Effects of Using Mean Scores in Regression Models: An Example From Environmental Psychology

Multiple regression analysis with grouped data is often used as a method for exploring environmental preferences, the preferred unit for measurement in such analyses is mean scores rather than individual scores.Although this procedure allows us to reduce the potential for error in measuring different variables and, as a consequence of this, improves the reliability of the technique, it also produces some additional, undesirable effects. The latter include artificial increases in R² values which give the impression that a high degree of fit has been achieved for the regression model. Indeed, this goodness fit often appears to be better than that which could have been achieved by using individual scores. Further, given that different studies operate with differing numbers of subjects in their groups, the R² scores which result from the analyses of these groups are not directly comparable.In the following discussion, we demonstrate how any value, other than zero for correlations between variables, can be increased, at will, by simply expanding the number of subjects in each group. We present the specialised formulae used for quantifying this increase and offer a warning about the purely relative nature of any study which bases its conclusions on models of regression analysis using grouped data.     

金融传染理论与政策取向

一个地区的流动性冲击能通过金融传染扩散到其他地区,完全的金融市场对于金融传染是稳健的,而不完全市场面对金融传染则是脆弱的,另外金融抑制能对金融传染的扩散起到短期抑制作用。     

Economic factors affecting the increase in obesity in the United States: Differential response to price

A sharp increase in obesity during the last 15 years in the United States became one of the nation’s main public health problems. The theory of rational addiction seems to explain human behavior in food consumption leading to obesity reasonably well. The interesting thing about our results is that the tax policy, normally used to correct various distortions, is to serve in this case as the preventive policy: additional taxes on future prices of the addictive (sweet) foods contribute to lower sugar consumption and BMI at present time. On the other hand, increasing education level is usually considered a preventive type of policy. In this case, it leads to lowering the levels of the BMI in already overweight and obese population.     

Yoga ?ffnet obere Atemwege

Zusammenfassung  YOGA bei Gesundheitsproblemen — Die bewusste Atmung ist ein st?ndiger Begleiter aller Yogahaltungen. Die Atmung erleichtert das Hineingehen in eine Haltung. Komplement?r dazu schafft diese Haltung eine Erweiterung des Atemraums. Das wird am Beispiel der Fischposition deutlich.     

“Surprise Gift” Purchases: Customer Insights from the Small Electrical Appliances Market

Surprise gifts offer more business opportunities than gifts suggested by recipients, because a larger part of the selection and purchase processes can be molded, and such gifts are especially valued by recipients. Yet the extant gift-giving literature explicitly takes into account neither the giver's intention to surprise nor the consequences for the gift selection and purchase processes. The present study investigates surprise gifts from the giver's point of view and disentangles the selection and purchase processes of surprise gifts and gifts that are not meant as surprises. The hypotheses emerge as a consequence of the enhanced pleasure and experiential motivation underlying surprise gifts, as well as their greater inherent perceived risk. According to panel data, design and money-back guarantees are more important for the purchase of surprise gifts (compared with non-surprise gifts), whereas good deals appear less important, and brand name does not seem to matter any more than it does for gifts not intended as a surprise. Also, surprise gifts more often are bought on the spot than non-surprise gifts, without extended information search (similar to impulse purchases), by women alone, and for someone within the household. Finally, the giver usually has a poorer idea of what he or she wants to buy before entering the shop and visits fewer stores to purchase surprise gifts. However, the last three results apply only to appliances which often serve as gifts. These insights lead to significant managerial implications for retailers and manufacturers.     

