130,596 research outputs found
“Heterogeneity in Cultural Expenditures of the municipalities:Evidence from Italian Data (2002-2006)”
No full textDrug therapy adherence and health outcomes in the presence of physician and patient unobserved heterogeneity
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Poverty Impact of Commodity Price Boom Using Household Survey. The Case of Maize in Zambia
No full textThis paper uses Household Survey data to analyze the possible eects that a food price surge could have on poverty
and overall welfare. In particular, we use the Zambian Living Conditions Monitoring Survey I (LCMS I) to estimate
a demand system that enables us to simulate various price scenarios for the Zambian main staple and its possible
eects for dierent population categories. Dierently from previous studies, in our demand system we address two
flaws usually encountered in this type of applications: one is the possible selection bias due to non-consumption of
a particular staple among households, the other is the dierence between the quantity used for estimation (typically
logarithm) and the quantity of interest (level). Jointly, this increases the reliability of our technique. Our results show
that a 50 percent increase in maize prices, which is in line with the actual surge in Zambia, could lead to an average
consumption decrease of 17 percent among Zambian households and overall poverty could rise from 40 percent to 43
percent fairly quickly at national level
Impact of Triflumuron on Halyomorpha halys (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae): laboratory and field studies
No full textHalyomorpha halys, (the brown marmorated stink bug, BMSB), is a high-concern invasive species causing severe damage to orchards in many countries outside its native Asian range. Control options matching both effectiveness and sustainability are currently lacking. Inhibitors of chitin biosynthesis might be exploited for integrated management programs because of the overall better ecotoxicological profile in comparison with most neurotoxic insecticides used so far against BMSB. In this study, the activity of triflumuron, a benzoylphenyl urea hampering chitin biosynthesis, was tested on BMSB in laboratory and field conditions. In laboratory bioassays, the insecticide was sprayed on potted peach plants (30 cm high) and residues were aged in a glasshouse for 0, 7, 14, and 21 d. Then, third-instar bugs were placed on the plants and continuously exposed to residues. Mortality was scored after 7, 14, and 21 d exposure. Triflumuron caused significantly higher mortality on BMSB nymphs in comparison with water controls at all aging periods. Moreover, aging of residues up to 21 d did not cause any significant reduction of activity. Field experiments were also carried out in 2019 in eight pear orchards. Injuries to fruits at harvest were compared between plots where triflumuron was added to insecticide sprays against BMSB and control plots managed exactly in the same way but without any triflumuron treatment. An overall mean of 9.99 ± 1.98% stink bug injured fruits was detected in plots managed with the strategy including triflumuron, whereas 19.45 ± 3.55% of fruits were injured in plots assigned to controls
Drug compliance, co-payment and health outcomes: evidence from a panel of Italian patients
No full textThis paper studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomes - hospitalization and mortality rates - using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow us to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health care services until they either die or leave the local health authority. We adopt a disease specific approach, concentrating on hypertensive patients treated with ACE-inhibitors. Our results show that medical compliance has a clear effect on both hospitalization and mortality rates: health outcomes clearly improve when patients become more compliant to drug therapy. At the same time, we are able to infer valuable information on the role that drug co-payment can have on compliance, and as a consequence on health outcomes, by exploiting the presence of two natural experiments during the period of analysis. Our results show that drug co-payment has a strong effect on compliance, and that this effect is immediate
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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