Preach what you practice? donating behaviour of parents and their offspring

Using data drawn from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we explore the relationship between the donating behaviour of parents and that of their children aged less than 18. Furthermore, we exploit information relating to whether or not parents encourage their children to donate to charity in order to unveil information related to the intergenerational transmission of philanthropic behaviour. Our findings suggest that whether a child donates to charity is influenced by positive effects from whether the parent donates to charity as well as from whether the parent talks to their child about donating to charity. In addition, whether the parent donates to charity has an indirect influence via its positive effect on the probability that the parent talks to the child about donating to charity. Further, we find that the influence of whether the parent donates to charity on the probability that the child donates to charity is particularly heightened in terms of both magnitude and statistical significance in the context of parental donations to religious causes

The existence and persistence of household financial hardship

We investigate the existence and persistence of financial hardship at the household level using data from the British Household Panel Survey. Our modelling strategy makes three important contributions to the existing literature on household finances. Firstly, we model nine different types of household financial problems within a joint framework, allowing for correlation in the random effects across the nine equations. Secondly, we develop a dynamic framework in order to model the persistence of financial problems over time by extending our multi-equation framework to allow the presence or otherwise of different types of financial problems in the previous time period to influence the probability that the household currently experiences such problems. Our third contribution relates to the possibility that experiencing financial problems may be correlated with sample attrition. We model missing observations in the panel in order to allow for such attrition. Our findings reveal interesting variations in the determinants of experiencing different types of financial problems including demographic and regional differences. Our findings also highlight persistence in experiencing financial problems over time as well as the role that saving on a regular basis in previous time periods can play in mitigating current financial problems

Estimating healthcare demand for an aging population: a flexible and robust bayesian joint model

In this paper, we analyse two frequently used measures of the demand for health care, namely hospital visits and out-of-pocket health care expenditure, which have been analysed separately in the existing literature. Given that these two measures of healthcare demand are highly likely to be closely correlated, we propose a framework to jointly model hospital visits and out-of-pocket medical expenditure. Furthermore, the joint framework allows for the presence of non-linear effects of covariates using splines to capture the effects of aging on healthcare demand. Sample heterogeneity is modelled robustly with the random effects following Dirichlet process priors with explicit cross-part correlation. The findings of our empirical analysis of the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey indicate that the demand for healthcare varies with age and gender and exhibits significant cross-part correlation that provides a rich understanding of how aging affects health care demand, which is of particular policy relevance in the context of an aging population

Skyrme Hartree-Fock Calculations for the Alpha Decay Q Values of Super-Heavy Nuclei

Hartree-Fock calculations with the SKX Skyrme interaction are carried out to obtain alpha-decay Q values for deformed nuclei above $^{208}$Pb assuming axial symmetry. The results for even-even nuclei are compared with experiment and with previous calculations. Predictions are made for alpha-decay Q values and half-lives of even-even super-heavy nuclei. The results are also compared for the recently discovered odd-even chain starting at Z=112 and N=165.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Nitrogen superfractionation in dense cloud cores

We report new calculations of interstellar 15N fractionation. Previously, we have shown that large enhancements of 15N/14N can occur in cold, dense gas where CO is frozen out, but that the existence of an NH + N channel in the dissociative recombination of N2H+ severely curtails the fractionation. In the light of recent experimental evidence that this channel is in fact negligible, we have reassessed the 15N chemistry in dense cloud cores. We consider the effects of temperatures below 10 K, and of the presence of large amounts of atomic nitrogen. We also show how the temporal evolution of gas-phase isotope ratios is preserved as spatial heterogeneity in ammonia ice mantles, as monolayers deposited at different times have different isotopic compositions. We demonstrate that the upper layers of this ice may have 15N/14N ratios an order of magnitude larger than the underlying elemental value. Converting our ratios to delta-values, we obtain delta(15N) > 3,000 per mil in the uppermost layer, with values as high as 10,000 per mil in some models. We suggest that this material is the precursor to the 15N `hotspots' recently discovered in meteorites and IDPsComment: accepted by MNRA