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The effect of vehicle ownership restrictions on travel behavior: Evidence from the Beijing license plate lottery
No full textTo combat traffic congestion and air pollution, many cities restrict vehicle ownership, but little is known about how these policies actually affect vehicle ownership, use, or travel time. Leveraging the randomization created by Beijing’s vehicle license plate lottery, we estimate the effects of the policy on travel behavior. We find that the policy reduces the total stock of cars in Beijing by 14%. It also causes large reductions in vehicle distance traveled, morning rush hour driving, and evening rush hour driving
Effects of specific-level versus broad-level training for broad-level category learning in a complex natural science domain.
Get PDFCategory learning is a core component of course curricula in science education. For instance, geology courses teach categorization of rock types. Using the educationally authentic rock categories, the current project examined whether category learning at a broad level (Igneous, Sedimentary, and Metamorphic rocks) could be enhanced by learning category information at a more specific level (e.g., Diorite under Igneous, Breccia under Sedimentary, etc.). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that specific-level training was inferior to broad-level training when participants were required to respond at the broad level regardless of whether broad- and specific- level category labels were presented simultaneously during classification training or specific-level categories were learned initially followed by training on the specific-broad level name associations. However, Experiments 3 and 4 showed that specific-level training was as good as broad-level training when the training was more extensive and participants were allowed to respond at the trained level. By considering confusion matrices (i.e., probabilities that instances in a given category was erroneously classified as belonging to other categories), we conjectured that between-specific-level category similarity, specifically the degree to which similar-looking specific-level categories belong to the same broad-level category, is an important factor in determining the efficacy of specific-level training
An Operational Mechanism Design for Fleet Management Coordination in Humanitarian Operations
Get PDFWe study incentive alignment to coordinate operations in humanitarian settings. Our research focuses on transportation, the second largest overhead cost to humanitarian organizations after personnel. Motivated by eld research, we study the eet size problem from a managerial perspective. In terms of transportation, the objective of humanitarian Programs is to have a vehicle available whenever it's needed; the bigger the eet, the higher the availability (the lower the cost of delay). On the other hand, the bigger the eet, the higher the eet cost. Fleet cost is the responsibility of the National Logistics. The dierent focus of the Programs and the National Logistics creates misaligned incentives that may lead to sub-optimal performance of a decentralized system. At the top of the system, the Headquarter must design incentive mechanisms to balance the operating cost of the eet with the equity cost represented by cost of delay. The incentive alignment issue is complex in a humanitarian setting as traditional instruments based on nancial rewards and penalties are not considered as viable options. The problem is complicated further by information asymmetry in the system due to the disperse geographical location of Programs, National Logistics and Headquarter. We propose a novel mechanism design for the incentive alignment problem where the Programs have private information regarding their true transportation needs. This study contributes to the humanitarian logistics literature and to the incentives in operations management literature
The Placebo and Nocebo effect on sports performance: A systematic review
No full textThe aim of this review was to determine the magnitude of the placebo and nocebo effect on sport performance. Articles published before March 2019 were located using Medline, Web of Science, PubMed, EBSCO, Science Direct, and Scopus. Studies that examined placebo and nocebo effects of an objective dependent variable on sports performance, which included a control or baseline condition, were included in the analysis. Studies were classified into two categories of ergogenic aids: 1) nutritional and 2) mechanical. Cohen’s d effect sizes were calculated from 32 studies involving 1,513 participants. Small to moderate placebo effects were found for both placebo (d = 0.36) and nocebo (d = 0.37) effects and when separated by nutritional (d = 0.35) and mechanical (d = 0.47) ergogenic aids. The pooled effect size revealed a small to moderate effect size across all studies (d = 0.38). Results suggest that placebo and nocebo effects can exert a small to moderate effect on sports performance
The everyday practice of policy
Get PDFEvery day, music teachers interact with and act on policy. Sometimes these policies go unnoticed, while at other times, these policies challenge educators’ practices and beliefs. For example, policies that often go unnoticed, such as a bell schedule, may be ingrained in the expectations of the organization of a school. In contrast, a policy developed about teacher evaluation may change several times from the beginning to the end of a teaching career. Because of this, music teachers need not only knowledge about current policies but the skills and dispositions to learn about, evaluate, act on, and respond to policy throughout their careers
