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Anecdotes abound regarding the decline of basic research in industrial and governmental settings, but very little empirical evidence exists about the phenomenon. This article provides a systematic and historical analysis of the contribution of various institutional sectors to knowledge production at the world and country levels across the past four decades. It highlights a dramatic decline in the diffusion of basic research by industrial and governmental sectors across all countries—with a corresponding increase in the share from universities—as well as an increase of partnerships between universities and other sectors. Results also shows an increase in the relative share of industries in applied research, as measured through patents. Such divergence in university and industry research activities may hinder industries’ ability to translate basic knowledge into technological innovation, and could lead to a growing misalignment between doctoral training and future job expectations. Industries and universities must rethink strategies for partnerships and publishing to maximize scientific progress and to ensure the greatest gains for society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate the impact of coal enterprises’ vertical integration on the performance of innovation corporate social responsibility (ICSR) and to elaborate its specific transmission path through financing structure and market power. This paper takes the data of A-share listed coal company from 2008 to 2017 as samples, uses input-output table method to measure the degree of vertical integration, and explores the relationship between the four factors through multiple linear regression and Bootstrap method. We found that: (1) the vertical integration of coal enterprises has positive incentives for the promotion of ICSR. (2) Financing structure and market power play a chain intermediary role in this process of incentive. (3) In areas with high marketization process, vertical integration has more significant incentive effect on ICSR. The paper extends the research on the relationship between vertical integration and innovation, which provides a reference for the improvement of China’s supply-side reform and corporate social responsibility (CSR) fulfillment policy. It is helpful to promote the sustainable development of the coal industry, stimulate the innovation vitality of enterprises, and improve the fulfillment of CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting: Research capacity is weakest in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) where operational research is highly relevant and needed. Structured Operational Research and Training Initiative (SORT IT) courses have been developed to train participants to conduct and publish operational research and influence policy and practice. Twenty courses were completed in Asia, Africa, Europe and the South Pacific between 2009 and 2014. Objectives: In the 20 completed SORT IT courses, to assess where the research was conducted, who was trained, who became facilitators in subsequent courses and course outcomes. Design: A cohort study of completed SORT IT courses Results: There were 236 participants (41% female) including 64 nationalities who conducted research in 59 countries, mostly from Asia and Africa (mean course duration = 9.7 months). Most participants (68%) were from government health programs and non-governmental agencies. A total of 213(90%) participants completed all milestones successfully with 41(19%) becoming subsequent course facilitators, 88% of whom were from LMICs. Of 228 manuscripts submitted to scientific journals, 197(86%) were either published or in press; in 86%, the principal investigator (first author) was a LMIC national. Papers were published in 23 scientific journals (impact factor 0.5–4.4) and covered 21 disease categories (median publication time = 5.7 months). Published papers (186) had 94,794 cumulative article views/downloads. Article views/downloads for immediate open access articles were double those from closed access journals. Conclusion: The SORT IT model has been effective in training personnel to produce relevant operational research in LMICs. It merits continued commitment and support for further scale-up and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recreational fishing is often perceived as harmless when it comes to fisheries management, and its impact often estimated to surpass the economic outcomes of e.g. large-scale fisheries. Recreational fisheries are often an indication of political stability and sound ecosystem management. However, despite a high economic impact, the economic costs on traditional and small-scale commercial fishers is yet to be known. This paper answers the question of how unregulated recreational fisheries could rather generate a loss to an economy, and cause unfair competition with existing commercial sectors using the example of Algeria. This paper assesses catches and economic value of recreational fisheries in Algeria, and finds that over 6,000 tonnes reach commercial markets annually, competing directly with the small-scale artisanal sector, while selling recreationally caught fish is still illegal. The paper further finds that the public is thereby deprived—through lost tax, licence income and landed value of $45 million US annually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Based on single cross-sectional data, prior research finds evidence of “transportation assimilation” among U.S. immigrants: the length of stay in the U.S. is negatively correlated with public transit use. This paper revisits this question by using repeated cross-sectional data, and examines the trend of transportation assimilation over time. Methods and results: Using 1980, 1990, 2000 1% census and 2010 (1%) American Community Survey, I examine the relationship between the length of stay in the U.S. and public transit ridership among immigrants. I first run regressions separately in four data sets: I regress public transit ridership on the length of stay, controlling for other individual and geographic variables. I then compare the magnitudes of the relationship in four regressions. To study how the rate of transportation assimilation changes over time, I pool the data set and regress public transit ridership on the length of stay and its interactions with year dummies to compare the coefficients across surveys. Results confirm the conclusion of transportation assimilation: as the length of stay in the U.S. increases, an immigrant’s public transit use decreases. However, the repeated cross-section analysis suggests the assimilation rate has been decreasing in the past few decades. Conclusions: This paper finds evidence of transportation assimilation: immigrants become less likely to ride public transit as the length of stay in the U.S. increases. The assimilation rate, however, has been decreasing over time. This paper finds that the rate of public transit ridership among new immigrants upon arrival, the geographic distribution of immigrants, and the changing demographics of the U.S. immigrants play roles in affecting the trend of transportation assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial sanctions are often thought of as the “soft alternative” to armed conflict and are widely used in the 21st century. Nonetheless, sanctions are often criticized for being non-specific in their action, and having impact beyond their intended remit. One often-overlooked area affected by sanctions are academic systems of research and education. Sanctions place “invisible barriers” for research in these countries by limiting access to necessary resources and curtailing their effective use. In this paper we present a national survey of Sudanese academics focused on the impact of 20 years of economic sanctions on their work. It identifies key areas of academic research and education that have been impacted by international sanctions. Moreover, these data highlight how the impact of sanctions on academia is likely to persist long after they are formally lifted. The paper concludes by problematising the current interpretation of jus post bellum, or moral behaviour after conflict. It suggests that the responsibility to make reparations in the form of support for academic systems applies to countries who impose economic sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial robots are a strategic future technology and an important part of the development of artificial intelligence, and they are a necessary means for the intelligent transformation of manufacturing industry. Based on global industrial robot trade data from 1998 to 2017, this paper applies the dynamic complex network analysis method to reveal the spatial and temporal variation characteristics and trade status evolution of the global industrial robot trade network. The results show that the global industrial robot network density has steadily increased, and the industrial robot trade has been characterized by ‘diversification’. The number of major industrial robot exporters in the world is increasing, and the import market is increasingly diversified. The export market structure is relatively tight, the centrality of the global industrial robot trade