Publications by Year: 2011

2011
William Tyler Gibson, J. Veldhuis, B. Rubinstein, H. Cartwright, N. Perrimon, W. Brodland, Radhika Nagpal, and Matthew C. Gibson. 2011. “Control of the Mitotic Cleavage Plane by Local Epithelial Topology.” Cell, 144, 3, Pp. 414-426.
Francis X Clooney. 2011. “"Female Beauty, Female Power: Seeing Devi in the Saundarya Lahari".” Edited by Tracy Pintchman and Rita D. Sherma. Woman and Goddess in Hinduism, Pp. 33–60.
Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions
Francis X. Clooney. 2011. Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Franco Farinelli. 2011. Why America is called America.
Robert F Shepherd, Filip Ilievski, Wonjae Choi, Stephen A Morin, Adam A Stokes, Aaron D Mazzeo, Xin Chen, Michael Wang, and George M Whitesides. 2011. “Multigait soft robot.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, Pp. 20400–20403. Publisher's VersionAbstract
This manuscript describes a unique class of locomotive robot: A soft robot, composed exclusively of soft materials (elastomeric polymers), which is inspired by animals (e.g., squid, starfish, worms) that do not have hard internal skeletons. Soft lithography was used to fabricate a pneumatically actuated robot capable of sophisticated locomotion (e.g., fluid movement of limbs and multiple gaits). This robot is quadrupedal; it uses no sensors, only five actuators, and a simple pneumatic valving system that operates at low pressures (<10 psi). A combination of crawling and undulation gaits allowed this robot to navigate a difficult obstacle. This demonstration illustrates an advantage of soft robotics: They are systems in which simple types of actuation produce complex motion.
B. Gladman, J. Kavelaars, L. Allen, C. Van Laerhoven, J. -M. Petit, I. Murray, L. Jones, J. W. Parker, P. Smith, J. -L. Margot, I. Smith, J. Coffey, P. Nicholson, R. Jacobson, M. Brozovic, S. Lawler, A. Bieryla, R. L. Jones, M. Ashby, M. Fouesneau, B. McLeod, P. Rousselot, O. Mousis, A. Campo-Bagatin, P. Benavidez, and G. V. Williams. 2011. Minor Planet Electronic Circulars, 2011-H58.
Nir Eyal and Alex Voorhoeve. 2011. “Inequalities in HIV care: chances versus outcomes.” Am J Bioeth, 11, 12, Pp. 42-4. Published Version
Y Isogai, S Si, L Pont-Lezica, T Tan, V Kapoor, VN Murthy, and C Dulac. 2011. “Molecular organization of vomeronasal chemoreception.” Nature, 478, 7368, Pp. 241-245. Publisher's Version
Dan Levy, Anca Dumitrescu, and Matt Sloan. 2011. “Impact evaluation of Niger's IMAGINE program.” http://www.mathematica-mpr.com. Publisher's VersionAbstract

The IMAGINE program was designed to improve educational outcomes of girls in Niger. IMAGINE was funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and was a component of the three-year Threshold Program in Niger (NTP) dedicated to reducing corruption, registering more businesses, promoting land titling, and increasing girls’ school enrollment, attendance, and completion rates. In December 2009, MCC suspended the NTP in the midst of implementation due to undemocratic actions undertaken by the government. While most of the NTP components were not sufficiently implemented to allow for a rigorous evaluation of their intended impacts, the girls’ education project had been substantially implemented by that time and is thus the focus of our evaluation.

The girls’ education program, locally known as IMAGINE, was implemented in 10 departments in Niger with low girls’ enrollment and primary school completion rates. Plan International, a nongovernmental organization, was responsible for implementing IMAGINE under the supervision of USAID, during 2008–2010.  The program consisted of constructing 68 primary schools and implementing a set of complementary interventions designed to increase girls’ enrollment and completion rates. The schools were based on a prototype that included three classrooms, housing for three female teachers, a preschool, and separate latrines for boys and girls equipped with hand- washing stations. Schools were deliberately located near a water source and a well was installed close by. The complementary interventions included designing and disseminating training modules for teachers, promoting extracurricular activities, providing teacher incentive awards, and conducting a mobilization campaign in support of girls’ education. Due to the suspension of the NTP, the IMAGINE program was only partially implemented. Sixty-two functional schools were constructed, but the majority of the complementary activities were not implemented.

