State Social Capital and Individual Health Status

Recent studies have found that two state-level measures of social capital, average levels of civic participation and trust, are associated with improvements in individual health status. In this study we employ these measures, together with the Putnam (2000) index, to examine several key aspects of the relationship between state social capital and individual health. We find that for all three measures, the association with health status persists after carefully adjusting for household income, and that for two measures, mistrust and the Putnam index, the size of this association warrants further attention. Using the Putnam index, we find particular support for the hypothesis that social capital has a more pronounced salutary effect for the poor. Our findings generate both support for the social capital and health hypothesis and a number of implications for future research.Social Capital, Health

Institutional finance for agricultural development

The authors review the literature to see at how rural financial institutions (RFIs) are organized, how they can improve their financial viability, and how real interest rates affect the demand for rural loans, the supply of rural deposits, and rural savings. Their purpose is to make the findings of the extensive literature on agricultural credit policy accessible to developing-country policymakers. The review addresses six major questions: Why promote formal RFIs? How should RFIs be organized? What are the transaction costs of RFIs and how should they be measured? What effects do real interest rates and other factors have on rural loans, deposits, and savings? What determines whether an RFI system is a net contributor to or a drain on public resources? And, what policy conclusions can be drawn from this analysis? To answer these questions, Desai and Mellor look at the literature on RFIs in high-, middle-, and low-income countries, both developed and developing. They include countries in four developing regions Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Near East and Mediterranean Basin, and Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Western Europe and North America.Rural credit Developing countries. ,Financial institutions. ,

Did the Devil Make Them Do It? The Effects of Religion and Religiosity in Public Goods and Trust Games

We test whether religious affiliation and participation in religious services are associated with behavior in public goods and trust games. Overall, religious affiliation is unrelated to individual behavior. However, we find some weak evidence that among subjects attending religious services, increased participation is associated with behavior in both public goods and trust games.Public goods, experiments, religion, and trust

Do Liberals Play Nice? The Effects of Party and Political Ideology in Public Goods and Trust Games

We test the conventional wisdom that political ideology is associated with generosity or compassion by comparing the behavior of experimental subjects in public goods or trust games. We find that self-described liberals and those identifying more closely with the Democrat party are just as likely to free-ride as conservatives or Republican-leaners; likewise, political ideology is unrelated to observed trusting behavior or trustworthiness in a bilateral trust game.Political Party, Free Rider

Inequality, Group Cohesion, and Public Good Provision: An Experimental Analysis

Recent studies argue that inequality reduces group cohesiveness and dampens support for expenditures on public goods and social programs. In light of competing theoretical explanations and mixed empirical evidence of the effect of inequality on public goods provision, we conduct a test using a public goods experiment. Our design introduces inequality by manipulating the levels and distributions of fixed payments given to subjects for participating in the experiment. When made salient through public information about each individuals standing within the group, inequality in the distribution of fixed payments reduces contributions to the public good for all group members.Public Good, Inequality, Free Rider

Performance Evaluation of Sparse Matrix Multiplication Kernels on Intel Xeon Phi

Intel Xeon Phi is a recently released high-performance coprocessor which features 61 cores each supporting 4 hardware threads with 512-bit wide SIMD registers achieving a peak theoretical performance of 1Tflop/s in double precision. Many scientific applications involve operations on large sparse matrices such as linear solvers, eigensolver, and graph mining algorithms. The core of most of these applications involves the multiplication of a large, sparse matrix with a dense vector (SpMV). In this paper, we investigate the performance of the Xeon Phi coprocessor for SpMV. We first provide a comprehensive introduction to this new architecture and analyze its peak performance with a number of micro benchmarks. Although the design of a Xeon Phi core is not much different than those of the cores in modern processors, its large number of cores and hyperthreading capability allow many application to saturate the available memory bandwidth, which is not the case for many cutting-edge processors. Yet, our performance studies show that it is the memory latency not the bandwidth which creates a bottleneck for SpMV on this architecture. Finally, our experiments show that Xeon Phi's sparse kernel performance is very promising and even better than that of cutting-edge general purpose processors and GPUs

An Experimental Study of the Effects of Inequality and Relative Deprivation on Trusting Behavior

Several non-experimental studies report that income inequality and other forms of population-based heterogeneity reduce levels of trust in society. However, recent work by Glaeser et al. (2000) calls into question the reliability of widely used survey-based measures of trust. Specifically, survey responses regarding trust attitudes did not reflect subjects actual behavior in a trust game. In this paper, we conduct a novel experimental test of the effects of inequality on trust and trustworthiness. Our experimental design induces inequality by varying the show-up fees paid to subjects, in contrast to previous experiments that focus on broad cultural or national differences in trust. We do not find robust support for the hypothesis that inequality per se dampens trusting behavior among all subjects; however, we do find some evidence that trust and rustworthiness are influenced by an individuals relative position in the group. Finally, we confirm previous findings that common survey-based measures of social trust are not associated with actual trusting behavior.Trust, social capital, heterogeneity, inequality, experiment

Production-decay interferences at NLO in QCD for t-channel single-top production

We present a calculation of O(\alpha_s) contributions to the process of t-channel single-top production and decay, which include virtual and real corrections arising from interference of the production and decay subprocesses. The calculation is organized as a simultaneous expansion of the matrix elements in the couplings \alpha_{ew},\alpha_s and the virtuality of the intermediate top quark, (p_t^2-m_t^2)/m_t^2 ~ \Gamma_t/m_t, and extends earlier results beyond the narrow-width approximation.Comment: 33 pages, 6 Figure