How responsive is body weight to transitory income changes? Evidence from rural Tanzania

We use time-series of rainfall to estimate the response of body weight to transitory changes in household income in rural Tanzania. We find that the response of body weight to income changes is positive on average, but that the impact is highest for female children, and lower for adults. For female children, a ten-percent increase in household income implies an increase in body weight by about 0.4 kg. In contrast, the body weight of adolescents and young adults is virtually invariant to income changes.     

The Prescribing Physician’s Influence on Consumer Choice Between Medically Equivalent Pharmaceuticals

This paper reports on a study of the prescribing physician??s influence on consumers?? choice between medically equivalent pharmaceuticals. The study was performed using a dataset of 666,000 observations in which consumers were asked whether they were prepared to pay the price difference in order to obtain the prescribed pharmaceutical instead of the cheapest available substitute. The main results support the hypothesis that prescribing physicians have an impact on consumers?? choice between medically equivalent pharmaceutical products.     

The concept of psychological capital: a comprehensive review

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive view on the concept of psychological capital (PsyCap) and develop an agenda for future research. PsyCap describes an individual’s psychological capacity that can be measured, developed, and managed for performance improvement. The higher-order construct comprises the psychological resources self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience, and has been linked with a range of desirable work attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes. By analyzing and structuring the existing literature on PsyCap, we identified several research gaps that require further analysis. In particular, we encourage researchers to expand the research on the effects of PsyCap to other workplace-related domains, especially the field of strategic decision-making, we call for researchers to further study the relationship between emotions and PsyCap, and we suggest to analyze the effects of PsyCap in the context of strategic human resources management. Also, future studies should establish transparency on the interaction between organizational change processes and PsyCap as well as the relative importance of the four components of PsyCap. We close by discussing the implications of our findings for corporate practice, such as employee selection and development.