This report documents the main findings from the impact evaluation of the IMAGINE program. Overall, IMAGINE had a 4.3 percentage point positive impact on primary school enrollment, no impact on attendance, and no impact on math and French test scores. The program impacts were generally larger for girls than for boy . For girls, the program had an 8 percentage point positive impact on enrollment and a 5.4 per centage point impact on attendance. The program had no impact on girls’ math scores, though there is suggestive evidence it may have had a positive impact of 0.09 standard deviations on girls’ French test scores. No significant impacts were detected for boys’ enrollment, attendance, or test scores. Finally, impacts were larger for younger children (ages 7-10), than for those between the ages of 10 and 12.

Benjamin A Olken and Rohini Pande. 2011. “Corruption in Developing Countries.” Annual Review of Economics, 4, Pp. 479-509. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists’ ability to measure corruption. This, in turn, has led to a new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what determines the level of corruption. We find robust evidence that corruption responds to standard economic incentive theory, but also that effects of anti-corruption policies often attenuate as officials find alternate strategies to pursue rents.

annual_review_of_economics_vol_4_pande_2011_-_hks.pdf
Ethics for Enemies : Terror, Torture, and War
FM. Kamm. 2011. Ethics for Enemies : Terror, Torture, and War, Pp. 178 p. Oxford : Oxford University Press. HOLLIS
Amitabh Chandra, Anupam B Jena, and Jonathan S Skinner. 2011. “The pragmatist's guide to comparative effectiveness research.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25, 2, Pp. 27-46. Publisher's VersionAbstract

All developed countries have been struggling with a trend toward health care absorbing an ever-larger fraction of government and private budgets. Adopting any treatment that improves health outcomes, no matter what the cost, can worsen allocative inefficiency by paying dearly for small health gains. One potential solution is to rely more heavily on studies of the costs and effectiveness of new technologies in an effort to ensure that new spending is justified by a commensurate gain in consumer benefits. But not everyone is a fan of such studies and we discuss the merits of comparative effectiveness studies and its cousin, cost-effectiveness analysis. We argue that effectiveness research can generate some moderating effects on cost growth in healthcare if such research can be used to nudge patients away from less-effective therapies, whether through improved decision making or by encouraging beefed-up copayments for cost-ineffective procedures. More promising still for reducing growth is the use of a cost-effectiveness framework to better understand where the real savings lie—and the real savings may well lie in figuring out the complex interaction and fragmentation of healthcare systems.

Amitabh Chandra, Jonathan Gruber, and Robin McKnight. 2011. “Patient Cost-Sharing and Hospitalization Offsets in the Elderly.” American Economic Review, 100, 1, Pp. 193-213. Publisher's VersionAbstract

In the Medicare program, increases in cost sharing by a supplemental insurer can exert financial externalities. We study a policy change that raised patient cost sharing for the supplemental insurer for retired public employees in California. We find that physician visits and prescription drug usage have elasticities that are similar to those of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE). Unlike the HIE, however, we find substantial “offset” effects in terms of increased hospital utilization. The savings from increased cost sharing accrue mostly to the supplemental insurer, while the costs of increased hospitalization accrue mostly to Medicare.

Conor J Walsh, Jeremy C Franklin, Alexander H Slocum, and Rajiv Gupta. 2011. “Design of a robotic tool for percutaneous instrument distal tip repositioning.” In 33rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS, Pp. 2097-2100. Boston, MA. PDF
Rohini Pande and Deanna Ford. 2011. Gender Quotas and Female Leadership: A Review. Gender Quotas and Female Leadership: A Review. World Development Report on Gender. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Gender Quotas and Female Leadership: A Review

gender_quotas.pdf
Monica Singhal and Benjamin A Olken. 2011. “Informal taxation.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 3, 4, Pp. 1-28. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Informal taxation is widespread, particularly in rural areas, with substantial in-kind labor payments. The wealthy pay more, but pay less in percentage terms, and informal taxes are more regressive than formal taxes. Failing to include informal taxation underestimates household tax burdens and revenue decentralization in developing countries. We discuss various explanations for and implications of these observed stylized facts.

