Spousal Labor Supply as Insurance: Does Unemployment Insurance Crowd Outthe Added Worker Effect?

We consider the role of spousal labor supply as insurance against spells of unemployment. Standard theory suggests that women should work more when their husbands are out of work (the Added Worker Effect or AWE), but there has been little empirical support for this contention. We too find little evidence of an AWE over the 1984-1993 period. We suggest that one reason for the absence of the AWE may be that unemployment insurance (UI) is providing a state-contingent income stream that counteracts the negative income shock from the husband's unemployment. We in fact find that increases in the generosity of UI lower labor supply among wives of unemployed husbands. Our results suggest that UI is crowding out a sizeable fraction of offsetting spousal earnings in response to unemployment spells, although even in the absence of a UI system the spousal response would only make up a small share of the associated reduction in family income. We also find evidence that families are making labor supply decisions in a life cycle context, since there are effects of UI on the labor supply of wives of employed husbands who face high unemployment risk. Yet, couples do not appear able to smooth the labor supply response to UI income flows equally over periods of employment and unemployment, suggesting the presence of liquidity constraints. Finally, wives in families with small children are more responsive to UI benefits in their labor supply decisions, which is consistent with the notion that they have a higher opportunity cost of market work.

Post-traumatic growth in adult survivors of brain injury: a qualitative study of participants completing a pilot trial of brief positive psychotherapy

Purpose: Post-traumatic growth (PTG) can occur following acquired brain injury (ABI). It has been proposed that people experiencing psychological distress following ABI may benefit from a positive psychotherapy intervention (PPT) aimed at increasing well-being; PPT may also influence PTG. We aimed to investigate PTG experiences in participants of a positive psychotherapy pilot trial. Methods: ABI survivors who had received PPT or treatment as usual (TAU) were interviewed individually after the end of the trial. Thematic analysis was conducted, to code transcripts for known themes from PTG literature as well as newly emerging themes. Results: Four participants (age = 46–62; n = 3 male; months since injury = 11–20) from the PPT group and three (age = 58–74; n = 2 male; months since injury = 9–22) from the TAU group were interviewed. Six themes were shared across both groups: personal strength, appreciation of life, relating to others, optimism/positive attitude, feeling fortunate compared to others, and positive emotional/behavioral changes. Two themes were expressed by PPT participants only: lifestyle improvements and new possibilities. One TAU participant reported spiritual change. Conclusions: A greater understanding of the development of PTG following ABI may help rehabilitation clinicians to promote better adjustment by focusing on clients’ potential for positive change and enhancing their capacity for growth

Towards validation of a new computerised test of goal neglect: preliminary evidence from clinical and neuroimaging pilot studies

Objective: Goal neglect is a significant problem following brain injury, and is a target for rehabilitation. It is not yet known how neural activation might change to reflect rehabilitation gains. We developed a computerised multiple elements test (CMET), suitable for use in neuroimaging paradigms. Design: Pilot correlational study and event-related fMRI study. Methods: In Study 1, 18 adults with acquired brain injury were assessed using the CMET, other tests of goal neglect (Hotel Test; Modified Six Elements Test) and tests of reasoning. In Study 2, 12 healthy adults underwent fMRI, during which the CMET was administered under two conditions: self-generated switching and experimenter-prompted switching. Results: Among the clinical sample, CMET performance was positively correlated with both the Hotel Test (r = 0.675, p = 0.003) and the Modified Six Elements Test (r = 0.568, p = 0.014), but not with other clinical or demographic measures. In the healthy sample, fMRI demonstrated significant activation in rostro-lateral prefrontal cortex in the self-generated condition compared with the prompted condition (peak 40, 44, 4; ZE = 4.25, p(FWEcorr) = 0.026). Conclusions: These pilot studies provide preliminary evidence towards the validation of the CMET as a measure of goal neglect. Future studies will aim to further establish its psychometric properties, and determine optimum pre- and post-rehabilitation fMRI paradigms

Precision Higgs Physics in the Standard Model Effective Field Theory

We consider the application of the dimension-6 standard model effective field theory (SMEFT) as a method to parameterize the effects of heavy new physics in processes involving the Higgs boson. We calculate the full set of next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections to the phenomenologically relevant Higgs decay into fermion pairs, summarized as $h \to f \bar{f}$, for $f \in \{b, \, c,\,\tau, \, \mu \}$. This work forms the basis of precision studies of these decay modes in effective field theory, and is an important constituent to the precision study of the Higgs in the SMEFT. We address several technical issues relating to the dimension-6 SMEFT at NLO. These issues include subtleties in the Higgs-$Z$ boson mixing, development of a physically consistent electric charge renormalization constant built from two-point functions, our own implementation of gauge fixing, and the treatment of tadpoles in the SMEFT. Additionally, we consider the role of decoupling relations as a method of removing anomalously large tadpole corrections to the decay rate when using a hybrid renormalization scheme, where some parameters are renormalized in the $\overline{\hbox{MS}}$ scheme, while others are renormalized in the on-shell scheme. The results are calculated fully analytically. We provide illustrative subsets of analytical results, and full numerical results for the decay rates calculated here. Furthermore, we study the convergence of the results, and estimate the size of uncalculated higher-order corrections by considering scale variations. We also explore the benefits of ratios of decay rates. In these ratios, full or partial cancellation of universal counterterms reduce the Wilson coefficient dependence as compared with decay rates alone. In some scenarios we find an enhanced sensitivity to operators generating the effective $hgg$ and $h\gamma\gamma$ couplings. In particular, we find that these ratios present an interesting test of minimal flavor violation

