Childhood Obesity Risk and the Role of Primary Caregivers: A Triangular Semi-parametric Simultaneous Equations Approach

This essay investigates the impacts of primary care giver’s (PCG) time allocation and food expenditure choices on childhood obesity using national panel study of income dynamic (PSID) data. A triangular system of equations is derived and estimated under parametric and semi-parametric model settings. The performances of the two modeling strategies are compared using predictive ability measures with the aid of bootstrap method. Test results suggest relatively better performance of the semi-parametric model than parametric model. Nevertheless, the comparison of the estimates from both parametric and semi-parametric estimation indicates no dramatic changes in our findings. Our results do not suggest significant impacts of PCG’s labor force participation choices, involvement in children’s outdoor activity, and household food expenditures on children’s Body Mass Index (BMI). However, the estimates from both iterated seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) and semi-parametric polynomial estimation indicate that parents’ BMI significantly influence children’s BMI. Obese parents tend to have obese children. Furthermore, physical activity appears to have weak correlation with children’s BMI. More physical activity time does not necessarily lead to lower BMI of children.Time Allocation, Childhood Obesity, Triangular System of Equations, Two-Stage Polynomial Regression, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy,

How old was she? The accuracy of assessing the age of adolescents' based on photos

Information on the degree to which individuals can make accurate estimations of someone's age can be of importance in different legal contexts, such as for example child sexual abuse cases in which the victim is an adolescent and asylum procedures. There is, however, a scarcity of studies concerning age estimations conducted with young target persons. Using facial photos of target persons aged 12-18 years, we investigated the effects of gender, age, and ethnicity of both targets (n = 240) and observers (n = 869) on the accuracy of age estimation. We also investigated the effects of targets' facial expressions (neutral or smiling), use of makeup, and photo quality. Participants overestimated the age of the adolescents by, on average, 3.51 years. Participants overestimated the age of young adolescent girls to a greater extent than that of younger boys. Men made larger overestimations than women. Participants also estimated smiling targets as being older than targets with neutral facial expression, and the age of girls with makeup to be older than girls without makeup. Because there was considerable variation in the accuracy of estimations, and overestimates were common, we conclude that the ability of individuals to estimate the age of adolescents is generally low. This might have important legal implications.Peer reviewe

Women's Earning Power and the "Double Burden" of Market and Household Work

Bargaining theory suggests that married women who experience a relative improvement in their labour market position should experience a comparative gain within their marriage. However, if renegotiation possibilities are limited by institutional mechanisms that achieve long-term commitment, the opposite may be true, particularly if women are specialized in household activities and the labour market allows comparatively more flexibility in their labour supply responses. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel indeed shows that, as long as renegotiation opportunities are limited, comparatively better wages for women exacerbate their 'double burden' of market and household work.bargaining, marriage and renegotiation

On the Perception of Religious Group Membership from Faces

BACKGROUND: The study of social categorization has largely been confined to examining groups distinguished by perceptually obvious cues. Yet many ecologically important group distinctions are less clear, permitting insights into the general processes involved in person perception. Although religious group membership is thought to be perceptually ambiguous, folk beliefs suggest that Mormons and non-Mormons can be categorized from their appearance. We tested whether Mormons could be distinguished from non-Mormons and investigated the basis for this effect to gain insight to how subtle perceptual cues can support complex social categorizations. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants categorized Mormons' and non-Mormons' faces or facial features according to their group membership. Individuals could distinguish between the two groups significantly better than chance guessing from their full faces and faces without hair, with eyes and mouth covered, without outer face shape, and inverted 180°; but not from isolated features (i.e., eyes, nose, or mouth). Perceivers' estimations of their accuracy did not match their actual accuracy. Exploration of the remaining features showed that Mormons and non-Mormons significantly differed in perceived health and that these perceptions were related to perceptions of skin quality, as demonstrated in a structural equation model representing the contributions of skin color and skin texture. Other judgments related to health (facial attractiveness, facial symmetry, and structural aspects related to body weight) did not differ between the two groups. Perceptions of health were also responsible for differences in perceived spirituality, explaining folk hypotheses that Mormons are distinct because they appear more spiritual than non-Mormons. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Subtle markers of group membership can influence how others are perceived and categorized. Perceptions of health from non-obvious and minimal cues distinguished individuals according to their religious group membership. These data illustrate how the non-conscious detection of very subtle differences in others' appearances supports cognitively complex judgments such as social categorization

