Revaluing public sector food procurement in Europe: an action plan for sustainability

This report on Revaluing Public Sector Food Procurement is the result of a unique collaboration between policy-makers, practitioners and scientists working together during the Foodlinks project. The idea for the report emerged during the initial stages of experimenting with how we exchanged our knowledge on public sector food procurement that came from our work within municipal administrations, urban and national governments, European platforms, civil society and the wider academic community. We wanted to ‘make’ a report together that reflects not only the reality of devising and implementing innovative approaches to public sector food procurement throughout Europe, but also offers an Action Plan to help and encourage urban governments to take up the challenge of more sustainable purchasing practices. This is the result of that work. The report was written as a joint collaboration over a number of months using a wiki on a web-based platform that was also open to other members of our knowledge-based Community of Practic

The Role of Risk and Transaction Costs in Contract Design: Evidence from Farmland Lease Contracts in U.S. Agriculture

The objective of this article is to provide new empirical evidence on landlord-tenant choices of share versus cash-rent contracts in U.S. agriculture. The focus is on the contribution of explanatory variables that represent transaction costs, risk-sharing incentives, or both. An empirical model of contract choice is tested against the 1999 Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey (AELOS) and finds mixed evidence for low transaction cost and risk-sharing-incentive motives for landlord-tenant choices of a share versus cash-rent contract. However, the behavior of landlords and tenants is consistent with them being risk averse. Although it is standard to control for the riskiness of the principal's task that is contracted, we find that other attributes of the landlord are an important part of a relatively complex story for U.S. land tenancy contacting. The latter results have generally been ignored in other published landlord-tenant contracting studies. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

Cerebral volume is unaffected after pre-eclampsia

OBJECTIVE: Pre-eclampsia, a hypertensive complication of pregnancy, has been associated with cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and/or psychological complaints. Signs of an altered brain morphology and more white matter hyperintensities during and shortly after preeclampsia were observed in some, but not all, earlier studies. Here, cerebral volumes, the number of white matter hyperintensities and the age-related effects were compared in formerly pre-eclamptic women and women with normotensive gestational history. METHODS: Structural 7-Tesla magnetic resonance images of the cerebrum were acquired of 59 formerly pre-eclamptic women (aged 37±6 years, 0.5-16 years postpartum) and 20 women with normotensive pregnancies (aged 39±5 years, 1-18 years postpartum). Fazekas scores were obtained to assess white matter hyperintensity load. Volumes of the whole brain, gray and white matter, brain lobes, ventricular cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and pericortical CSF were calculated after semi-automatic segmentation. Group differences were analyzed with ANCOVA and Bayes factors. Results were adjusted for age, educational attainment and total intracranial volume. Effects of age on cerebral volumes was analyzed using a linear regression analysis. RESULTS: No changes in global and local brain volumes were observed between formerly pre-eclamptic and control women. Also, no difference in white matter hyperintensity load was observed. Independent of pre-eclamptic history, gray matter volume significantly decreased with age, while ventricular and peri-cortical CSF volumes significantly increased with age. CONCLUSIONS: Volumetric changes of the cerebrum are age-related, but independent of a pre-eclamptic history in the first two decades after childbirth. No evidence for more white matter lesions after pre-eclampsia was found. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved