Food Labels and Weight Loss: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

This study investigates the role of nutrition and ingredients information, included in the food labels, as useful tools for individuals who are trying to lose weight. This research has three objectives - examine personal characteristics as predictors of willingness to lose weight conditional on individual's current body mass index, investigate whether those who are trying to lose weight are more likely to read food labels to gather nutritional and ingredients information, and, analyze whether those who want to lose weight and read food labels have a greater propensity to lose weight. Estimates from random effects logistic regressions indicate higher usage of food labels by those who are trying to lose weight, irrespective of their current body mass index. There is also greater likelihood of weight loss in the user group. Future research entails use of more sophisticated econometric techniques to control for self-selection and endogeneity.Nutritional information, ingredient information, body mass index, panel data, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Geroch Group Description of Black Holes

On one hand the Geroch group allows one to associate spacetime independent matrices with gravitational configurations that effectively only depend on two coordinates. This class includes stationary axisymmetric four- and five-dimensional black holes. On the other hand, a recently developed inverse scattering method allows one to factorize these matrices to explicitly construct the corresponding spacetime configurations. In this work we demonstrate the construction as well as the factorization of Geroch group matrices for a wide class of black hole examples. In particular, we obtain the Geroch group SL(3,R) matrices for the five-dimensional Myers-Perry and Kaluza-Klein black holes and the Geroch group SU(2,1) matrix for the four-dimensional Kerr-Newman black hole. We also present certain non-trivial relations between the Geroch group matrices and charge matrices for these black holes.Comment: 29 pages, no figures; v2: references added; v3: minor changes, matches published versio

Saving Behaviour of the Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in the UK: Evidence from Panel Data

The fact that members of an immigrant community may have different demographic characteristics, or may have different tastes, to the indigenous population, may manifest itself in differences in saving behaviour. In addition, depending on their ethnic background, there could be differences among the immigrants themselves. Using household level panel data for the UK, this paper analyzes the saving behaviour of the immigrants of different ethnicities vis a vis the natives. Our estimation results provide evidence of diverse saving behaviour among British households, which depends on both immigration status as well as ethnic background. Decomposition analysis indicates that these differences are primarily attributable to unobservable rather than to the differences in observed characteristics.Immigrant, Ethnicity, Household Savings, Decomposition Analysis

Intergenerational Earnings Mobility of Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in the UK

This paper analyzes intergenerational earnings mobility of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the UK. It has used a two sample instrumental variable technique, and utilized British Household Panel Survey for estimating mobility coefficient. The estimation provides the evidence of differences in generational mobility based on immigration status and ethnic origin. Earnings of the indigenous people tend to have a strong correlation with that of the father with a mobility coefficient of 0.34. However for immigrants as well as ethnic minorities, the father’s earnings has a lesser effect on children’s earnings with a much lower coefficient estimate.Intergenerational Mobility, Immigrant, Ethnic Minority, Two Sample Instruemental Variable.

Women Empowerment in Assam

The present paper is an attempt to analyze the status of women and their empowerment in terms of various indicators such as access to education, employment, household decision making power, financial autonomy, freedom of movement, exposure to media, political participation, experience of domestic violence etc in the state of Assam using secondary data obtained from various sources. The study reveals that development process in the state is not gender neutral; women enjoy quite inferior status as compared to the average women in India. Percentage of women in the government services and their political participation is quite low and does not show any sign of significant improvement. Sex ratio though not in favor of women is improving over time. Women enjoy better status in the state as compared to women in India in terms of decision making power at the household level while the situation is reverse in case of their financial autonomy and sexual violence. Inter district disparity is rampant in the state. Districts like Kamrup and Tinisukia in spite of having high per capita DDP have not been able to transform the development effort to bridge the gender gap. Districts with high literacy rates are having high proportion of female main and marginal workers and low proportion of non-workers. Higher the literacy higher is the female workforce participation rate. Female enrolment rate is below fifty per cent in spite of universalisation of primary education and provision of mid day meal schemes. Although Government has undertaken a number of steps the situation has remained gloomy mainly because the educated women are not forward looking and cherish the baseless age old customs. There is a need to create awareness towards achieving the desired goal of women empowerment in the state.Women Empowerment, Gender

Holographic description of non-supersymmetric orbifolded D1-D5-P solutions

Non-supersymmetric black hole microstates are of great interest in the context of the black hole information paradox. We identify the holographic description of the general class of non-supersymmetric orbifolded D1-D5-P supergravity solutions found by Jejjala, Madden, Ross and Titchener. This class includes both completely smooth solutions and solutions with conical defects, and in the near-decoupling limit these solutions describe degrees of freedom in the cap region. The CFT description involves a general class of states obtained by fractional spectral flow in both left-moving and right-moving sectors, generalizing previous work which studied special cases in this class. We compute the massless scalar emission spectrum and emission rates in both gravity and CFT and find perfect agreement, thereby providing strong evidence for our proposed identification. We also investigate the physics of ergoregion emission as pair creation for these orbifolded solutions. Our results represent the largest class of non-supersymmetric black hole microstate geometries with identified CFT duals presently known.Comment: 35 pages, v2: comments added, typos corrected, reference adde

Out of Time Ordered Quantum Dissipation

We consider a quantum Brownian particle interacting with two harmonic baths, which is then perturbed by a cubic coupling linking the particle and the baths. This cubic coupling induces non-linear dissipation and noise terms in the influence functional/master equation of the particle. Its effect on the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators (OTOCs) of the particle cannot be captured by the conventional Feynman-Vernon formalism.We derive the generalised influence functional which correctly encodes the physics of OTO fluctuations, response, dissipation and decoherence. We examine an example where Markovian approximation is valid for the OTO dynamics. If the original cubic coupling has a definite time-reversal parity, the leading order OTO influence functional is completely determined by the couplings in the usual master equation via OTO generalisation of Onsager-Casimir relations. New OTO fluctuation-dissipation relations connect the non-Gaussianity of the thermal noise to the thermal jitter in the damping constant of the Brownian particle.Comment: 46 pages+appendices, typos corrected, minor changes, references update

Spousal Risk Preferences and Household Investment Decisions

Most adults are married, plan for retirement with their spouse, and pool assets to a significant degree. How then are each individual’s risk preferences combined in choosing the portfolio that represents for them the optimal tradeoff between risk and return? There are two pathways through which marriage could amplify the expression of individual risk preferences at the household level. First, if people choose spouses in part based on their appetite for risk, or another characteristic correlated with risk tolerance, then there could be polarization of household level risk preferences towards extremes. Second, spouses may strategically adjust their decisions to compensate for their spouse’s preferences. Is an only mildly risk averse person that is married to someone that is nearly risk neutral motivated to choose a very low risk low return asset allocation to compensate for their spouse’s risky behavior? In this paper we explore the influence of marriage on the expression of individual risk preferences by examining both sorting in the marriage market and strategic decision making. Using data from the Health and Retirement Survey we find a positive correlation between the risk preferences of spouses. We also develop a theoretical model that determines optimal investment allocations conditional on own and spousal risk tolerance. Optimal asset allocations from this model are compared to a naïve model that only includes own risk tolerance. In related research the explanatory power of the naïve and spousal models are evaluated for prediction ability based on actual asset allocation decisions for couples using the HRS data.Households, Risk, Investing, Consumer/Household Economics,