Impact of the economic downturn on nursing schools

The challenges posed by the economic downturn on baccalaureate nursing schools in the southeast as it relates to their perceptions of changes in the number of applicants, acceptance rates, employer recruitment efforts, and student clinical and job placement were explored. Responses from deans and program directors indicated nursing schools are experiencing negative effects of the economic downturn in the form of graduates having difficulty finding employment, decreased recruitment efforts from prospective employers, difficulty locating clinical placements for students, and no change in faculty applicants despite an increase in undergraduate student applicants as well as graduate student applicants. These multiple factors combined could signal the death knell for programs that are ill-prepared to deal with such a crisis. Programs need to be aggressive in their efforts to draw health care recruiters as well as qualified faculty applicants to their campuses. Nursing schools must be able to clearly show why their graduates are superior to other programs' graduates when competing for both highly qualified faculty applicants and prospective student employers.     

Effects of age, need for cognition, and affective intensity on advertising effectiveness

This paper explores how individual characteristics of age, need for cognition (NFC), and affective intensity (AI) interact with each other and with advertising appeal frames (i.e., rational, positive-emotional, negative-emotional) to influence ad attitudes, involvement, and recall. The mixed design study reveals that younger adults recall emotional messages, especially negative ones, better than rational ones, but recall does not differ for older adults across appeal frames. Older adults prefer rational and positive messages to negative-emotional messages but ad attitudes do not differ among younger adults across appeal frames. Finally, age interacts with AI, but not NFC, to influence ad responsiveness. Both age and AI influence ad attitudes such that older adults exhibit the most positive ad attitudes across all appeal frames.     

Impact of star and movie buzz on motion picture distribution and box office revenue

This study contributes to research on the impact that consumer buzz has on movie distribution and box office success by examining the impact of buzz generated about the individual stars and about the movie itself. The results indicate that movie buzz is instrumental in boosting box office revenue throughout the theatrical release, not just in the later run, as has been suggested in previous studies. Star buzz can enhance box office receipts during the opening week and can contribute to the public's anticipation of the movie pre-release. However, early buzz can have a negative impact on revenue during subsequent weeks if the movie fails to resonate with the audiences. Model simulations reveal that, even for poorly received films, the overall impact of star buzz is positive because the initial revenue boost normally outweighs the later decline. Thus, this study empirically demonstrates the positive impact of star buzz on revenue, which helps shed light on the long-standing debate regarding the importance of star participation in the success of a movie.     

Injury count model for quantification of risk of occupational injury

Reduction of risk of occupational injuries is one of the most challenging problems faced by industry. Assessing and comparing risks involved in different jobs is one of the important steps towards reducing injury risk. In this study, a comprehensive scheme is given for assessing and comparing injury risks with the development of injury count model, injury risk model and derived statistics. The hazards present in a work system and the nature of the job carried out by workers are perceived as important drivers of injury potential of a work system. A loglinear model is used to quantify injury counts and the event-tree approach with joint, marginal and conditional probabilities is used to quantify injury risk. A case study was carried out in an underground coal mine. Finally a number of indices are proposed for the case study mine to capture risk of injury in different jobs. The findings of this study will help in designing injury intervention strategies for the mine studied. The job-wise risk profiles will be used to prioritise the jobs for redesign. The absolute indices can be applied for benchmarking job-wise risks and the relative indices can be used for comparing job-wise risks across work systems.     

Boosting the Employment Rate of Older Men and Women

European countries need to expand employment among older individuals. Many papers have examined this issue from different angles. However, very few seem to have considered its gender dimension properly, despite evidence that lifting the overall senior employment rate requires significantly raising that of women older than 50. The key issue examined by this paper is whether employers are willing to employ more older workers, in particular older women. The answer depends to a large extent on the ratio of older individuals’ productivity to their cost to employers. To address this question we tap into a unique firm-level panel of Belgian data to produce robust evidence on the causal effect of age/gender on productivity and labour costs. We take advantage of the panel structure to identify age/gender-related differences from within-firm variation. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production function estimation literature, we address the problem of endogeneity of the age/gender mix, using a structural production function estimator (Olley and Pakes in Econometrica 64(6):1263–1297, 1996; Levinsohn and Petrin in Rev Econ Stud 70(2):317–341, 2003) alongside IV-GMM methods where lagged value of labour inputs are used as instruments. Our results indicate a small negative impact of larger shares of older men on the productivity-labour cost ratio. An increment of 10%-points of in their share causes a 0.17–0.69%-point contraction. However, the main result is that the equivalent handicap with older women is larger, ranging from 1.3 to 2.0%-points. This is not good news for older women’s employability. And the vast services industry does not seem to offer working conditions that mitigate older women’s disadvantage, on the contrary.     

Emergency preparedness and response

In order to select routes that minimize risk, government officials need information about the material being transported and its sources and destinations, the risks involved, shipping patterns, and emergency response capabilities.