Reactive attachment disorder in the general population: a hidden ESSENCE disorder

Reactive attachment disorder (RAD) is a severe disorder of social functioning. Previous research has shown that children with RAD may have poor cognitive and language abilities; however, findings mainly come from biased, institutionalised samples. This paper describes the characteristics of all children who were given a suspected or likely diagnosis of reactive attachment disorder in an epidemiological study of approximately 1,600 children investigating the prevalence of RAD in the general population. We found that children with RAD are more likely to have multiple comorbidities with other disorders, lower IQs than population norms, more disorganised attachment, more problem behaviours, and poorer social skills than would be found in the general population and therefore have a complex presentation than can be described as ESSENCE. We discuss the clinical and educational implications

Measuring real exchange rate instability in developing countries : empirical evidence and implications

Exchange rate policy has received renewed attention because of its prominent role in adjustment programs. Several analysts have examined the impact of real exchange rate uncertainty on the performance of such economic variables as GDP growth, exports, and investment. The author uses data on the real exchange rate for 56 developing countries with managed exchange rates to make three points. First, the distribution of annual changes in real exchange rates is highly non-normal - both skewness and excess kurtosis. Secondly, this asymmetric non-normality implies that the common practice of using the standard deviation (or coefficient of variation) to compare real exchange rate uncertainty across countries is not justified. Finally, empirically, the higher order moments (skewness and kurtosis) are at least as important as the standard deviation in explaining cross-country performance.Macroeconomic Management,Achieving Shared Growth,Economic Stabilization,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences,Economic Theory&Research

Divergence, big time

Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth to the phenomenon of"conditional convergence,"the tendencies of economies with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of factor accumulation. The author documents that, regardless of conditional convergence, perhaps the basic fact of modern economic history is massive absolute divergence in the distribution of incomes across countries. Discussions of long-run convergence or divergence has been hindered by the lack of reliable historical estimates of per capita income for poor countries. The author shows that to draw reasonable inferences about whether incomes have converged or diverged does not require historical estimates of per capita income as a plausible lower limit for historical per capita incomes combined with estimates of current income in poor countries places a binding constraint on their historical growth rates. Finally, the author estimates that between 1870 and 1985 the ratio of incomes in the richest and poorest countries increased sixfold, the standard deviation of (natural log) per capita incomes increased by between 60 and 100 percent, and the average income gap between the richest and the poorest countries grew almost ninefold (from $1,500 to over$12,000).Economic Theory&Research,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Public Institution Analysis&Assessment,Economic Theory&Research,Inequality,Achieving Shared Growth,Governance Indicators,Economic Conditions and Volatility

Birth Satisfaction Units (BSU): Measuring Cross-National Differences in Human Well-Being

While everyone agrees that GDP per capita is an inadequate measure of a country’s overall “development” it is difficult to specify what, if anything, should take its place as a useful single summary number (or even just ranking). The Human Development Index is a prominent alternative which moves towards the notion of a more comprehensive measure of human wellbeing, but suffers many limitations in the limits of the domains it covers (only adding mortality and education) and in how those domains are assessed (only averages). I propose that a useful conceptual device is to imagine that individuals were ranking the countries they were to be born into, not knowing what position in that country they would occupy (e.g. male or female, rich or poor). The result could be a cardinal ranking of country of birth satisfaction units, how strongly someone would prefer to be born into country X versus country Y. While this thought experiment obviously does not of itself resolve any of the key issues, it can provide a framework for reasoning about how people would produce such a ranking: the domains of well being they would assess as important and how they would assess the distribution of well-being in those domains (e.g. would they care about the average, levels of absolute deprivation, inequalities).Human Development, Poverty, Vulnerability

The tyranny of concepts - CUDIE (Cumulated, Depreciated Investment Effort) is NOT capital

The cost of public investment is not the value of public capital. Unlike for private investors, there is no remotely plausible behavioral model of the government as investor that suggests that every dollar the public sector spends as"investment"creates capital in an economic sense. This seemingly obvious point has so far been uniformly ignored in the voluminous empirical literature on economic growth, which uses, at best,"cumulated, depreciated investment effort"(CUDIE), to estimate capital stocks. But in developing countries especially, the difference between investment cumulated at cost and capital value is of primary empirical importance: government investment is half or more of total investment. And perhaps as much as half, or more of government investment spending has not created equivalent"capital."This suggests that nearly everything empirical written in three broad areas is misguided. First, none of the estimates of the impact of public spending identify the productivity of public capital. Even where public capital could be very productive, regressions and evaluations, may suggest that public investment spending has little impact. Second, everything currently said about"total factor productivity"in developing countries is deeply suspect, as there is no way empirically to distinguish between low output (or growth) attributable to investments that created no"factors"and low output (or growth) attributable to low (or slow growth in) productivity in using accumulated"factors."Third, multivariate growth regressions to date have not, in fact,"controlled"for the growth of capital stock, so spurious interpretations have emerged.Economic Theory&Research,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Decentralization,Capital Markets and Capital Flows,Environmental Economics&Policies,Capital Flows,Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform

