We studied the prevalence of influenza A virus in wintering waterfowl from the Central Flyway on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Of 5,363 hunter-harvested migratory and resident waterfowl and wetland-associated game birds sampled during 3 consecutive hunting seasons (September-January 2006-07, 2007-08, and 2008-09), real-time reverse transcription-PCR detected influenza A matrix sequences in 8.5% of s...

The UK Road Fund was set up in 1921 and financed by earmarked taxes, but was unsuccessful as a form of road finance and abandoned in 1937. The paper examines why earmarking failed and what problems arise for replacing road taxes by hypothecated road charges. These charges would need to be regulated and could evolve into a more efficient system of road pricing. The paper claims that recent exper...

We analyze positive theories of redistribution, social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework. Political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents. Voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of current political choices on future political and economic outcomes. The theory is consistent with larg...

Using an individual panel data set to control for student fixed effects, we estimate the impact of charter schools on students in charter schools and in nearby traditional public schools. We find that students make considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in public schools. The large negative estimates of the effects of attending a charter schools are neith...

It is vividly debated how the ongoing process of European integration will a¤ect the need and scope for welfare state activities. To some this process signals that welfare state activities have to be rolled back, while others stress that international integration may increase the need for (explicit or implicit) social insurance arrangements. This paper discusses these issues by first considerin...

This paper measures the extent to which the presence of religious state-funded secondary schools in England impacts on the educational experiences of pupils who attend neighbouring schools, whether through school effort induced by competition or changes in peer groups induced by sorting. National administrative data is used to estimate pupil test score growth models between the ages of 11 and 1...

Often democracy is defeated by democratically elected leaders who pursue undemocratic policies. The present contribution seeks to explain how information can a¤ect the danger of incompetent or populist politicians being elected into o¢ ce. It is shown with the help of a voting model that both the proportion of informed voters in a society and the state of the economy matter for determining who ...

s tructural change is defined as a change in the relative weight of the important constituents of the macro-economic indicator such as production, taxes, imports and exports, workforce etc. since the structure change is one of the main reasons for the growth and economic development of countries, the investigation of the trend of changes in economic important constituents is important. tax as a...

the features of helicobacter pylori adhesins, their interactions with their host counterparts, regulated and selective gene expressions are amongst the many clever strategies this microorganism undertakes to survive the otherwise sterile gastric milieu. the ingenious crafting of these interactions and the respective host reactions govern, in part, an array of consequences ranging from asymptoma...