Engineering fundamentals of energy efficiency

Using energy more efficiently is essential if carbon emissions are to be reduced. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy efficiency improvements represent the largest and least costly savings in carbon emissions, even when compared with renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage. Yet, how should future priorities be directed? Should efforts be focused on light bulbs or diesel engines, insulating houses or improving coal-fired power stations? Previous attempts to assess energy efficiency options provide a useful snapshot for directing short-term responses, but are limited to only known technologies developed under current economic conditions. Tomorrow's economic drivers are not easy to forecast, and new technical solutions often present in a disruptive manner. Fortunately, the theoretical and practical efficiency limits do not vary with time, allowing the uncertainty of economic forecasts to be avoided and the potential of yet to be discovered efficient designs to be captured. This research aims to provide a rational basis for assessing all future developments in energy efficiency. The global fow of energy through technical devices is traced from fuels to final services, and presented as an energy map to convey visually the scale of energy use. An important distinction is made between conversion devices, which upgrade energy into more useable forms, and passive systems, from which energy is lost as low temperature heat, in exchange for final services. Theoretical efficiency limits are calculated for conversion devices using exergy analysis, and show a 89% potential reduction in energy use. Efforts should be focused on improving the efficiency of, in relative order: biomass burners, refrigeration systems, gas burners and petrol engines. For passive systems, practical utilisation limits are calculated based on engineering models, and demonstrate energy savings of 73% are achievable. Significant gains are found in technical solutions that increase the thermal insulation of building fabrics and reduce the mass of vehicles. The result of this work is a consistent basis for comparing efficiency options, that can enable future technical research and energy policy to be directed towards the actions that will make the most difference.The work was supported by the Overseas Research Scheme, the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the C.T. Taylor Fund and the Clare Hall bursary scheme

ForgetMeNot: Active Reminder Entry Support for Adults with Acquired Brain Injury

Smartphone reminding apps can compensate for memory impairment after acquired brain injury (ABI). In the absence of a caregiver, users must enter reminders themselves if the apps are going to help them. Poor memory and apathy associated with ABI can result in failure to initiate such configuration behaviour and the benefits of reminder apps are lost. ForgetMeNot takes a novel approach to address this problem by periodically encouraging the user to enter reminders with unsolicited prompts (UPs). An in situ case study investigated the experience of using a reminding app for people with ABI and tested UPs as a potential solution to initiating reminder entry. Three people with severe ABI living in a post-acute rehabilitation hospital used the app in their everyday lives for four weeks to collect real usage data. Field observations illustrated how difficulties with motivation, insight into memory difficulties and anxiety impact reminder app use in a rehabilitation setting. Results showed that when 6 UPs were presented throughout the day, reminder-setting increased, showing UPs are an important addition to reminder applications for people with ABI. This study demonstrates that barriers to technology use can be resolved in practice when software is developed with an understanding of the issues experienced by the user group

Mapping Global Flows of Chemicals: From Fossil Fuel Feedstocks to Chemical Products.

Chemical products are ubiquitous in modern society. The chemical sector is the largest industrial energy consumer and the third largest industrial emitter of carbon dioxide. The current portfolio of mitigation options for the chemical sector emphasizes upstream "supply side" solutions, whereas downstream mitigation options, such as material efficiency, are given comparatively short shrift. Key reasons for this are the scarcity of data on the sector's material flows, and the highly intertwined nature of its complex supply chains. We provide the most up to date, comprehensive and transparent data set available publicly, on virgin production routes in the chemical sector: from fossil fuel feedstocks to chemical products. We map global mass flows for the year 2013 through a complex network of transformation processes, and by taking account of secondary reactants and by-products, we maintain a full mass balance throughout. The resulting data set partially addresses the dearth of publicly available information on the chemical sector's supply chain, and can be used to prioritise downstream mitigation options

Conservative World Models

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) promises to provide agents that can perform any task in an environment after an offline pre-training phase. Forward-backward (FB) representations represent remarkable progress towards this ideal, achieving 85% of the performance of task-specific agents in this setting. However, such performance is contingent on access to large and diverse datasets for pre-training, which cannot be expected for most real problems. Here, we explore how FB performance degrades when trained on small datasets that lack diversity, and mitigate it with conservatism, a well-established feature of performant offline RL algorithms. We evaluate our family of methods across various datasets, domains and tasks, reaching 150% of vanilla FB performance in aggregate. Somewhat surprisingly, conservative FB algorithms also outperform the task-specific baseline, despite lacking access to reward labels and being required to maintain policies for all tasks. Conservative FB algorithms perform no worse than FB on full datasets, and so present little downside over their predecessor. Our code is available open-source via https://enjeeneer.io/projects/conservative-world-models/

Designing climate change mitigation plans that add up.

Mitigation plans to combat climate change depend on the combined implementation of many abatement options, but the options interact. Published anthropogenic emissions inventories are disaggregated by gas, sector, country, or final energy form. This allows the assessment of novel energy supply options, but is insufficient for understanding how options for efficiency and demand reduction interact. A consistent framework for understanding the drivers of emissions is therefore developed, with a set of seven complete inventories reflecting all technical options for mitigation connected through lossless allocation matrices. The required data set is compiled and calculated from a wide range of industry, government, and academic reports. The framework is used to create a global Sankey diagram to relate human demand for services to anthropogenic emissions. The application of this framework is demonstrated through a prediction of per-capita emissions based on service demand in different countries, and through an example showing how the "technical potentials" of a set of separate mitigation options should be combined