The Light Composite Higgs in Strong Extended Technicolor

This paper extends an earlier one describing the Higgs boson $H$ as a light composite scalar in a strong extended technicolor model of electroweak symmetry breaking. The Higgs mass $M_H$ is made much smaller than $\Lambda_{ETC}$ by tuning the ETC coupling very close to the critical value for electroweak symmetry breaking. The technicolor interaction, neglected in the earlier paper, is considered here. Its weakness relative to extended technicolor is essential to understanding the lightness of $H$ compared to the low-lying spin-one technihadrons. Technicolor cannot be completely ignored, but implementing technigluon exchange together with strong extended technicolor appears difficult. We propose a solution that turns out to leave the results of the earlier paper essentially unchanged. An argument is then presented that masses of the spin-one technifermion bound states, $\rho_H$ and $a_H$, are much larger than $M_H$ and, plausibly, controlled by technicolor. Assuming $M_{\rho_H}$ and $M_{a_H}$ are in the TeV-energy region, we identify $\rho_H$ and $a_H$ with the diboson excesses observed near $2\,{\rm TeV}$ by ATLAS and CMS in LHC Run 1 data, and we discuss their phenomenology for Runs 2 and 3.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Updated discussion of diboson resonance status in view of current Run 2 data. Version to be published in JHE

Population growth, factor accumulation, and productivity

In research on how population growth affects economic performance, some researchers stress that population growth reduces the natural resources and capital (physical and human) per worker while other researchers stress how greater population size and density affect productivity. Despite these differing theoretical predictions, the empirical literature hs focused mainly on the relationship between population growth and output per person (or crude proxies for factor accumulation). It has not decomposed the effect of population through factor accumulation and the effect through productivity. The author uses newly created cross-country, time-series data on physical capital stocks and the educational stock of the labor force to establish six findings: There is no correlation between the growth of capital per worker and population growth. The common practice of using investment rates as a proxy for capital stock growth rates is completely unjustified, as the two are uncorrelated across countries. There is either no correlation, or a weak positive correlation, between the growth of years of schooling per worker and the population growth rate. Enrollment rates are even worse as a crude proxy for the expansion of the educational capital stock, as the two are negatively correlated. There is no correlation, or a weak negative correlation, between measures of total factory productivity growth and population growth. Nearly all of the weak correlation between the growth of output per person and population growth is the result of shifts in participation in the labor force, not of changes in output per worker.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Public Health Promotion,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Agricultural Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Growth,Achieving Shared Growth,Environmental Economics&Policies

Printing Quality as Determined by the I.G.T. Tester

Investigation of this method for the determination of printability indicates that it can be used to predict the printability of paper. However, since it lacks numerical rating, the visual evaluation depends finally upon the personal judgment of the investigator

Heavy Vector Partners of the Light Composite Higgs

If the Higgs boson $H(125)$ is a composite due to new strong interactions at high energy, it has spin-one partners, $\rho_H$ and $a_H$, analogous to the $\rho$ and $a_1$ mesons of QCD. These bosons are heavy, their mass determined by the strong interaction scale. The strongly interacting particles light enough for $\rho_H$ and $a_H$ to decay to are the longitudinal weak bosons $V_L = W_L,\, Z_L$ and the Higgs boson $H$. These decay signatures are consistent with resonant diboson excesses recently reported near 2 TeV by ATLAS and CMS. We calculate $\sigma\times BR(\rho_H \to VV) =$ few fb and $\sigma\times BR(a_H \to VH) =$ 0.5-1 fb at $\sqrt{s} =$ 8 TeV, increasing by a factor of 5-7 at 13 TeV. Other tests of the hypothesis of the strong-interaction nature of the diboson resonances are suggested.Comment: Improved discussion of Drell-Yan production; 11 pages, 2 tables, no figures; version to appear in Physics Letters