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This study examined the secular trends in socioeconomic inequality in obesity during the period 1971–1994 in the United States. We analyzed the national representative data collected from three waves of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) conducted between those years. The Concentration Index was calculated to measure the socioeconomic inequality in obesity across gender, age, and ethnic groups in each survey period. In general, socioeconomic inequality in obesity was reduced between the 1970s and 1990s in women and black men, although the trend was not statistically significant for black women and was stable in white men. Our results indicate that, first, the association between obesity and socioeconomic status (SES) weakened over time, and second, SES inequality was not an important contributor to the dramatic increase in the prevalence of obesity in the United States. Our findings suggest that other social and environmental factors, which have influenced changes in people’s lifestyle, might better explain the increasing overweight problem in the United States. Effective intervention efforts for the prevention and management of obesity should target all SES groups from a population perspective.

This study contributes to the understanding of the health effects of pesticides exposure and of how pesticides have been and should be regulated.

This study presents literature reviews for the period 2000–2013 on (i) the health effects of pesticides and on (ii) preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, as well as a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis applied to pesticide regulatory measures.

This study indicates that the health literature has focused on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, i.e. farmers, while the literature on preference valuation has focused on those with indirect exposure, i.e. consumers. The discussion highlights the need to clarify the rationale for regulating pesticides, the role of risk perceptions in benefit-cost analysis, and the importance of inter-disciplinary research in this area.

This study relates findings of different disciplines (health, economics, public policy) regarding pesticides, and identifies gaps for future research.

Relative bipolarisation indices are usually constructed making sure that they achieve their minimum value of bipolarisation if and only if distributions are perfectly egalitarian. However, the literature has neglected discussing the existence of a benchmark of maximum relative bipolarisation. Consequently there is no discussion as to the implications of maximum bipolarisation for the optimal normalisation of relative bipolarisation indices either. In this note we characterize the situation of maximum relative bipolarisation as the only one consistent with the key axioms of relative bipolarisation. We illustrate the usefulness of incorporating the concept of maximum relative bipolarisation in the design of bipolarisation indices by identifying, among the family of rank-dependent Wang–Tsui indices, the only subclass fulfilling a normalisation axiom that takes into account both benchmarks of minimum and maximum relative bipolarisation.

Currently, most research about the autism spectrum has examined Caucasian autistics. Consequently, African American autistics have not received much attention from scholars. This chapter begins with an overview of statistics from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about the population of Black and Latino autistics in the United States from 2000 to 2016. Plausible reasons for why there is a lack of research about African American autistics are then presented along with a section about the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in autism spectrum research. Four strategies that can improve the production of research about African American autistics are then presented. The purpose of presenting these strategies is to help stimulate the production of research about African American autistics.

The original contribution that this chapter makes to the field of autism spectrum research is to inform the reader about the lack of research about African American autistics in comparison to other ethnicities.

With the advance of the Silk Road Initiative proposed by China, it has been a focus of China government to develop strategic emerging industries. The development of strategic emerging industries needs the support of competitive intelligence on many aspects such as strategical planning, policy making, industrial structure adjustment, and technology innovation. However, so far there are few studies toward the competitive intelligence systems for strategic emerging industries. In this article, we focus on a number of issues related to the competitive intelligence for strategic emerging industries in China. First, we conduct a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis on the situations of strategic emerging industries in China, based on which the necessity of building a competitive intelligence (CI) service system for strategic emerging industries is discussed. Next, the authors present a framework of a CI service system for strategic emerging industries in China. The principles, components, working process, and product forms are deeply described. The CI service system proposed in this article consists of a cooperation network platform, three layered organizations, and three systems, which integrates organizations, information, people, network, and service platforms into an ecosystem to offer competitive intelligence supports for government, industry, and enterprises. Finally, the authors discuss a case study of the proposed CI service system for the new energy automobile industry.

This chapter summarizes a meta-analysis of 72 studies (N= 20,701) that link customer mistreatment (abusive, nasty, and rude behavior of customers toward employees) to psychological, attitudinal, and behavioral strains. Results showed that customer mistreatment related significantly to a variety of psychological and attitudinal strains (emotional exhaustion, emotional strain, job (dis)satisfaction, turnover intentions, perceived organizational support, and supervisor support) and behavioral strains (reduced customer service performance and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) directed toward organizations and customers). These results were similar to those found with general mistreatment, suggesting that mistreatment by organizational outsiders might have similar effects to mistreatment from organizational insiders. These results suggest a clear association of mistreatment with strains, but recent work is discussed that questions the typical assumption that mistreatment leads to CWB rather than the reverse.

The relative bipolarisation literature features examples of indices which depend on the median of the distribution, including the renowned Foster–Wolfson index. This study shows that the use of the median in the design and computation of relative bipolarisation indices is both unnecessary and problematic. It is unnecessary because we can rely on existing well-behaved, median-independent indices. It is problematic because, as the study shows, median-dependent indices violate the basic transfer axioms of bipolarisation (defining spread and clustering properties), except when the median is unaffected by the transfers. The convenience of discarding the median from index computations is further illustrated with a numerical example in which median-independent indices rank distributions according to the basic transfer axioms while median-dependent indices do not.

Like many countries, the US government-imposed travel restriction policies on selected countries with a high spread of COVID-19 airports to prevent the introduction and spread of COVID-19. Between March 2020 and October 2021, travellers from China, Iran, European Schengen countries, the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and India were restricted with some exceptions. The main objective with this study was to explore the associations between COVID-19 cases and death rates, and the proximity to airports, train stations and time of public transportation. To address the study objective, the authors used the most recent JHU COVID-19 database, the American Community Survey and Airport and Amtrak data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics from 3,132 US counties. The authors categorised the counties into three groups according to their distance from an airport: less than 25 miles, between 25 and 50 miles and more than 50 miles. The authors then ran negative binomial regressions and Cox regression models, adjusted for population density, population race/ethnicity, travel time, being close to an international airport and the main sources of commutes. The findings showed that the number of airports, the number of train station and the length of commuting time were predictors for the number of deaths and cases in a county. The authors found that counties within 25 miles of an airport had 1.372 times the rate of COVID-19 cases and 1.338 times the rate of COVID-19 deaths compared to the counties that were more than 50 miles from an airport. To prevent the introduction and spread of COVID-19 and any similar pandemic that transfers by air, the timing of the travel restriction policy is a crucial element. Policymakers and officials in transportation and public health should collaborate to promulgate policies and procedures to prevent the spread of airborne infectious diseases.

This paper uses a simple analytic model to analyze the problem of tax evasion by a monopolist subject to price ceiling regulation. Prior research had explored tax evasion decisions of a monopolist in a non-regulatory environment. However, since monopolies often operate in a regulatory environment, it is important to examine how a regulated monopolist makes its tax reporting decisions. This paper shows that under certain conditions, an increase in the effective price ceiling increases tax evasion. The production decision of the monopolist however is unaffected by tax evasion parameters. A social planner, attempting to maximize social welfare, subject to a revenue constraint, can achieve optimality in a number of ways; with or without full compliance.