How Effective are Interventions to Enhance Adherence to Psychiatric Medications? Practice Implications for Social Workers Working With Adults Diagnosed With Severe Mental Illness

This study integrates eight systematic reviews of adherence enhancement interventions to develop practice guidelines for social workers who work with adults who do not adhere to prescribed psychiatric medications. Findings indicate that existing investigations are disparate in their adherence definitions, methodologies employed, and sampling strategies, rendering it difficult to construct overall guidelines for social work practice. However, themes associated consistently with increased adherence are collaboration between clients and providers regarding medication decisions, consistent follow-up care, and a comprehensive network of professionals and caregivers who support clients in their use of medication to facilitate stabilization of mental health symptoms.     

Dynamic Financial Constraints: Distinguishing Mechanism Design From Exogenously Incomplete Regimes

We formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit/insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment. We compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes (autarky, saving only, borrowing and lending in a single asset). We develop computational methods based on mechanism design, linear programming, and maximum likelihood to estimate, compare, and statistically test these alternative dynamic models with financial/information constraints. Our methods can use both cross‐sectional and panel data and allow for measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate the models using data on Thai households running small businesses from two separate samples. We find that in the rural sample, the exogenously incomplete saving only and borrowing regimes provide the best fit using data on consumption, business assets, investment, and income. Family and other networks help consumption smoothing there, as in a moral hazard constrained regime. In contrast, in urban areas, we find mechanism design financial/information regimes that are decidedly less constrained, with the moral hazard model fitting best combined business and consumption data. We perform numerous robustness checks in both the Thai data and in Monte Carlo simulations and compare our maximum likelihood criterion with results from other metrics and data not used in the estimation. A prototypical counterfactual policy evaluation exercise using the estimation results is also featured.     

Effects of Context and Feelings on Perceptions of Genetically Modified Food

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the role of feelings in framing perceptions and decisions about risk, yet no study has specifically examined the impact of feelings on perceptions/judgments about biotechnology. This exploratory study investigated current perceptions of genetically modified (GM) food to examine (1) the effects of context (making judgments about GM food at the same time as rating other current areas of concern), and (2) the effect of feelings of dread (integral affect) and background feelings of stress (negative incidental affect) on risk judgments about GM food. An established psychometric method (semantic differential task) used with a sample of 126 adults (recruited "topic-blind," mostly from a student population) showed that, when rated in the context of other current concerns such as human cloning and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), there was less concern about GM food than might have been anticipated. Participants were recruited "topic-blind" in order to ensure that they were unaware that the focus of the research was on GM food specifically (and thus preventing biased recruitment to the study). Relative to 19 other current concerns GM food was "not dreaded," not viewed as "unethical," was judged as "controllable," and was seen as the least "risky" of all the issues studied. GM food was viewed as a "hot topic," a new risk, and as relatively unnatural (although it was not the highest rated concern on this scale). Ratings of risks across concerns by individuals experiencing high levels of negative incidental affect (stress) did not differ significantly from those reporting low stress.     

On the influence of market structure in modelling the US copper industry

Many of the contemporary models used to describe the behavior of the mineral industries assume a competitive market i.e. one in which market price is equal to marginal production cost. One such recent model of the worldwide copper industry is the MIDAS-II model developed for the Bureau of Mines [3, 4]. This model is used to project production and prices up through the year 2000. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of the assumed market structure in the construction of these forecasts. If the market structure of the US copper industry is assumed to be comprised of a few large firms (an oligopoly), then forecasts based upon exactly the same data base differ significantly from the competitive market assumption.     

Women and citizenship post‐trafficking: the case of Nepal

This article analyses the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship embedded in models of citizenship in the Global South, specifically in South Asia, and the meanings associated with having – or not having – citizenship. It does this through an examination of women's access to citizenship in Nepal in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the ‘new’ Nepal ‘post‐conflict’. Our analysis explores gendered and sexualized constructions of citizenship in this context through a specific focus on women who have experienced trafficking, and are beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and actively lobby for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. Building from this, in the final section we consider important implications of this analysis of post‐trafficking experiences for debates about gender, sexuality and citizenship more broadly.     

Migrant earnings gaps in Gulf Cooperation Council countries: Employers' perceptions or opportunity costs?

This article discusses earnings differentials among skilled Western, Arab and Asian migrants, who constitute most of the private sector labour force in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, during the period 2012–14. Using two standard decomposition methodologies, it investigates the view that Westerners are paid premium rates due to the unobserved perceptions of private employers. The results indicate that while one‐third to three‐quarters of real hourly earnings differentials are attributable to differing observed levels of productivity‐related characteristics, the remainder are due to the incorporation of higher opportunity costs for Westerners into the bargaining process. The potential effect of unobserved perceptions is found to be irrelevant to observed earnings differentials.     

INTEGRATED HOUSEHOLD SURVEYS: AN ASSESSMENT OF U.S. METHODS AND AN INNOVATION

We present a vision for improving household financial surveys by integrating responses from questionnaires more completely with financial statements and combining them with payments data from diaries. Integrated household financial accounts—balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows—are used to assess the degree of integration in leading U.S. household surveys, focusing on inconsistencies in measures of the change in cash. Diaries of consumer payment choice can improve dynamic integration. Using payments data, we construct a statement of liquidity flows: a detailed analysis of currency, checking accounts, prepaid cards, credit cards, and other payment instruments, consistent with conventional cash flow measures and the other financial accounts. (JEL D12, D14, E41, E42)     

Product value matrices help firms to focus their efforts

In management theory a gap seems to exist between consumer buying behaviour and the economic life cycles of products. This gap is the subject of this paper using product value matrices (PVMs). Brought together in this paper are some well-known theories dealing with consumer behaviour, buying behaviour and product life cycles (PLCs), in a manner that provides useful information to all firms. Too often it is found that these theories are elegant in isolation, but provide little help in focusing a company's efforts. Consumer behaviour has been researched for many decades, as has product life cycles, but the link between consumer buying behaviour and economic life cycles of products is mystical, with most chief executive officers (CEOs) believing it occurs like magic. The paper initially develops frameworks describing the economic life cycles of products and consumer buying behaviour. The paper then links the frameworks with the product value matrix and illustrates how they can be used in focusing a firm's efforts.