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Dual practice, where physicians work both in public and private hospitals, is a widely observed phenomenon, particularly in developing countries. This paper studies a multi-stage game where hospitals compete for physicians as well as patients and, the service provided by physicians endogenously depends on the competitive setting in which hospitals operate. Specifically, we examine the impact of allowing dual practice on hospital payoffs, physician's service and societal welfare. We find that dual practice is socially desirable, since it softens the competition for physician's exclusive service while also increasing the amount of their service. However, if the degree of competition between the hospitals is significant, dual practice may not yield the highest payoffs for both public and private hospitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The storage and utilization of low‐carbon electricity and decarbonization of transportation are essential components for the future energy transition into a low‐carbon economy. While hydrogen has been identified as a potential energy carrier, the lack of viable technologies for safe and efficient storage and transportation of H2 greatly limits its applications and deployment at scale. Formic acid (FA) is considered one of the promising H2 energy carriers because of its high volumetric H2 storage capacity of 53 g H2/L, and relatively low toxicity and flammability for convenient and low‐cost storage and transportation. FA can be employed to generate electricity either in direct FA fuel cells (FCs) or indirectly as an H2 source for hydrogen FCs. FA can enable large‐scale chemical H2 storage to eliminate energy‐intensive and expensive processes for H2 liquefaction and compression and thus to achieve higher efficiency and broader utilization. This perspective summarizes recent advances in catalyst development for selective dehydrogenation of FA and high‐pressure H2 production. The advantages and limitations of FA‐to‐power options are highlighted. Existing life cycle assessment (LCA) and economic analysis studies are reviewed to discuss the feasibility and future potential of FA as a fuel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adequate nutrition is generally regarded as a core dimension in any evaluation of well‐being. In the context of India, a country with a high prevalence of poor nutrition, there is a dearth of nutrition studies with adequate coverage and comparability. Using primary data on food consumption from a village in a poorer state of India, we study the consumption of five key nutrients, namely, calories, protein, carbohydrates, calcium and iron. Among the various determinants of nutrition, we find that expenditure has a significant impact on nutrition and the expenditure elasticity of nutrition is comparatively high for all the key nutrients. By correcting for potential endogeneity, we demonstrate a causal link from expenditure and food subsidy provided by the public distribution system to nutritional intake. There is some evidence that household characteristics such as household size and gender of the household head matter for nutrition; however, they are not robust under various specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The NiII complex 1 containing pyridyl- and hydroxy-functionalized N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) is synthesized and its catalytic utility for the selective nitrile hydration to the corresponding amide under base-free conditions is evaluated. The title compound exploits a hemilabile pyridyl unit to interact with a catalytically relevant water molecule through hydrogen-bonding and promotes a nucleophilic water attack to the nitrile. A wide variety of nitriles is hydrated to the corresponding amides including the pharmaceutical drugs rufinamide, Rifater, and piracetam. Synthetically challenging α-hydroxyamides are accessed from cyanohydrins under neutral conditions. Related catalysts that lack the pyridyl unit (i.e., compounds 2 and 4) are not active whereas those containing both the pyridyl and the hydroxy or only the pyridyl pendant (i.e., compounds 1 and 3) show substantial activity. The linkage isomer 1′ where the hydroxy group is bound to the metal instead of the pyridyl group was isolated under different crystallization conditions insinuating a ligand hemilabile behavior. Additional p Ka measurements reveal an accessible pyridyl unit under the catalytic conditions. Kinetic studies support a ligand-promoted nucleophilic water addition to a metal-bound nitrile group. This work reports a Ni-based catalyst that exhibits functional hemilability for hydration chemistry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical model to show how distributional concerns can engender social conflict. We have a two-period model that highlights the crucial role of future inequality. Equality of assets and income in the current period does not stop conflict from arising the anticipated future inequality is significant. Further we find that the impact of inequality on conflict is not straightforward. Societies with low levels of inequality show no conflict; groups engage in conflict only when inequality exceeds a certain threshold level. Additionally the model shows that the link between inequality and conflict may be non-monotonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well accepted that a country's GDP may not fully reflect its level of well-being. In recent years, happiness has emerged as an alternative indicator of well-being, and research has mainly focused on determining the level of happiness. While it is important to look at the level, the distribution of happiness is also a salient aspect in any evaluation of inequality. There has been a growing interest in the distribution of happiness, although the ordinal nature of the data makes the use of standard inequality measures problematic. Our paper contributes to the literature by exploring the distributions for the U. S. from 1972 to 2010. Based on new methods developed for ordinal data, we are able to overcome the problems associated with ordinality and obtain unambiguous rankings of happiness distributions. We also compute the level of happiness inequality using existing measures based on median centred approaches. Further, we decompose the median based inequality measures of happiness by gender, race, and region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate how inequality affects corruption in the presence of an imperfect credit market. We favor an explanation based on a multimarket framework where corruption in one market (or sector) arises because of imperfections exacerbated by inequality in related markets. We demonstrate that even when an individual's ability to pay bribes and benefit from engaging in corruption are not affected by wealth level, greater (wealth) inequality will lead to an increase in corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In measuring social deprivation in a multidimensional framework, ideally one should first measure each individual's overall deprivation, and then aggregate the overall deprivation levels of all individuals. However, given only aggregate data, one is often forced to measure social deprivation in terms of each attribute separately and then to aggregate them so as to get the overall social deprivation. This paper shows that it is only under extremely stringent conditions that this procedure would always yield the same result as the conceptually sound procedure referred to earlier. A similar difficulty also arises in measuring a society's standard of living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]