Which table salt to chose?

The link between salt consumption and hypertension has been the focus of many studies and clinical trials in the past few years. It is recommended that table salt intake does not exceed the maximum of 5g per day and yet most people find almost impossible to comply with this recommendation. New types of salt have recently appeared in the market and they claim to be less harmful to health than current commercial salt. Besides being less salty to the taste these new types of salt contain less sodium and more trace minerals than commercial salt but there is a need of experiments and studies in order to establish their benefit to health.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Role of Agriculture in Aggregate Business Cycle Fluctuations

The agricultural sector has certain distinctive features over the business cycle: it is more volatile than and not positively correlated with the rest of the economy and its employment is counter-cyclical. Because of these features and even though the agricultural sector represents less than 2% of the U.S. economy, we show that agriculture plays an essential role in understanding aggregate business cycles. The inclusion of agriculture into standard business cycle analysis resolves the longstanding problems of the standard theory in matching the observed volatility of aggregate labor and the correlation of aggregate labor and productivity (the so called Dunlop-Tharshis observation). In addition, the role of agriculture in the economy can account for the substantial differences observed in business cycle patterns across countries. This novel implication of the model is consistent with the systematic relationship observed between business cycle patterns and the share of agriculture across countries. Our theory has two important implications. First, the model implies that as the size of the agricultural sector falls, business cycle properties across countries should converge. Second, the role of agriculture provides a simple, measurable, and contrastable explanation for the historical properties of aggregate business cycles documented by Backus and Kehoe (1992).Business Cycles, Agriculture, Two-sector Model.

Money, Credit and Default

This paper develops a quantitative model of unsecured debt, default, and money demand for heterogenous agents economies. The paper generates a theory of money demand for the case in which money is a dominate asset that is not needed to carry-out transactions. In this environment holding money helps the agents to smooth their consumption during those periods in which they are excluded from credit markets following a default in their debts. In the model the welfare of the individuals is affected by the inflation rate: high inflation rates preclude individuals of using money as an asset that helps them smooth their consumption profile but low inflation rates tend to make softer the punishment for default making it diffcult to sustain high levels of debt at equilibrium. This two opposite effects imply that in equilibrium the inflation rate that maximizes individuals welfare is positive but not too high.Default, Inflation, Money, Endogenous Borrowing Constraint

Aggregate Employment Fluctuations and Agricultural Share

Differences in employment volatility and the correlation of employment with output across countries are often cited as examples of the limitation of standard real business cycle (RBC) theory to reproduce the observed labor market facts. These observations have lead researchers to argue for the necessity of Non-Walrasian features to reflect the labor institutions in European countries. In this paper, we show that the same labor market evidence is observed in regional economies with the same labor market institutions. We conjecture that differences in agricultural activity can generate the observed differences in labor market behavior. We show that a standard two-sector RBC model with agriculture and non-agriculture can account for the observed labor market facts. In particular, as the size of agricultural activity increases, aggregate employment volatility and the correlation between aggregate employment and output decrease. Moreover, contrary to the Non-Walrasian approach to business cycles, agricultural activity can account for the correlation between aggregate employment and output as reported by Danthine and Donaldson (1993) for Europe and the U.S.Business Cycles, Agriculture, Two-sector Model.

A cross-country evaluation of cheating in academia: is it related to ‘real world’ business ethics?

Today’s economics and business students are expected to be our future’s business people and potentially our tomorrow’s economic leaders and politicians. Thus, their beliefs and practices are likely to affect the definition of acceptable economics and business ethics. The empirical evaluation of the cheating phenomenon in academia has been almost exclusively focused on the US context, and the non-US studies involve, in general, a narrow scope of countries. In the present paper we perform a wide cross-country study on the determinants of economics and business undergraduate cheating which involves 21 countries from the American (4), European (14), Africa (2) and Oceania (1) Continents and 7213 students. We found that the average magnitude of copying among the economics and business undergraduates is quite high (62%) but with a significant cross-country heterogeneity. The probability of cheating is significantly lower in students enrolled in schools located in the Nordic or the US plus British Isles blocks when compared with their South Europe counterparts; quite surprisingly that probability is also lower for the African block. Distinctly, students enrolled in schools from the Western and especially from the Eastern Europe observe statistically significant higher propensities for perpetrating academic fraud. Our findings further suggest that average cheating propensity in academia is significantly correlated with ‘real world’ business corruption.cheating; corruption; university; economics; business; countries

Crime without punishment: An update review of the determinants of cheating among university students

The issue of cheating is a serious problem since it can call the efficiency of an education system into question. Furthermore, it is a devaluing factor in the country's stock of human capital. A student who copies is a free-rider, in the sense that he/she gains a higher grade than that merited by the actual amount of effort expended on study. In addition, it makes it impossible for teachers to fully achieve the goal of effective dissemination to, and acquisition of knowledge by, students. This paper conceptually and methodologically systematizes the phenomenon of academic fraud. Distinct forms of theorizing illegal behaviours are examined, adapting Becker’s crime model (1968) to cheating. A systematic review of the literature has allowed certain direct determinants of the probability of “copying”, not yet investigated, to be identified, viz: 1) the ‘advantages’, in terms of a higher grade, that students see themselves as gaining from fraudulent behaviour in comparison with not indulging in it; 2) the breakdown of students’ grades by nature of discipline - “reasoning” versus “cramming”; and 3) the existence or otherwise of a code of honour in universities. As a result, this paper proposes a new, ‘expanded’, econometric specification for estimating cheating (i.e., the probability of “copying”) based on an analysis of the expected cost-benefit, according to Becker’s model.crime, cheating, university, human capital