network shows a downward trend, and the dissimilarity of the ‘core-edge’ clusters decreases year by year. The trade status of ‘catch-up’ countries represented by China has rapidly increased. However, Japan, Germany, and Italy are still in the central position of the industrial robot trade. Moreover, trade of the ‘catch-up’ countries’ is dominated by imports, and exports of industrial robot products are insufficient. Finally, policy suggestions are provided according to the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies show that discrimination by identity found in offline markets also prevails online. This paper reveal that in a competitive market, buyers that intend to discriminate exist but they are prevented from influencing the market outcome. To this end, we construct a field experiment on eBay, where half of the sellers disclose their names in their usernames while the other half do not. eBay, however, automatically discloses the seller’s names to the buyer after the auction. In the anonymous auctions, winning bidders thus learn the identity of the seller after the auction ends, and here we find buyers to discriminate against sellers with foreign-sounding names by leaving them feedback less often. However, there is no such discrimination in feedback provision when the seller name was known to the buyer before the auction. When bidders know the names of the sellers, the bidders with animus towards individuals with specific names can select out of auctions from these sellers, leaving winners that do not discriminate. One would expect that the auctions of for example sellers with foreign-sounding names would receive fewer bidders and thus lower auction prices. However, we observe no such differences: there are no statistically significant differences in the number of bids or auction prices received by sellers with foreign or domestic sounding names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is facing severe pressure on its water resources and water environments. Calculating the industrial water efficiency of each province is an important index for the central government to evaluate local governments. In the traditional water resources evaluation index, the industrial water use efficiency and pollutant discharge are evaluated separately. In this paper, we collected industrial input data, output data and pollutant discharge data with a four-stage data envelopment analysis to calculate China's industrial water use efficiency with and without considering pollutant discharge, and then analyzed the factors influencing the industrial water use efficiency. The results show that the eastern coastal provinces of China have the highest water use efficiency and are less affected by pollutant discharge than other provinces. The industrial water use efficiency of the central and western provinces is lower than that of the other provinces, and the industrial water use efficiency in the central provinces is greatly affected by pollutant discharge. Factor endowment, economic development level, scientific and technological progress, industrial structure, proportion of foreign investment, water consumption per 10000 yuan of value-added by industry, industrial sewage treatment capacity and educational investment have a significant influence on the industrial water use efficiency of China. We suggest that the government strengthen the construction of sewage plants and other related infrastructure in central provinces when conducting the industrial transfer of heavy polluting enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of elasticities of substitution between inputs is a standard method for addressing the effect of a change in the mix of inputs used for production from a technical or cost standpoint. Most estimation methods use parametric production or cost functions or frontiers to estimate these elasticities. A potentially useful nonparametric alternative is data envelopment analysis (DEA). The purpose of this paper is to derive elasticities of input substitution for both technical and cost frontiers using DEA, extending the use of this approach in the field of economics and associated fields. The paper provides derivations for both Hicksian (production and cost frontier) and Morishima (cost frontier) elasticities of input substitution, as well as a parsimonious method for estimating them using DEA. The derivations are presented using an agricultural example form Kansas, USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing a unique dataset of more than 270,000 scientists, we discovered substantial gender differences in scientific collaborations. While men are more likely to collaborate with other men, women are more egalitarian. This is consistently observed over all fields and regardless of the number of collaborators a scientist has. The only exception is observed in the field of engineering, where this gender bias disappears with increasing number of collaborators. We also found that the distribution of the number of collaborators follows a truncated power law with a cut-off that is gender dependent and related to the gender differences in the number of published papers. Considering interdisciplinary research, our analysis shows that men and women behave similarly across fields, except in the case of natural sciences, where women with many collaborators are more likely to have collaborators from other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the rapid development of China's air transport industry and the change in market consumption structure, service quality has become one of the important factors affecting airline revenue. How to formulate a reasonable pricing strategy and maintain competitiveness in the fierce market competition has become an urgent problem for airlines. First, the impact factor of service quality level in the traditional pricing model is introduced and a static price competition model for multi-oligopoly airlines based on service quality is established in this paper. And then, a dynamic pricing model based on service quality of the multi-oligopoly airlines is established. The model incorporates the weight factor of service quality impact, which is used to indicate the weight of the service quality level in the process of airline dynamic pricing. The research results show that the service quality level of airlines has an indispensable influence on its development. Airlines should improve service quality as soon as possible to enhance market competitiveness and achieve sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the accelerated failure time (AFT) model is modified to analyze post-work grocery shopping activity duration. Much previous shopping duration analysis was conducted using the proportional hazard (PH) modeling approach. Once the proportionality assumption was violated, the traditional accelerated failure time (TAFT) model was usually selected as an alternative modeling approach. However, a TAFT model only has covariates with non-proportional and time-dependent effects on the hazard overtime while a PH model only accommodates covariates with proportional and time-independent effects. Neither of them considers the possibility that some of covariates may have proportional and time-independent effects and some may have non-proportional and time-dependent effects on the hazard value in one model. To address this issue, the paper generalizes the TAFT model and develops a modified accelerated failure time (MAFT) model to accommodate both time-dependent and time-independent covariates for activity duration analysis. Checking on the proportionality assumption indicates that the assumption is not valid in the post-work grocery shopping activity data extracted from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). Both TAFT and MAFT models are developed for comparisons and analysis. The empirical and statistical results show that there do exist two different types of covariates affecting shopping activity duration, including covariates only with proportional and time-independent effects (i.e. working duration, commute travel time) and those with non-proportional and time-dependent effects. The MAFT model can capture the subtleties in various types of covariate effects and help better understand how those covariates affect activity duration overtime. This paper also shows the importance to develop a flexible duration model with both time-dependent and time-independent covariates for accurately evaluating travel demand management (TDM) policies, like flexible work hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Partnerships in global health and development governance have been firmly established as a tool to achieve effective outcomes. Botswana implements Safe Male Circumcision (SMC) for HIV prevention through a North-South partnership comprising the local Ministry of Health, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (funded by PEPFAR) and Africa Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnership (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). The SMC partnership experienced significant antagony and the aim of this paper is to illuminate the actions and processes in the SMC program that contributed to that antagony. Methods: Methods used to gather data include observation of the partners’ planning and strategic meeting in 2012, in-depth interviews with lead officers at national level, focus group discussions with district officers and implementers, younger male officers and old community members as recipients of the service. Results: The findings reveal that the partnership experienced antagony during operational processes and as the ultimate outcome. Target setting, financial power of the North, superficial ownership given to the South, ignoring local traditional realities results in antagony. Three roots of antagony have been identified: 1. therapeutic domination–medical expertise given with arrogance; 2.iatrogenic violence–good intentions that cause unintended harm; 3. the Trojan horse–Reckless acceptance of the gift as well as deceptive power positioned under the pretext of benevolence. Conclusion: The three roots of antagony; therapeutic domination, iatrogenic violence and the Trojan horse, constitute attitudes, hidden intentions and unintended consequences that influence program implementation and cause harm at different levels. Examples of therapeutic domination and the Trojan horse have highlighted the need for vigilance at the stage of establishing a partnership, to prevent more powerful partners from developing and applying hidden agendas and to strengthen accountability from the local partner. Iatrogenic violence has highlighted the need for partnership interventions to prevent good partner intentions accidentally producing bad outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate reporting and forecasting of PM2.5 concentration are important for improving public health. In this paper, we propose a partial differential equation (PDE) model, specially, a linear diffusive equation, to describe the spatial-temporal characteristics of PM2.5 in order to make short-term prediction. We analyze the temporal and spatial patterns of a real dataset from China’s National Environmental Monitoring and validate the PDE-based model in terms of predicting the PM2.5 concentration of the next day by the former days’ history data. Our experiment results show that the PDE model is able to characterize and predict the process of PM2.5 transport. For example, for 300 continuous days of 2016, the average prediction accuracy of the PDE model over all city-regions is 93% or 83% based on different accuracy definitions. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use PDE-based model to study PM2.5 prediction in both temporal and spatial dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the heavy exploitation of holothurians over the last few decades, it is necessary to implement fishing regulations aimed at reversing this situation. Holothurians require specific regulations that take into account their biology and ecology. Their behavior to group and form patches as a strategy for feeding, defense and reproduction, makes them vulnerable to overfishing. The higher the population density, the higher the catchability coefficient, and because they are sedentary organisms, the catchability does not change significantly until the density is very low. Hence, the stock assessment of holothurians can be improved by analyzing their spatial distribution. This paper proposes a stock assessment technique that considers the spatial distribution pattern of the sea cucumber Isostichopus badionotus from Yucatan, Mexico. A bioeconomic spatial model was developed to explain the interactions between fishing effort allocation, quasi-profits and the population in the short term. Because of the high price of the species and the low production costs, artisanal fishers preferred to maximize short-term quasi-profits, rather than the long-term benefits they could gain with low fishing mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern cities are engines of production, innovation, and growth. However, urbanization also increases both local and global pollution from household consumption and firms’ production. Do emissions change proportionately to city size or does pollution tend to outpace or lag urbanization? Do emissions scale differently with population versus economic growth or are emissions, population, and economic growth inextricably linked? How are the scaling relationships between emissions, population, and economic growth affected by environmental regulation? This paper examines the link between urbanization, economic growth and pollution using data from Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States between 1999 and 2011. We find that the emissions of local air pollution in these MSAs scale according to a ¾ power law with both population size and gross domestic product (GDP). However, the monetary damages from these local emissions scale linearly with both population and GDP. Counties that have previously been out of attainment with the local air quality standards set by the Clean Air Act show an entirely different relationship: local emissions scale according to the square root of population, while the monetary damages from local air pollution follow a 2/3rds power law with population. Counties out of attainment are subject to more stringent emission controls; we argue based on this that enforcement of the Clean Air Act induces sublinear scaling between emissions, damages, and city size. In contrast, we find that metropolitan GDP scales super-linearly with population in all MSAs regardless of attainment status. Summarizing, our findings suggest that environmental policy limits the adverse effects of urbanization without interfering with the productivity benefits that manifest in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: Proper management of fecal sludge has significant positive health and environmental externalities. Most research on managing onsite sanitation so far either simulates the costs of, or the welfare effects from, managing sludge in situ in pit latrines. Thus, designing management strategies for onsite rural sanitation is challenging, because the actual costs of transporting sludge for treatment, and sources for financing these transport costs, are not well understood. Methods: In this paper we calculate the actual cost of sludge management from onsite latrines, and identify the contributions that latrine owners are willing to make to finance the costs. A spreadsheet-based model is used to identify a cost-effective transport option, and to calculate the cost per household. Then a double-bound contingent valuation method is used to elicit from pit-latrine owners their willingness-to-pay to have sludge transported away. This methodology is employed for the case of a rural subdistrict in Bangladesh called Bhaluka, a unit of administration at which sludge management services are being piloted by the Government of Bangladesh. Results: The typical sludge accumulation rate in Bhaluka is calculated at 0.11 liters/person/day and a typical latrine will need to be emptied approximately once every 3 to 4 years. The costs of emptying and transport are high; approximately USD 13 per emptying event (circa 14% of average monthly income); household contributions could cover around 47% of this cost. However, if costs were spread over time, the service would cost USD 4 per year per household, or USD 0.31 per month per household—comparable to current expenditures of rural households on telecommunications. Conclusion: This is one of few research papers that brings the costs of waste management together with financing of that cost, to provide evidence for an implementable solution. This framework can be used to identify cost effective sludge management options and private contributions towards that cost in other (context-specific) administrative areas where onsite sanitation is widespread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of global value chains (GVCs) characterized by the so-called “outsourcing”, “fragmentation production”, and “trade in tasks” has been considered one of the most important phenomena for the 21st century trade. GVCs also can play a decisive role in trade policy making. However, due to the increasing complexity and sophistication of international production networks, especially in the equipment manufacturing industry, conventional trade statistics and the corresponding trade indicators may give us a distorted picture of trade. This paper applies various network analysis tools to the new GVC accounting system proposed by Koopman et al. (2014) and Wang et al. (2013) in which gross exports can be decomposed into value-added terms through various routes along GVCs. This helps to divide the equipment manufacturing-related GVCs into some sub-networks with clear visualization. The empirical results of this paper significantly improve our understanding of the topology of equipment manufacturing-related GVCs as well as the interdependency of countries in these GVCs that is generally invisible from the traditional trade statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While basic access to clean water is critical, another important issue is the affordability of water access for people around the globe. Prior international work has highlighted that a large proportion of consumers could not afford water if priced at full cost recovery levels. Given growing concern about affordability issues due to rising water rates, and a comparative lack of work on affordability in the developed world, as compared to the developing world, more work is needed in developed countries to understand the extent of this issue in terms of the number of households and persons impacted. To address this need, this paper assesses potential affordability issues for households in the United States using the U.S. EPA’s 4.5% affordability criteria for combined water and wastewater services. Analytical results from this paper highlight high-risk and at-risk households for water poverty or unaffordable water services. Many of these households are clustered in pockets of water poverty within counties, which is a concern for individual utility providers servicing a large proportion of customers with a financial inability to pay for water services. Results also highlight that while water rates remain comparatively affordable for many U.S. households, this trend will not continue in the future. If water rates rise at projected amounts over the next five years, conservative projections estimate that the percentage of U.S. households who will find water bills unaffordable could triple from 11.9% to 35.6%. This is a concern due to the cascading economic impacts associated with widespread affordability issues; these issues mean that utility providers could have fewer customers over which to spread the large fixed costs of water service. Unaffordable water bills also impact customers for whom water services are affordable via higher water rates to recover the costs of services that go unpaid by lower income households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant responsibility that physicians have in healthcare delivery, we know surprisingly little about why physician practice styles vary within or across institutions. Estimating variation in physician practice styles is complicated by the fact that patients are rarely randomly assigned to physicians. This paper uses the quasi-random assignment of patients to physicians in emergency departments (EDs) to show how physicians vary in their treatment of patients with minor injuries. The results reveal a considerable degree of variation in practice styles within EDs; physicians at the 75th percentile of the spending distribution spend 20% more than physicians at the 25th percentile. Observable physician characteristics do not explain much of the variation across physicians, but there is a significant degree of sorting between physicians and EDs over time, with high-cost physicians sorting into high-cost EDs as they gain experience. The results may shed light on why some EDs remain persistently higher-cost than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper quantifies the effect of speed cameras on road traffic collisions using an approximate Bayesian doubly-robust (DR) causal inference estimation method. Previous empirical work on this topic, which shows a diverse range of estimated effects, is based largely on outcome regression (OR) models using the Empirical Bayes approach or on simple before and after comparisons. Issues of causality and confounding have received little formal attention. A causal DR approach combines propensity score (PS) and OR models to give an average treatment effect (ATE) estimator that is consistent and asymptotically normal under correct specification of either of the two component models. We develop this approach within a novel approximate Bayesian framework to derive posterior predictive distributions for the ATE of speed cameras on road traffic collisions. Our results for England indicate significant reductions in the number of collisions at speed cameras sites (mean ATE = -15%). Our proposed method offers a promising approach for evaluation of transport safety interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stock price prediction is an important and challenging problem in stock market analysis. Existing prediction methods either exploit autocorrelation of stock price and its correlation with the supply and demand of stock, or explore predictive indictors exogenous to stock market. In this paper, using transaction record of stocks with identifier of traders, we introduce an index to characterize market confidence, i.e., the ratio of the number of traders who is active in two successive trading days to the number of active traders in a certain trading day. Strong Granger causality is found between the index of market confidence and stock price. We further predict stock price by incorporating the index of market confidence into a neural network based on time series of stock price. Experimental results on 50 stocks in two Chinese Stock Exchanges demonstrate that the accuracy of stock price prediction is significantly improved by the inclusion of the market confidence index. This study sheds light on using cross-day trading behavior to characterize market confidence and to predict stock price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current models of bilateral trade neglect the effects of income distribution. This paper addresses the issue by accounting for non-homothetic consumer preferences and hence investigating the role of income distribution in the context of the gravity model of trade. A theoretically justified gravity model is estimated for disaggregated trade data (Dollar volume is used as dependent variable) using a sample of 104 exporters and 108 importers for 1980–2003 to achieve two main goals. We define and calculate new measures of income distribution similarity and empirically confirm that greater similarity of income distribution between countries implies more trade. Using distribution-based measures as a proxy for demand similarities in gravity models, we find consistent and robust support for the hypothesis that countries with more similar income-distributions trade more with each other. The hypothesis is also confirmed at disaggregated level for differentiated product categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is increasing evidence that mobile phone health interventions (“mHealth”) can improve health behaviors and outcomes and are critically important in low-resource, low-access settings. However, the majority of mHealth programs in developing countries fail to reach scale. One reason may be the challenge of developing financially sustainable programs. The goal of this paper is to explore strategies for mHealth program sustainability and develop cost-recovery models for program implementers using 2014 operational program data from Mobile for Reproductive Health (m4RH), a national text-message (SMS) based health communication service in Tanzania. Methods: We delineated 2014 m4RH program costs and considered three strategies for cost-recovery for the m4RH program: user pay-for-service, SMS cost reduction, and strategic partnerships. These inputs were used to develop four different cost-recovery scenarios. The four scenarios leveraged strategic partnerships to reduce per-SMS program costs and create per-SMS program revenue and varied the structure for user financial contribution. Finally, we conducted break-even and uncertainty analyses to evaluate the costs and revenues of these models at the 2014 user volume (125,320) and at any possible break-even volume. Results: In three of four scenarios, costs exceeded revenue by $94,596, $34,443, and $84,571 at the 2014 user volume. However, these costs represented large reductions (54%, 83%, and 58%, respectively) from the 2014 program cost of $203,475. Scenario four, in which the lowest per-SMS rate ($0.01 per SMS) was negotiated and users paid for all m4RH SMS sent or received, achieved a $5,660 profit at the 2014 user volume. A Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis demonstrated that break-even points were driven by user volume rather than variations in program costs. Conclusions: These results reveal that breaking even was only probable when all SMS costs were transferred to users and the lowest per-SMS cost was negotiated with telecom partners. While this strategy was sustainable for the implementer, a central concern is that health information may not reach those who are too poor to pay, limiting the program’s reach and impact. Incorporating strategies presented here may make mHealth programs more appealing to funders and investors but need further consideration to balance sustainability, scale, and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of the shared prosperity goal by the World Bank in 2013 and Sustainable Development Goal 10, on inequality, by the United Nations in 2015 should strengthen the focus of development interventions and cooperation on the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution. This paper contributes to the incipient literature on within-country allocations of development institutions and assesses the geographic targeting of World Bank projects to the bottom 40 percent. Bivariate correlations between the allocation of project funding approved over 2005–14 and the geographical distribution of the bottom 40 as measured by survey income or consumption data are complemented by regressions with population and other potential factors affecting the within-country allocations as controls. The correlation analysis shows