7,785 research outputs found
Healthy school meals and educational outcomes
This paper provides field evidence on the effects of a diet on educational outcomes, exploiting a campaign lead in the UK in 2004, which introduced drastic changes in the meals offered in the schools of one Borough – Greenwich- shifting from low-budget processed meals towards healthier options. We evaluate the effect of the campaign on educational outcomes in primary schools using a difference in differences approach; comparing educational outcomes in primary schools (key stage 2 outcomes more specifically) before and after the reform, using the neighbouring Local Education Authorities as a control group. We find evidence that educational outcomes did improve significantly in English and Science. We also find that authorised absences – which are most likely linked to illness and health- fell by 14%
Observed parity-odd CMB temperature bispectrum
Parity-odd non-Gaussianities create a variety of temperature bispectra in the
cosmic microwave background (CMB), defined in the domain: . These models are yet unconstrained in the literature, that
so far focused exclusively on the more common parity-even scenarios. In this
work, we provide the first experimental constraints on parity-odd bispectrum
signals in WMAP 9-year temperature data, using a separable modal parity-odd
estimator. Comparing theoretical bispectrum templates to the observed
bispectrum, we place constraints on the so-called nonlineality parameters of
parity-odd tensor non-Gaussianities predicted by several Early Universe models.
Our technique also generates a model-independent, smoothed reconstruction of
the bispectrum of the data for parity-odd configurations.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in JCA
Accounting for the Rise in Consumer Bankruptcies
Personal bankruptcies in the United States have increased dramatically, rising from 1.4 per thousand working age population in 1970 to 8.5 in 2002. We use a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with competitive financial intermediaries who can observe households’ earnings, age and current asset holdings to evaluate several commonly offered explanations. We find that increased uncertainty (income shocks, expense uncertainty) cannot quantitatively account for the rise in bankruptcies. Instead, stories related to a change in the credit market environment are more plausible. In particular, we find that a combination of a decrease in the transactions cost of lending and a decline in the cost of bankruptcy does a good job in accounting for the rise in consumer bankruptcy. We also argue that the abolition of usury laws and other legal changes are unimportant.Consumer Bankruptcy, Uncertainty, Credit Markets, Stigma
Consumer bankruptcy: a fresh start
American consumer bankruptcy provides for a Fresh Start through the discharge of a household’s debt. Until recently, many European countries specified a No Fresh Start policy of life-long liability for debt. The trade-off between these two policies is that while Fresh Start provides insurance across states, it drives up interest rates and thereby makes life-cycle smoothing more difficult. This paper quantitatively compares these bankruptcy rules using a life-cycle model with incomplete markets calibrated to the U.S. and Germany. A key innovation is that households face idiosyncratic uncertainty about their net asset holdings (expense shocks) and labor income. We find that expense uncertainty plays a key role in evaluating consumer bankruptcy laws.
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