Laura J Brattain, Caspar Floryan, Oliver P Hauser, Michael Nguyen, Steven B Corn, Robert J Yong, Samuel B Kesner, and Conor J Walsh. 2011. “Design of an Ultrasound Needle Guidance System.” In 33rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS, Pp. 8090-8093. Boston, MA.Abstract

In this paper, we describe our prototype of an ultrasound guidance system to address the need for an easy-touse, cost-effective, and portable technology to improve ultrasound-guided procedures. The system consists of a lockable, articulating needle guide that attaches to an ultrasound probe and a user-interface that provides real-time visualization of the predicted needle trajectory overlaid on the ultrasound image. Our needle guide ensures proper needle alignment with the ultrasound imaging plane. Moreover, the calculated needle trajectory is superimposed on the real-time ultrasound image, eliminating the need for the practitioner to estimate the target trajectory, and thereby reducing injuries from needle readjustment. Finally, the guide is lockable to prevent needle deviation from the desired trajectory during insertion. This feature will also allow the practitioner to free one hand to complete simple tasks that usually require a second practitioner to perform. Overall, our system eliminates the experience required to develop the fine hand movement and dexterity needed for traditional ultrasound-guided procedures. The system has the potential to increase efficiency, safety, quality, and reduce costs for a wide range of ultrasound-guided procedures. Furthermore, in combination with portable ultrasound machines, this system will enable these procedures to be more easily performed by unskilled practitioners in non-ideal situations such as the battlefield and other disaster relief areas.

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Filip Ilievski, Aaron D Mazzeo, Robert F Shepherd, Xin Chen, and George M Whitesides. 2011. “Soft robotics for chemists.” Angewandte Chemie, 123, Pp. 1930–1935. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In areas from assembly of machines to surgery, and from deactivation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to unmanned flight, robotics is an important and rapidly growing field of science and technology. It is currently dominated by robots having hard body plans—constructions largely of metal structural elements and conventional joints — and actuated by electrical motors, or pneumatic or hydraulic systems. Handling fragile objects—from the ordinary (fruit) to the important (internal organs)—is a frequent task whose importance is often overlooked and is difficult for conventional hard robots; moving across unknown, irregular, and shifting terrain is also. Soft robots may provide solutions to both of these classes of problems, and to others. Methods of designing and fabricating soft robots are, however, much less developed than those for hard robots. We wish to expand the methods and materials of chemistry and soft-materials science into applications in fully soft robots.
Amitabh Chandra and Jonathan S Skinner. 2011. “Technology growth and expenditure growth in health care”. Publisher's VersionAbstract

In the United States, health care technology has contributed to rising survival rates, yet health care spending relative to GDP has also grown more rapidly than in any other country. We develop a model of patient demand and supplier behavior to explain these parallel trends in technology growth and cost growth. We show that health care productivity depends on the heterogeneity of treatment effects across patients, the shape of the health production function, and the cost structure of procedures such as MRIs with high fixed costs and low marginal costs. The model implies a typology of medical technology productivity: (I) highly cost-effective “home run” innovations with little chance of overuse, such as anti-retroviral therapy for HIV, (II) treatments highly effective for some but not for all (e.g. stents), and (III) “gray area” treatments with uncertain clinical value such as ICU days among chronically ill patients. Not surprisingly, countries adopting Category I and effective Category II treatments gain the greatest health improvements, while countries adopting ineffective Category II and Category III treatments experience the most rapid cost growth. Ultimately, economic and political resistance in the U.S. to ever-rising tax rates will likely slow cost growth, with uncertain effects on technology growth.

Monica Singhal and Erzo FP Luttmer. 2011. “Culture, Context, and the Taste for Redistribution.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 3, 1, Pp. 157-179. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Is culture an important determinant of preferences for redistribution? To separate culture from the economic and institutional environment ("context"), we relate immigrants' redistributive preferences to the average preference in their birth countries. We find a strong positive relationship that is robust to rich controls for economic factors and cannot easily be explained by selective migration. This effect is as large as that of own household income and appears stronger for those less assimilated into the destination country. Immigrants from high-preference countries are more likely to vote for more pro-redistribution parties. The effect of culture persists strongly into the second generation.

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