The Effects of Children's Time Use and Home and Neighborhood Quality on their Body Weight and Cognitive/Behavioral Development

We estimate a directional distance function to assess the impacts of multiple time-varying parent and child inputs on a cluster of jointly produced child outcomes for children aged 7 to 13 years. The directional distance function specification avoids several well-known empirical problems associated with analysis of household production data, namely, the need to aggregate inputs and outputs, assume separability among inputs and outputs, or estimate reduced form equations. Using a balanced panel of families from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Sample for 1996 to 2000, we assess the marginal contributions of home and neighborhood environmental quality and children's time allocations, on their math and reading performance, behavior problems, and body mass index. We also measure productivity growth, technical change, efficiency change, and technical efficiency for production of child outcomes. Our results indicate significant jointness among good and bad child outcomes. Significant improvements in children's good outcomes and reductions in bad outcomes are also associated with a better home and parent perceived neighborhood environment, Head Start participation, and increased family time spent together during meals. Children's productivity growth is found to be highest at age 8 years and diminishes thereafter.Health Economics and Policy, Labor and Human Capital,

Facilitating goal-oriented behaviour in the Stroop task: when executive control is influenced by automatic processing.

A portion of Stroop interference is thought to arise from a failure to maintain goal-oriented behaviour (or goal neglect). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether goal- relevant primes could enhance goal maintenance and reduce the Stroop interference effect. Here it is shown that primes related to the goal of responding quickly in the Stroop task (e.g. fast, quick, hurry) substantially reduced Stroop interference by reducing reaction times to incongruent trials but increasing reaction times to congruent and neutral trials. No effects of the primes were observed on errors. The effects on incongruent, congruent and neutral trials are explained in terms of the influence of the primes on goal maintenance. The results show that goal priming can facilitate goal-oriented behaviour and indicate that automatic processing can modulate executive control

Identifying a sufficient core group for trachoma transmission.

BackgroundIn many infectious diseases, a core group of individuals plays a disproportionate role in transmission. If these individuals were effectively prevented from transmitting infection, for example with a perfect vaccine, then the disease would disappear in the remainder of the community. No vaccine has yet proven effective against the ocular strains of chlamydia that cause trachoma. However, repeated treatment with oral azithromycin may be able to prevent individuals from effectively transmitting trachoma.Methodology/principal findingsHere we assess several methods for identifying a core group for trachoma, assuming varying degrees of knowledge about the transmission process. We determine the minimal core group from a completely specified model, fitted to results from a large Ethiopian trial. We compare this benchmark to a core group that could actually be identified from information available to trachoma programs. For example, determined from the rate of return of infection in a community after mass treatments, or from the equilibrium prevalence of infection.Conclusions/significanceSufficient groups are relatively easy for programs to identify, but will likely be larger than the theoretical minimum

Living in a Battleground: Presidential Campaigns and Fundamental Predictors of Vote Choice

Little evidence links the strategic decisions of campaigns to individual-level voting behavior. Yet for campaigns to matter in the way that experts argue, exposure to campaigns must also matter so there should be observable differences in the structure of vote choice between battleground and non-battleground states. Combining presidential campaign data with the Senate Election Study, we show that intense campaigning can activate factors like race, ideology, partisanship, and presidential approval. We find that the campaigns affected different variables in 1988 than in 1992, which we hypothesize is the consequence of campaign messages

Appointing Arbitrators: Tenure, Public Confidence, and a Middle Road for ISDS Reform

Many governments now join academics and activists in questioning whether ad hoc tribunals, which comprise private individuals holding no tenured role on a court, ought to be entrusted with deciding cases, where the resultant awards sometimes impose significant financial burdens on the respondent State, constrain the State’s regulatory choices, and affect the interests of third parties. Investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS), during the great expansion of its practice over the past quarter century, has relied on party-appointed arbitrators to constitute the ad hoc tribunals that hear and decide cases that investors bring. Moved by a turn of public sentiment in recent years against ISDS, the European Union (EU) leads an effort to replace ad hoc tribunals with a permanent, standing judicial mechanism. A recent behavioral economics study by Maria Laura Marceddu and Pietro Ortolani in the European Journal of International Law adduces empirical evidence that those investigators say supports the effort toward an ISDS court. According to Marceddu and Ortolani, people who look disfavorably on ISDS would place more confidence in dispute settlement outcomes if the decision-makers were tenured judges serving on a court rather than arbitrators constituting ad hoc tribunals. However, they reach that conclusion on the basis of experiments that compare survey respondents’ sentiment between courts and ad hoc tribunals without interrogating what, precisely, respondents think courts and ad hoc tribunals are and what they think about them. Behavioral economics method, as originally developed, entails a closer look at the “objective attributes” of phenomena, public response to which an experiment aims to measure. To speak confidently about comparisons between public response to courts and public response to ad hoc arbitral tribunals, the empirical agenda around ISDS reform therefore should go a step further than Marceddu and Ortolani’s pathbreaking, but as yet only introductory, effort. Further experiments, rather than just comparing two kinds of dispute settlement organs as objects, would aim to identify what about those organs leads people to have confidence in one or the other. In this article, we hypothesize, in particular, that the attributes of the people who constitute a court or a tribunal matter more than the label that the organ is given. Whom to appoint as decision-maker is a central question in the wider discussion today over ISDS reform. The EU is not alone in exploring the possibilities. The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) has turned its attention to ISDS reform over the past several years. The selection and appointment of ISDS decision-makers is one of the main topics under the UNCITRAL mandate in that connection. States, nongovernmental organizations, and academics have joined the discourse, which continues as the EU now advances a new generation of investment agreements stipulating the creation of bilateral ISDS courts and the pursuit of a future multilateral court to address ISDS at global level. From our behavioral economics hypothesis about ISDS decision-making, we suggest that what influences public sentiment most meaningfully are signals of public confidence in the people who make decisions. Moving from hypothesis to policy, we suggest further that stakeholders who now are considering options for ISDS reform should seek to identify what those signals are. We tentatively advance that ethics, diversity, transparency, and demonstrated commitment through prior service in positions of public trust may be signals that influence public sentiment toward a decision-making apparatus. We close with some suggestions about how policy-makers might systematize such signals, so as to realign ISDS to address the concerns of the wider communities that institution affects

China’s Sanctions and Rule of Law: How to Respond When China Targets Lawyers

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has begun to use sanctions against people who speak out against its policies. Well-known are the sanctions that the PRC’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson announced on January 20, 2021 against twenty-eight persons, both named and unnamed, who recently served or were then serving in the Trump administration, including the then-Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. On March 26, 2021, however, the PRC announced sanctions against a less conspicuous target: Essex Court Chambers, a set of barristers’ chambers in London known for commercial work and investment arbitration. What ostensibly provoked China’s unusual move was a hundred-odd-page legal opinion. Four barristers in Essex Court—Alison Macdonald QC, Jackie McArthur, Naomi Hart, and Lorraine Aboagye—had supplied the opinion to address whether China might have international criminal responsibility for crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uyghurs

Appointing Arbitrators: Tenure, Public Confidence, and a Middle Road for ISDS Reform

When parties bring claims under investor-state dispute settlement (“ISDS”) procedures, who should serve as decision-maker? Relevant par- ties ask the question in different settings and with different criteria in mind. A party in a dispute, contemplating ISDS proceedings, whether by it or against it, likely will focus on the qualities of particular individuals available to serve as arbitrators. Party-appointed panelists charged under the applicable instrument with choosing a neutral or chair, and institutional appointing authorities charged with that task or with choosing arbitrators in default of party choice, will also turn their minds to candidate assessment. Different individuals or institutions might look for somewhat different qualities, but all who are called upon to make the choice will think about how best to assess the candidates

Great Powers and New Risks: What Businesses and Regulators Should Know about China’s Strategic Ambitions

China’s geopolitical ambitions give rise to risks that government agencies and the businesses they regulate need to address. In particular, Military-Civil Fusion (MCF), a whole-of-government legal and administrative machinery created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), aims to give China’s military, as well as China’s state championed companies, the technologies essential to strategic competitiveness in the decades ahead. In service of China’s effort to acquire technology, MCF breaks down barriers of professional responsibility and confidentiality that organizations and individuals in the West take for granted. Through both executive and legislative action, the United States has begun to address MCF. To continue benefitting from opportunities that China presents, those who do business in or with China therefore need both to heighten their situational awareness when they transact with Chinese partners and to increase their familiarity with the responses that United States regulators now are developing