Entrepreneurship and the extensive margin in export growth : a microeconomic accounting of Costa Rica's export growth during 1997-2007

The literature on the correlation between exports and economic development runs deep into the history of economic thought and permeates policy debates. This paper studies the microeconomic structure of export growth in Costa Rica, with special emphasis on the extensive margin of trade, encompassing new exporting firms, new products, and new export markets, as well as the unit values of new versus incumbent products. The data suggest that few new firms survive the test of exporting -- more than 40 percent of firms exit export activities after one year -- and this firm turnover is associated with a steady deterioration of export unit values (prices). Furthermore, most new export products are associated with product switching by incumbent exporting firms. The typical new product introduced by incumbent firms tended to be priced at about 90 percent of the unit values of incumbent products. In contrast, the usual suspected obstacles to export growth, such as the inability of small firms to enter exporting activities or to grow their exports, appear to be important sources of export growth. In fact, the smallest exporting firms experienced the fastest growth in their export values. Some of these results are compared with those from other countries that have been examined in related literature.Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Airports and Air Services,Microfinance,Tax Law

Reproducing Prevention: Teen Pregnancy and Intimate Citizenship in the Post-Welfare Era

This dissertation examines the politics of teen pregnancy prevention in the 1990s and early 2000s within public policy, popular culture, and local and national nonprofit advocacy. Widely viewed as a distressing social problem, teenage reproduction has provoked decades of prevention and regulation that pervade across public and private sectors. Teen pregnancy has been associated with, if not fully blamed for, a host of other so-called social problems throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the beginning of the twenty-first century. As scholars such as Kristen Luker and Lisa Arai have labored to illustrate, causal connections between adolescent reproduction and the social ills it is said to precipitate and exacerbate are tentative at best. As such, the ubiquity of demonizing portrayals of teen pregnancy and parenthood as dangerous and irresponsible demands evaluation for what it can reveal about the values that govern mainstream society. Heavily racialized imagery of teen pregnancy was crucial to the passage of neoliberal welfare reform in 1996. Using historical, visual, and discursive analysis, I argue that contemporary privatized teen pregnancy prevention forms a key counterpart to neoliberal welfare retrenchment. I show that representations of and approaches to teen pregnancy as a social problem have shifted starkly in the post-welfare era toward a newly multicultural framework. Pioneered by some of the foremost architects of 1990s welfare reform legislation, this new discourse is purveyed through a privatized regime of coordinated social media and television that presents the management of teen sexuality as central to social wellbeing. As such, the post-welfare teen pregnancy prevention regime undergirds and extends the political and economic project of neoliberalism in three important and interrelated ways: (1) by promoting the intertwining neoliberal cultural logics of intimate citizenship, multiculturalism, and market rationality, (2) by obscuring the continued existence and lack of efficacy of punitive welfare reform policy, and (3) by helping to instantiate a paradigm of public wellbeing that sidesteps state-arbitrated wealth redistribution altogether

Documentary Review: Belly of the Beast

Belly of the Beast (Cohn, 2020) chronicles the legal and political battle surrounding forced and coerced sterilization of women incarcerated in the Central California Women’s Facility during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Uncovering a contemporary example of eugenics and the institutional logics that protect and justify those practices, this film provides a crucial tool for feminist educators teaching about reproductive injustice, racism, gender-based oppression, and the power of feminist activism. In what follows, I briefly summarize the film and offer a discussion of how it might be used as a tool of feminist pedagogy by 1) providing an opportunity to explore power relations based on the intersecting forces of racism, sexism, medicalization, and criminalization, 2) illustrating the value of multiple ways of knowing (personal experience, scientific inquiry, legal and moral argumentation), and 3) exhibiting the power of feminist activism to bridge social and institutional divides and create meaningful change

Writing effective performance appraisals : a practical seminar

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2505947

Measurement, Reporting and Verification in a Post-2012 Climate Agreement

Considers options for the measurement, reporting, and verification of developed nations' mitigation commitments or actions, developing nations' mitigation actions, and support for the latter. Outlines basic issues and existing mechanisms and requirements

A marker of biological ageing predicts adult risk preference in European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris

Why are some individuals more prone to gamble than others? Animals often show preferences between 2 foraging options with the same mean reward but different degrees of variability in the reward, and such risk preferences vary between individuals. Previous attempts to explain variation in risk preference have focused on energy budgets, but with limited empirical support. Here, we consider whether biological ageing, which affects mortality and residual reproductive value, predicts risk preference. We studied a cohort of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) in which we had previously measured developmental erythrocyte telomere attrition, an established integrative biomarker of biological ageing. We measured the adult birds’ preferences when choosing between a fixed amount of food and a variable amount with an equal mean. After controlling for change in body weight during the experiment (a proxy for energy budget), we found that birds that had undergone greater developmental telomere attrition were more risk averse as adults than were those whose telomeres had shortened less as nestlings. Developmental telomere attrition was a better predictor of adult risk preference than either juvenile telomere length or early-life food supply and begging effort. Our longitudinal study thus demonstrates that biological ageing, as measured via developmental telomere attrition, is an important source of lasting differences in adult risk preferences

Early Development of Professional Skills Benefits Students & Community Partners

The BSc (Hons) Human Nutrition & Dietetics programme requires the early development of professional skills. In the Stage 2 module Professional Practice Studies , academic staff and students worked with Dublin City Council and older people in the North Central area to facilitate the development of these skills.https://arrow.tudublin.ie/civpostbk/1010/thumbnail.jp

Early Development of Professional Skills Benefits Students & Community Partners

Poster advocating Early Development of Professional Skills Benefits Students & Community Partnershttps://arrow.tudublin.ie/civpostbk/1030/thumbnail.jp