The Growing Importance of Cognitive Skills in Wage Determination

Using data from two longitudinal surveys of American high school seniors, we show that basic cognitive skills had a larger impact on wages for 24-year-old men and women in 1986 than in 1978. For women, the increase in the return to cognitive skills between 1978 and 1986 accounts for all of the increase in the wage premium associated with post-secondary education. We also show that high school seniors' mastery of basic cognitive skills had a much smaller impact on wages two years after graduation than on wages six years after graduation.

Changes in yield and composition of barley, wheat and triticale grains harvested during advancing stages of ripening

peer-reviewedThis study involved an evaluation of the changes in grain yield, nutritive value, ensilability and harvesting losses of intensively managed winter cereals harvested during the advancing stages of ripening. Five cereal crops (barley cv. Regina and wheat cv. Madrigal in 2001; barley cv. Regina, wheat cv. Falstaff and triticale cv. Fidelio in 2002) were assessed. Twenty plots per crop were arranged in a randomised complete block design, with five times of harvest (four for barley in 2002) and four replicate blocks per harvest. Dry matter (DM) yields changed relatively little between harvest dates, but fresh yields declined (P < 0.001) over time due to the moisture loss associated with ripening. Time-course changes in indices of nutritive value, such as concentrations of crude protein, starch and ash, and organic matter digestibility, were relatively small and did not follow a consistent pattern. Ensilability indices, such as DM and watersoluble carbohydrate concentrations and buffering capacity, indicated that satisfactory fermentations were likely if such crops were ensiled; buffering capacity, generally declining with advancing maturity. Harvesting losses were not clearly related to growth stage at harvest. It is concluded that winter cereal grain (barley, wheat and triticale) DM yields and quality were relatively constant as ripening progressed from DM concentrations of around 550 to >800 g/kg.One of the authors (P.S.) was in receipt of a Teagasc Walsh Fellowship

Real Output in Mental Health Care During the 1990s

Health accounts document changes over time in the level and composition of health spending. There has been a continued evolution in the ability to track such outlays. Less rapid has been the ability to interpret changes in spending. In this paper we apply quality adjusted price indexes for several major mental disorders to national mental health account estimates to assess changes in real "output". We show that using the new price indexes reveals large gains in real output relative to application of BLS indexes.

Reliability training

Discussed here is failure physics, the study of how products, hardware, software, and systems fail and what can be done about it. The intent is to impart useful information, to extend the limits of production capability, and to assist in achieving low cost reliable products. A review of reliability for the years 1940 to 2000 is given. Next, a review of mathematics is given as well as a description of what elements contribute to product failures. Basic reliability theory and the disciplines that allow us to control and eliminate failures are elucidated

Access to long term care after a wealth shock: evidence from the housing bubble and burst

Home equity is the primary self-funding mechanism for long term services and supports (LTSS). Using data from the relevant waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we exploit the exogenous variation resulting from the value of housing assets during the Great Recession to examine the effect of housing wealth on use of home health, unpaid help and nursing home care by older adults. Consistent with the idea that individuals consume part of their housing equity during an emergency, we find evidence of a significant increase in the use of paid home health care, nursing home and unpaid informal care. The intensity of unpaid care, however, was not affected. We conduct a placebo test on individuals who do not own property; their use of LTSS was not affected by the housing wealth changes. Taken together, the findings suggest that a housing wealth shock exerts a positive and significant effect on the uptake of home health and nursing home entry and some effect on the probability of unpaid care, but no significant effect on the intensity of unpaid care

The role of intermolecular coupling in the photophysics of disordered organic semiconductors: Aggregate emission in regioregular polythiophene

We address the role of excitonic coulping on the nature of photoexcitations in the conjugated polymer regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene). By means of temperature-dependent absorption and photoluminescence spectroscopy, we show that optical emission is overwhelmingly dominated by weakly coupled H-aggregates. The relative absorbance of the 0-0 and 0-1 vibronic peaks provides a powerfully simple means to extract the magnitude of the intermolecular coupling energy, approximately 5 and 30 meV for films spun from isodurene and chloroform solutions respectively.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, published in Phys. Rev. Let

A Hamilton-Jacobi point of view on mean-field Gibbs-non-Gibbs transitions

We study the loss, recovery, and preservation of differentiability of timedependent large deviation rate functions. This study is motivated by mean-field Gibbs-non-Gibbs transitions. The gradient of the rate-function evolves according to a Hamiltonian flow. This Hamiltonian flow is used to analyze the regularity of the time dependent rate function, both for Glauber dynamics for the Curie-Weiss model and Brownian dynamics in a potential. We hereby create a unifying framework for the treatment of mean-field Gibbs-non-Gibbs transitions, based on Hamiltonian dynamics and viscosity solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi equations