Food Crises and Food Markets: Implications for Emergency Response in Southern Africa

Food Security and Poverty,

Food Price Spikes and Strategic Interactions between the Public and Private Sectors: Market Failures or Governance Failures.

When food prices shoot over import parity, this often leads to social and political unrest and even the toppling of governments. If markets behaved efficiently and in the absence of trade barriers, food prices should not exceed the price in world markets plus the cost of importing it to domestic markets (i.e., import parity). However, food prices routinely soar above import parity in several countries of East and Southern Africa, causing widespread hunger and asset depletion among the poor.Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty,

Smallholder Farming Under Increasingly Difficult Circumstances: Policy and Public Investment Priorities for Africa

Agricultural and Food Policy,

A comparison of retirement saving behavior between active duty military members and civilians

Doctor of PhilosophySchool of Family Studies and Human ServicesSonya LutterSecondary data was used from the 2018 Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Investor Education Foundation’s National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) to investigate predictors of retirement savings behavior of active duty military personnel. Using the framework of social learning theory, this study investigated personal, environmental, and behavioral factors related to making regular contributions to a retirement plan for active duty military personnel compared to civilian personnel. Results of the study indicate that some similarities exist between the two populations regarding propensity to contribute to a retirement plan. Higher levels of subjective financial knowledge, objective financial knowledge, and financial confidence all showed a positive correlation for both groups. Similarly, having an established emergency fund and calculating retirement needs were positively correlated. Saving for a child’s college fund and having student loans showed positive correlations, indicating neither is crowding out retirement savings. Analyses also revealed several differences between the two populations. Workplace financial education showed a positive correlation for the civilian population, but not the military. Overspending had a negative association with retirement saving for the civilian populace, while positive credit card behaviors such as paying off the balance each month showed a positive association. Neither was a significant predictor for the military sample. These results indicate that the active duty and civilian populations differ in several aspects. This dissertation adds to the literature by examining this financial outcome of a little researched population of interest, active duty military personnel, which have not been fully addressed in prior research. An increased emphasis on financial education that focuses on increasing the financial self-efficacy of its members and utilizes instructors to whom the military audience admires and relates may be one effective approach to increasing retirement savings plan participation rates for the military. Implications of this research are important to active duty military members, Department of Defense policy makers, and the financial services industry who service the military community. They will become increasing more important due to recent changes in the military retirement system that is converting from a purely defined-benefit plan to a hybrid plan that includes some elements of a defined-contribution program

Low-mass eclipsing binaries in the WFCAM Transit Survey : The persistence of the M-dwarf radius inflation problem

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present the characterization of five new short-period low-mass eclipsing binaries (LMEBs) from the WFCAM Transit Survey. The analysis was performed by using the photometric WFCAM J-mag data and additional low- and intermediate-resolution spectroscopic data to obtain both orbital and physical properties of the studied sample. The light curves and the measured radial velocity curves were modelled simultaneously with the JKTEBOP code, with Markov chain MonteCarlo simulations for the error estimates. The best-model fit have revealed that the investigated detached binaries are in very close orbits, with orbital separations of 2.9 ≤ a ≤ 6.7R⊙ and short periods of 0.59 ≤ Porb ≤ 1.72 d, approximately. We have derived stellar masses between 0.24 and 0.72M⊙ and radii ranging from 0.42 to 0.67 R⊙. The great majority of the LMEBs in our sample has an estimated radius far from the predicted values according to evolutionary models. The components with derived masses of M < 0.6M⊙ present a radius inflation of ~9 per cent or more. This general behaviour follows the trend of inflation for partially radiative stars proposed previously. These systems add to the increasing sample of low-mass stellar radii that are not well-reproduced by stellarmodels. They further highlight the need to understand the magnetic activity and physical state of small stars. Missions like TESS will provide many such systems to perform high-precision radius measurements to tightly constrain low-mass stellar evolution models.Peer reviewe

Using Empirical Information in the Era of HIV/AIDS to Inform Mitigation and Rural Development Strategies: Selected Results from African Country Studies

Community/Rural/Urban Development, Health Economics and Policy, Downloads July 2008-March 2009: 7,

B-cell depletion in SLE: clinical and trial experience with rituximab and ocrelizumab and implications for study design.

B cells are believed to be central to the disease process in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), making them a target for new therapeutic intervention. In recent years there have been many publications regarding the experience in SLE of B-cell depletion utilising rituximab, an anti-CD20 mAb that temporarily depletes B cells,reporting promising results in uncontrolled open studies and in routine clinical use. However, the two large randomised controlled trials in extra-renal lupus (EXPLORER study) and lupus nephritis (LUNAR study) failed to achieve their primary endpoints. Based on the clinical experience with rituximab this failure was somewhat unexpected and raised a number of questions and concerns, not only into the true level of benefit of B-cell depletion in a broad population but also how to test the true level of effectiveness of an investigational agent as we seek to improve the design of therapeutic trials in SLE. A better understanding of what went wrong in these trials is essential to elucidate the underlying reasons for the disparate observations noted in open studies and controlled trials. In this review, we focus on various factors that may affect the ability to accurately and confidently establish the level of treatment effect of the investigational agent, in this case rituximab, in the tw studies and explore hurdles faced in the randomised controlled trials investigating the efficacy of ocrelizumab, the humanised anti-CD20 mAb, in SLE. Further, based on the lessons learned from the clinical trials, we make suggestions that could be implemented in future clinical trial design to overcome the hurdles faced