1,720,988 research outputs found
The effects of health shocks on risk preferences:Do personality traits matter?
Full text linkOlder individuals hold a disproportionate amount of total wealth, and are particularly vulnerable to shocks to health. Accordingly, there is a interest in understanding the extent to which health detriments influence financial choices and portfolio holdings within this group of society. A separate strand of literature has recently focused on the role of non-cognitive skills, and in particular personality traits, in shaping attitudes towards risk. We combine these literatures to explore the extent to which unanticipated shocks to health display heterogeneous impacts on preferences towards financial risk via portfolio investments and stock market participation. We find that health shocks have a negative effect on the level of risk at the household level when men, but not women, experience the shock. Moreover, there appears to be heterogeneity in the response by personality trait. Households where men display dominant traits for neuroticism, extraversion and openness to experience tend to be most affected in investment decisions following a health shock. The household becomes less risk tolerant when the level of neuroticism or openness increases, and more risk tolerant when the level of extroversion of the man increases
Freedom of choice and health services’ performance: Evidence from a national health system
No full textPublic policies fostering the freedom of choice of provider in the healthcare sector are increasingly common in many countries and regions, where policymakers wish to empower patients and improve health service performance. However, in the literature there is not clear consensus about the impact of expanded patient choice on healthcare quality yet. This study investigates whether increasing patients' freedom of choice influences health system outcomes in terms of various non-clinical aspects of care, a dimension often overlooked by researchers in this field. Our study considers a “natural experiment” that took place within the Spanish National Health System in 2009 under which citizens of the Community (region) of Madrid were allowed to freely choose among any GP and/or specialist in their region. The empirical analysis was conducted by using Spanish microdata for the period 2002–2016 and used synthetic control estimation techniques. The key findings show the reform had a strong and long-lasting impact, reducing average waiting times and increasing patients' satisfaction with the specialist attention received. We did not detect any statistically significant impact of the reform on the other responsiveness domains analysed. Our analysis shows that freedom of choice policies could improve health system performance if they are combined with appropriate economic incentives for health providers
Well-being and psychological consequences of temporary contracts: the case of younger Italian employees
Full text linkWorking conditions in Western countries have changed dramatically in the last twenty years,
witnessing the emergence of new forms of employment contracts. The number of "standard" fulltime
permanent jobs has decreased, while non-standard work arrangements such as temporary,
contingent or part-time contracts have become much more common. This paper analyses the impact
of temporary contracts and job insecurity on well-being among younger Italian employees. We use
the "Health Conditions and Use of the Health Service Survey" carried out by the Italian National
Institute of Statistics in conjunction with the Bank of Italy's Survey on Households Income and
Wealth (SHIW). We consider four dimensions of individual well-being: physical health, mental
health, self-assessed health and happiness. To account for individual heterogeneity we match each
temporary worker with a permanent worker using propensity score matching. Well-being of
matched individuals is compared to estimates of the average effect of working with a temporary as
opposed to a permanent contract. Our analysis reveals a negative relationship between
psychological well-being, happiness and having a temporary job and is particularly marked for males
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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