that, of the 58 countries in the sample, 41 exhibit a positive correlation between the shares of the bottom 40 and World Bank funding, and, in almost half of these, the correlation is above 0.5. Slightly more than a quarter of the countries, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, exhibit a negative correlation. The regression analysis shows that, once one controls for population, the correlation between the bottom 40 and World Bank funding switches sign and becomes significant and negative on average. This is entirely driven by Sub-Saharan Africa and not observed in the other regions. Hence, the significant and positive correlation in the estimations without controlling for population suggests that World Bank project funding is concentrated in administrative areas in which more people live (including the bottom 40) rather than in poorer administrative areas. Furthermore, capital cities receive disproportionally high shares of World Bank funding on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines a Granger causality test and a VAR model to investigate the relationships among oil price shocks, global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU), and China’s industrial economic growth. Based on monthly data from 2000 to 2017, we reveal that GEPU and world oil prices jointly Granger cause China's industrial economic growth; world oil prices have a positive effect on China's industrial economic growth, while GEPU has a negative effect. Further analyses investigate the asymmetry effect of oil prices and find that the negative component shows a more significant impact on China's industrial economic growth. The results are robust to different oil price and EPU proxies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quigley derived his hybrid price model to improve the precision of predicted prices of sold homes by statistically merging data of resold homes in a repeat sales model with that of once-sold homes in a single sales hedonic price model. The literature has few applications of the hybrid model aside from those by Quigley and his collaborators. Two reasons for this underuse may be its computational intensiveness and its marginal empirical improvement in comparison with two other models. This paper first demystifies this computational intensiveness by calibrating models in Microsoft Excel with transferable procedures into other software. It second evaluates the hybrid price model’s empirical improvement as a reason for its underuse by predicting prices of 2,559 sold and resold homes observed in two inner-city neighbourhoods in Windsor, Ontario, during a 30-year period. The results as hypothesized are its lower standard errors of regression coefficients and higher simple R-squared than those of a single sales hedonic price model. Moreover, the hybrid model’s predictions have higher correlations than those of the single sales model with not only in-sample observed prices or changes in prices but also out-of-sample ones. The conclusion speculates in plans for future research about reasons for two models’ similar or dissimilar regression coefficients and standard errors predicting correspondingly similar or dissimilar sale prices of homes through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To describe level of education and work participation among adults with congenital unilateral upper limb deficiency (CUULD) in Norway and to explore associations between work participation and demographic and clinical factors. Methods: Cross-sectional study. In 2012, a postal questionnaire was sent to 186 persons with congenital limb deficiency (CLD), age ≥ 20 years, registered at the TRS National Resource Center for Rare Disorders. In the original CLD study, 77 persons with CUULD responded. In this paper 64 persons with CUULD of working age (20–67 years) are included. Data on demographic factors as education level and work participation, and clinical factors including limb deficiency characteristics, chronic pain (Standardized Nordic Questionnaire), fatigue (Fatigue Severity Scale), physical and mental health (SF-36) were analyzed through descriptive and comparable statistics and logistic regression analyses. Results: Sixty-four persons participated, mean age 43.4 (SD 13.7; range 20–67 years), 45 were women. Education level >13 years was reported by 34. Forty- three of the 64 participants were employed, 21 were prematurely retired (disability benefits). 11 of the 43 employed, and 6 of the 21 prematurely retired had completed vocational education. Physically demanding occupations (work activities that required standing, walking and lifting) were reported by 25 of the 43 employed and 13 of the 21 prematurely retired. 17 of the 64 reported need for further adaptions in their workplaces. The strongest predictors of work participation were younger age (OR 0.86) and good physical health (OR 1.21). Conclusion: Two thirds of persons with CUULD were employed; while one third was prematurely retired and had left work earlier than expected. This suggests that persons with CUULD may experience challenges in work participation. Although levels of education were relatively high, several had chosen careers that required physical strain. Younger age and good physical health were the most important factors mediating work participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clustering of time series has attracted growing research interest in recent years. The most popular clustering methods assume that the time series are only linearly dependent but this assumption usually fails in practice. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we study clustering methods applicable to time series with a general and dependent structure. We propose a copula-based distance to measure dissimilarity among time series and consider an estimator for it, where the strong consistency of the estimator is guaranteed. Once the pairwise distance matrix for time series has been obtained, we apply a hierarchical clustering algorithm to cluster the time series and ensure its consistency. Numerical studies, including a large number of simulations and analysis of practical data, show that our method performs well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to difficulties in accurately predicting the emergency timing and the magnitude of a disaster, operations for perishable emergency inventory planning often encounter expiration and shortage problems. In order to ease the expiration problem in emergency medicine preparation inventories, this paper investigates an emergency medicine closed-loop supply chain for returning unused items from an ERC (Emergency Reserve Center) to a hospital. To assure that the return strategy is meaningful, we propose a critical parameter that we term the latest return time, after which the remaining emergency medicine in the ERC cannot be returned to the hospital. In addition, the short lifetime of emergency products and uncertainty about demand time and demand quantity are also considered in this emergency inventory planning system. In analyzing the optimal ordering policies, we find that the two threshold values for the predefined return time, which affect the total costs, are not monotonous; rather, the direction of their effect is first down, then up, and then down again, which means that a better predefined value of the latest return time can be determined by minimizing total costs. By studying and comparing decentralized and centralized decisions, we find that the centralized decision system works better to control expiration and costs. Therefore, we design a coordination mechanism for the cooperation between the ERC and the hospital. Our analysis shows that we should not ignore the emergency uncertainty and perishability of emergency items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new European model stipulates the achievement of an inclusive, sustainable and intelligent economic growth. Increasing the share of renewable energy is one of the factors that improve the quality of economic growth, similar to research, development and investment in human capital. In this paper we tested the correlation between economic growth and renewable energy consumption for ten European Union (EU) member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the period 1990–2014, using Auto-regressive and Distributed Lag (ARDL) modeling procedure, a technique that captures causal relationships both on a short run and on a long run. The short run perspective reveals the transition towards a new energy paradigm, while the long run approach corresponds to the long-term equilibrium of the analyzed factors. Our results shows that, in the short run, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Renewable Energy Consumption (REC) dynamics are independent in Romania and Bulgaria, while in Hungary, Lithuania and Slovenia an increasing renewable energy consumption improves the economic growth. The hypothesis of bi-directional causality between renewable energy consumption and economic growth is validated in the long run for both the whole group of analyzed countries as well as in the case of seven CEE states which were studied individually. These results allow us to look into the feasibility of the Europe 2020 goals regarding the increase of energy efficiency and to propose public policies to achieve these goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last years, the new science of cities has been established as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems display universal scaling behavior regarding socioeconomic, infrastructural and individual basic services variables. This paper discusses the extension of the universality proposition by testing it against a broad range of urban metrics in a developing country urban system. We present an exploration of the scaling exponents for over 60 variables for the Brazilian urban system. Estimating those exponents is challenging from the technical point of view because the Brazilian municipalities’ definition follows local political criteria and does not regard characteristics of the landscape, density, and basic utilities. As Brazilian municipalities can deviate significantly from urban settlements, urban-like municipalities were selected based on a systematic density cut-off procedure and the scaling exponents were estimated for this new subset of municipalities. To validate our findings we compared the results for overlaying variables with other studies based on alternative methods. It was found that the analyzed socioeconomic variables follow a superlinear scaling relationship with the population size, and most of the infrastructure and individual basic services variables follow expected sublinear and linear scaling, respectively. However, some infrastructural and individual basic services variables deviated from their expected regimes, challenging the universality hypothesis of urban scaling. We propose that these deviations are a product of top-down decisions/policies. Our analysis spreads over a time-range of 10 years, what is not enough to draw conclusive observations, nevertheless we found hints that the scaling exponent of these variables are evolving towards the expected scaling regime, indicating that the deviations might be temporally constrained and that the urban systems might eventually reach the expected scaling regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturing in China has developed rapidly with the widening and deepening of globalization, but only innovation can industry keep upgrading and enhancing its international competitiveness. This paper combines Global Value Chains (GVCs) and National Value Chains (NVCs) in a unified theory framework, uses Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) to explore how innovation capacity, production capacity, and vertical specialization affect innovation performance from the supply and demand sides by examining the case of Electronic Manufacturing of China. We observe that innovation inputs and outputs present strong regional heterogeneity between coastal and inland regions. Although most regions continue to engage in processing trade or assembly manufacturing in GVCs, NVCs are gradually established and led by coastal regions. The results indicate a good chance for cultivating innovation capacity in coastal regions. After assessing the influence of determinants on innovation performance, we observe that from supply-side, innovation capacity has a positive effect on innovation performance, production capacity in coastal regions is improving, and domestic demand for domestic products is increasingly important. From the demand side, innovation capacity continues to have a positive effect on innovation performance, production capacity improves rapidly, and imported intermediate inputs enhance innovation performance more effectively than domestic intermediate inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the public transport industry, travellers’ perceived satisfaction is a key element in understanding their evaluation of, and loyalty to ridership. Despite its notable importance, studies of customer satisfaction are under-represented in the literature, and most previous studies are based on survey data collected from a single city only. This does not allow a comparison across different transport systems. To address this underrepresentation, this paper reports on a study of train passengers’ satisfaction with the fare paid for their most recent home-based train trip in five Australian capital cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. Two data sources are used: a nation-wide survey, and objective information on the train fare structure in each of the targeted cities. In particular, satisfaction with train fares is modelled as a function of socio-economic factors and train trip characteristics, using a random parameters ordered Logit model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in the population. Results indicate that gender, city of origin, transport mode from home to the train station, eligibility for either student or senior concession fare, one-way cost, and waiting time as well as five diverse interaction variables between city of origin and socio-economic factors are the key determinants of passenger satisfaction with train fares. In particular, this study reveals that female respondents tend to be less satisfied with their train fare than their male counterparts. Interestingly, respondents who take the bus to the train station tend to feel more satisfied with their fare compared with the rest of the respondents. In addition, notable heterogeneity is detected across respondents’ perceived satisfaction with train fare, specifically with regard to the one-way cost and the waiting time incurred. An intercity comparison reveals that a city’s train fare structure also affects a traveller’s perceived satisfaction with their train fare. The findings of this research are significant for both policy makers and transport operators, allowing them to understand traveller behaviours, and to subsequently formulate effective transit policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: To date, the scientific literature on socioeconomic correlates and determinants of physical activity behaviours has been dispersed throughout a number of systematic reviews, often focusing on one factor (e.g. education or parental income) in one specific age group (e.g. pre-school children or adults). The aim of this umbrella review is to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of the scientific literature from previously conducted research by summarising and synthesising the importance and strength of the evidence related to socioeconomic correlates and determinants of PA behaviours across the life course. Methods: Medline, Embase, ISI Web of Science, Scopus and SPORTDiscus were searched for systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses of observational studies investigating the association between socioeconomic determinants of PA and PA itself (from January 2004 to September 2017). Data extraction evaluated the importance of determinants, strength of evidence, and methodological quality of the selected papers. The full protocol is available from PROSPERO (PROSPERO2014:CRD42015010616). Results: Nineteen reviews were included. Moderate methodological quality emerged. For adults, convincing evidence supports a relationship between PA and socioeconomic status (SES), especially in relation to leisure time (positive relationship) and occupational PA (negative relationship). Conversely, no association between PA and SES or parental SES was found for pre-school, school-aged children and adolescents. Conclusions: Available evidence on the socioeconomic determinants of PA behaviour across the life course is probable (shows fairly consistent associations) at best. While some evidence is available for adults, less was available for youth. This is mainly due to a limited quantity of primary studies, weak research designs and lack of accuracy in the PA and SES assessment methods employed. Further PA domain specific studies using longitudinal design and clear measures of SES and PA assessment are required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an optimization model, using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), to support decisions related to making investments in the design of power grids serving industrial clients that experience interruptions to their energy supply due to disruptive events. In this approach, by considering the probabilities of the occurrence of a set of such disruptive events, the model is used to minimize the overall expected cost by determining an optimal strategy involving pre- and post-event actions. The pre-event actions, which are considered during the design phase, evaluate the resilience capacity (absorption, adaptation and restoration) and are tailored to the context of industrial clients dependent on a power grid. Four cases are analysed to explore the results of different probabilities of the occurrence of disruptions. Moreover, two scenarios, in which the probability of occurrence is lowest but the consequences are most serious, are selected to illustrate the model’s applicability. The results indicate that investments in pre-event actions, if implemented, can enhance the resilience of power grids serving industrial clients because the impacts of disruptions either are experienced only for a short time period or are completely avoided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is