Qualitative business survey data are used widely to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional indicators exploit only aggregate survey information, namely the proportions of respondents who report “up” and “down”. This paper examines disaggregate or firm-level survey responses. It considers how the responses of the individual firms should be ...

The least well known structure of the Galaxy is its central region, because of the high extinction, the crowding and the confusion between disk and bulge sources along the line of sight. We show how the structure of the inner Galaxy and the dust distribution can be strongly constrained by using red clump stars as distance indicator. The results of this method applied on the deep near-infrared s...

sthma is a common malady, affecting persons of all ages. Much of ur understanding of the natural history of this condition has come from comlnunity-based studies,12 including the Harvard Six Cities Study, discussed elsewhere in this issue (see article by Speizer, this issue). However, information on prevalence of asthma, mortality due to asthma, and the impact of the disease in the US populatio...

Abstract: Measures of households’ expectations are frequently obtained using household surveys. Examples are questions on subjective survival and health expectations in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). It is tempting to relate subjective expectations to measures of past and planned behavior, but the cognitive processes that generate the answers to such questions are still not well underst...

Our purpose was to determine pediatric endocrinologists' knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and practices (KABPs) regarding recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) treatment, examine care-related attitude consensus or discordance, and identify evidence-based practice gaps. We developed a survey for National Cooperative Growth Study (NCGS) investigators (N = 711) to elicit their KABPs regarding GH s...

The Combined EIS-NVSS Survey Of Radio Sources (CENSORS) is a 1.4 GHz radio survey selected from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) and complete to a flux-density of 7.2 mJy. It targets the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS) Patch D, which is a 3 by 2 square degree field centred on 09 51 36.0 −21 00 00 (J2000). This paper presents the results of spectroscopic observations of 143 of the 150 CENSORS sources. Th...

This paper studies nonmarket institutions that facilitate exports. In Malawi, as in many other developing countries, farmers face numerous constraints that disconnect them from export markets. We explore the role of a local institution, the burley tobacco clubs, in bridging smallholders to exports. Burley clubs potentially enable farmers to increase their tobacco farming productivity by providi...

BACKGROUND We explored racial/ethnic differences in perceived cancer risk and determinants of these differences in a nationally representative sample of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. METHODS Multiple regression techniques, including mediational analyses, were used to identify determinants and quantify racial/ethnic differences in the perception of the risk of developing cancer among ...