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There has been substantial interest in US cesarean rates, which increased from 5% of deliveries in the 1970s to nearly one-third of births by the mid-2000s. Explanations typically emphasize individual risk factors (e.g., advanced maternal age, increased BMI, and greater desire for control over delivery) of women giving birth, or address institutional factors, such as the medicalization of childbirth and the culture of liability leading physicians to practice defensive medicine. We focus here on another non-medical explanation – childbirth education (CBE). CBE is an important, underexplored mechanism that can shape women’s expectations about labor and birth and potentially lead them to expect, or desire, a cesarean delivery as a normalized outcome. We analyze data from three waves (2002, 2006, 2013) of the Listening to Mothers national survey on US women’s childbearing experiences (n = 3,985). Using logistic regression analysis, we examined both mode of delivery (vaginal versus cesarean), and attitudes about future request for elective cesarean among both primiparous and multiparous women. Despite previous research suggesting that CBE increased the likelihood of vaginal delivery, we find that CBE attendance was not associated with likelihood of vaginal delivery among either primiparous or multiparous women. However, both primiparous and multiparous women who attended CBE classes were significantly more likely to say they would request a future, elective cesarean. Furthermore, these effects were in the opposite direction of effects for natural birth attitudes. Our findings suggest that contemporary CBE classes may be a form of “anticipatory socialization”, potentially priming women’s acceptance of medicalized childbirth.

Home visiting is a strategy widely implemented to support families following the birth of a baby. There is a broad consensus that home visiting programmes are successful. But there is little understanding of factors moderating this success. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between maternal involvement in a nurse home visiting programme, maternal depression, and adjustment to the parenting role.

A retrospective design was employed in which the medical records of 40 mothers who had been enroled in a nurse home visiting programme were examined. The number of nurse home visits from birth to six months, maternal depressive symptoms, Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) and responsivity scores were examined. Mothers had been selected for the programme if they had a history of mental illness, were in a violent relationship, or reported drug or alcohol problems.

A significant, positive relationship was found between maternal involvement, positive HOME environment and maternal responsivity scores. Furthermore, the mothers with the highest scores for HOME environment and responsivity to their infant ' s cues at six months were mothers experiencing deteriorating symptoms of depression. These mothers had the highest levels of involvement with the programme. Despite their mothers’ deteriorating mental health, infants whose mothers received the greatest number of visits from a nurse received the greatest benefit ameliorating their risk for developing poor attachment and impaired behavioural, emotional and cognitive development.

This is the first study to examine the relationship between changes in maternal depression and programme outcomes in a home visiting programme. It is one of the first explorations of the relationship between maternal involvement and programme outcomes in a targeted nurse home visiting programme to prevent child maltreatment. The findings from this study are critical to future home visiting programme development and evaluation.

Recent research has examined the effect of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, more commonly known as the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB), on the market value of U.S. commercial banks, life insurers, property-liability insurers, thrifts, finance companies, and securities firms. This study fills a gap in our understanding of the Act by measuring the price and trading volume effects of the GLB on U.S.-listed foreign banks. A primary contribution of this study is to examine the role, if any, of two corporate governance perspectives, the stakeholder (code law), and shareholder (common law) models, in a cross-sectional analysis of foreign bank market reaction to the GLB.

Using a generalized least squares (GLS) portfolio approach, Corrado's rank statistic, and confirmed by the traditional market model approach, we find significant negative share price reactions to certain legislative announcements surrounding the passage of the GLB. Trading volume reactions corroborate the significant share price responses. In general, our results indicate that investors in foreign banks reacted negatively to key legislative action. In a cross-sectional analysis, younger, higher-risk foreign banks with less concentrated ownership and more subordinated debt from countries with higher quality accounting standards appear to have more positive (or less negative) share price reactions.

Interrelated conflict and transformation are associated with post World War II U.S. military. Conflicts within the command structure are depicted by military officers in their writings. Transformation, characterised by military sociologists as a process of “civilianisation,” has informed understanding over the past few decades. However, neither the officer‐writers‘ “close‐up” perspective nor, in retrospect, the sociologists’ sanguine formulations effectively interrelate structural transformation and conflicts in command. In this respect, these literatures suggest relevant analogies: officer‐writers reflect existential crisis not unlike many traditional peoples experiencing consequences of externally induced economic change; sociological characterisations of “civilianisation,” like those of “modernisation,” fail to account for adverse and conflictual consequences of such “development”. Both the “crisis in command” and sociological failures to explicate it may be related to political economy's transformation of the military. That is the argument entailed in this article.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

Introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2013.

Provides information about each source, discusses the characteristics of current scholarship and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine trading costs of both acquiring firms and target firms differentiated by method of payment, mode of acquisition, and deal attitude around merger and acquisition (M&A) announcements. The author calculates four spread measures of trading costs: quoted spread, percentage quoted spread, effective spread, and percentage effective spread.

Differences in spreads differentiated by M&A characteristics are calculated and two‐sample t‐tests applied. A linear regression model is developed to test whether changes in trading costs are related to acquiring firm's post‐merger price performance. The regression is estimated by OLS method.

It is found that various methods of payment affect the spreads of target firm differently on certain days around M&A announcement. For acquiring firms, significant differences are found in spreads between cash offers and stock offers, and between stock offers and mix offers. Significant difference was not found in spreads between cash offers and mix offers. The mode of acquisition affects the bid‐ask spreads of target firms only, but not those of acquiring firms. Deal attitudes affect the spreads of target firms on and after M&A announcements. It was also found that all four spread measures are significantly linked to acquiring firms’ post‐merger daily returns.

Further study can be done on mechanisms through which M&A characteristics impact trading costs.

This study suggests that M&A characteristics affect firms’ spreads and that changes in spreads need to be accounted for in explaining acquiring firms’ post‐merger daily returns.

The paper fills in an important gap in existing literature by examining trading costs of acquiring firms around M&A announcements. It provides additional evidence on the anomaly of acquiring firm's negative post‐merger returns. The paper is intended to help improve the understanding of trading costs and the behavior of the market participants in response to a major corporate event.

This chapter investigates the cost of public debt for firms using a comprehensive sample consisting of 17,368 industrial bond issues from 1970 to 2011. The empirical evidence shows that yield spreads for seasoned bond issues are significantly lower than those for initial bond issues. This seasoning effect is robust across different sample periods, subsamples, and model specifications. On average, the yield spreads for seasoned bond issues are around 50 bps lower than those for initial bond issues. This difference cannot be explained by other bond and firm characteristics. The seasoning effect is more pronounced for firms with higher levels of uncertainty, lower information disclosure quality, and longer time intervals between the first and subsequent issues. Our empirical findings provide supportive evidence for the extant theories that aim to rationalize the information role in determining the cost of capital.

The theory presented suggests that underwriters are both advisors and independent agents in the issuerʼs attempt to send “signals” of quality to investors by making pre-IPO organizational changes. These pre-IPO gambits are intended to increase IPO proceeds, and preemptively address potential investor concerns that would deter them from subscribing. These organizational changes initially can financially benefit founders, early investors and underwriters. But they can also have a longterm impact that some issuers, especially founders, would prefer to avoid. Utilizing signaling and resource-based power, we find that underwriter power is significantly associated with making pre-IPO gambits and lower levels of underpricing.