The demand for sports and exercise: Results from an illustrative survey

Funding from the Department of Health policy research programme was used in this study.There is a paucity of empirical evidence on the extent to which price and perceived benefits affect the level of participation in sports and exercise. Using an illustrative sample of 60 adults at Brunel University, West London, we investigate the determinants of demand for sports and exercise. The data were collected through face-to-face interviews that covered indicators of sports and exercise behaviour; money/time price and perceived benefits of participation; and socio- economic/demographic details. Count, linear and probit regression models were fitted as appropriate. Seventy eight per cent of the sample participated in sports and exercise and spent an average of £27 per month and an average of 20 min travelling per occasion of sports and exercise. The demand for sport and exercise was negatively associated with time (travel or access time) and ‘variable’ price and positively correlated with ‘fixed’ price. Demand was price inelastic, except in the case of meeting the UK government’s recommended level of participation, which is time price elastic (elasticity = −2.2). The implications of data from a larger nationally representative sample as well as the role of economic incentives in influencing uptake of sports and exercise are discussed.This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

Epidemiology of antibiotic Use and Drivers of Cross-Border Procurement in a Mexican american Border Community

BACKGROUND: The U.S.-Mexico Border is an area of opportunity for improved health care access; however, gaps remain as to how and where U.S. border residents, particularly those who are underinsured, obtain care. Antibiotics are one of the most common reported drivers of cross-border healthcare access and a medication of particular concern since indiscriminate or inappropriate use is associated with antimicrobial resistance. In addition, many studies assessing preferences for Mexican pharmaceuticals and healthcare in U.S. border residents were done prior to 2010 when many prescription medications, including antibiotics, were available over the counter in Mexico. METHODS: Data used in this study were collected during the baseline examination of an ongoing longitudinal cohort study in Starr Country, Texas, one of 14 counties on the Texas-Mexico border. Participants self-reported the name, date of use, and the source country of each antibiotic used in the past 12 months. Logistic regression was used to determine social, cultural, and clinical features associated with cross-border procurement of antibiotics. RESULTS: Over 10% of the study cohort reported using antibiotics in the past 30 days with over 60% of all rounds used in the past 12 months sourced from Mexico. A lack of health insurance and generation score, a measure of acculturation, were the strongest predictors of cross-border procurement of antibiotics. CONCLUSIONS: Factors previously associated with cross-border acquisition of antibiotics are still present despite changes in 2010 to prescription drug regulations in Mexico. These results may be used to inform future public health initiatives to provide culturally sensitive education about responsible antibiotic stewardship and to address barriers to U.S. healthcare and pharmaceutical access in medically underserved, impoverished U.S.-Mexico border communities

Evolution of the Magnetized, Neutrino-Cooled Accretion Disk in the Aftermath of a Black Hole Neutron Star Binary Merger

Black hole-torus systems from compact binary mergers are possible engines for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). During the early evolution of the post-merger remnant, the state of the torus is determined by a combination of neutrino cooling and magnetically-driven heating processes, so realistic models must include both effects. In this paper, we study the post-merger evolution of a magnetized black hole-neutron star binary system using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC) from an initial post-merger state provided by previous numerical relativity simulations. We use a finite-temperature nuclear equation of state and incorporate neutrino effects in a leakage approximation. To achieve the needed accuracy, we introduce improvements to SpEC's implementation of general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), including the use of cubed-sphere multipatch grids and an improved method for dealing with supersonic accretion flows where primitive variable recovery is difficult. We find that a seed magnetic field triggers a sustained source of heating, but its thermal effects are largely cancelled by the accretion and spreading of the torus from MHD-related angular momentum transport. The neutrino luminosity peaks at the start of the simulation, and then drops significantly over the first 20\,ms but in roughly the same way for magnetized and nonmagnetized disks. The heating rate and disk's luminosity decrease much more slowly thereafter. These features of the evolution are insensitive to grid structure and resolution, formulation of the MHD equations, and seed field strength, although turbulent effects are not fully converge

Extinction and the Radial Distribution of Supernova Properties in Their Parent Galaxies

We use a Monte Carlo technique and assumed spatial distributions of dust and supernova (SN) progenitors in a simple model of a characteristic SN--producing disk galaxy to explore the effects of extinction on the radial distributions of SN properties in their parent galaxies. The model extinction distributions and projected radial number distributions are presented for various SN types. Even though the model has no core-collapse SNe within three kpc of the center, a considerable fraction of the core-collapse SNe are projected into the inner regions of inclined parent galaxies owing to their small vertical scale height. The model predicts that because of extinction, SNe projected into the central regions should on average appear dimmer and have a much larger magnitude scatter than those in the outer regions. In particular, the model predicts a strong deficit of bright core-collapse events inside a projected radius of a few kpc. Such a deficit is found to be present in the observations. It is a natural consequence of the characteristic spatial distributions of dust and core-collapse SNe in galaxies, and it leads us to offer an alternative to the conventional interpretation of the Shaw effect.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

PRIVATE SAVINGS IN TRANSITION ECONOMIES: ARE THERE TERMS OF TRADE SHOCKS?

