The Effects of Nutrition Label Comparison Baselines on Consumers' Food Choices

Recent legislative changes in the European Union have mandated nutrition labeling for the majority of pre‐packaged foods. This research compared effects of several nutrition labeling formats on consumers' food choices (i.e., the nutrition table, GDA 100 g/ml, and GDA portion). We primarily focused on whether nutrition label information was standardized to a fixed or varying comparison baseline. Fixed baselines (e.g., 100 g/ml) allow consumers to make direct, relative comparisons of products, while varying baselines (e.g., portion size) often require consumers to undertake complex mathematical calculations. Findings suggest that consumers' food choices are likely to be healthier when nutrition label information is presented on a fixed baseline. Gender was found to moderate these effects such that women made healthier choices—but only when the nutrition label baseline was fixed. Thus, the type of comparison baseline is an important characteristic of nutrition labels for public policymakers, public health officials, and academic researchers to consider.     

Consumer involvement in health research: a UK scoping and survey

Consumer involvement or patient and public involvement (PPI) in health research is a UK policy imperative and a prerequisite for many funders. PPI in research is defined as research carried out with or being carried out by the public (or service users), rather than research on patients and public as subjects or participants. Despite the clear policy driver, there is relatively little empirical evidence on the extent, processes and impact of user involvement in research. This paper aims to add to the international evidence base on PPI in research by providing a key overview of current trends and impacts. In order to understand the current extent and variation of PPI in research, a scoping exercise and survey were carried out on selected UK studies. Six research topic areas (cystic fibrosis, diabetes, arthritis, dementia, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and public health) were selected to ensure a range of designs, study populations and histories of PPI in research. A total of 838 studies (non‐commercial studies and not older than 2 years) were contacted. The response rate for the scoping was 38% and the survey 28%. In the scoping, 51% of studies had some evidence of PPI and in the survey 79%. The most common PPI activity was steering committee membership and reviewing patient information leaflets. There appeared to be some blurred roles with patients participating as research subjects as well as carrying out patient involvement roles. A major finding was the limited amount of available information about PPI in publicly accessible research documents. We suggest that the invisibility of this type of involvement and the lack of routinely collected information about PPI results in a lack of shared understanding of what optimal PPI in a study should look like, with important implications for practice. Furthermore, without a framework to review PPI it is difficult to know if different approaches to PPI have a different impact on key outcomes of the research.     

Does school matter for educational achievement? a two-way nested-error components analysis

School effectiveness is a much-debated question both at an analytical level and as a policy issue. In this paper we used a two-way nested-error components educational production function model to evaluate the relative importance of latent class and school variables in explaining student school achievement. The analysis is carried out with a sample of Montreal francophone public elementary school students. As for the observable variables, the empirical results suggest that the latent class and school variables are negligible with respect to the latent personal and socioeconomic variables. Related policy issues are discussed in the conclusion.     

Local investors,price discovery,and market efficiency

This study examines the effect of locally informed investors on market efficiency and stock prices using large power outages, which are exogenous events that constrain trading. Turnover in stocks headquartered in an outage area with 0.5% of U.S. electrical customers drops by 3–7% on the first full day of the outage, and bid–ask spreads narrow by 2.5%. Firm-specific price volatility is 2.3% lower on blackout dates. This effect is larger for smaller, lesser-known stocks and in higher income areas. Consistent with a valuation discount and higher expected returns for stocks with more informed traders, firms with a one-standard-deviation higher local trading propensity have market-to-book values that are 5% lower, Tobin's Q that is 6% lower, annualized four-factor alphas that are 1.2% higher, and average spreads that are 6.5% higher. Together, the evidence suggests that informed investors contribute disproportionately to both liquidity and price discovery, and that these contributions are reflected in valuations and expected returns.     

Challenges facing international projects for entrepreneurial development in South Africa

International development projects that support entrepreneurship face a number of challenges, not least because they need to integrate different paradigms. Based on the case study of a Canadian non-governmental organisation in South Africa, this paper provides an exploratory assessment of these challenges and highlights four major factors that affect the success of such international projects: transposing a northern business model to the south; developing local roots and adapting to the local context; balancing the allocation of resources between managing the project and providing services to entrepreneurs; and aligning the cultures of the private sector and international development agencies. In practical terms, the findings provide benchmarks for the success of these projects and could help improve interventions that encourage entrepreneurship in developing countries.     

From Occupation to Recuperation: Property,Politics and Provincialization in Contemporary Madrid

Recent debates have once again engaged with the substance and meaning of urban politics within our increasingly complex and startling contemporary landscapes. Yet these debates, while giving nods in the direction of feminist and postcolonial scholarship, largely work through traditional lenses of class, labor and the dynamic workings of neoliberal capitalism. In this article, I focus on spaces of difference and their engagement with the urban to demonstrate how politics ‘happens' in locations often left off the map of both scholarship and popular imaginaries, and, crucially, how those locations can, in fact, illuminate shifting political arrangements elided by other methodologies. By juxtaposing European okupa debates with postcolonial discussions of urban informality, I trace what I argue is a new iteration of squatting within a city both ravaged by edicts of neoliberal austerity and buoyed by the efflorescence of social movements and alternative political projects. I then explicate the role of property in constituting the urban within Spain, using the concept of ‘provincialization'. In doing so, I think relationally between systems of property and emergent forms of insurgency to argue that we are witnessing an anticipatory politics that fundamentally challenges hegemonic relationships between everyday citizens and regimes of property ownership.