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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the evidence base of the Food Dudes healthy eating programme, specifically the short- and long-term effectiveness of the intervention for consumption of fruit and vegetables both at school and at home and displacement of unhealthy snack consumption.

Articles were identified using Academic Search Complete, PsycARTICLES, Medline and PubMed databases keywords for the period January 1995 to August 2013. Articles were included if they reported an empirical evaluation of the Food Dudes programme aimed at children aged between 4-11 years. Articles were included regardless of geographical location and publication type (i.e. published and “grey” literature).

Six articles were included for review. Findings indicated that the programme was moderately effective in the short term; however, the long-term effectiveness of the programme is unknown. The ability of the programme to generalise to the home setting and to displace unhealthy snack foods also requires further investigation.

This is the first independent review of the Food Dudes programme. In light of the extensive roll out of the Food Dudes programme, an appraisal of the evidence surrounding the programme is timely. The review highlights that sustaining fruit and vegetable intake cannot be achieved through behaviour-based interventions alone and the long-term maintenance of fruit and vegetable consumption requires more than the implementation of an intervention found to be effective in a controlled research environment.

There is widespread concern that children consume too few fruit and vegetables and as a result are likely to incur health problems. This paper outlines a series of studies in which an intervention that combines video‐based peer modelling with rewards has been shown to be very effective in enabling children to eat a variety of fruit and vegetables that previously they rejected. These effects have been very substantial and long lasting. The procedure has been used successfully in children’s own homes and, as this paper shows in particular detail, in school settings.

The importance of socially just leadership has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years as integral for tackling issues of disadvantage and inequality across education and schooling systems. However, there are still remaining questions about what these leadership practices look like in the everyday work of school leaders. This chapter draws on a research project to embed Indigenous perspectives in schools as an example of socially just leadership. The links between Indigenous communities and schools are a key focus area for improving educational outcomes for Indigenous students. This project sought to bring Indigenous community members into classrooms in six schools in New South Wales, Australia. Community members were recruited to work with teachers as co-constructors of learning activities that explicitly value and work with Indigenous perspectives. This chapter outlines the positive outcomes from this project as well as challenges faced by schools, teachers, principals, and community members as part of this culturally responsive work. The practices of community members, teachers, and principals are theorized using the notion of culturally responsive leadership. The chapter argues for an approach to leadership that is grounded in culturally responsive understandings to improve the educational outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous students and the cultural understanding and awareness of non-Indigenous students, to better promote reconciliation. This chapter provides a concrete example of powerful leadership practices that are working towards equity and social justice for their schools and communities. While the cases are specifically from the Australian context, they are relevant for a variety of schooling contexts and leadership practices.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Department of Health and carried out by Social and Community Planning Research and MRC Dunn Nutrition Unit, the dental hospitals of the Universities of Newcastle and Birmingham and the Department of Epidemiology of the University of London, this research forms part of the National Diet and Nutrition Survey. Set up in 1992 the surveys cover representative groups of the population and examine the diet of the over‐65s in terms of actual dietary intake, habits, energy and nutrient intakes, physical measurements. Regional and socio‐economic comparisons are made.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between loose monetary policy, low inflation, and easy bank credit and house price booms.

Using a panel of 11 OECD countries from 1920 to 2011 we estimate a panel VAR in order to identify loose monetary policy shocks, low inflation shocks, bank credit shocks, and house price shocks.

We show that during boom periods there is a heightened impact of all three “policy” shocks with the bank credit shock playing an important role. However, when we look at individual house price boom episodes the cause of the price boom is not so clear. The evidence suggests that the house price boom that occurred in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s was not due to easy bank credit.

Shocks from the shadow banking system are not separately identified. These are incorporated into the fourth “catch-all” shock.

Our evidence on housing price booms that expansionary monetary policy is a significant trigger buttresses the case for central banks following stable monetary policies based on well understood and credible rules.

This paper uses historical evidence to evaluate the relative importance of three main causes of house price booms. Our results bring into question the commonly held view that loose bank credit was to blame for the U.S. house price bubble of the later 1990s.

Introduction: The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 highlighted the importance of financial cycle fluctuations. While the regulatory response was to mandate higher bank capital requirements during the financial cycle upswing, academic research focussed on identifying the best performing early warning indicators to forecast financial cycle fluctuations that have proven to be often unrelated to business cycle changes. To safeguard the global financial system against the financial cycle fluctuations, Basel Committee of Banking Supervisors, based on first strands of empirical evidence, proposed the credit-to-GDP gap as the headline indicator tied to the countercyclical capital buffer. However, later research on this indicator identified certain concerns, among them subpar performance for economies with short available data series.

Aim of the Study: To this end this study aims to analyse various financial cycle indicators from a unique perspective of their potential viability under limited historical data availability.

Methods: For this purpose, a meta-study of existing research is carried out as well as an empirical study to compare performance of certain indicators for the sample of six countries in the Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European region, where long data series are not available.

Main Findings: It was found that certain approaches, among them calculation of raw credit growth rate and application of Hamilton filter, can supplement or possibly even outperform the Basel credit-to-GDP gap indicator under limited data availability.

Conclusion: Author concludes that for limited time series Basel credit-to-GDP gap can be potentially outperformed by other indicators and further research in this currently under-studied field is warranted.

Originality of the Paper: By using various financial cycle indicators that already proven their early warning prediction powers from previous research, this study focusses on their potential viability under limited historical data availability. Respective findings might be appreciated for supplementing policy-makers’ toolkits as complementary indicators in cases where there is no available long time series for financial cycle estimation, for example, such as countries that entered market economies relatively late.

This study is based on previous research which suggests that the Dudes programme increases children's fruit and vegetable consumption for school-provided meals by assessing its effectiveness in increasing the provision and consumption of fruit and vegetables in home-provided meals.

Two cohorts of children participated from six schools in the West Midlands in the UK, one receiving the Food Dudes intervention and a matched control group who did not receive any intervention. Participants were children aged four to seven years from six primary schools, three intervention (n=123) and three control schools (n=156). Parental provision and consumption of fruit and vegetables was assessed pre-intervention, then three and 12 months post-intervention. Consumption was measured across five consecutive days in each school using digital photography.

No significant increases in parental provision or consumption were found at three or 12 months for children in the intervention schools, however, increases were evident for children in the control group.

Further development of the Food Dudes programme could develop ways of working with parents and children to increase awareness of what constitutes a healthy lunch.

This is the first independent evaluation to assess the influence of the Food Dudes programme on parental provision and children's consumption of lunchtime fruit and vegetables.