tables. The problem of “missing women” is investigated by making dominance comparisons of female mortality distributions among major LDC regions. Using United Nations model life-table data it is shown that for a wide range of life expectancy values, female mortality in the Far East dominates the overall pattern for females in LDCs, while the converse is true for South Asia and Latin America.

LORENZ DECOMPOSITION AND INTERDISTRIBUTIONAL LORENZ COMPARISONS

We use recently developed methods to perform decompositions of the Lorenz curve in the United States by race, region, and marital status. The decomposed Lorenz ordinates are used to construct interdistributional Lorenz curves (ILCs), which allow us to identify an economic advantage by one subgroup over another or changes in economic advantage over time. We propose asymptotically distribution-free estimators for the ILCs and apply these estimators to data from the Current Population Survey for 1977 and 1997. As one might expect, there are economic advantages by race, region, and marital status, even in 1997. Economic advantage is greatest for marital status and smallest for region in both years. We find significant convergence (i.e. a smaller economic advantage) over time by race and region, though not by marital status.

Second‐Order Discrimination and Generalized Lorenz Dominance

We propose a definition of second-order discrimination that does not require the reference distribution to first-order dominate the comparison one, and allows rankings of discrimination patterns when both the reference and the comparison distributions differ. It involves comparing the probabilities that randomly selected individuals in the reference and comparison distributions belong to subgroups having the same cumulative mean income, yields orderings of distributions equivalent to those from generalized Lorenz dominance, and allows orderings of discrimination patterns, partial or complete, across pairs of distributions. We compare discrimination against U.S. seniors (inter-distributional inequality between seniors and non-seniors) by ethnicity.