PESTICIDES AND CHILD HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM HISPANIC CHILDREN IN THE U.S.

This paper examines whether there is an externality of parental occupational exposure to pesticides on children's health, and whether some children are more severely affected by the externality than others. Using the Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination survey, we find children of exposed parents are more likely to develop chronic conditions and less likely to attain good health than children of unexposed parents, after controlling for a large set of child and family characteristics. Furthermore, children from low socioeconomic status are most vulnerable to health shocks resulting from pesticides and other related environmental toxins. Our analysis suggests that terminating the pathway of parental occupational exposure would be cost effective to correct the externality. Taken together with earlier findings that poor childhood health is associated with lower adult earnings, our results suggest more attention to be paid to the health shocks from environmental toxins for the poor as a potential mechanism through which the increasing poverty across generations at the very poor takes place: poverty makes individuals more susceptible to health shocks at childhood, which is associated with worse poverty for their children.Health Economics and Policy,

Book Review: Shooting from the Hip

Review of Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun by A.J. Somerset (Biblioasis, 2015)

How Do Emotions Influence Saving Behavior

Employers have moved away from traditional defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. As a result, many individuals are now required to make their own retirement saving and investment decisions, which has raised concerns about their ability and desire to handle these decisions. Since investment choices have major implications for future financial welfare, it is important to understand how individuals make these decisions and to identify potential ways to improve the decision-making process. Researchers have explored various factors affecting retirement saving, such as income, age, job tenure, self-control failure, financial literacy and trust. No prior research, however, has looked at the effects of emotions on retirement savings. This Issue in Brief examines how two different emotions – hope and hopefulness – affect 401(k) participation and asset allocation. The first section defines the terms. The second section describes the structure of a recent field experiment. The third section summarizes the results, which reveal that having high hope (i.e. yearning) – for a secure retirement leads to different investment behaviors than having high hopefulness (i.e. perceived likelihood). Furthermore, threats to hope and threats to hopefulness are found to have different effects on 401(k) participation and investment decisions. The final section concludes.

Understanding Hope and Its Implications for Consumer Behavior: I Hope, Therefore I Consume

Building on prior work (MacInnis and de Mello (2005) \u27The concept of hope and its relevance to product evaluation and choice\u27. Journal of Marketing 69(January), 1-14; de Mello and MacInnis (2005) \u27Why and how consumers hope: Motivated reasoning and the marketplace\u27. Inside Consumption: Consumer Motives, Goals, and Desires, S. Ratneshwar and D. G. Mick (eds.). London/New York: Routledge, pp. 44-66), the authors argue that the concept of hope is highly relevant to consumer behavior and marketing, though its study has not yet appeared in these literatures. Complicating this study is that the definition of hope across literatures is inconsistent. The purpose of this conceptual article is to articulate the concept of hope and elucidate its relevance to consumer behavior. We do so in six sections. The first section explores the conceptual meaning of hope. A definition of hope and the constituent elements that underlie it is articulated. We compare this definition to ones provided elsewhere and differentiate hope from related terms like wishing, expectations, involvement, and faith. The second section focuses on what consumers hope for. The third section considers several important consumer relevant outcomes of hope, including biased processing and self-deception, risk taking behavior, product satisfaction, and life satisfaction and materialism. The fourth section addresses the extent to which marketers are purveyors of hope and what tactics they use to induce hope in consumers. The fifth section uses the conceptualization of hope to both discuss novel ways of measuring hope and their comparisons to existing hope measures. The final section addresses a set of interesting, yet unresolved questions about hope and consumer behavior

Hydraulic architecture and water relations of several species at diverse sites around Sydney

Seasonal comparisons of leaf water potential, root biomass, hydraulic architecture, xylem embolism and xylem dimensions were made for eight woody species in four diverse habitats (mangroves, coastal heathland, ridge-top woodland and river-flat woodland). In most comparisons, pre-dawn and minimum leaf water potentials were lower in winter than in summer, a result attributed to lower rainfall and a smaller root biomass in winter than in summer. Branch hydraulic conductivities (per unit transverse area, sapwood area or leaf area) were generally larger in summer than in winter across all species in all habitats. An inverse relationship between Huber value and conductivity was observed across all four habitats. Increased solar radiation and evaporative demand in the summer was associated with an increased percentage loss of xylem conductance arising from embolism, compared with winter. These results are discussed in the context of patterns and relationships among water relations, microclimate and hydraulic architecture

Second Set of Spaces

This document describes the Gloss infrastructure supporting implementation of location-aware services. The document is in two parts. The first part describes software architecture for the smart space. As described in D8, a local architecture provides a framework for constructing Gloss applications, termed assemblies, that run on individual physical nodes, whereas a global architecture defines an overlay network for linking individual assemblies. The second part outlines the hardware installation for local sensing. This describes the first phase of the installation in Strathclyde University

Seasonal variations in tree water use and physiology correlate with soil salinity and soil water content in remnant woodlands on saline soils

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. Ecophysiological studies of remnant woodlands in saline environments are scarce. We investigated seasonal fluctuations in soil water and salinity together with leaf and branch traits (area-based maximum assimilation (Amax), foliar nitrogen, specific leaf area (SLA) and Huber value (Hv)) and sap velocities of Eucalyptus macrorhyncha at four semi-arid sites in south-eastern Australia. Summer and winter soil salinities (10 cm depth) were 15-35 dS m-1 and 8-10 dS m-1 respectively. Gravimetric soil water content in the upper 20 cm was 2-5% in summer and 7-23% in winter, resulting in a significant inverse correlation between soil water and soil salinity. We found significant correlations between soil conditions and plant traits and function across seasons. Soil water content was significantly correlated with foliar N, SLA, Hv and maximum sap velocity while soil salinity was significantly correlated with Amax, Hv and maximum sap velocity. Correlations indicate co-variation of soil conditions and plant physiology in response to environmental conditions such as solar radiation and vapour pressure deficit (D). E. macrorhyncha tolerates the dual stresses of high salinity and low soil water during summer. While the plants appeared unhealthy, our data show that remnant vegetation can remain functional even in close proximity to saline scalds

Applying a SPA model to examine the impact of climate change on GPP of open woodlands and the potential for woody thickening

Woody thickening is a global phenomenon that influences landscape C density, regional ecohydrology and biogeochemical cycling. The aim of the work described here is to test the hypothesis that increased atmospheric CO2 concentration, with or without photosynthetic acclimation, can increase gross primary production (GPP) and that this can explain woody thickening. We examine mechanisms underlying the response of GPP and highlight the importance of changes in soil water content by applying a detailed soil-plant-atmosphere model. Through this model, we show that CO2 enrichment with decreased or increased D and photosynthetic acclimation results in decreased canopy water use because of reduced gs. The decline in water use coupled with increased photosynthesis resulted in increased GPP, water-use efficiency and soil moisture content. This study shows that this is a valid mechanism for GPP increase because of CO2 enrichment coupled with either a decrease or an increase in D, in water-limited environments. We also show that a large increase in leaf area index could be sustained in the future as a result of the increased soil moisture content arising from CO2 enrichment and this increase was larger if D decreases rather than increases in the future. Large-scale predictions arising from this simple conceptual model are discussed and found to be supported in the literature. We conclude that woody thickening in Australia and probably globally can be explained by the changes in landscape GPP and soil moisture balance arising principally from the increased atmospheric CO2 concentration. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd