9,578 research outputs found
What would you do? An investigation of stated-response data
When analysing choices or policy impacts, economists generally rely on what people actually do, rather than what they say they would do. The "stated response" approach is treated with scepticism due, for example, to concerns regarding the effect of strategic or social considerations on what people say, and a belief that people may not adequately consider such a hypothetical question. This paper evaluates an example of this approach; the direct questioning of parents as to whether they would withdraw their children from school if the Familias en Accion education subsidies were withdrawn. Our results suggest that these concerns are not entirely invalid but that the stated responses do provide important information and correlate in the expected manner with child and household characteristics. We conclude by emphasising the importance of good question design, which may allow researchers to use the "stated response" method as a complement to more typical quantitative methodologies
How effective are conditional cash transfers? Evidence from Colombia
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes are becoming an extremely popular tool for improving the education and health outcomes of poor children in developing countries. An incomplete list of countries in which they are being implemented under the support of the World Bank and other international financial institutions includes Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Brazil, Turkey and Mozambique. While the implementation details vary from country to country, many are modelled on the Mexican PROGRESA. In a typical CCT, mothers from poor backgrounds receive cash conditional on their promoting certain activities on behalf of their children. For their youngest children - usually those below the age of 6 - the conditionality involves visits to preventive healthcare centres in which their growth is monitored. School attendance is the most common stipulation for receipt of cash transfers for older children - usually those between 7 and 17 years old. This targeting of health and education of children is at the essence of the long-term poverty alleviation objective of CCT programmes. Such transfer programmes are also aimed at the short-term reduction of poverty, through the provision of immediate funds to indigent households.
In this Briefing Note, we will focus on the programme Familias en AcciĂłn (FA), the CCT implemented by the Colombian government from 2001/02. In particular, we will provide estimates of how the programme has influenced key welfare indicators such as school attendance, child nutrition and health status, as well as household consumption. In this respect, we will update the preliminary results that were reported in Attanasio et al. (2003 and 2004)
Nonleptonic two-body B-decays including axial-vector mesons in the final state
We present a systematic study of exclusive charmless nonleptonic two-body B
decays including axial-vector mesons in the final state. We calculate branching
ratios of B\to PA, VA and AA decays, where A, V and P denote an axial-vector, a
vector and a pseudoscalar meson, respectively. We assume naive factorization
hypothesis and use the improved version of the nonrelativistic ISGW quark model
for form factors in B\to A transitions. We include contributions that arise
from the effective \Delta B=1 weak Hamiltonian H_{eff}. The respective
factorized amplitude of these decays are explicitly showed and their penguin
contributions are classified. We find that decays B^-to a_1^0\pi^-,\barB^0\to
a_1^{\pm}\pi^{\mp}, B^-\to a_1^-\bar K^0, \bar B^0\to a_1^+K^-, \bar B^0\to
f_1\bar K^0, B^-\to f_1K^-, B^-\to K_1^-(1400)\etap, B^-\to b_1^-\bar K^{0},
and \bar B^0\to b_1^+\pi^-(K^-) have branching ratios of the order of 10^{-5}.
We also study the dependence of branching ratios for B \to K_1P(V,A) decays
(K_1=K_1(1270),K_1(1400)) with respect to the mixing angle between K_A and K_B.Comment: 28 pages, 2 tables and one reference added, notation changed in
appendices, some numerical results and abstract correcte
Diffusion anomaly and dynamic transitions in the Bell-Lavis water model
In this paper we investigate the dynamic properties of the minimal Bell-Lavis
(BL) water model and their relation to the thermodynamic anomalies. The
Bell-Lavis model is defined on a triangular lattice in which water molecules
are represented by particles with three symmetric bonding arms interacting
through van der Waals and hydrogen bonds. We have studied the model diffusivity
in different regions of the phase diagram through Monte Carlo simulations. Our
results show that the model displays a region of anomalous diffusion which lies
inside the region of anomalous density, englobed by the line of temperatures of
maximum density (TMD). Further, we have found that the diffusivity undergoes a
dynamic transition which may be classified as fragile-to-strong transition at
the critical line only at low pressures. At higher densities, no dynamic
transition is seen on crossing the critical line. Thus evidence from this study
is that relation of dynamic transitions to criticality may be discarded
Breast feeding and the weekend effect: an observational study
OBJECTIVE: To compare the incidence of breast feeding by day of week of birth. DESIGN: Retrospective database study using 16â
508 records from the 2005 and 2010 Infant Feeding Surveys. SETTING: England and Wales, UK. PARTICIPANTS: Mothers of a sample of births from among all registered births in the periods August-September 2005 and August-October 2010. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Incidence of breast feeding after birth. RESULTS: Among babies of mothers who left full-time education aged 16 or under, the incidence of breast feeding was 6.7 percentage points lower (95% CI 1.4 to 12.1 percentage points) for those born on Saturdays than for those born on Mondays-Thursdays. No such differences by day of week of birth were observed among babies of mothers who left school aged 17 or over. CONCLUSIONS: Breastfeeding policy should take into account differences in breast feeding by day of week of birth, which are apparent among low-educated mothers. Further research is needed to ascertain the reason for this finding
Tracing the early development of harmful algal blooms with the aid of Lagrangian coherent structures
Several theories have been proposed to explain the development of harmful
algal blooms (HABs) produced by the toxic dinoflagellate \emph{Karenia brevis}
on the West Florida Shelf. However, because the early stages of HAB development
are usually not detected, these theories have been so far very difficult to
verify. In this paper we employ simulated \emph{Lagrangian coherent structures}
(LCSs) to trace the early location of a HAB in late 2004 before it was
transported to an area where it could be detected by satellite imagery, and
then we make use of a population dynamics model to infer the factors that may
have led to its development. The LCSs, which are computed based on a surface
flow description provided by an ocean circulation model, delineate past and
future histories of boundaries of passively advected fluid domains. The
population dynamics model determines nitrogen in two components, nutrients and
phytoplankton, which are assumed to be passively advected by the simulated
surface currents. Two nearshore nutrient sources are identified for the HAB
whose evolution is found to be strongly tied to the simulated LCSs. While one
nutrient source can be associated with a coastal upwelling event, the other is
seen to be produced by river runoff, which provides support to a theory of HAB
development that considers nutrient loading into coastal waters produced by
human activities as a critical element. Our results show that the use of
simulated LCSs and a population dynamics model can greatly enhance our
understanding of the early stages of the development of HABs.Comment: Submitted to JGR-Ocean
Hydration and anomalous solubility of the Bell-Lavis model as solvent
We address the investigation of the solvation properties of the minimal
orientational model for water, originally proposed by Bell and Lavis. The model
presents two liquid phases separated by a critical line. The difference between
the two phases is the presence of structure in the liquid of lower density,
described through orientational order of particles. We have considered the
effect of small inert solute on the solvent thermodynamic phases. Solute
stabilizes the structure of solvent, by the organization of solvent particles
around solute particles, at low temperatures. Thus, even at very high
densities, the solution presents clusters of structured water particles
surrounding solute inert particles, in a region in which pure solvent would be
free of structure. Solute intercalates with solvent, a feature which has been
suggested by experimental and atomistic simulation data. Examination of solute
solubility has yielded a minimum in that property, which may be associated with
the minimum found for noble gases. We have obtained a line of minimum
solubility (TmS) across the phase diagram, accompanying the line of maximum in
density (TMD). This coincidence is easily explained for non-interacting solute
and it is in agreement with earlier results in the literature. We give a simple
argument which suggests that interacting solute would dislocate TmS to higher
temperatures
A minimal model coupling communicable and non-communicable diseases
This work presents a model combining the simplest communicable and
non-communicable disease models. The latter is, by far, the leading cause of
sickness and death in the World, and introduces basal heterogeneity in
populations where communicable diseases evolve. The model can be interpreted as
a risk-structured model, another way of accounting for population
heterogeneity.
Our results show that considering the non-communicable disease (in the end,
heterogeneous populations) allows the communicable disease to become endemic
even if the basic reproduction number is less than . This feature is known
as subcritical bifurcation. Furthermore, ignoring the non-communicable disease
dynamics results in overestimating the reproduction number and, thus, giving
wrong information about the actual number of infected individuals. We calculate
sensitivity indices and derive interesting epidemic-control information.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure
THE IMPRINT of RADIAL MIGRATION on the VERTICAL STRUCTURE of GALAXY DISKS
We use numerical simulations to examine the effects of radial migration on the vertical structure of galaxy disks. The simulations follow three exponential disks of different mass but similar circular velocity, radial scalelength, and (constant) scale height. The disks develop different non-axisymmetric patterns, ranging from feeble, long-lived multiple arms to strong, rapidly evolving few-armed spirals. These fluctuations induce radial migration through secular changes in the angular momentum of disk particles, mixing the disk radially and blurring pre-existing gradients. Migration primarily affects stars with small vertical excursions, regardless of spiral pattern. This "provenance bias" largely determines the vertical structure of migrating stars: inward migrators thin down as they move in, whereas outward migrators do not thicken up but rather preserve the disk scale height at their destination. Migrators of equal birth radius thus develop a strong scale-height gradient, not by flaring out as commonly assumed, but by thinning down as they spread inward. Similar gradients have been observed for low-[α/Fe] mono-abundance populations (MAPs) in the Galaxy, but our results argue against interpreting them as a consequence of radial migration. This is because outward migration does not lead to thickening, implying that the maximum scale height of any population should reflect its value at birth. In contrast, Galactic MAPs have scale heights that increase monotonically outward, reaching values that greatly exceed those at their presumed birth radii. Given the strong vertical bias affecting migration, a proper assessment of the importance of radial migration in the Galaxy should take carefully into account the strong radial dependence of the scale heights of the various stellar populations. © 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved
Collaborative semantic web browsing with Magpie
Web browsing is often a collaborative activity. Users involved in a joint information gathering exercise will wish to share knowledge about the web pages visited and the contents found. Magpie is a suite of tools supporting the interpretation of web pages and semantically enriched web browsing. By automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources, Magpie allows relevant services to be invoked as well as remotely triggered within a standard web browser. In this paper we describe how Magpie trigger services can provide semantic support to collaborative browsing activities
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