Governments are present-biased toward spending. Fiscal rules are deficit limits that trade off commitment to not overspend and flexibility to react to shocks. We compare centralized rules — chosen jointly by all countries — to decentralized rules. If governments’ present bias is small, centralized rules are tighter than decentralized rules: individual countries do not internalize the redistribu...

In a recent paper published in this journal entitled Cognition and the compassion deficit: the social psychology of helping behaviour in nursing, John Paley analyzes the two reports by Robert Francis on the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust (Mid Staffs) and suggests that, contrary to the findings and the general consensus both inside and outside the nursing profession, there was no ‘failure of compas...

PURPOSE To investigate visual function and ocular features in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). METHODS Fifty-one children underwent a detailed ophthalmologic evaluation. Thirty-two were diagnosed with ADHD, and 19 children with attention deficit disorder (ADD). The mean age was 9.9±3.1 years. RESULTS The average best-corrected visual acuity of the better-seeing...

OBJECTIVE It has come to be generally accepted that low levels of lead exposure may result in mental deficit. This causal inference is based on claimed time precedence of the lead exposure and on biological plausibility. The objective of this study is to argue that mental deficit causes pica which causes lead exposure (i.e. to support the theory of reverse causation). METHODOLOGY The literatu...

Symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) often co-occur. The DSM-IV had specified that an ASD diagnosis is an exclusion criterion for ADHD, thereby limiting research of this common clinical co-occurrence. As neurodevelopmental disorders, both ASD and ADHD share some phenotypic similarities, but are characterized by distinct diagnostic crit...

investigation of physiological responses to water deficit in sesame (sesamum indicum l.) genotypes can help to identify effective mechanisms of plant resistance to stress. therefore, chlorophyll content, proline, soluble carbohydrates, net photosynthesis rate, stomatal conductance, maximum quantum efficiency (fv/fm), plant height and shoot dry weight in a complete block factorial pot experiment...

Characteristic symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have been recognized in the medical literature for over 200 years. The earliest known clinical description is found in the book by the Scottish physician Sir Alexander Crichton, entitled An Inquiry into the Nature and Origins of Mental Derangement (Crichton, 1798, as cited in Baumeister et al., 2011). In the chapter, “At...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether parent perceptions about care (barriers, disorder knowledge, treatment willingness) vary among children who drop out of or stay in publicly funded care for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and to explore whether parent perceptions are predictive of staying in care over time. METHODS A longitudinal cohort study of 529 children ages 5 to 11 years rece...

BACKGROUND This study aims to establish if adult patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and childhood Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms would be more frequently within the bipolar spectrum than depressed patients without childhood ADHD. METHODS This study was carried out in outpatients recruited by psychiatrists in private practice, with 3963 participants being i...

In 2004, the federal budget deficit stood at $412 billion and reached 4.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Though not at a record level, the deficit as a fraction of GDP is now the largest since the early 1980s. Moreover, the recent swing from surplus to deficit is the largest since the end of World War II (Figure 1). The flip side of deficit spending is that the amount of government de...