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Over the past three decades, the U.S. economy experienced a sharp increase in the labor-force participation of women, causing a similar increase in the demand for non-parental child care. Concurrent with these developments has been a dramatic rise in the prevalence of childhood obesity, prompting the question as to what extent the increase in child-care utilization is responsible for the growth in obesity. This chapter examines the impact of various child-care arrangements on school-age children's weight outcomes using panel data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). An advantage of the ECLS-K for our purposes is that it tracks children's child-care arrangements between Kindergarten and the 5th grade. Our fixed-effects' results suggest that non-parental child-care arrangements are not strongly associated with children's weight outcomes. Our findings are robust to numerous sensitivity and subgroup analyses.

Using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this chapter investigates the impact of individual drug use on robbery, burglary, theft, and damaging property for juveniles. Using a variety of fixed-effects models that exploit variations over time and between siblings and twins, the results indicate that drug use has a significant impact on the propensity to commit crime. We find that the median impact of cocaine use on the propensity to commit various types of crimes is 11 percentage points. The impact of using inhalants or other drugs is an increase in the propensity to commit crime by 7 percentage points, respectively.

Six papers on individual behaviour are included in this volume. The first three are devoted to the determinants of individual consumption behaviour, the next two analyse the impact of individual substance use on labour market performance and criminal activities, respectively, while the last one challenges recent research, which claims that the increase in the prescription of antidepressants is the major factor behind the observed reduction in suicide rates during the 1990s.

In March 2010, President Obama signed into law the most broad and sweeping reform of health care in U.S. history. This was done at a time when aggregate medical expenses are significantly higher than they have ever been:

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the causal effect of vocational high school (VHS) education on employment likelihood relative to general high school (GHS) education in Turkey using Census data.

To address non-random selection into high school types, the authors collect construction dates of the VHSs at the town level and use various measures of VHS availability in the town by the age of 13 as instrumental variables.

The first-stage estimates suggest that the availability of VHS does not affect the overall high school graduation rates, but generates a substitution from GHS to VHS. The OLS estimates yield the result that individuals with a VHS degree are around 5 percentage points more likely to be employed compared to those with a GHS degree. When the authors use measures of VHS availability as instruments, they still find positive and statistically significant effect of VHS degree on employment likelihood relative to GHS degree. However, once they include town-level controls or town fixed effects, IV estimates get much smaller and become statistically insignificant.

The authorsconclude that, although VHS construction generates a substitution from GHS to VHS education, this substitution is not transformed into increased employment rates in a statistically significant way.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the significant factors determining foreign direct investment (FDI) in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (ASEAN3) and Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore (ASEAN5).

This paper applies the first differencing technique to estimate the parameters on the constructed panel data starting from 2000 to 2011.

Due to the different stages of economic development between ASEAN3 and ASEAN5, the determinants of FDI are different. We found that there are significantly positive effects of infrastructure facility, level of openness, and negative effect of inflation on FDI inflow in ASEAN3; while real exchange rate, gross domestic product and net official development assistance have no effect on its FDI. The finding in ASEAN5 showed that market size and infrastructure facility are significant factors to attract FDI. Furthermore, even though there are an increase in inflation rate as well as a decrease in level of openness measurement, ASEAN5 are still attractive to foreign investors.

The time variant and invariant unobserved effects that are ignored in the previous studies are considered in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to report the investigation on obtaining a high-porosity Cu-based structure which was sintered successfully using direct laser sintering and to reveal the mechanisms of obtaining high porosity and acceptable strength simultaneously as well as the effect of NaCl content on characteristics of the sintered samples.

Experimental study has been performed. The powder mixture utilized in this experiment includes metal powder (Cu and Cu3P mixture) and porogen [sodium chloride (NaCl)]. Scanning electron microscope, energy-dispersive X-ray analysis and the Archimedes density measurement were used to detect the characteristics of the sintered sample and to reveal the mechanism of forming high porosity and strength structure.

More than 57 per cent porosity can be achieved while the structural strength is acceptable, and the infiltrated experiment verifies the pores in the structure are inter-connected. During laser sintering, NaCl powder melts and brings a larger amount of liquid phase, inducing large rearrange force and fast rearrangement of Cu particles. Therefore, after NaCl is removed, the dense and strong longer-bar shape tracks with larger amount of pores in the microstructure can be obtained. The size of pores as well as the porosity of the sintered sample increase with the NaCl content in the powder mixture.

The mechanism of obtaining high porosity and acceptable strength simultaneously was revealed. The effect of NaCl content on characteristics of the sintered samples was also disclosed.