difficult to know whether different dimensions of trust have different effects on local residents’ acceptance of nuclear power plants (NPPs). In previous research such trust has been considered as a single dimensional concept. This paper divides trust into goodwill trust and competence trust, and we explore the ways in which trust affects acceptance of NPPs through structural equation modeling. A survey of 491 people was conducted in Haiyan County, China, where the Qinshan nuclear power plant is located. We find that goodwill trust is significantly correlated with competence trust, and each can indirectly promote residents’ acceptance of NPPs but by different paths. Goodwill trust improves acceptance of NPPs by decreasing risk perception, while competence trust improves acceptance of NPPs by increasing benefit perception. However, the associations between goodwill trust and benefit perception, competence trust and risk perception, are not significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an automatic system for the analysis and labeling of structural scenes, floor plan drawings in Computer-aided Design (CAD) format. The proposed system applies a fusion strategy to detect and recognize various components of CAD floor plans, such as walls, doors, windows and other ambiguous assets. Technically, a general rule-based filter parsing method is fist adopted to extract effective information from the original floor plan. Then, an image-processing based recovery method is employed to correct information extracted in the first step. Our proposed method is fully automatic and real-time. Such analysis system provides high accuracy and is also evaluated on a public website that, on average, archives more than ten thousands effective uses per day and reaches a relatively high satisfaction rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The population of Ghana is increasingly becoming urbanized with about 70% of the estimated 27 million people living in urban and peri-urban areas. Nonetheless, eight out of the ten regions in Ghana remain predominantly rural where only 32% of the national health sector workforce works. Moreover, the rural-urban disparities in the density of health tutors (staff responsible for pre-service training of health professionals) are enormous. This paper explores perceived needs of health tutors in rural and urban health training institutions in Ghana. Methods: This is a descriptive qualitative study conducted in the Greater Accra and Northern regions of Ghana. The Study used the deductive thematic and sub-thematic analysis approaches. Five health training institutions were randomly sampled, and 72 tutors engaged in separate focus group discussions with an average size of 14 participants per group in each training institution. Results: Perceived rural-urban disparities among health tutors were found in the payment of extra duty allowances; school infrastructure including libraries and internet connectivity; staff accommodation; and opportunities for scholarships and higher education. Health tutors in rural areas generally expressed more frustration with these work conditions than those in urban areas. Conclusions: There is the need to initiate and sustain work incentives that promote motivation of rural health tutors to control ongoing rural-urban migration of qualified staff. It is recommended the following incentives be prioritized to promote retention of qualified health tutors in rural health training schools: payment of research, book and rural allowances; early promotion of rural staff; prioritizing rural tutors for scholarships, and introduction of national best health tutor awards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists are increasingly dissatisfied with funding systems that rely on peer assessment and, accordingly, have suggested several proposals for reform. One of these proposals is to distribute available funds equally among all qualified researchers, with no interference from peer review. Despite its numerous benefits, such egalitarian sharing faces the objection, among others, that it would lead to an unacceptable dilution of resources. The aim of the present paper is to assess this particular objection. We estimate (for the Netherlands, the U.S. and the U.K.) how much researchers would receive were they to get an equal share of the government budgets that are currently allocated through competitive peer assessment. For the Netherlands, we furthermore estimate what researchers would receive were we to differentiate between researchers working in low-cost, intermediate-cost and high-cost disciplines. Given these estimates, we then determine what researchers could afford in terms of PhD students, Postdocs, travel and equipment. According to our results, researchers could, on average, maintain current PhD student and Postdoc employment levels, and still have at their disposal a moderate (the U.K.) to considerable (the Netherlands, U.S.) budget for travel and equipment. This suggests that the worry that egalitarian sharing leads to unacceptable dilution of resources is unjustified. Indeed, our results strongly suggest that there is room for far more egalitarian distribution of funds than happens in the highly competitive funding schemes so prevalent today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: While women and girls face special risks from lack of access to sanitation facilities, their ability to participate and influence household-level sanitation is not well understood. This paper examines the association between women's decision-making autonomy and latrine construction in rural areas of Odisha, India. Methods: We conducted a mixed-method study among rural households in Puri district. This included a cross sectional survey among 475 randomly selected households. These were classified as either having a functional latrine, a non-functional latrine or no latrine at all. We also conducted 17 in-depth interviews and 9 focus group discussions among household members of these three categories of households. Results: Decisions on the construction of household level sanitation facilities were made exclusively by the male head in 80% of households; in 11% the decision was made by men who consulted or otherwise involved women. In only 9% of households the decision was made by women. Households where women were more involved in general decision making processes were no more likely to build a latrine, compared to households where they were excluded from decisions. Qualitative research revealed that women’s non-involvement in sanitation decision making is attributed to their low socio-economic status and inability to influence the household’s financial decisions. Female heads lacked confidence to take decisions independently, and were dependent on their spouse or other male family members for most decisions. The study revealed the existence of power hierarchies and dynamics within households, which constrained female’s participation in decision-making processes regarding sanitation. Conclusions: Though governments and implementers emphasize women’s involvement in sanitation programmes, socio-cultural factors and community and household level dynamics often prevent women from participating in sanitation-related decisions. Measures are needed for strengthening sanitation policies and effective implementation of programmes to address gender power relations and familial relationships that influence latrine adoption and use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overweight and obesity are highly prevalent in the population of the United States, affecting roughly 2/3 of Americans. These diseases, along with their associated conditions, are a major burden on the healthcare industry in terms of both dollars spent and effort expended. Volitional weight loss is attempted by many, but weight regain is common. The ability to predict which patients will lose weight and successfully maintain the loss versus those prone to regain weight would help ease this burden by allowing clinicians the ability to skip treatments likely to be ineffective. In this paper we introduce a new windowed approach to the persistent homology signal processing algorithm that, when paired with a modified, semimetric version of the Hausdorff distance, can differentiate the two groups where other commonly used methods fail. The novel approach is tested on accelerometer data gathered from an ongoing study at the University of Michigan. While most standard approaches to signal processing show no difference between the two groups, windowed persistent homology and the modified Hausdorff semimetric show a clear separation. This has significant implications for clinical decision making and patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a sustainable transportation mode, high-speed railway (HSR) has become an efficient way to meet the huge travel demand. However, due to the high acquisition and maintenance cost, it is impossible to build enough infrastructure and purchase enough train-sets. Great efforts are required to improve the transport capability of HSR. The utilization efficiency of train-sets (carrying tools of HSR) is one of the most important factors of the transport capacity of HSR. In