Does school-based private health insurance improve students’ health status? Evidence from China

Private health insurance is an important supplement to social health insurance. However, there is a lack of research on the impact of school-based private health insurance programs on students’ health in developing countries. This study aims to investigate the causal impact of school-based supplementary private health insurance programs on the self-rated health status of Chinese secondary school students, with an average age of 14, using a longitudinal database, the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS). The study exploits the cross-school variation and discrete feature of the response variable by applying a two-level ordered logit model with a random effect at the school level. An ordered logit propensity score matching method, clustering the standard errors by school, is applied for the robustness check. Lagged values of potential endogenous covariates are included in both methods to control the effect of unobserved individual heterogeneities. The results indicate that participating in uniform schoolbased private health insurance programs does not improve student self-rated health status, whereas individualized health insurance significantly improves student self-rated health status

Glucocorticoids Inhibit Sodium Depletion-induced Salt Appetite in Rat

Glucocorticoids, produced in adrenal cortex, exert potent natriuretic and diuretic actions in the kidney. Recently, it has been found that glucocorticoids could upregulate the expression of natriuretic peptide receptor A (NPR-A), the primary receptor of atrial natriuretic peptide, in the hypothalamus of the rat. Consequently, systemic administration of glucocorticoid could block dehydration-induced water intake by activation hypothalamic NPR-A. We describe here glucocorticoids could inhibit sodium intake when administrated systemically in conscious, salt-depleted rats; an effect which was strong and long-lasting. The study provided further evidence for the actions of glucocorticoids on central nervous system, which together with their established renal actions coordinated to normalize extracellular fluid volume

Matrix of Polynomials Model based Polynomial Dictionary Learning Method for Acoustic Impulse Response Modeling

We study the problem of dictionary learning for signals that can be represented as polynomials or polynomial matrices, such as convolutive signals with time delays or acoustic impulse responses. Recently, we developed a method for polynomial dictionary learning based on the fact that a polynomial matrix can be expressed as a polynomial with matrix coefficients, where the coefficient of the polynomial at each time lag is a scalar matrix. However, a polynomial matrix can be also equally represented as a matrix with polynomial elements. In this paper, we develop an alternative method for learning a polynomial dictionary and a sparse representation method for polynomial signal reconstruction based on this model. The proposed methods can be used directly to operate on the polynomial matrix without having to access its coefficients matrices. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method for acoustic impulse response modeling.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure