Injury Rates During Water-Based Wilderness Recreation

This study came about after the author approached several people in the wilderness-recreation field about their risk-management practices, especially those related to training people who lead trips involving water exposure. The author was surprised that no widely accepted standards exist for training trip leaders or for the skills they need to deal with cases of water emergency. Some people even speculated that injury rates would increase if more water-safety training were conducted because injury rates during land-based activities were assumed to be greater. Although it was outside the scope of this effort to test all current opinions about wilderness water safety held by every practitioner in the field, the author hopes that this study will initiate more conversation about a topic that has not gotten much attention. The purpose of the study was to compare injury rates between water-based wilderness recreation and other backcountry activities and investigate whether more needs to be done to reduce the probability of injury during water-related backcountry activities

Factors Affecting Minority Drowning

Research has revealed that racial or ethnic minorities historically drown at higher rates than the general population. Current research still has not identified or exposed fully the risk factors experienced by these groups that account for this disparity. By employing a review of the literature approach typical of the methods used in the humanities, the present article identifies many of the factors that explain this difference (e.g. age, sex, location, access, supervision, swimming lessons, and communication) and suggests future research that would help to illuminate the detailed circumstances that account for this ethnic gap in drowning rates (e.g. drowning -related research that takes race and ethnicity into account more consistently)

Corporate Scandals and Regulation

Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre-empt corporate misbehavior? From a public interest view, we would expect “effective” regulation to ex ante mitigate agency conflicts between corporate insiders and outsiders, and prevent corporate misbehavior from occurring or quickly rectify transgressions. However, regulators are also self-interested and may be captured, uninformed, or ideological, and become less effective as a result. In this registered report, we develop a historical time series of corporate (accounting) scandals and (accounting) regulations for a panel of 26 countries from 1800 to 2015. An analysis of the lead-lag relations at both the global and individual country level yields the following insights: (i) Corporate scandals are an antecedent to regulation over long stretches of time, suggesting that regulators are typically less flexible and informed than firms. (ii) Regulation is positively related to the incidence of future scandals, suggesting that regulators are not fully effective, that explicit rules are required to identify scandalous corporate actions, or that new regulations have unintended consequences. (iii) There exist systematic differences in these lead-lag relations across countries and over time suggesting that the effectiveness of regulation is shaped by fundamental country characteristics like market development and legal traditio

Succession and seasonal onset of colonization in sublittoral hard-bottom communities off northern Chile

Although there is extensive information concerning the colonization sequences of benthic communities, little is known about the successional development of subtidal hard-bottom habitats in highly productive coastal upwelling areas. In these systems succession is predicted to be fast due to high growth rate of the later dominant colonizers. Using artificial hard substrata a field experiment was conducted in a rocky subtidal area off northern Chile (Humboldt Current System) and monitored at three-month intervals to test the following hypotheses: (1) epibenthic succession may proceed through consecutive replacement of species, (2) a fast convergence rate towards natural communities, and (3) different seasonal starting points on the colonization will produce different community structure over a one-year period of exposure. Panels were installed on a vertical wall at 17 m water depth. Three replicate panels were sampled every three months over a period of 27 months. As a reference, six haphazardly selected plots from the surrounding natural community were surveyed at each sampling date. To evaluate how seasonally varying substratum availability affects community development, further panels were exposed for a 12-month period, starting in four different seasons (n = 3 replicates per season). Community succession was slow and occurred through progressive changes, between early encrusting red corallines, middle Balanus flosculus and late Lagenicella variabilis. After 27 months, the community composition, but not its structure, was similar between experimental and reference communities on surrounding rocky bottoms. Seasonality had no effects and after one year of exposure the experimental communities converged towards a common structure. This study indicates that succession of subtidal epibenthic communities follows a slow and predictable pattern with a dominant late colonial species. In addition, aseasonal variability might be more relevant during colonization and succession in this upwelling ecosystem