BACKGROUND Lack of information regarding biochemical changes in women during labor and its outcomes on maternal and neonatal health still is an unanswered question. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of oral carbohydrate intake during labor on the duration of the active phase and other maternal and neonatal outcomes. METHODS A parallel prospective randomized controlled trial, conduc...

This paper uses quasi-experimental data from Ecuador to understand the impacts of women’s employment on household paid and unpaid labor allocation. The “treatment” area is in the area of the cut flower industry, which has a high demand for female labor. The “control” area is in a culturally similar, but economically more traditional valley. This approach addresses the problem of endogeneity tha...

BACKGROUND Policy makers and health professionals are progressively using evidence-based rationale to guide their decisions. There has long been controversy regarding which maternal position is more appropriate during the first stage of labor. This problem has been examined often and repeatedly and the optimal recommendation remains unclear. METHODS This is a systematic review of the effect o...

The global crisis that began in 2008 reheated the debate on market deregulation as a tool to improve economic performance. This paper addresses the consequences of increased flexibility in goods and labor markets for the conduct of monetary policy in a monetary union. We model a two-country monetary union with endogenous product creation, labor market frictions, and price and wage rigidities. W...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China during transition. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market) allocation of land, and the extent of unevenly developed non-agricultural opportunities. Using a rec...

We adopt a time-varying cointegration test to discriminate among different empirical studies claiming to find a stable Euro Area money demand equation. A time-invariant relation explaining real balances is rejected by data, even when accounting for housing, financial and labour markets. Conversely, an international portfolio allocation approach provides stabilization. In particular, internation...

The Northern Ache comprise a small continuously interacting population with a shared community history. Full-time hunter-gatherers until recently, they now divide their time between mobile foraging and settledfarming. Here we describe adult time allocation at the settlement and contrast it with our previous descriptions of time allocation during foraging periods. We report that at the settlemen...

Societies are characterized by customs governing the allocation of non-market goods such as marital partnerships. We explore how such customs affect the educational investment decisions of young singles and the subsequent joint labor supply decisions of partnered couples. We consider two separate matching paradigms for agents with heterogeneous abilities one where partners marry for money and t...

The efficiency of social insect colonies critically depends on their ability to efficiently allocate workers to the various tasks which need to be performed. While numerous models have investigated the mechanisms allowing an efficient colony response to external changes in the environment and internal perturbations, little attention has been devoted to the genetic architecture underlying task s...

We investigate asset-allocation strategies open to members of defined-contribution pension plans with a model that incorporates asset, salary (labour-income) and interest-rate risk. We propose a novel form of terminal utility function, incorporating habit formation, that uses the member’s final salary as a numeraire. The paper discusses various properties and characteristics of the optimal asse...