Communicating a Health Risk/Crisis: Exploring the Experiences of Journalists Covering a Proximate Epidemic
Get PDFMedia are an indispensable partner in health communication but, there is often concern about how the media cover health and science issues. These critiques tend to be based on analyses of news content that don’t consider the production process of the content. Using a media sociology framework, the paper examines the news production process of the Ebola outbreak from the perspective of Ghanaian journalists. The study finds that routines influenced what the media produced. This study reiterates the call for public health to work closely with the media, and to provide translated health information in multilingual low literate societies
Managerial control benefits and takeover market efficiency
No full textHow and to what extent do managerial control benefits shape the efficiency of the takeover market? We revisit this question by estimating both the dark and bright sides of managerial control benefits in an industry equilibrium model. On the dark side, managers’ private benefits of control distort firms’ takeover incentives and hinder the reallocation role of the takeover market. On the bright side, fear of a takeover induces underperforming managers to exert more effort and enhances the disciplinary role of the takeover market. Our estimates suggest that the bright-side effect increases the value created by an active takeover market by 21%, comparable in magnitude to the dark-side effect. It is also important to account for this bright-side effect in explaining certain features of the takeover market, including a low takeover-performance sensitivity
Why Pay Our Fair Share? How Perceived Influence over Laws Affects Tax Evasion
Get PDFWe examine how the relation between taxpayers and their government affects tax evasion. Specifically, we examine how perceived influence over government policymaking affects firms’ decisions to evade tax. We argue that firms are less willing to comply with tax laws when they perceive the influence over their government to be unfavorable to them or the result of an unfair policymaking process. Consistent with this argument, we find that firms evade more tax when other domestic firms have more perceived influence over domestic government policymaking. This suggests a potential negative externality of lobbying: higher tax evasion by other firms. However, government effectiveness or lack of corruption eliminates the positive relation between evasion and perceived influence over policymaking. Our results suggest that limiting domestic firms’ influence over policymaking could help governments decrease tax evasion
The third sector and innovation: competitive strategies, incentives, and impediments to change
Get PDFPurpose: Much of the justification for third sector involvement in education advances from the notion that attributes from the business and non-profit fields could benefit state-run public schools. This analysis explores this issue by examining the theoretical underpinnings and expectations for third sector participation in public education systems, particularly with respect to educational innovations and improvements, and the structural opportunities, incentives and impediments for such innovation. Design: The question emerges regarding the extent to which third sector participation shapes the rate, nature, and types of innovations in education as schools interact in response to competitive pressures. In this conceptual analysis of the role of the third sector in fostering innovation, we examine the political-economic features and structures of the sector, with reference to the empirical record on the US sector that was specifically positioned to enhance the innovative capacity of publicly funded education. Findings: The analysis indicates that it is not at all clear that educational innovations are more prevalent in or because of the third sector, nor that they are commonly shared as was intended by reformers. Moreover, it appears that schools often respond to competitive incentives in ways not anticipated by policymakers, such as school marketing rather than instructional improvement, as well as in ways which may be detrimental to goals set out for public education, such as social sorting. In fact, instead of the third sector simply developing or incentivizing innovations, we note evidence that this sector has adopted innovations developed in the state sector. Implications: The analysis suggest that a third sector based more on a professional as opposed to a competitive model may better facilitate the development of innovative capacity in education
Moments of angular distribution and beam asymmetries in photoproduction at GlueX
No full textIn the search for exotic mesons, the GlueX collaboration will soon extract moments of the angular distribution. In the perspective of these results, we generalize the formalism of moment extraction to the case in which the two mesons are produced with a linearly polarized beam, and build a model for the reaction . The model includes resonant -, -, -waves in , produced by natural exchanges. Moments of the angular distribution are computed with and without the -wave, to illustrate the sensitivity to exotic resonances. Although little sensitivity to the -wave is found in moments of even angular momentum, moments of odd angular momentum are proportional to the interference between the -wave and the dominant - and -waves. We also generalize the definition of the beam asymmetry for two mesons photoproduction and show that, when the meson momenta are perpendicular to the reaction plane, the beam asymmetry enhances the sensitivity to the exotic -wave