Suchergebnisse

Does variation in how religious festivals are celebrated have economic consequences? We study the economic impacts of the timing of Catholic patron saint day festivals in Mexico. For causal identification, we exploit cross-locality variation in festival dates and in the timing of agricultural seasons. We estimate the impact of " agriculturally coinciding" festivals (those coinciding with peak planting or harvest months) on long-run economic development of localities. Agriculturally coinciding festivals lead to lower household income and worse development outcomes overall. These negative effects are likely due to lower agricultural productivity, which inhibits structural transformation out of agriculture. Agriculturally coinciding festivals may nonetheless persist because they also lead to higher religiosity and social capital. (JEL O12, O13, O18, 043, Q12, Z12, Z13)

Between 1921 and 1956, French colonial governments organized medical campaigns to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. Villagers were forcibly examined and injected with medications with severe, sometimes fatal, side effects. We digitized 30 years of archival records to document the locations of campaign visits at a granular geographic level for five central African countries. We find that greater campaign exposure reduces vaccination rates and trust in medicine, as measured by willingness to consent to a blood test. We examine relevance for present-day health initiatives; World Bank projects in the health sector are less successful in areas with greater exposure. (JEL F54, I12, I15, I18, N37, N47, Z13)

The architecture office GOP was awarded the execution of the project for the regional government office building "Consejerías") in the city of Mérida, designed by Bruce S. Fairbanks, through an International Competition of Ideas summoned by the Junta de Extremadura. The new Consejerías in Mérida set the standards for a wholly sustainable building. It modifies its natural outdoors environment by soothing the climate and giving shelter. A design strategy was, among others, to gain as much confort as possible inside the building: thermal confort, visual confort, indoor air quality and acoustic quality. The new Consejerías underlying precept is to make a simple building, so they are designed to meet all these objectives by taking full advantage of architectonic means rather than requesting to technical fixtures for the conditioning of their indoor environment. The system designed to benefit from the inertia of the soil as a buffer for the building interior temperatures has never been used in Spain in large facilities, because they require large air volumes due to their low specific temperature. In this case, an air-to-earth heat exchanger was included in the project for a large institutional building. ; El Estudio GOP ha obtenido la adjudicación del proyecto del edificio de Consejerías en la ciudad de Mérida, diseñadas por Bruce S. Fairbanks, mediante el Concurso Internacional de Ideas convocado por la Junta de Extremadura. Las nuevas Consejerías de Mérida se constituyen como un ejemplo de edificio sostenible en todos sus aspectos. El edificio modifica el entorno natural externo moderando el clima y ofreciendo protección y cobijo. Entre las estrategias seguidas al diseñarlo está obtener el máximo confort en el interior: confort térmico, confort visual, calidad del aire interno y calidad acústica. Las nuevas Consejerías están diseñadas para alcanzar todos estos objetivos, manteniendo la idea subyacente de un edificio simple y obteniendo el máximo rendimiento de los recursos arquitectónicos antes de apelar a las ...

The large increase in renewable energy sources (RES-E) penetration in the European Union (EU) has raised the concern of policy makers about the costs of public promotion of RES-E, in spite of the commitment of the European Commission to the deployment of RES-E in the last years. ; This paper is focused on wind energy, because it is the renewable technology with the highest contribution to electricity mix in Europe (excluding hydro). ; An economic analysis of wind energy contribution should not only take into account the policy costs of the deployment, which are finally paid by electricity consumers, but also its benefits, particularly those related to climate change mitigation and the reduction of fossil fuel dependence distributed among citizens. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap and evaluate the policy costs and the most relevant benefits of wind energy deployment in the EU28 (28 Member States) using 2013 data. For this purpose, an innovated methodology internationally validated has been used. ; The results show that the benefits considered are relevant and should be taken into account when support costs are assessed and in the future development of energy policies in Europe. ; Peer reviewed