Effects of ethyl alcohol on injuries severity according to injury severity scales in pedestrian fatal injury in traffic crashes

Abstract

Introduction: The dominant cause of injuries in traffic crashes. A significant portion of them affects victims under the influence of ethyl alcohol. The goal of the studies was to assess the correlation between the state of sobriety and the severity of injuries expressed by injury severity scales in fatal pedestrian victims of traffic crashes. Research Material and Method: The data were obtained from the Warsaw Medical University's Department of Forensic Medicine. The analysis covered the data for 2009–2013 and included 200 fatal pedestrian victims hit by passenger cars. The assessment of the effect of risk factors on injury severity expressed in terms of injury severity scales such as Life Threat Indicator (LTI), International Classification based Injury Severity Score (ICISS), Injury Severity Score (ISS) and New Injury Severity Score (NISS), was made using adequately selected methods of statistical analysis. Results: As alcohol concentration increases in women, the values of LTI, ICISS-10 and ICISS-15 decrease, which denotes more severe injuries. In the ISS and NISS, the effect of alcohol concentration on the severity of injuries turned out to be negligible. However, these injuries are significantly heavier in women than in men. According to all the scales used, the older the victims, the milder injuries cause their death. Conclusions: The studies show that ethyl alcohol concentration may harm injury severity, especially in the case of women. The assessment of the severity of injuries in traffic crash victims is significantly influenced by their age and gender. The more risk factors the scale takes into consideration, the more precise is the assessment.     

Individual wages and regional market potential

In this article, we study wage determinants in Poland by employing the augmented NEG wage equation that controls for individual worker characteristics. Our analysis is based on the Labor Force Survey (LFS) conducted by the Polish Central Statistical Office (CSO) for the period 1999–2009. Using annual data on about 10,000 Polish workers in 16 regions, we find that a significant fraction of inter‐individual wage differences can be explained by the geography of access to markets.     

Multinational Firms, International Knowledge Flows, and Dual Labor Markets in Developing Economies

This paper seeks to explain how the expansion of multinational firms in a developing economy affects its labor market variables, such as wages in indigenous firms, the average wage level and total employment. Three potential effects: the transfer of foreign knowledge and the associated technological change, diffusion of this knowledge among indigenous firms, and the inflow of the physical capital from abroad, are examined under two possible scenarios: fixed and unlimited labor supply. The results obtained depend on the organization of the labor market in the host country, differences in capital intensity between multinational and local sectors, the amount of physical capital transferred to the host country from abroad, as well as the magnitude of knowledge spillovers stemming from multinational activity to indigenous firms. The predictions of the model are more consistent with empirical observations reported in empirical studies than those of other theoretical studies existing in the literature.     

Burn-in for a time-transformed exponential model

The problem of the optimal duration of a burn-in experiment is considered in the case of simultaneous testing n components with the conditionally independent time-transformed exponential life-times, given an unknown parameter. The explicit solution is derived by reformulation of the problem considered to an optimal stopping problem for a suitable defined three-dimensional Markov process and reduction to a free-boundary problem.     

The Limits of Discipline: Ownership and Hard Budget Constraints in the Transition Economies

The existing literature on soft budget constraints suggests that firms may be subsidized for political reasons or because of the creditors' desire to recover a part of the sunk cost invested in an earlier period. In all these models hard budget constraints are viewed as being, in principle, capable of inducing the necessary restructuring behaviour on the level of the firm. This paper argues that the imposition of financial discipline is not sufficient to remedy ownership and governance-related deficiencies of corporate performance. Using evidence from the post-communist transition economies, the paper shows that a policy of hard budget constraints cannot induce successful revenue restructuring, which requires entrepreneurial incentives inherent in certain ownership types (most notably, outside investors). The paper also shows that the policy of hard budget constraints falters when state firms, because of inferior revenue performance and less willingness to meet payment obligations, continue to pose a higher credit risk than privatized firms. The brunt of state firms' lower creditworthiness falls on state creditors. But the 'softness' of these creditors, while harmful in many ways, is not necessarily irrational, if it prevents the demise of firms that are in principle capable of successful restructuring through ownership changes.     

Sharp bounds on moments of generalized order statistics

Sharp lower and upper bounds on expected values of generalized order statistics are proven by the use of rearranged Moriguti's inequality. The method yields improvements of known quantile and moment bounds for expectations of order and record statistics based on independent identically distributed random variables. The bounds are attainable providing new characterizations of two-point distributions. Received: January 1999     

On perfect equilibria in stochastic models of growth with intergenerational altruism

Summary. The well-known model of altruistic growth/strategic bequest is studied. A stochastic transition function is considered and fairly general sufficient conditions for the existence of Markov-stationary subgame-perfect equilibrium are given. Also some special cases in which the equilibrium policy is continuous and nondecreasing are discussed.Received: 20 September 2003, Revised: 11 December 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C73, D91, O40.Research was partially supported by KBN grant 5 PO3A 01420.     

External Openness and Economic Growth in Developing Countries

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between two channels of external openness: international trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and the rate of economic growth implied by the leader–follower model. The predictions of the theory are tested for the group of 97 developing countries in the period of 1974–2006 using static and dynamic panel data estimation methods. The estimation results show that both international trade and FDI positively contribute to growth.