ORCID Profile
0000-0002-6368-7140
Current Organisation
BRAC University
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Publisher: Emerald
Date: 05-03-2020
Abstract: This paper aims to study students' strategic behaviors for increasing their job prospect in response to university administrators' moves for lifting up institutional reputation in the academia. A Stackelberg differential game is used to study this strategic interplay between administrators and students. In this game, an administrator maximizes institutional quality to build university reputation while student maximizes grades to increase their job prospects. Therefore, administrators being the leader move first while students set strategies for maximizing their objective function by following administrators' move. The study produces several distinctive results by analyzing administrator–students’ strategic interactions. First, university administrators need to be sufficiently more impatient for building reputation by improving institutional quality than students’ impatience for increasing their job prospects to have feasible solutions. Second, students attempt to increase academic grades for making them more marketable in response to administrators’ additional efforts for increasing their students’ job prospects. Third, exogenous increase in university reputation improves institutional quality and students’ job prospects without affecting their academic grades. However, increase in job prospects motivates students to increase their grades. Fourth, administrators’ too much impatience for increasing university reputation could inflate students’ grade, reduce job prospect and degrade institutional quality. Fifth, an exogenous rise in students’ impatience improves institutional quality and students’ job prospects but reduces students’ grades. Finally, the exogenous increase in opportunity cost of securing good grade degrades institutional quality, thus reducing further job prospects. Therefore, administrators’ positive but moderate impatience for reputation will improve students’ academic performances, institutional quality and job prospects. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyze students’ strategic responses for improving their job prospects in response to administrators’ actions for enhancing university reputation. It helps administrators to design an effective framework for building university reputation in the academic market through improving institutional quality and expanding job markets for their students.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 16-09-2019
DOI: 10.1007/S13753-019-00229-X
Abstract: Nonfunctionality of engineered water sources after two catastrophic cyclones—Sidr in November 2007 and Aila in May 2009—created acute scarcity of safe drinking water in coastal Bangladesh. The objective of this study was to estimate households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for disaster resilient water sources in Dacope upazila of Khulna District in southwestern coastal Bangladesh. By applying the double bounded dichotomous contingent valuation method to a dataset of 250 randomly selected households, we found that the mean WTP is BDT 263 and that inaccessibility to functional safe drinking water sources is the most significant determining factor of households’ WTP. Projecting mean WTP for a disaster resilient water source project in the study area, we measured a present value of aggregate WTP over project’s life span worth about BDT 624 (USD 7.37) million, which is about 14.30 times the present value of project’s aggregate establishment and maintenance cost. However, charging the local inhabitants a water tariff at mean WTP would lead to the exclusion of around 50% of the people from getting access to the improved water services or create a free riding problem. Through simulation exercises this study determined that the socially optimal water tariff is BDT 50 per month. This tariff would not only generate revenue of more than five times the project cost but would also create access to disaster resilient improved drinking water sources for almost 99% of the people.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 03-07-2020
DOI: 10.1108/CAER-12-2018-0239
Abstract: Recent studies suggest extensive use of environmental resources in agrofarming degrades ecosystem significantly. In this backdrop, this study aims at assessing ecoefficiency of paddy farming. Because ecoefficiency links up between economic performances and environmental resources supporting the provision of goods and services for the society, this study further investigates the effectiveness of attending Farmers' Field School (FFS), an agroenvironmental program, in conserving environmental resources through improving farm-level ecoefficiency. In a dataset of 200 randomly selected paddy farmers from three districts of the southwestern Bangladesh, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to compute both radial and pressure-specific (nutrient balance, energy balance, irrigation and pesticide lethal risk) ecoefficiency scores. Furthermore, propensity score matching (PSM) technique is applied to examine the impact of FFS program on farm-level ecoefficiency. The DEA results suggest that paddy farmers are highly eco-inefficient. The computed radial eco-efficiency score is 0.40 implying farmers could reduce around 60% of environmental pressure equiproportionally even by maintaining the same level of value addition. In addition, the PSM results suggest farmers' participation in FFS program led to around 22.5% higher radial ecoefficiency and 7–25% higher environmental pressure-specific eco-efficiencies. Furthermore, simulation exercises reveal that FFS participation in interaction with farm size would lead to around 32–40% reduction of all environmental pressures. Promoting FFS programs among paddy farmers could be an effective policy option to improve eco-efficiency through environment-friendly farming paradigm. This study is probably the maiden effort that has examined the impact of attending the FFS program on ecoefficiency improvement in Bangladesh. This study contributes to both the concern literature by adding useful information and the policymakers by providing new insights about the reduction of environmental resource usage with maintaining the same value addition from agrofarming.
No related grants have been discovered for Sonia Afrin.