Increasing exposure at home to improve literacy skills at school

Master's Project (M.Ed.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2014The focus of this project was to help the home literacy environment by supplying materials for families that are an expansion on what students are learning in the classroom with weekly take-home book bags. Research shows that students who become good readers stay good readers. The bags include a selection of books for families to read together along with audio recordings of each of the books to allow the student to make full use of the books without assistance. For families for whom English is not a first language or for families who have limited time for parent-child interactions, the recordings may be especially helpful so that students can interact with the materials independently. Overall, the additional time spent focusing on literacy will have a positive impact on reading skills and help build a strong school-to-home connection for future years

Waist circumference provides an indication of numerous cardiometabolic risk factors in adults with cerebral palsy

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Objective: To report the prevalence of cardiometabolic risk factors in a cohort of adults with cerebral palsy (CP) and to investigate the ability of anthropometric measures to predict these factors. Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Testing took place in a laboratory setting. Participants: Adults with CP (NZ55; mean age, 37.5 13.3y; Gross Motor Function Classification System levels, IeV) participated in this study. Interventions: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measures: Total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, insulin, and C-reactive protein levels were measured from a fasting venous blood sample. Insulin resistance was calculated using the Homeostasis Model Assessment (HOMA-IR) index. Blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), waist-hip ratio, and waist-height ratio were also measured. The metabolic syndrome (MetS) was defined according to the 2009 Joint Interim Statement. Results: The prevalence of the MetS was 20.5% in ambulatory adults and 28.6% in nonambulatory adults. BMI was associated with HOMA-IR only (bZ.451; P<.01). WC was associated with HOMA-IR (bZ.480; P<.01), triglycerides (bZ.450; P<.01), and systolic blood pressure (bZ.352; P<.05). Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed that WC provided the best indication of hypertensive blood pressure, dyslipidemia, HOMA-IR, and the presence of multiple risk factors (area under the curve, .713e.763). Conclusions: A high prevalence of the MetS was observed in this relatively young sample of adults with CP. WC was a better indicator of a number of risk factors than was BMI and presents as a clinically useful method of screening for cardiometabolic risk among adults with CP

Costly Information, Entry, and Credit Access

Using a theoretical model that incorporates asymmetric information and differing comparative advantages among lenders, this paper analyzes the impact of lender entry on credit access and aggregate net output. The model shows that lender entry has the potential to create a segmented market that increases credit access for those firms targeted by the new lenders but potentially reduces credit access for all other firms. The overall impact on net output depends on the distribution of firms, the relative costs of lenders, and the cost of acquiring information. The model provides new insights into the evidence regarding foreign lenders\u27 entry into emerging markets

The Impact of Foreign Bank Entry in Emerging Markets: Evidence From India

This paper uses the entry of foreign banks into India during the 1990s—analyzing variation in both the timing of the new foreign banks’ entries and in their location—to estimate the effect of foreign bank entry on domestic credit access and firm performance. In contrast to the belief that foreign bank entry should improve credit access for all firms, the estimates indicate that foreign banks financed only a small set of very profitable firms upon entry, and that on average, firms were 8 percentage points less likely to have a loan after a foreign bank entry because of a systematic drop in domestic bank loans. Similar estimates are obtained using the location of pre-existing foreign firms as an instrument for foreign bank locations. Moreover, the observed decline in loans is greater among smaller firms, firms with fewer tangible assets, and firms affiliated with business groups. The drop in credit also appears to adversely affect the performance of smaller firms with greater dependence on external financing. Overall, this evidence is consistent with the exacerbation of information asymmetries upon foreign bank entry

Identifying and Addressing Barriers to Accessing Treatment for Substance Use Disorders among Opioid-misusing Individuals Following Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

