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Unemployment insurance (UI) reduces the opportunity cost of leisure, but it is unknown whether this additional leisure time is physically active. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of UI on physically active leisure participation, I exploit changes in UI program legislation across US states and time. Using nationally representative monthly data between 2003 and 2010 from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), I find evidence that both state UI eligibility expansions and increases in maximum allowable state UI benefits coincide with greater probability of physical activity among the recently unemployed. Based on point estimates, state UI eligibility expansions increased the probability of physical activity participation by 8–10 percentage points among the unemployed with less than a high school education, while a 10% increase in the maximum allowable state UI benefit increased the probability of physical activity by 0.3 to 0.6 percentage points among the unemployed who have completed high school or some college.

The chapter describes the SHL Corporate leadership model (Bartram, 2002) and the results of an investigation of leadership competency potential in 11 different European countries (39,354 people). The measures of potential used are eight competency factors known as the ‘Great Eight’ (Bartram, 2005) derived from Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ32) scale scores. The results show some very clear trends in terms of effects of managerial experience and effects of gender on competency potential profiles. While there are differences in patterns of results between countries, these tend to be relatively small and non-systematic. The gender and experience effects, on the contrary, are consistent across countries. Overall, we find that transactional competencies decrease and transformational competencies increase with increases in level of managerial experience and that females show generally lower levels of transformational competencies and higher levels of transactional competencies than males. These findings are discussed in relation to the literature on gender differences in leadership.

The authors construct an intertemporal model of rent-maximizing behavior on the part of a timber harvester under potentially multidimensional risk as well as geographical heterogeneity. Subsequently, the authors use recursive methods (specifically, the method of stochastic dynamic programing) to characterize the optimal policy function – the rent-maximizing timber-harvesting profile. One noteworthy feature of their application to forestry in the province of British Columbia, Canada is the unique and detailed information the authors have organized in the form of a dynamic geographic information system to account for site-specific cost heterogeneity in harvesting and transportation, as well as uneven-aged stand dynamics in timber growth and yield across space and time in the presence of stochastic lumber prices. Their framework is a powerful tool with which to conduct policy analysis at scale.