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Advertisements often use fear appeals to encourage prevention focused behaviors. This approach has been somewhat successful in changing attitudes and behaviors, often encouraging consumers to secede from behaviors such as smoking or to adopt preventative behaviors such as engaging in health screenings. However, health-care marketers have been less successful in efforts to reduce obesity. The obesity crisis has led to an abundance of marketing communications designed to influence weight loss. Many of these focus on fear of physical health risks associated with being overweight which have a certain degree of uncertainty surrounding them. This study aims to examine financial threats that have lower perceptions of uncertainty, and the differential impact this type of threat has on elements of the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM).

A 2 × 2 experimental design is used to examine the differential impact of messages communicating threat of financial and physical risk on evoked fear, perceived uncertainty, perceived susceptibility, efficacy and intention to lose weight.

Overall results indicate that response to weight loss advertising varies given the type of threat presented. Results indicate that there is a greater level of uncertainty associated with physical health threats than that with financial threats. Moreover, even though individuals were more fearful of and felt more susceptible to physical threats, when they believed that the recommended behavior was feasible, financial threat was more influential.

To encourage weight loss and intentions to lose weight advertising in practice and advertising research primarily focus on the physical health risks associated with being overweight as a motivating factor. Current research explores the impact of financial threats on attitudes and behavioral intention and finds that financial threats are perceived as more certain than physical threats, and the communication of financial threats is more salient in its effect on weight loss intentions. An opportunity for future research is to further explore the impact of uncertainty in relation to components of EPPM and how threats varying in degrees of uncertainty may impact weight loss intentions.

Technological progress renders various skills obsolete, however, the rate of skill obsolescence will vary according to the worker's human capital investments. Workers heavily invested in general skills, such as education, will not suffer high rates of obsolescence, while less-educated workers who invest more in “technology-specific” skills will suffer more when the technology is changed. Consistent with this framework, this chapter demonstrates that increasing randomness is the primary source of inequality growth within uneducated workers, whereas inequality growth within educated workers is determined more by predictable factors. Furthermore, this chapter shows that increasing randomness generates a “precautionary” demand for education.

This paper considers how new technologies affect the returns to experience and how experience affects the adoption of new technologies. Whereas the traditional vintage model emphasizes skill obsolescence generated by imperfect transferability of skills across technologies, we consider the possibility that new technologies complement existing skills. Consistent with the vintage model, among college graduate men, young workers have adopted computers most intensively and the returns to experience have been flat. Among high school graduate men however, experienced workers have adopted new technologies most intensively and the returns to experience have increased, pointing toward complementarities between existing skills and new technologies.

Who works, how much one works, and what one earns are the cornerstones of labor economics. However, determining the answers to these questions can be tricky because many factors are involved in estimating labor supply, explaining the implications of labor demand, and determining the resulting earnings. This volume contains 13 chapters on these components of the labor market. Five deal directly with labor supply; four deal with labor demand, most notably the effect of cyclical demand fluctuations; and the remaining four deal with compensation, particularly wages, wage distributions, and fringe benefits.

This volume is devoted to a number of multifaceted issues regarding worker well-being. Of the 15 chapters, the first two are the most general, dealing with overall earnings distribution and overall changes in welfare policy. The remaining chapters examine specific aspects of human welfare. They cover fertility, disability, minimum wage, pension wealth, human capital investment, migration, health, and earnings. The book culminates with four chapters relating to gender and the family. Ultimately, determining who works, how much is earned, and how these earnings get distributed define the components of individual and social welfare. The topics covered in this volume shed light on these questions.