What your Facebook Profile Picture Reveals about your Personality

People spend considerable effort managing the impressions they give others. Social psychologists have shown that people manage these impressions differently depending upon their personality. Facebook and other social media provide a new forum for this fundamental process; hence, understanding people's behaviour on social media could provide interesting insights on their personality. In this paper we investigate automatic personality recognition from Facebook profile pictures. We analyze the effectiveness of four families of visual features and we discuss some human interpretable patterns that explain the personality traits of the individuals. For example, extroverts and agreeable individuals tend to have warm colored pictures and to exhibit many faces in their portraits, mirroring their inclination to socialize; while neurotic ones have a prevalence of pictures of indoor places. Then, we propose a classification approach to automatically recognize personality traits from these visual features. Finally, we compare the performance of our classification approach to the one obtained by human raters and we show that computer-based classifications are significantly more accurate than averaged human-based classifications for Extraversion and Neuroticism

Rumination and inhibitory difficulties: exploring the role of state rumination with emotionally self-relevant words

The aim of this project was to examine the roles of working memory capacity, depressive symptoms, and rumination (state and trait) in inhibitory difficulties with self-relevant emotional words following a rumination/distraction manipulation using the negative affective priming cognitive task. It was hypothesized that brooding would predict inhibitory difficulties with negative rather than positive self-relevant words in a non-clinical undergraduate sample (N = 148). Additionally, it was proposed that state rumination would play a mediating role in the relationship between brooding and inhibitory difficulties with emotional words, a relationship that would be further moderated by working memory capacity. Though brooding marginally predicted negative bias scores using multiple regression, this valence-specific finding was not confirmed with multi-level statistical analysis. Results failed to support the proposed moderated meditational model, a finding that may be impacted by restricted range of dysphoric affect in the sample. However, results from linear regression indicated that brooding predicted state rumination regardless of condition

Asymmetric labor force participation decisions over the business cycle: evidence from U.S. microdata

The purpose of this paper is to explore the microfoundations of the observed asymmetric movement in aggregate unemployment rates. Using U.S. data, we find that individual labor force participation responds asymmetrically to changes in local labor market conditions, consistent with the pattern of movements in the aggregate unemployment rate. Differences in the asymmetry and sensitivity of labor force participation decisions are found across gender, age, and education groups, and these differences are used to anticipate changes in the aggregate movements as population characteristics change over time.

Gender Differences in Labor Supply to Monopsonistic Firms : An Empirical Analysis Using Linked Employer-Employee Data from Germany

This paper investigates women?s and men?s labor supply to the firm within a structural approach based on a dynamic model of new monopsony. Using methods of survival analysis and a linked employer-employee dataset for Germany, we find that labor supply elasticities are small (0.9?2.4) and that women?s labor supply to the firm is substantially less elastic than men?s (which is the reverse of gender differences in labor supply usually found at the level of the market). One implication of these findings is that the gender pay gap could be the result of wage discrimination by profit-maximizing monopsonistic employers. -- Mithilfe eines strukturellen Ansatzes, der auf einem dynamischen Monopsonmodell beruht, untersuchen wir das Arbeitsangebot von Frauen und Männern auf Firmenebene. Die unter Verwendung von Verweildauermodellen und eines deutschen kombinierten Firmen-Beschäftigten-Datensatzes geschätzten Arbeitsangebotselastizitäten sind gering (0,9?2,4) und fallen für Frauen erheblich geringer aus als für Männer (während man für das Arbeitangebot auf Marktebene üblicherweise eine höhere Elastizität für Frauen findet). Eine Implikation hieraus ist, dass geschlechtsspezifische Lohndifferentiale die Folge von Lohndiskriminierung seitens gewinnmaximierender monopsonistischer Arbeitgeber sein könnten.labor supply,monopsony,gender,discrimination