Women out, children out : the effect of female labor on portuguese preschool enrollment rates

This article tests whether Portuguese female activity rates have increased preschool enrollment rates. Particularly during the last 20 years, Portuguese women have assumed new roles in the marketplace and have become active workers outside of the home environment. This change has encouraged more sensible decisions with respect to preschool enrollment. Using cointegration techniques, we concluded that female activity rates and real income per capita caused a long-term increase in preschool enrollment rates. Although the percentage of agricultural gross value added to the gross domestic product and the number of preschool institutes were also found to be significant in the estimated vector error correction model, their causal relationship with preschool enrollment was only short term.COMPETE; QREN; FEDER; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Existential abstractions for distributed reactive systems via syntactic transformations

Synchronous languages are well suited to implementation and verification of reactive systems. Large reactive systems tend to be distributed to cope with scalability and application specific demands. We propose abstractions for distributed reactive systems modelled as a set of synchronous nodes with asynchronous communication between them. The special features of synchronous programs allow us to obtain abstractions that are also valid synchronous programs only by syntactic transformations. For a given program, the set of all such abstractions forms a semi-lattice with the original program as the bottom and the most abstract program as the top element. The transformation we define is a natural basis for constructing an abstraction-refinement framework for verification. Given a program and a safety property, the abstraction-refinement process is a search in a lattice of programs obtained via syntactic transformations. We have implemented this abstraction refinement framework in a prototype tool and report our case studies

Existential abstractions for distributed reactive systems via syntactic transformations

Synchronous languages are well suited to implementation and verification of reactive systems. Large reactive systems tend to be distributed to cope with scalability and application specific demands. We propose abstractions for distributed reactive systems modelled as a set of synchronous nodes with asynchronous communication between them. The special features of synchronous programs allow us to obtain abstractions that are also valid synchronous programs only by syntactic transformations. For a given program, the set of all such abstractions forms a semi-lattice with the original program as the bottom and the most abstract program as the top element. The transformation we define is a natural basis for constructing an abstraction-refinement framework for verification. Given a program and a safety property, the abstraction-refinement process is a search in a lattice of programs obtained via syntactic transformations. We have implemented this abstraction refinement framework in a prototype tool and report our case studies

Cost-effectiveness of Mifepristone Pretreatment for the Medical Management of Nonviable Early Pregnancy

ImportanceEarly pregnancy loss (EPL) is the most common complication of pregnancy. A multicenter randomized clinical trial compared 2 strategies for medical management and found that mifepristone pretreatment is 25% more effective than the standard of care, misoprostol alone. The cost of mifepristone may be a barrier to implementation of the regimen.ObjectiveTo assess the cost-effectiveness of medical management of EPL with mifepristone pretreatment plus misoprostol vs misoprostol alone in the United States.Design, setting, and participantsThis preplanned. prospective economic evaluation was performed concurrently with a randomized clinical trial in 3 US sites from May 1, 2014, through April 30, 2017. Participants included 300 women with anembryonic gestation or embryonic or fetal demise. Cost-effectiveness was computed from the health care sector and societal perspectives, with a 30-day time horizon. Data were analyzed from July 1, 2018, to July 3, 2019.InterventionsMifepristone pretreatment plus misoprostol administration vs misoprostol alone.Main outcomes and measuresCosts in 2018 US dollars, effectiveness in quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and treatment efficacy. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) of mifepristone and misoprostol vs misoprostol alone were calculated, and cost-effectiveness acceptability curves were generated.ResultsAmong the 300 women included in the randomized clinical trial (mean [SD] age, 30.4 [6.2] years), mean costs were similar for groups receiving mifepristone pretreatment and misoprostol alone from the health care sector perspective ($696.75 [95$591.88-$801.62] vs$690.88 [95% CI, $562.38-$819.38]; P = .94) and the societal perspective ($3846.30 [95$2783.01-$4909.58] vs$4845.62 [95% CI, $3186.84-$6504.41]; P = .32). The mifepristone pretreatment group had higher QALYs (0.0820 [95% CI, 0.0815-0.0825] vs 0.0806 [95% CI, 0.0800-0.0812]; P = .001) and a higher completion rate after first treatment (83.8% vs 67.1%; P < .001) than the group receiving misoprostol alone. From the health care sector perspective, mifepristone pretreatment was cost-effective relative to misoprostol alone with an ICER of $4225.43 (95$195 053.30 to $367 625.10) per QALY gained. From the societal perspective, mifepristone pretreatment dominated misoprostol alone (95$5 111 629 to $1 801 384). The probabilities that mifepristone pretreatment was cost-effective compared with misoprostol alone at a willingness-to-pay of$150 000 per QALY gained from the health care sector and societal perspectives were approximately 90% and 80%, respectively.Conclusions and relevanceThis study found that medical management of EPL with mifepristone pretreatment was cost-effective when compared with misoprostol alone.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02012491