The impact of trade promotion services on Canadian exporter performance.

We evaluate the impact of the export promotion program delivered by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service on various dimensions of export performance. Over the 1999-2006 time period we study, Canadian firms successfully diversified their exports to destinations beyond the United States and smaller firms increased their share of total exports. Both of these achievements are explicit aims of the program, but in order to make causal inferences we rely on various identifying assumptions from the treatment effects literature. The results indicate very robustly that the program had an effect at the intensive margin, boosting the average level of exports to given product-destination markets. Effects at the extensive margins of trade, increasing the number of export destinations or number of products exported, are smaller and more sensitive to the identification assumption. This finding differs from previous studies for several Latin American countries where extensive margin effects were most robust. One reason is that the Canadian program was most effective for larger firms and for firms already active on several export markets.

The impact of trade promotion services on Canadian exporter performance

We evaluate the impact of the programs delivered by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service (TCS) on export performance by Canadian firms. We draw on a unique set of microdata created by linking three separate firm-level databases: Statistics Canada’s Exporter Register and its Business Register, which provide information on export activity and firm characteristics, and the TCS client management database maintained by Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, which contains details on trade promotion services provided to Canadian firms. We apply the treatment effects analytical framework to isolate the effects of public sector trade promotion. We find that TCS programs have a consistent and positive impact on Canadian exporter performance. Exporters that access TCS services export, on average, 17.9 percent more than comparable exporters that do not. Furthermore, we also find that TCS assistance benefits exporters in terms of product and market diversification.Export Promotion, Heterogeneous Firms, Canada

Cultural Conceptualizations of the Trauma Response: The Role of Locus of Control, Religiosity, and Religious Coping

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a relatively recent diagnosis that results in significant personal and societal costs. Given the diversity of American mental health consumers, a more thorough understanding of PTSD and its relation to cultural factors may have important implications for treatment implementation and refinement. Cultural factors such as locus of control, religiosity, and religious coping have been frequently overlooked in trauma research, yet show a clear link to PTSD risk and symptomatology. This study examined these cultural factors in more detail with relation to race and trauma type and their combined influence on PTSD symptomatology. A national sample of adults (N = 1,654) who endorsed a Criterion A event completed a series of online questionnaires. Analyses showed that participants who experienced a noninterpersonal index trauma and more negative religious coping tended to report the highest levels of PTSD. African Americans who reported more negative religious coping also tended to report the most symptoms of PTSD when compared to Whites. Such findings suggest the importance of considering the ways religion may influence one’s meaning-making following a traumatic experience. Clinical implications and future research directions are also discussed

Food for Thought: Poverty, Family Nutritional Environment, and Children\u27s Educational Performance in Rural China

Insecure access to nutritious food is a common experience for poor households in developing countries. Despite the global scale of food insecurity, it has not been conceptualized by sociologists as a significant component of home environment or dimension of poverty that might matter for children\u27s outcomes. Analyzing data from rural China, the authors show that nutritional environment in the home is associated with household socioeconomic status, that it predicts children\u27s school performance, and that it is a significant mediator of poverty effects on schooling for children in early primary grades

Progress in Certifying Hardware Model Checking Results

We present a formal framework to certify k-induction-based model checking results. The key idea is the notion of a k-witness circuit which simulates the given circuit and has a simple inductive invariant serving as proof certificate. Our approach allows to check proofs with an independent proof checker by reducing the certification problem to pure SAT checks and checking a simple QBF with one quantifier alternation. We also present Certifaiger, the resulting certification toolkit, and evaluate it on instances from the hardware model checking competition. Our experiments show the practical use of our certification method.Peer reviewe

Genomic data reveals strong differentiation and reduced genetic diversity in island golden eagle populations

Understanding population structure and the extent and distribution of genetic diversity are recognised as central issues in endangered species research, with broad implications for effective conservation management. Advances in whole genome sequencing (WGS) techniques provide greater resolution of genome-wide genetic diversity and inbreeding. Subspecies of golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) in Scotland (A. c. chrysaetos) and Japan (A. c. japonica) are endangered; it is therefore important to understand genetic diversity and inbreeding of these small island populations to increase the chances of conservation success. We investigated this using WGS data from golden eagles in Scotland, continental Europe, Japan, and the USA. Following determination of population genetic structure, analysis of heterozygosity and nucleotide diversity revealed reduced levels of genetic diversity together with runs of homozygosity (ROH), suggesting evidence of inbreeding due to recent shared parental ancestry in the island populations. These results highlight the need to consider genetic reinforcement of small isolated golden eagle populations from neighbouring outbred populations, alongside existing efforts to boost population size through within-island conservation translocations and captive breeding programmes

Poverty, parental ill health and children's access to schooling in rural Gansu, China

As reforms to China\u27s health care system have raised costs to users in recent decades, studies suggest that ill health has become intimately tied to social stratification as both a precipitant and a consequence of poverty. The problem may be particularly pronounced in China’s poorest rural populations. Focusing on Gansu Province, one of China’s poorest, this paper investigates the possibility that the ill health of adults also carries cross-generational consequences, through interfering with the education of children. Analyzing a survey of children in 100 rural villages, we find that parental illness is experienced disproportionately by the most economically vulnerable children. Moreover, parental illness can be linked to children’s educational access and experience in several ways. Children with an ill father are less likely to be enrolled than others; prior parental ill health is associated with lower household educational spending; and ill parents are more likely to report borrowing for their children’s education. Children with ill mothers are more likely to be absent and to work longer in the household. Children with ill mothers perform more poorly in math, and those with ill mothers and ill fathers are more likely to work for wages, on average, but these effects are accounted for by the deeper impoverishment of households with ill parents, compared to other households. Results suggest that ill health may have a ‘spillover’ effect on the long-term educational (and thus economic) prospects of the next generation. A change in this situation depends heavily on the success of new government initiatives to reduce health care and education cost burdens on the poor