The paper examines the impact of terms of trade shocks on private savings in the transition economies after accounting for the effect of other determinants. Economic agents in the transition economies are subject to tight credit constraints which are more pronounced during bad state of nature. Thus, adverse shocks to commodity prices in the world market can force them to reduce savings by a larger amount than they would otherwise have. Empirical analysis using a dynamic panel model and data from twenty one transition economies confirm that most of the determinants of savings identified in the literature also apply to the transition economies. Favorable movements in both the permanent and transitory components of the terms of trade have a significant positive impact on private savings with transitory movements having a larger impact than the permanent component. This reflects the lack of access to foreign borrowing that many of the transition economies have faced during the last decade. Although the impact of terms of trade shocks are found to be asymmetric, the magnitude of the impact appears to be small. The results are robust for alternative estimators, determinants, and country groupings.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39958/3/wp572.pd

Consumer price indexes: an analysis of heterogeneity across sub-populations

La rilevanza dell'Indece dei Prezzi al Consumo quale misura dell'inflazione è stata a lungo dibattuta in particolare esminando le differenti cause di distorsione dovute all'utilizzo di un paniere fisso di beni e servizi. Di conseguenza la letteratura ha proposto indici dei prezzi sperimentali per particolari sottogruppi di popolazioni. tali indici hanno rilevanza ai fini della politica economica e sociale, poiché è probabile che differenti gruppi di popolazione abbiano comportamenti nei consumi differenti dalla media, ad esempio i consumatori poveri (Garner, Johnson & Kokoski, 1996) e quelli anziani (Stewart, 2008). Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di esaminare le possibilità offerte da metodi di costruzione alternativi degli Indici dei Prezzi al Consumo ai fini di cogliere la variabilità dei tassi di inflazione relativi a differenti categorie di consumatori.The soundeness of Consumer Price Indexes (CPI) as a measure of inflation has long been debeate, focusing on the different sources of bias inherent to use of a constant basket of goods and services. Thus experimental consumer price indexes have been proposed for targeted sub-populations specifically relevant for social and economic policy, that are likely to have consumption patterns different from yhe average, i.e poor (Garner, Johnson & Kokoski, 1996) and elderly (Stewart, 2008)houseolds. Aim of this work is to investigate the possibilities offered by alternative methods of construction of consumer price indices in order to capture the variability of inflation rates facing different houseolds' types

Measuring Individual Material Well-Being Using Multidimensional Indices: An Application Using the Gender and Generation Survey for Russia

This paper suggests a new and comprehensive approach to the assessment of the material well-being at the individual level by constructing a multidimensional index. Using this approach, material well-being is understood as a generic notion that covers a number of different domains, whereas the concept of domain is used to distinguish between different aspects of people’s resources, including income security, basic needs, durables, housing and subjective material well-being. Each dimension is measured independently, using the best indicators available, to generate a score or domain index for each aspect of material well-being. The procedure of re-weighting the indicators within the separate domains enables us to account for the disparity in resources and consumer preferences across different population subgroups. The final domain scores, combined with explicit weighting, are then used to generate a summary material well-being index. The domain indices and the summary material well-being index are validated by exploring their relationships to key socio-economic attributes, which were previously shown to be strongly associated with individual material well-being. The results showed that the summary indices of material well-being are characterized by greater differentiation in relation to such measures, as occupational class and judgments of satisfaction with one’s life. This allows us to conclude that our summary indices capture the latent concept of material well-being better than any of our domain indices used separately. Although the index is constructed using the Russian Gender and Generation Survey data for 2007, the methodological approach that we applied can be easily replicated in other surveys which contain information on several aspects of material well-being

What’s on trial? The making of field experiments in international development

In the last 20 years, the drive for evidence‐based policymaking has been coupled with a concurrent push for the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the “gold‐standard” for generating rigorous evidence on whether or not development interventions work. Drawing on content analysis of 63 development RCTs and 4 years of participant observation, I provide a rich description of the diverse set of actors and the transnational organizational effort required to implement development RCTs and maintain their “scientific status.” Particularly, I investigate the boundary work that proponents of RCTs—also known as randomistas—do to differentiate the purposes and merits of testing development projects from doing them, as a way to bypass the political and ethical problems presented by adopting the experimental method with foreign aid beneficiaries in poor countries. Although randomistas have been mostly successful in differentiating RCTs from the projects evaluated, I also examine cases where they were not able to do so, as a means to highlight the controversies associated with implementing RCTs in international development.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154964/1/bjos12723_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154964/2/bjos12723.pd