The payoffs from investments in information technology are investigated at the international level by analyzing a database containing six years of output, employment and investment data for six industry sectors in 36 countries. The Solow endogenousgrowth model is employed to derive parameters of a Cobb-Douglas production function relating aggregate GDP to levels of three inputs: IT capital, non...

Higher social capital is associated with improved mental and physical health and reduced risk of premature mortality. We explored the relationship between five measures of structural social capital and 1) intermediate health outcomes (elevated C-reactive protein, cholesterol, blood pressure, and serum fibrinogen) and 2) distal outcomes (cardiovascular and all cause mortality). We did so using t...

The purpose of this study is to assess the thresholds at which military expenditure modulates the effect of terrorism on capital flight. We employed a panel data of 37 African countries from 1996-2010.The empirical evidence was based on: (i) baseline contemporary and noncontemporary OLS, (ii) contemporary and non-contemporary fixed effects regressions to account for the unobserved heterogeneity...

BACKGROUND Inadequate life habits are known to favor hypertension, and Adventists recommend healthy life habits. OBJECTIVE To assess the prevalence of hypertension among Seventh-Day Adventists from the inner São Paulo state and São Paulo state capital. METHODS This study assessed 264 Adventists (mean age, 41.17 ± 15.27 years; women, 59.8%) with a high religiosity level assessed by use of th...

In this paper we study copula-based models for aggregation of operational risk capital across business lines in a bank. A commonly used method of summation of the value-at-risk (VaR) measures, that relies on a hypothesis of full correlation of losses, becomes inappropriate in the presence of dependence between business lines and may lead to over-estimation of the capital charge. The problem can...

We argue that combined observations of galaxy rotation curves and gravitational lensing not only allow the deduction of a galaxy’s mass profile, but also yield information about the pressure in the galactic fluid. We quantify this statement by enhancing the standard formalism for rotation curve and lensing measurements to a first postNewtonian approximation. This enhanced formalism is compatibl...

The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) has been used by policymakers and research analysts to provide information on a wide array of topics about the Medicare Program. Nonresponse bias is potentially one of the most important threats to the validity of the estimates from the MCBS. In this article we present results of our methodological study that analyzes the impact of nonresponse on M...

Abstract A desk top analysis was conducted to assess the feasibility and economics of introducing a fully mechanised combine harvesting system on several farms of a miller cum planter estate located in the KwaZulu Natal Midlands of South Africa. Machinery and equipment costing exercises based on row length, haul-out distance and harvester forward speeds were investigated. The outcome of the stu...