The international empirics of management.

A country's national income broadly depends on the quantity and quality of workers and capital. But how well these factors are managed within and between firms may be a key determinant of a country's productivity and its GDP. Although social scientists have long studied the role of management practices in shaping business performance, their primary tool has been individual case studies.

Deficient functional wound closure as measured by elevated trans-epidermal water loss predicts chronic wound recurrence: An exploratory observational study.

A single-center, prospective, observational pilot study was performed to evaluate wound healing endpoint and recurrence by measuring transepidermal water loss (TEWL) post-closure at the site of wound repair. Patients with clinically-defined chronic wounds (such as pressure ulcers, diabetic ulcers, and trauma wounds) who visited the Plastic Surgery outpatient department or were in-patients at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh, India, and were referred for chronic wound management, were enrolled. Non-invasive point-of-care TEWL measurements were obtained, from closed wound-site and contralateral healthy skin site, starting from confirmation of closure (post-closure, V0) continuing every 2 weeks for a maximum of five visits or until the wound recurred.

Proxy Survey Cost Indicators in Interviewer-Administered Surveys: Are they Actually Correlated with Costs?

Survey design decisions are-by their very nature-tradeoffs between costs and errors. However, measuring costs is often difficult. Furthermore, surveys are growing more complex.

Universal Full-Day Kindergarten and Maternal Labor Supply: A Life-Cycle Analysis.

We estimate the effect of state-level policies enacting universal free full-day kindergarten on mothers' labor supply using a life-cycle analysis. Similar to previous research on childcare and labor supply, we find that free full-day kindergarten increases labor force participation rates for mothers whose youngest child is kindergarten-aged by 4.3 to 7.

Coordination dynamics between fuel cell and battery technologies in the transition to clean cars.

Significant progress reconciling economic activities with a stable climate requires radical and rapid technological change in multiple sectors. Here, we study the case of the automotive industry's transition to electric vehicles, which involved choosing between two different technologies: fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) or battery electric vehicles (BEVs). We know very little about the role that such technological uncertainty plays in shaping the strategies of firms, the efficacy of technological and climate policies, and the speed of technological transitions.

Self-Reported Disability Type and Risk of Alcohol-Induced Death - A Longitudinal Study Using Nationally Representative Data.

Background: Disability is associated with alcohol misuse and drug overdose death, however, its association with alcohol-induced death remains understudied.

Objective: To quantify the risk of alcohol-induced death among adults with different types of disabilities in a nationally representative longitudinal sample of US adults.

Methods: Persons with disabilities were identified among participants ages 18 or older in the Mortality Disparities in American Communities (MDAC) study ( = 3,324,000).

Positive affect and heart rate variability: a dynamic analysis.

Traditional survey methods can provide noisy data arising from recall, memory and other biases. Technological advances (particularly in neuroscience) are opening new ways of monitoring physiological processes through non-intrusive means. Such dense continuous data provide new and fruitful avenues for complementing self-reported data with a better understanding of human dynamics and human interactions.

Unlocking the importance of perceived governance: The impact on COVID-19 in NUTS-2 European regions.

In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, governments implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Previous literature suggests that NPI effectiveness is influenced by governance quality. The acceptance and perceived necessity of these measures by the public are crucial to their success, as NPIs cannot be easily enforced without public support.

On the determinants of anti-COVID restriction and anti-vaccine movements: the case of IoApro in Italy.

Following restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19, and subsequent vaccination campaigns, sentiments against such policies were quick to arise. While individual-level determinants that led to such attitudes have drawn much attention, there are also reasons to believe that the macro context in which these movements arose may contribute to their evolution. In this study, exploiting data on business activities which supported a major Italian anti-restriction and anti-vaccine movement, IoApro, using quantitative analysis that employs both a fractional response probit and logit model and a beta regression model, we investigate the relationship between socio-economic characteristics, institutional quality, and the flourishing of this movement.

Mathematical Modeling for the Assessment of Public Policies in the Cancer Health-Care System Implemented for the Colombian Case.

The incidence of cancer has been constantly growing worldwide, placing pressure on health systems and increasing the costs associated with the treatment of cancer. In particular, low- and middle-income countries are expected to face serious challenges related to caring for the majority of the world's new cancer cases in the next 10 years. In this study, we propose a mathematical model that allows for the simulation of different strategies focused on public policies by combining spending and epidemiological indicators.

Fear itself.

Among non-pharmaceutical measures for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most important is the implementation of lockdowns. The cost and effectiveness of this policy remains a much-debated topic in economics. In this study we investigate whether a 'fear effect' is at work in influencing the effectiveness of lockdowns.

Assessing the effectiveness of mandatory outdoor mask policy: The natural experiment of Campania.

Face masks are possibly the main symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic. Once rarely used in Western countries, in the last two years they have become an object it is impossible to leave one's home without. Italy made their use a legal requirement, even outdoors, from late 2020 to early 2022.

Community matters: Heterogeneous impacts of a sanitation intervention.

Sanitation is at the heart of public health policies in most of the developing world, where around 85% of the population still lack access to safe sanitation. We study the effectiveness of a widely adopted participatory community-level information intervention aimed at improving sanitation. Results from a randomized controlled trial, implemented at scale in rural Nigeria, reveal stark heterogeneity in impacts: the intervention has immediate, strong and lasting effects on sanitation practices in less wealthy communities, realized through increased sanitation investments.

