Graduate Student Seminar

Speaker 1: Mingkai Yu

Title

Stability Analysis of Swarms

Abstract

We specify an `individual-based’ continuous-time model for swarm aggregation in n-dimensional space and study its stability properties. We show that the individuals (autonomous agents or biological creatures) will form a cohesive swarm size, which depends only on the parameters of the swarm size. Finally, we show that the configuration of the swarm members converges to a constant arrangement.

Speaker 2: Michael Daniel Lucagbo

Title

The link between agricultural output and the states of poverty in the Philippines: Evidence from self-rated poverty data

Abstract

The high poverty incidence in the Philippines is a concern that policy makers should address. Since poverty incidence has dynamic patterns, studies using official poverty data encounter difficulty because of a limited number of data points. This study builds econometric models in analyzing the movement of poverty in the Philippines using the quarterly self-rated poverty series of the Social Weather Stations. First, the Markov Switching Model is used to identify the states of poverty. It assumes two states: high and moderate states of poverty. On the average, 61 percent of the population consider themselves poor when the country is in the state of high poverty. In times of moderate poverty, 49.5 percent of the population consider themselves poor. The results show that once the country is in the state of high poverty, it stays there for an average of 24 quarters, or six years, before moving out. The logistic regression model is then used to identify predictors of poverty states.

The study shows that poverty incidence in the country is dynamic, and frequent monitoring through self-rated poverty surveys is important in order to assess the effectiveness of the government programs in reducing poverty.