School meal crowd out in the 1980s

This paper explores whether state provision of school meals in the 1980s crowded out private provision by examining two UK policy reforms that dramatically reduced school meal take-up. The paper examines whether this affected children’s BMI, using a large, unique, longitudinal dataset of primary school children from 1972 – 1994. This period is characterized by –for some– relative scarcity of foods. The reforms placed further constraints on some families’ already tight food budgets, leading to nutritionists expecting children to become malnourished. The findings however, show no evidence of any such effects. In addition, I find no support for the hypothesis of intra-household food reallocation. As some of those affected are relatively poor, and as sample sizes are often large with fairly precise estimates, the analysis should have been able to detect any effects. With no such evidence, this suggests that the state provision of school meals was crowding out private provision of similarly nutritious packed and home lunches.Crowd Out; School Meal Provision; Body Mass Index; Difference-in-Difference

The London bombings and racial prejudice: evidence from housing and labour markets

This paper investigates the impact of the London bombings on attitudes towards ethnic minorities, examining outcomes in housing and labour markets across London boroughs. We use a difference-in-differences approach, specifying `treated' boroughs as those with the highest concentration of Asian residents. Our results indicate that house prices in treated boroughs fell by approximately 2.3% in the two years after the bombings relative to other boroughs, with sales declining by approximately 5.7%. Furthermore, we present evidence of a rise in the unemployment rate in treated compared to control boroughs, as well as a rise in racial segregation. These results are robust to several `falsification' checks with respect to the definition and timing of treatment

Two-dimensional global manifolds of vector fields

We describe an efficient algorithm for computing two-dimensional stable and unstable manifolds of three-dimensional vector fields. Larger and larger pieces of a manifold are grown until a sufficiently long piece is obtained. This allows one to study manifolds geometrically and obtain important features of dynamical behavior. For illustration, we compute the stable manifold of the origin spiralling into the Lorenz attractor, and an unstable manifold in zeta(3)-model converging to an attracting limit cycle

Towards the right way of seeing what is left in Homonymous Hemianopia

Homonymous Hemianopia (HH) refers to one-sided blindness due to unilateral visual pathway damage. To determine the potential of individuals with HH to recover, it is important to consider the functional and structural integrity of their entire visual brain. In her thesis "Towards the right way of seeing what is left in Homonymous Hemianopia'', Hinke describes four exploratory neuroimaging studies and with that showed how the functional and structural integrity of the visual system changes in individuals with HH and how brain activity can inform us about the residual visual functioning of individuals with HH. In particular, she has shown that 1) the extent of collateral damage, i.e. damage in addition to the initial damage, is more widespread than previously reported and even affects the contralateral "healthy" hemisphere; 2) the visual system can functionally reorganize in response to surgical removal of one of the hemispheres (i.e. a hemispherectomy); 3) the functional connectivity strength between the precuneus and the occipital pole can predict training-induced visual recovery; and 4) visual field reconstructions based on brain activity can reveal parts of the "blind" visual field with preserved visual processing. With these findings, she has shed light on aspects that may be critical when determining the recovery potential of individuals with HH