Transdisciplinary research partnerships: making research happen!

Health care professionals are expected to do more with less. Partnerships can be formed to gather information for research. Numerous opportunities exist for health care professionals to work with students in a wide variety of disciplines. Forming partnerships can result in a win-win situation for all involved.     

STATE DRUG CONTROL SPENDING AND ILLICIT DRUG PARTICIPATION

The purpose of this article is to estimate the effect of state criminal justice expenditures and state public health expenditures on deterring illicit drug use. The empirics are based on a demand-and-supply model of drug markets. The effect of a given expenditure on criminal justice or public health programs is dependent on the magnitude of the resulting shifts in the two functions and the demand price elasticity. A reduced form of the demand-and-supply model is also estimated. The data employed come from the 1990 and 1991 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). Data on state and local spending for drug-related criminal justice and drug-related public health programs were merged with the NHSDA. The main findings from the regression results are that drug control spending reduces drug use. However, the results suggest that for marijuana users, the marginal cost of drug control exceeds the social benefits of drug control. This may not be the case for users of other illicit drugs. Spending for drug enforcement by police and drug treatment is found most effective in deterring drug use. However, spending for correctional facilities is never significant, which suggests that a more efficient method of reducing drug use might be to reduce correctional facilities spending and increase spending on treatment.     

Cross-sectional performance and investor sentiment in a multiple risk factor model

Economists have long recognized the importance of information veracity in valuing risky securities. Market participants concerned about the credibility of information measures may require additional compensation to entice them to hold stocks with less transparent information. These same securities are expected to display greater sensitivities to measures of market sentiment. We find that investor sentiment sensitivities increase directly with multiple measures of opacity in the cross-section. Next we examine the extent to which sentiment sensitivities are priced in an asset pricing context. Using the Jha et al. (2009) model of conditional performance evaluation, we find an inverse relation between ex ante known investor sentiment and the marginal performance of opaque stocks. In contrast, translucent stocks exhibit relatively little variability in performance across levels of sentiment.     

The trade-off between agriculture and biodiversity in marginal areas: Can crofting and bumblebee conservation be reconciled?

Crofting is a low intensity agricultural system restricted to the Highlands and Islands of northern Scotland typified by small scale mixed livestock production and rotational cropping activities. As with other low intensity farming systems across Europe, crofting is changing in response to a range of socio-economic factors. This is having a negative impact on the populations of rare bumblebees that are associated with this agricultural system. In this paper we use an ecological-economic modelling approach to examine the likely impacts of introducing two different management options for conserving bumblebees on croft land-use and income. Two linear programming models were constructed to represent the predominant crofting systems found in the Outer Hebrides, and varying constraints on bumblebee abundance were imposed to examine the trade-off between conservation and agricultural incomes. The model outputs illustrate that in some instances it is likely that both agricultural profits and bumblebee densities can be enhanced. We conclude that policy-makers should take into consideration the type of farming system when designing cost-effective agri-environment policies for low intensity farming systems, and that improvements in bee conservation are not necessarily in conflict with maintaining farm income.     

Reconceptualizing entrepreneurial framework conditions

This report is an empirical examination of entrepreneurial framework conditions—the environmental conditions that encourage and support entrepreneurial activity at the national level. In particular, it attempts to validate the framework conditions employed in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a multi-year, multinational study of entrepreneurial activity widely used in entrepreneurship research. The validity of the GEM entrepreneurial framework conditions is examined using empirical analysis of data drawn from Global Competitiveness Report measures for 53 countries over 4 years. The data suggest an alternative conceptualization of entrepreneurial framework conditions: commercial munificence, technology openness, regulatory openness, and technology influx. These findings have implications for theorists and policy makers interested in antecedents to entrepreneurially based economic growth.