Job Loss and Retirement Behavior of Older Men

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the employment and retirement behavior of men aged fifty and above who have experienced an involuntary job loss. Hazard models for returning to work and for exiting post-displacement employment are estimated and used to examine work patterns for ten years following a job loss. The findings show that a job loss results in large and lasting effects on future employment probabilities, and that these effects vary with the age of the worker. Displaced workers in their fifties are estimated to have a three in four chance of returning to work within two years after a job loss, whereas for a 62-year-old job loser, the probability is less than a third. Once re-employed, men 50 and above face significantly higher probabilities of exiting the workforce than do workers who have not experienced a recent job loss; however, the direction of this effect gradually reverses over time. The net outcome of these entry and exit rates is a substantial gap between the employment rates of men who have and have not lost jobs, that lasts at least seven years.

What You Don’t Know Can’t Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives. While virtually all recent empirical work has relied on administrative- or employer-reported data, we document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are five times more responsive to pension incentives than the average. In contrast, ill-informed individuals respond to their own misperceptions of the incentives rather than being unresponsive to any measured incentives.pension plans, retirement behavior

What You Don't Know Can't Help You: Pension Knowledge and Retirement Decision Making

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives. We find that well-informed individuals are five times more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual when knowledge is ignored. We further find that the ill-informed individuals do respond to their own misperception of the incentives, rather than being unresponsive to any incentives.

How Does Job Loss Affect the Timing of Retirement?

We use the Health and Retirement Study to examine the effects of job loss on factors affecting retirement incentives, including earnings, assets and pensions. We then estimate models of the retirement decision, which take into account the incentive to retire and any additional effects of displacement that are not captured by retirement incentives. There are substantial effects of displacement on retirement incentives as the result of changes to both earnings and pensions. Displacement significantly increases the probability of retirement, but only a small fraction of the displacement-induced changes in retirement behavior and labor force participation are the result of workers responding to these altered retirement incentives.

Retirement Incentives and Expectations

This paper investigates the responsiveness of individuals' retirement expectations to forward-looking measures of pension wealth accumulations. While most of the existing literature on retirement has used cross-sectional variation to identify the effects of pension and Social Security wealth on retirement behavior, we estimate fixed-effects regressions to control for unobserved heterogeneity that might be correlated with retirement plans and wealth. As expected, we find significant effects of future pension wealth accumulations on retirement expectations, but the magnitude of these effects differs substantially between OLS and fixed-effects estimation. Coefficients from fixed-effects estimation are at most half the magnitude of similar OLS regressions. Our results point to potentially large biases from the failure to control for unobserved heterogeneity in empirical models of retirement-related outcomes.

Waterfowl Harvest Benefits in Northern Aboriginal Communities and Potential Climate Change Impacts

Migratory waterfowl are important to the diets of residents in Canada’s northern communities. Contrary to recreational hunters, indigenous peoples have rights to harvest wildlife for subsistence needs without permits. As a result, migratory waterfowl are an important component of diets of Aboriginal peoples in northern Canada, substituting for expensive beef transported from the south. Wild geese and duck provide many benefits to native people, including improved nutrition and health. In this paper, scaled-down data from global climate models are used in a wildlife model to project potential migratory waterfowl abundance in the Northwest Territories for three future periods up to 2080. The models project potential future harvests of geese and ducks by Aboriginal hunters and the financial and nutritional benefits. It turns out that northern Aboriginal peoples can benefit significantly as a result of climate change that affects migratory waterfowl, but likely at the expense of hunters and recreationists in other regions of North America.subsistence harvests by indigenous peoples; diet and nutrition; climate change

Assessing the sensitivity of two TEWL measuring methods: open vs. closed chamber

Transepidermal water loss (TEWL) is a key parameter in the assessment of skin barrier impairment and recovery. The aim of this study was to perform a comparative assessment of the two types of TEWL instruments, with specific emphasis on their sensitivity in detecting small differences. An open chamber (Tewameter TM300, Courage & Khazaka, Germany) and a closed, condenser-chamber instrument (AquaFlux AF200, Biox Systems, UK) were used in the study. A complimentary skin hydration test (Corneometer CM825, Courage & Khazaka, Germany) was also carried out. In the first study, the closed chamber results have revealed two additional sets of significantly different data, in comparison to the open chamber method. In the second study, where the level of barrier impairment was higher, both methods have resulted in the same statistical outcome. It was concluded that the condenser-chamber instrument possesses higher sensitivity than the open chamber when assessing small differences in TEWL, under the same experimental conditions

Physiological and ecological determinants of nutrient partitioning in caribou and reindeer

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1991The effects of season, migration, and reproduction on the adipose and protein dynamics of barren-ground caribou were determined from field collections of adult females from the Porcupine Herd. Radio-collared females recaptured over time provided data on animals of known reproductive status. Pregnant females averaged a daily loss of 50g body fat and 15g body protein during the last 60 days of gestation. Between June and September, lactating females preferentially deposited body protein but non-lactating females preferentially deposited body fat. In both cohorts, fat deposition increased relative to protein deposition in fall, but maximum fat deposition occurred in summer. Females that conceived averaged 220% more body fat and 17% more body protein than females that did not conceive. Fetal and birth weight positively correlated with maternal protein reserves, but not with maternal fat reserves. Fieldwork on free-ranging caribou were complemented with nutritional experiments on captive animals to determine the effects of energy intake, protein intake, the dietary protein:energy ratio, date, and body condition on nutrient partitioning between fat and protein deposition, and between maternal tissue deposition and milk production. In both lactating and non-lactating females, the proportion of tissue deposited as fat rather than protein increased between spring and fall but decreased with increasing fatness. Lactating and non-lactating females had comparable efficiency coefficients for net energy retention (60% and 65% respectively), but daily maintenance requirement for lactating females (456 KJ/BW\sp{0.75}) was twice that for non-lactating individuals (233 KJ/BW\sp{0.75}). Energy intake increased protein deposition in lactating females but increased fat deposition in non-lactating females. Production of milk dry matter, fat, and energy were unaffected by maternal energy intake, maternal protein intake, maternal body condition, or calf age. However, production of milk lactose correlated with maternal energy intake, while production of milk protein correlated with the maternal dietary protein:energy ratio. Prediction equations for body weight and composition of barren-ground caribou were developed using bone, muscle, fat, and organ indices. Prediction equations for body weight were validated with an independent data set

Site Directed Mutation Of Ctx Operon In Vcusm2, Vibrio Cholerae Vaccine Candidate Strain: Towards The Development Of A Vaccine For Cholera [RA644.C3 C454 2008 F rb].

Kolera ialah penyakit cirit-birit akut dan dahsyat yang disebabkan oleh jangkitan bakteria Vibrio cholerae O1 dan O139. Ia merupakan penyakit endemik di negara-negara yang tidak mempunyai sumber air yang bersih mahupun sistem kumbahan yang baik. Cholera is an acute diarrheal disease caused by Vibrio cholerae O1 and O139. It affects countries with scarce clean water supplies and poor sanitation systems. Reported cases and mortality rates are increasing