STUDENT NUMBERS AND SUSTAINING COURSES AND FIELDS IN PH.D. PROGRAMS

Many agricultural economics departments are concerned about the vitality of their Ph.D. programs. A particular problem is insufficient student numbers to justify teaching certain courses or fields. As a consequence, much faculty time can be spent debating alternative program structures without any real idea of the likelihood that a proposed program structure will succeed. This article presents a framework for deriving some analytical and empirical results for alternative Ph.D. program structures. A downloadable program is used to generate some representative results that will hopefully help others minimize speculations and time spent in committee or departmental meetings.Ph.D. programs, student numbers, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession, A2, Q1,

Household income pooling and the demand for food: does family financial structure matter?

Research on food consumption and expenditures usually employs the use of unitary models that do not account for type of family financial structure. This research presents two collective models of household behavior, conditional and unconditional models, which were used in the analysis of the household data that came from the “Parental Time, Role Strain and Children’s Fat Intake and Obesity Related Outcomes”. This research utilized the Generalized Method of Moments in the estimation of the system of expenditures on food at and away from home to test the validity of the unitary model by testing one of the implications of this model, the income pooling hypothesis, as well as family financial structure. It was found that the omission of family financial structure and not the income pooling hypothesis would lead to the incorrect assertion that the unitary model is the correct model for the analysis of intrahousehold allocation. The collective models proposed in this research were found to be preferred to those of the unitary models. These two models, conditional and unconditional, not only allow for the effect of earned and unearned incomes of fathers and mothers to be different, but also incorporate family financial structure into the analysis of expenditures on food at and away from home. This research shows that the parameters of the unitary models are reduced form parameters that do not represent the effect that the variable of interest has on the household expenditures category of interest. This research finds that these reduced form parameters show the total effect which is composed of three parts. First, the change in the expenditure category of interest that comes about from a change in the variable of interest when we hold family financial structure constant. Second, the change in the expenditure category of interest that comes about from a change in the family financial structure. Third, the change in family financial structure that comes about from a change in the variable of interest

STUDENT NUMBERS AND SUSTAINING COURSES AND FIELDS IN PH.D. PROGRAMS

Many agricultural economics departments are concerned about the vitality of their Ph.D. programs. A particular problem is insufficient student numbers to justify teaching certain courses or fields. As a consequence, much faculty time can be spent debating alternative program structures without any real idea of the likelihood that a proposed program structure will succeed. This article presents a framework for deriving some analytical and empirical results for alternative Ph.D. program structures. A downloadable program is used to generate some representative results that will hopefully help others minimize speculations and time spent in committee or departmental meetings

Parental Time, Role Strain, and Children’s Fat Intake and Obesity-Related Outcomes

This study uses a unique dataset to examine parental influence on children’s dietary intake and whether or not the children will become obese. The study shows that household income, parents’ time spent with children, and parents’ work experiences significantly affect children’s energy and fat intake and obesity-related outcomes. For example, the more time mothers spent with their children, the lower the children’s Body Mass Index (BMI) was. On the other hand, the more time fathers spent with their children, the higher the children’s BMI was. And the more time both fathers and mothers spent with their children, the higher their children’s fat intake (as a percentage of energy) was. In general, mothers tended to have a greater effect on their children’s dietary intake than fathers did. Both parents seemed to influence children ages 9-11 more than they did children ages 13-15