Three Economist’s Tools for Antitrust Analysis: A Non-Technical Introduction

The importance of economics to the analysis and enforcement of competition policy and law has increased tremendously in the developed market economies in the past forty years. In younger and developing market economies, competition law itself has a history of twenty to twenty-five years at most – sometimes much less – and economic tools that have proven useful to competition law enforcement in developed market economies in focusing investigations and in assisting decision makers in distinguishing central from secondary issues are inevitably less well understood. This paper presents a non-technical introduction to three economic tools that have become widespread in competition law enforcement in general and in the analysis of proposed mergers in particular: critical loss analysis, upward pricing pressure, and the vertical arithmetic

Risk factors predict post-traumatic stress disorder differently in men and women

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>About twice as many women as men develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even though men as a group are exposed to more traumatic events. Exposure to different trauma types does not sufficiently explain why women are more vulnerable.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The present work examines the effect of age, previous trauma, negative affectivity (NA), anxiety, depression, persistent dissociation, and social support on PTSD separately in men and women. Subjects were exposed to either a series of explosions in a firework factory near a residential area or to a high school stabbing incident.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Some gender differences were found in the predictive power of well known risk factors for PTSD. Anxiety predicted PTSD in men, but not in women, whereas the opposite was found for depression. Dissociation was a better predictor for PTSD in women than in men in the explosion sample but not in the stabbing sample. Initially, NA predicted PTSD better in women than men in the explosion sample, but when compared only to other significant risk factors, it significantly predicted PTSD for both men and women in both studies. Previous traumatic events and age did not significantly predict PTSD in either gender.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Gender differences in the predictive value of social support on PTSD appear to be very complex, and no clear conclusions can be made based on the two studies included in this article.</p

Predicting Transitions in Low and High Levels of Risk Behavior from Early to Middle Adolescence: The TRAILS Study

The present study examined the joint development of substance use and externalizing problems in early and middle adolescence. First, it was tested whether the relevant groups found in previous studies i.e., those with an early onset, a late onset, and no onset or low levels of risk behavior could be identified, while using a developmental model of a single, underlying construct of risk behavior. Second, departing from Moffitt’s taxonomy of antisocial behavior, it was tested if early, but not late, onset risk behavior is predicted by a problematic risk profile in childhood. Data were used from TRAILS, a population based cohort study, starting at age 11 with two follow-ups at mean ages of 13.6 and 16.3 years. Latent transition analyses demonstrated that, both in early and middle adolescence, a single underlying construct of risk behavior, consisting of two classes (labeled as low and high risk behavior), adequately represented the data. Respondents could be clearly classified into four possible transition patterns from early to middle adolescence, with a transition from high to low being almost non-existent (2.5 %), low to low (39.4 %) and low to high (41.8 %) being the most prevalent, and high to high (16.2 %) substantial. As hypothesized, only the high-high group was characterized by a clear adverse predictor profile in late childhood, while the low-high group was not. This study demonstrates that the development of substance use is correlated with externalizing problems and underscores the theory that etiologies of early and later onset risk behavior are different

Association of child maltreatment with South African adults’ wages:Evidence from the Cape area panel study

Child maltreatment is a prevalent public health problem in both developed and developing countries. While many studies have investigated the relationship between violence against children and health of the victims, little is known about the long term economic consequences of child maltreatment, especially in developing countries. Using data from the Cape Area Panel Study, this paper applies Heckman selection models to investigate the relationship between childhood maltreatment and young adults’ wages in South Africa. The results show that, on average, any experience of physical or emotional abuse during childhood is associated with a later 12% loss of young adults’ wages. In addition, the correlation between physical abuse and economic consequence (14%) is more significant than the relationship between emotional abuse and wages (8%) of young adults; and the higher the frequency of maltreatment, the greater the associations with wages. With respect to gender differences, wage loss due to the experience of childhood maltreatment is larger for females than males. Specifically, males’ wages are more sensitive to childhood emotional abuse, while females’ wages are more likely to be affected by childhood physical abuse. These results emphasize the importance of prioritizing investments in prevention and intervention programs to reduce the prevalence of child maltreatment and to help victims better overcome the long-term negative effect