BACKGROUND: This project utilized opioid-misusing adults to investigate the association between type of opioid misuse and perceived readiness, financial, structural, and stigma-related barriers to accessing SUD treatment; identified classes of PSU and the association between patterns of PSU and perceived barriers, and evaluated effectiveness of an out-of-hospital opioid-treatment connection program. METHODS: Respondents from 2015-2018 NSDUH included insured adults reporting past year opioid misuse. Multivariate logistic regression assessed relationship between type of opioid misuse and perceived barriers to SUD treatment. LCA identified patterns of PSU, and multivariate logistic regression assessed association between PSU classes and perceived barriers. EMS ePCRs for nonfatal OOD from February 1st 2016 – January 31st 2020 were utilized for SITSA and MITSA to evaluate association between implementation of an out-of-hospital opioid-treatment connection program and monthly trend of nonfatal OOD in the county of implementation and a control county. RESULTS: Of 6,095 individuals, 3.7% perceived at least one barrier. LCA identified: Heroin injectors with high PSU, PPR users with low PSU, and PPR users with high PSU. Heroin injectors with high PSU faced significantly greater odds of perceiving readiness, structural, and stigma-related barriers compared to PPR users with low PSU. The county of implementation reported an immediate decrease in nonfatal OOD by 0.34% each month post-intervention, however there were no significant differences in pre- to post-intervention level or slope between counties. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study can be used to develop public-health interventions targeted towards sub-populations perceiving barriers, and continue evaluation of out-of-hospital intervention programs

Do Public Equity Markets Matter in Emerging Economies? Evidence From India

Do public equity markets serve an unique role that is not easily served by other forms of financing in emerging economies? We analyze this question using the collapse of India’s equity market in 1997, which provides an exogenous shock to firms’ ability to issue equity. We find that both public and private firms exhibit higher bankruptcy rates and lower growth after 1997. The decline in growth is greater among firms with more external finance needs and fewer tangible assets. Overall, the evidence suggests that public equity markets are an important, not easily replaced, source of finance in emerging economies

Growing Out of Trouble? Corporate Responses to Liability Risk

This article analyzes corporate responses to the liability risk arising from workers\u27 exposure to newly identified carcinogens. We find that firms, especially those with weak balance sheets, tend to respond to such risks by acquiring large, unrelated businesses with relatively high operating cash flows. The diversifying growth appears to be primarily motivated by managers\u27 personal exposure to their firms\u27 risk in that the growth has negative announcement returns and is related to firms\u27 external governance, managerial stockholdings, and institutional ownership. The results suggest that corporate governance is particularly important when firms are exposed to the risk of large, adverse shocks

Common Errors: How to (and Not to) Control for Unobserved Heterogeneity

Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity (or “common errors”), such as industry-specific shocks, is a fundamental challenge in empirical research.This paper discusses the limitations of two approaches widely used in corporate finance and asset pricing research: demeaning the dependent variable with respect to the group (e.g., “industry-adjusting”) and adding the mean of the group\u27s dependent variable as a control. We show that these methods produce inconsistent estimates and can distort inference. In contrast, the fixed effects estimator is consistent and should be used instead. We also explain how to estimate the fixed effects model when traditional methods are computationally infeasible

An Analysis of Critical Literacy in Featured Manuscripts Appearing in Two Major Literacy Journals (2011-2020)

Literacy journals provide an important resource for teachers’ professional development. Although school districts offer in-service education for their faculty and teachers often attend conferences and workshops sponsored by professional teaching organizations, journal reading remains an important source of information for teachers’ ongoing learning. In this study we examined what elementary teachers would learn about teaching critical literacy from reading major journals in literacy education. Critical literacy served as our focus because of the increasing importance of readers knowing how to recognize political, social and cultural perspectives embedded in the texts that they read. Content analysis served as our research method in which all volumes of The Reading Teacher and Language Arts published between 2011 and 2020 were examined. Results yielded 20 manuscripts meeting our criteria, and these clustered into two categories: (1) manuscripts describing effective critical literacy projects in elementary classrooms; (2) manuscripts discussing the use of children’s literature for teaching critical literacy. Given recent national events relating to racial and ethnic injustice throughout the country, we recommend that literacy journals place greater emphasis in publishing manuscripts that help teachers include a critical literacy lens into the lessons they teach children