Long-term mortality following injury in working-age adults: a systematic review

Priorities for prevention activities and planning for services depend on comprehensive knowledge of the distribution of the injury-related burden in the community. The aim of this systematic review was to quantify the effect of being injured, compared with not being injured, on long-term mortality in working age adults. Cohort studies were selected that were population-based, measured mortality post-discharge from inpatient treatment, included a non-injured comparison group and related to working-age adults. Data synthesis was in tabular and text form with a meta-analysis not being possible because of the heterogeneity between studies. Eleven studies met the inclusion criteria. All studies found an overall positive association between injury and increased mortality. While the greatest excess mortality was evident during the initial period post-injury, increased mortality was shown in some studies to persist for up to 40 years after injury. Due to the limited number of injury types studied and heterogeneity between studies, there is insufficient published evidence on which to calculate population estimates of long-term mortality, where injury is a component cause. The review does suggest there is considerable excess mortality following injury that is not accounted for in current methods of quantifying injury burden, and is not used to assess quality and effectiveness of trauma care.     

Environmental Regulation and Innovation Offsets in the Bluegrass Seed Industry

Burning bluegrass seed stubble is an important production practice that, among other benefits, increases production and stand life of this perennial crop. Despite economic forecasts that higher production costs from the 1996 state ban on seed stubble burning would reduce Washington production by up to 30%, output in the years 1998–2005 was nearly two-thirds higher than in any previous eight-year period. This study seeks to explain why that paradoxical behavior occurred. This study puts forward and systematically tests several hypotheses. The only hypothesis with any support, innovation offsets, is examined by an assessment of contemporaneous innovations and by corroborative statistical evidence.     

Networked FDI: Sales and Sourcing Patterns of Japanese Foreign Affiliates

This paper applies a novel empirical approach to characterising the horizontal‐ness and vertical‐ness of affiliates based on Yeaple's complex FDI concept. In its simplest form, horizontal‐ness is measured as affiliates’ local sales share while their vertical‐ness is measures as their share of non‐local sourcing of intermediates. Japanese affiliates in most sectors and nations are partly vertical and partly horizontal, but those in North American are far more ‘horizontal’ than those in the EU and Asia. Affiliates became more vertical between 1996 and 2005. A four‐way sales and sourcing split (host, home, regional and RoW) suggests that affiliates act as nodes in regional production networks – especially in Asia. We posit several hypotheses that could be tested with our empirical approach.     

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.     

Source of income effects for demand decisions and taxable consumption

The relationship between sources of income and demand decisions by the household is examined here with an eye toward the ramifications on consumption tax bases. Income sources may be important when households attach psychic and transaction costs to individual purchases or when sources are assigned via a mental accounting process. In either case, general and specific sales tax bases may be affected by changes in income composition. Empirical results indicate two important findings. First, tax exemptions can introduce significant income source effects for a general consumption tax base. Second, the importance of differential tax rates for gasoline and food-at-home strongly depends on the mix of labour, capital, retirement and non-retirement transfer pay.     

Evolutionary social science and universal Darwinism

How should social scientists, inclined to an evolutionary theory of aspects of human culture like science, technology, business organization and practice, react to proposals that they embrace a “Universal Darwinism”? The most prominent variety of Universal Darwinism argues for close counterparts between the variables and mechanisms of cultural evolution and biological evolution, for example proposing the concept of “memes” as units of culture. Other Universal Darwinists propose, more flexibly, that human culture and biological species both change over time through a process that involves variation and selection, but that the details of the processes may be very different. This essay argues that the narrower form of Universal Darwinism should not be acceptable to social scientists. The differences in the details of cultural evolution and biological evolution are considerable. On the other hand, if Universal Darwinism provides a roomy intellectual tent welcoming scholars studying a variety of topics, with the unifying element being a dynamic theory involving variation and selection, but with the key variables and mechanisms being recognized as perhaps differing greatly between biology and human culture, we can be happy in that camp. Evolutionary Social Science and Universal Darwinism.