The economics of child well-being

This paper presents an integrated economic approach that organizes and interprets the evidence on child development. It also discusses the indicators of child well-being that are used in international comparisons. Recent evidence on child development is summarized, and policies to promote child well-being are discussed. The chapter concludes with some open questions and suggestions for future research

Popularity

What makes you popular among your high-school peers? And what are the labor market returns to popularity? We investigate these questions using an objective measure of popularity derived from sociometric theory: the number of friendship nom- inations received from schoolmates. We provide novel evidence that early family en- vironment, school composition and school size play a signicant role in determining popularity. We show that the estimated wage return to one additional nomination is about 2 percent the popularity premium. This amounts to roughly 40 percent of the return to one more year of education. A revised version of this paper is published in the Fall 2013 issue of the Journal of Human Resources

The health effects of Sure Start

From lagging well behind most European countries in the early 1990s, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-5s in Europe (OECD, 2014). One of the biggest programmes for this age group is Sure Start. It offers families with children under the age of 5 a ‘one-stop shop’ for childcare and early education, health services, parenting support, and employment advice, with the aim of improving children’s school readiness, health, and social and emotional development

A Demonstration Study of the Quiet Time Transcendental Meditation Program

This manuscript presents a demonstration study of Quiet Time (QT), a classroom-based Transcendental Meditation intervention. The aim of the study is to assess the feasibility of implementing and evaluating QT in two pilot settings in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This study contributes to the field by targeting middle childhood, testing efficiency in two settings operating under different educational systems, and including a large array of measures. First, teacher and pupil engagement with QT was assessed. Second, the feasibility of using a quasi-experimental design and a wide range of instruments to measure changes in pupil outcomes before and after the intervention was assessed. This allows us to obtain information about which instruments might be feasible to administer and most sensitive to change. The first setting included 89 students from a primary school in the United Kingdom: those in sixth grade received the QT intervention, while those in fifth grade practiced meditation using the Headspace application. The second setting included 100 fifth- and sixth-grade students from two schools in Ireland: one received the QT intervention, the other served as a control. Recruitment and retention rates were high in both settings, and the intervention was feasible and accepted by students, parents and teachers. Implementation fidelity was lower in the United Kingdom setting where delivery started later in the school year and the practice was affected by preparation for the Standard Assessment Tests. These results show that QT may be feasibly delivered in school settings, and suggest the use of a compact battery of tests to measure impact. We find suggestive evidence that the intervention affected executive function as children who practiced QT showed improved working memory in both settings. In the Irish setting, pupils in the QT group had improved ability to control responses. These results have implications for future studies by a) demonstrating that implementation fidelity is highly context dependent and b) providing suggestive evidence of the malleability of children’s skills in middle childhood. The results of this demonstration study will be used to inform a larger RCT of the QT intervention

Bayesian exploratory factor analysis

This paper develops and applies a Bayesian approach to Exploratory Factor Analysis that improves on ad hoc classical approaches. Our framework relies on dedicated factor models and simultaneously determines the number of factors, the allocation of each measurement to a unique factor, and the corresponding factor loadings. Classical identification criteria are applied and integrated into our Bayesian procedure to generate models that are stable and clearly interpretable. A Monte Carlo study confirms the validity of the approach. The method is used to produce interpretable low dimensional aggregates from a high dimensional set of psychological measurements. (authors' abstract

Expanding Indian public health insurance above the poverty line

Since 2008 India’s public health insurance policy has covered the poorest quarter of the population, and the government wants to expand the policy to include households above the poverty line. Disentangling the health and financial effects of the policy is vital to establishing a cost-effective expansion of eligibility for this insurance

Psychometric evaluation supported by a social robot: personality factors and technology acceptance

Robotic psychological assessment is a novel field of research that explores social robots as psychometric tools for providing quick and reliable screening exams. In this study, we involved elderly participants to compare the prototype of a robotic cognitive test with a traditional paper-and-pencil psychometric tool. Moreover, we explored the influence of personality factors and technology acceptance on the testing. Results demonstrate the validity of the robotic assessment conducted under professional supervision. Additionally, results show the positive influence of Openness to experience on the interaction with robot's interfaces, and that some factors influencing technology acceptance, such as Anxiety, Trust, and Intention to use, correlate with the performance in the psychometric tests. Technical feasibility and user acceptance of the robotic platform are also discussed

HLA in migraine and coeliac children

The linkage between HLA antigens and disease susceptibility has been investigated in several diseases. Two different mechanisms are known to act in the relation between the HLA system and headache: linkage and association of alleles. Among neurological disorders associated with coeliac disease (CD) we focused on headache in 1997. From a group of 70 coeliac children, we studied 10 children with headache (3 boys and 7 girls). For each subject we evaluated clinical history and HLA antigens. The incidence of headache was not different with respect to the prevalence of headache in the general population. The HLA setting is not different between the 2 groups examined. However, we highlight 2 cases for the particular HLA setting