OBJECTIVE To investigate the feasibility, costs and sample representativeness of a recruitment method that used workers with back injuries as the point of entry into diverse working environments. METHODS Workers' compensation claims were used to randomly sample workers from five heavy industries and to recruit their employers for ergonomic assessments of the injured worker and up to 2 co-work...

Psychologists have consistently documented people’s tendency to be overconfident about their own ability. We interpret workers’ confidence in their own skills as their morale, and investigate the implication of worker overconfidence on the firm’s optimal wage-setting policies. In our model, a wage contract both provides incentives and conveys to the worker the firm’s opinion about her ability, ...

BACKGROUND The consequences of alcohol consumption on health outcomes are largely determined by two separate, but related, dimensions of drinking: the total volume of alcohol consumed and the pattern of drinking. Most epidemiological studies focus on the amount of alcohol consumed and do not consider the pattern of drinking. OBJECTIVES This study evaluated the prevalence of and factors associ...

INTRODUCTION Smoke-free air laws in restaurants and bars protect patrons and workers from involuntary exposure to secondhand smoke, but owners often express concern that such laws will harm their businesses. The primary objective of this study was to estimate the association between local smoke-free air laws and economic outcomes in restaurants and bars in 8 states without statewide smoke-free ...

In a previous paper (Illius et al., 1998), we analysed the potential of tracking strategies to increase output under climatic variability. Regrettably, an error in the processing of data on the annual variability of sales led us to the wrong conclusions about the usefulness of tracking policies in smoothing inter-annual variation. This note presents corrections. Our conclusions about the genera...

Land surface radiation and energy budgets are critical to address a variety of scientific and application issues related to climate trends, weather predictions, hydrologic and biogeophysical modeling, and the monitoring of ecosystem health and agricultural crops. This is an introductory paper to the special issue of land surface radiation and energy budgets from an international conference on t...

Prior Converted Croplands (PCCs) are historic wetlands that were transformed (drained, dredged, filled or leveled) to support production of agricultural crops prior to “Swampbuster” provisions of the 1985 Food Security Act. Our research suggests that PCCs can substantially reduce nitrate export from agricultural watersheds in the region, an ecosystem function shared with natural and restored we...