Examining multi-functionality for crop yield and ecosystem services in five systems of agroecological intensification

Agroecological intensification (AEI) integrates ecological principles and biodiversity management into farming systems with the aims of increasing farm productivity, reducing dependency on external inputs, and sustaining or enhancing ecosystem services. This review develops an analytic framework to characterize the fulfilment of these objectives by documenting the co-occurrence of positive, neutral, and negative outcomes for crop yield and nine regulating ecosystem services. We provide an illustrative examination of the framework, evaluating evidence for yield and ecosystem service outcomes across five AEI systems: conservation agriculture, holistic grazing management, organic agriculture, precision agriculture, and system of rice intensification (SRI). We reviewed 104 studies containing 245 individual comparisons between AEI and contrasting farming systems. In three of the five AEI systems, conservation agriculture, precision agriculture, and SRI, more than half of reviewed comparisons reported ‘win-win’ outcomes, enhancement of both yield and ecosystem services, or ‘win-neutral’ outcomes relative to contrasting farming systems. The review presents substantial evidence that the five AEI systems can contribute to multi-functional agriculture by increasing ecosystem service provision, or reducing negative externalities associated with agriculture, while maintaining or increasing yields. A framework such as the one presented here can help guide decision-makers considering how best to implement multi-functional agriculture so that both crop yield and ecosystem service delivery can be maintained or increased.     

Reading Brand Africa Geopolitically: Nation Branding,Subaltern Geopolitics and the Persistence of Politics

In 2010, the ‘Brand Africa’ initiative was launched with the mission to transform perceptions of Africa from a continent of calamities into one of promising economic prospects and entrepreneurial populations. This transformation, ‘Brand Africa’ claims, is one where Africans take their representation from the hands of foreigners and make, through a new image, their own (hi)story. In this respect Brand Africa can be interpreted as a form of subaltern geopolitics seeking to subvert dominant geopolitical knowledge and to fight established structures of domination. However, the article argues its subversive elements are limited, especially when compared to the historical discourses of decolonial pan-Africanism upon which it draws for legitimacy. Indeed, while appropriating this legacy Brand Africa offers up a very different geopolitical vision of possible/desirable African futures. It is argued that this may be accounted for by understanding the extent to which the Brand Africa initiative appears embedded within a South African national context and its own geopolitical ambitions evident within its own nation branding project. What this highlights in turn is that the emancipatory potential and assumed synergies between national and supranational branding central to the Brand Africa initiative are not as unproblematic or uncontested as claimed.     

INTERNATIONAL CORPORATE TAX AVOIDANCE: A REVIEW OF THE CHANNELS,MAGNITUDES, AND BLIND SPOTS

This paper reviews the rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations. It surveys evidence on the main channels of corporate tax avoidance including transfer mispricing, international debt shifting, treaty shopping, tax deferral, and corporate inversions. Moreover, it performs a meta-analysis of the extensive literature that estimates the overall size of profit shifting. We find that the literature suggests that, on average, a 1 percentage-point lower corporate tax rate will expand before-tax income by 1%—an effect that is larger than reported as the consensus estimate in previous surveys and tends to be increasing over time. The literature on tax avoidance still has several unresolved puzzles and blind spots that require further research.     

The Effect of Providing Monetary Information on Energy Savings for Household Appliances: A Field Trial in Spain

Journal of Consumer Policy - Energy labels are one of the most widely used policies in the European Union for increasing the energy efficiency of household appliances. However, their effectiveness...     

Boards and Sustainability: the Contingent Influence of Director Interlocks on Corporate Environmental Performance

This paper highlights the importance of a firm's board with respect to sustainability issues by analysing the relationship between director interlocks, i.e. directors who simultaneously belong to the boards of directors of several companies, and a firm's environmental performance. The previous literature has focused on the influence of firm‐level resources on corporate environmental performance. This study utilizes insights from a resource‐based view and research on social capital to demonstrate that the environmental performance of a firm is also influenced by the difficult‐to‐imitate capabilities that are embedded in the network relationships of its directors. Our results support a contingency perspective of the social capital theory that finds that director interlocks are positively connected with the environmental performance of a firm in two specific situations: (1) when the firm is linked to a larger parent company and (2) in cases of low and high levels of interlock diversity. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.