The effect of self-esteem on the spread of a pandemic. A cross-country analysis of the role played by self-esteem in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Extant research on COVID-19 suggests that many socio-economic determinants, by affecting personal behavior, have influenced the evolution of the pandemic. In this paper we study the role played in this regard by average levels of self-esteem in the public. There are reasons to believe that both low and very levels of self-esteem may have an effect on the spread of COVID-19, for opposite reasons.

Large losses from little lies: Strategic gender misrepresentation and cooperation.

This paper investigates the possibility that a small deceptive act of misrepresenting one's gender to others reduces cooperation in the Golden Balls game, a variant of a prisoner's dilemma game. Compared to treatments where either participants' true genders are revealed to each other in a pair or no information on gender is given, the treatment effects of randomly selecting people to be allowed to misrepresent their gender on defection are positive, sizeable, and statistically significant. Allowing people to misrepresent their gender reduces the average cooperation rate by approximately 10-12 percentage points.

In COVID We Trust: The Impact of The Pandemic on Religiousness-Evidence from Italian Regions.

By changing many aspects of everyday life, the COVID-19 pandemic and the social distance policies implemented to face it have affected the behaviour of people all over the world. Has the pandemic also affected people's approach towards the divine? Previous evidence suggests that prayer searches on the Internet rose during the pandemic and that people tend to rely mainly on intrinsic rather than extrinsic religiousness to cope with adversity. In the present contribution, using a set of panel random effect estimators, we compare the change in religious attendance in Italian regions before and during the pandemic.

Is There a Male-Breadwinner Norm? The Hazards of Inferring Preferences from Marriage Market Outcomes.

This paper argues that distributions of spousal earnings gaps provide no identifying information for the male breadwinner norm, nor such a norm's consequences for gender inequality. First, we show that simple marital matching models-without norm-related assumptions-closely replicate U.S.

Male Earnings Volatility in LEHD before, during, and after the Great Recession.

This paper is part of a coordinated collection of papers on prime-age male earnings volatility. Each paper produces a similar set of statistics for the same reference population using a different primary data source. Our primary data source is the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure files.

Macrofinancial information on the post-COVID-19 economic recovery: Will it be V, U or L-shaped?

We use standard macrofinancial no-arbitrage term structure models to forecast key macroeconomic variables such as GDP. Simple adaptations to the models are proposed in order to generate plausible forecasts in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The financial market variables included in the models are shown to improve GDP forecasts.

Your vaccine attitude determines your altitude. What are the determinants of attitudes toward vaccination?

Attitudes toward vaccination are doubtless an important determinant of public health, and this became evident after the first year of the last COVID-19 pandemic. The issue, long-debated within European societies, especially with respect to occasional surges of diseases in given years, has become a crucial determinant of the wellbeing of a country since 2021. In this study, using microdata from a 2019 Eurobarometer survey, we frame and deepen our knowledge about the main determinants of vaccination attitudes as observed by the related literature.

US Embassy air-quality tweets led to global health benefits.

The World Health Organization estimates that over 90% of the world's population is exposed to hazardous levels of local air pollution. Air pollution is markedly worse in low- and middle-income countries, yet air-quality monitoring is typically sparse. In 2008, the US Embassy in Beijing began tweeting hourly air-quality information from a newly installed pollution monitor, dramatically improving the information on air quality available to Beijing residents.

The role of mentalizing capacity and ecological language diversity on irony comprehension in bilingual adults.

Diverse bilingual experiences have implications for language comprehension, including pragmatic elements such as verbal irony. Irony comprehension is shaped by an interplay of linguistic, cognitive, and social factors, including individual differences in bilingual experience. We examined the relationship between individual differences related to bilingualism, specifically, the capacity to understand others' mental states and ambient exposure to language diversity, on irony comprehension.

Persistent Vulnerabilities in the World of Work and Contemporary Capitalism: Some Reflections on India.

The onslaught of COVID-19 has been catastrophic for India's world of work. While it was a bolt out of the blue, its impacts on employment need to be located in the context of a long-term and ongoing structural crisis of (un) employment and systemic vulnerabilities (and subsequent burgeoning of 'labour reserves') that have tended to worsen during the neo-liberal regime. Using the various EUS and subsequent PLFS rounds for roughly the last two decades, the paper seeks to highlight selected aspects of the vulnerabilities and inequities that have plagued India's world of work.

Carrot and stick: Economic support and stringency policies in response to COVID-19.

To address the economic losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, countries have implemented, together with policies aimed at stopping the spread of the virus, a mixture of fiscal and monetary measures. This work investigates the effect of containment policies and economic support measures on economic growth in the short run, investigating a time window of six quarters in a cross country perspective. Our results confirm the existence of a negative effect of stringency measures on GDP; we also detect a positive effect from economic support measures.

Exploring Surgeons', Nurses', and Patients' Information Seeking Behavior on Medical Innovations: The Case of 3D Printed Biodegradable Implants in Breast Reconstruction.

Objectives: To explore information seeking behavior on medical innovations.

Background: While autologous and alloplastic options for breast reconstruction are well established, it is the advent of the combination of 3D printing technology and the biocompatible nature of a highly porous biodegradable implants that offers new treatment options for the future. While this type of prosthesis is not yet clinically available understanding how patients, surgeons, and nurses take up new medical innovations is of critical importance for efficient healthcare provision.