order to enhance the utilization efficiency of the train-sets, this paper proposed a train-set circulation optimization model to minimize the total connection time. An innovative two-stage approach which contains segments generation and segments combination was designed to solve this model. In order to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach, an experiment was carried out in the Beijing-Tianjin passenger dedicated line, to fulfill a 174 trips train diagram. The model results showed that compared with the traditional Ant Colony Algorithm (ACA), the utilization efficiency of train-sets can be increased from 43.4% (ACA) to 46.9% (Two-Stage), and 1 train-set can be saved up to fulfill the same transportation tasks. The approach proposed in the study is faster and more stable than the traditional ones, by using which, the HSR staff can draw up the train-sets circulation plan more quickly and the utilization efficiency of the HSR system is also improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a reliable facility location design model under imperfect information with site-dependent disruptions; i.e., each facility is subject to a unique disruption probability that varies across the space. In the imperfect information contexts, customers adopt a realistic “trial-and-error” strategy to visit facilities; i.e., they visit a number of pre-assigned facilities sequentially until they arrive at the first operational facility or give up looking for the service. This proposed model aims to balance initial facility investment and expected long-term operational cost by finding the optimal facility locations. A nonlinear integer programming model is proposed to describe this problem. We apply a linearization technique to reduce the difficulty of solving the proposed model. A number of problem instances are studied to illustrate the performance of the proposed model. The results indicate that our proposed model can reveal a number of interesting insights into the facility location design with site-dependent disruptions, including the benefit of backup facilities and system robustness against variation of the loss-of-service penalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the economic transition, manufacturing in China has undergone profound changes not only in number of enterprises, but also in ownership structure and intra-urban spatial distribution. Investigating the changing manufacturing landscape from the perspective of ownership structure is critical to a deep understanding of the changing role of market and government in re-shaping manufacturing location behavior. Through a case study of Wuxi, a city experiencing comprehensive ownership reform, this paper presents a detailed analysis of the intra-urban spatial shift of manufacturing, identifies the location discrepancies, and examines the underlying forces responsible for the geographical differentiations. Through zone- and district-based analysis, a distinctive trend of decentralization and suburbanization, as well as an uneven distribution of manufacturing, is unveiled. The results of Location Quotient analysis show that the distribution of manufacturing by ownership exhibits distinctive spatial patterns, which is characterized by a historically-based, market-led, and institutionally-created spatial variation. By employing Hot Spot analysis, the role of development zones in attracting manufacturing enterprises of different ownerships is established. Overall, the location behavior of the diversified manufacturing has been increasingly based on the forces of market since the land marketization began. A proactive role played by local governments has also guided the enterprise location decision through spatial planning and regulatory policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the encouragement of entrepreneurship within university research labs relates with research activities, research outputs, and early doctorate careers. Utilizing a panel survey of 6,840 science & engineering doctoral students at 39 R1 research universities, this study shows that entrepreneurship is widely encouraged across university research labs, ranging from 54% in biomedical engineering to 18% in particle physics, while only a small share of labs openly discourage entrepreneurship, from approximately 3% in engineering to approximately 12% in the life sciences. Within fields, there is no difference between labs that encourage entrepreneurship and those that do not with respect to basic research activity and the number of publications. At the same time, labs that encourage entrepreneurship are significantly more likely to report invention disclosures, particularly in engineering where such labs are 41% more likely to disclose inventions. With respect to career pathways, PhDs students in labs that encourage entrepreneurship do not differ from other PhDs in their interest in academic careers, but they are 87% more likely to be interested in careers in entrepreneurship and 44% more likely to work in a startup after graduation. These results persist even when accounting for individuals’ pre-PhD interest in entrepreneurship and the encouragement of other non-academic industry careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To determine which characteristics and circumstances were associated with very early and second-trimester abortion. Methods: Paper and pencil surveys were collected from a national sample of 8,380 non-hospital U.S. abortion patients in 2014 and 2015. We used self-reported LMP to calculate weeks gestation; when LMP was not provided we used self-reported weeks pregnant. We constructed two dependent variables: obtaining a very early abortion, defined as six weeks gestation or earlier, and obtaining second-trimester abortion, defined as occurring at 13 weeks gestation or later. We examined associations between the two measures of gestation and a range of characteristics and circumstances, including type of abortion waiting period in the patients’ state of residence. Results: Among first-trimester abortion patients, characteristics that decreased the likelihood of obtaining a very early abortion include being under the age of 20, relying on financial assistance to pay for the procedure, recent exposure to two or more disruptive events and living in a state that requires in-person counseling 24–72 hours prior to the procedure. Having a college degree and early recognition of pregnancy increased the likelihood of obtaining a very early abortion. Characteristics that increased the likelihood of obtaining a second-trimester abortion include being Black, having less than a high school degree, relying on financial assistance to pay for the procedure, living 25 or more miles from the facility and late recognition of pregnancy. Conclusions: While the availability of financial assistance may allow women to obtain abortions they would otherwise be unable to have, it may also result in delays in accessing care. If poor women had health insurance that covered abortion services, these delays could be alleviated. Since the study period, four additional states have started requiring that women obtain in-person counseling prior to obtaining an abortion, and the increase in these laws could slow down the trend in very early abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Good governance (GG) is an important concept that has evolved as a set of normative principles for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to strengthen the functional capacity of their public bodies, and as a conditional prerequisite to receive donor funding. Although much is written on good governance, very little is known on how to implement it. This paper documents the process of developing a strategy to implement a GG model for Health Technology Management (HTM) in the public health sector, based on lessons learned from twenty years of experience in policy development and implementation in Benin. The model comprises six phases: (i) preparatory analysis, assessing the effects of previous policies and characterizing the HTM system; (ii) stakeholder identification and problem analysis, making explicit the perceptions of problems by a diverse range of actors, and assessing their ability to solve these problems; (iii) shared analysis and visioning, delineating the root causes of problems and hypothesizing solutions; (iv) development of policy instruments for pilot testing, based on quick-win solutions to understand the system’s responses to change; (v) policy development and validation, translating the consensus solutions identified by stakeholders into a policy; and (vi) policy implementation and evaluation, implementing the policy through a cycle of planning, action, observation and reflection. The policy development process can be characterized as bottom-up, with a central focus on the participation of diverse stakeholders groups. Interactive and analytical tools of action research were used to integrate knowledge amongst actor groups, identify consensus solutions and develop the policy in a way that satisfies criteria of GG. This model could be useful for other LMICs where resources are constrained and the majority of healthcare technologies are imported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]