Estimating the costs of non-fatal consumer product injuries in the United States

This paper describes a data-driven injury cost model (ICM) developed to estimate the costs associated with non-fatal consumer product injuries. The modeling effort combines information by diagnosis from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) and 17 other large data sets. The ICM contains four aggregated cost components: (1) medical costs, (2) work losses, (3) quality of life and pain and suffering costs, and (4) product liability insurance administration and litigation costs. The ICM estimates societal costs, which are broader than costs to any individual group, such as victims, insurers, or product manufacturers. Costs associated with consumer product injuries are estimated to be approximately $500 billion in 1996, accounting for nearly one-third of the total annual injury costs. We examine injury costs in several ways, including by major product category, by sex and age of victims, by body part injured, by injury diagnosis, and by highest level of medical treatment received. We also rank the 10 leading consumer products that account for injury costs overall and within different age groups. Products such as stairs and floors are among the top 10 for all age groups. Other products, however, are more closely tied to injuries at particular stages of life (e.g., infant/toddler, child, young adult, elderly). These cost estimates are useful in assessing which products and types of injuries impose the greatest costs on society and for identifying areas for focused injury prevention efforts.     

The Imperative of Education

Teaching midgrade leaders at the Command and General Staff Officers Course (CGSOC) located in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, comes with many unique challenges. At CGSOC, students arrive having led soldiers in combat and having served in leadership positions in the United States Army for at least 10 years. When they walk into the classroom and see an instructor with a dress shirt and tie—not in a uniform—their immediate thought is, “What can this civilian teach me? I have fought in foreign lands and had to watch people die and lead soldiers through intensely difficult circumstances.” Through most of their careers, their approach to learning in Professional Military Education (PME) has been through training. CGSOC is the first time they experience learning from mostly an educational pedagogy as opposed to training. We focus on teaching how to think instead of what to think. At CGSOC we use an Experiential Learning Model (ELM), based on Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory. The ELM takes Kolb's experiential learning cycle and superimposes five steps on the preferred learning styles described by Kolb. We promote student‐to‐student dialogue, drawing out the experience resident in the classroom, and add leadership theory to reinforce the learning.     

Neighbourhood effects,preference heterogeneity and immigrant educational attainment

This paper investigates differences between the educational attainment of immigrants, children of immigrants and native-born individuals in Australia by using Australian Youth Survey (AYS) data combined with aggregate Australian Census data. Differences in educational attainment are decomposed into: (i) typical demographic and socio-economic sources common to all ethnic groups; (ii) unobserved region of residence and region of origin effects; and (iii) neighbourhood effects such as degree and ethnic concentration of particular ethnic groups in different neighbourhoods. A theoretical model incorporating these effects is proposed but structural estimation is not possible for lack of appropriate data. Instead, a reduced form methodology is proposed and employed. The empirical results identify positive ethnic neighbourhood effects in high school completion and university enrolment for some immigrant groups in Australia, in particular first and second generation immigrants from Asia. The results indicate that it is not just the size of the ethnic network but the ‘quality’ of the network that is important.     

International cattle ID and traceability: Competitive implications for the US

Global standards for animal identification and traceability are evolving rapidly. Major world animal health, trade, and food safety organizations have formally recognized the importance of, and actively promoted, animal identification and traceability system development. Advanced animal traceability systems have been deployed by major beef exporters and are increasingly being adopted by important beef importing countries. This study summarizes and compares animal identification systems across major export and import countries. Results reveal that the United States lags behind both major export and import countries in development and adoption of cattle identification and tracing systems. As such, the United States has placed itself in a vulnerable position relative to competing export countries with respect to demonstrated animal traceability. This status could adversely affect market access in the future for US beef exports.     

Big brands,big cities: How the population penalty affects common,identity relevant brands in densely populated areas

The population density of a geographical area has a well-known and strong positive effect on sales in the area. Yet, for some brands, there may be factors that affect the strength of this density-sales relationship. The present research shows that for product categories that consumers use to signal their identities (e.g., clothing, restaurants and cars), the strength of this relationship varies with brand commonness. Consumers residing in densely populated areas are motivated to express their distinctiveness by reducing their preference for identity relevant brands that are common, such as large chains and brands owned by many people. Thus, as identity-relevant brands become more common, they suffer from a “population penalty” – a weakening of the positive effect of population density on sales. We show this effect with three experiments and two empirical analyses of automobile and alcohol sales. Our findings extend literature on distinctiveness theory by demonstrating these effects at the community level and provide insights for marketers on accounting and adjusting for this effect.     

从零开始——新建一个质量体系的路线图和工具箱

虽然各种质量体系、方法和设计工具之间的不同并不十分清楚--这是所有质量文献面临的共同问题--旦识别出这些质量方法的关键联系,就可了解各体系之间相互关联的概况.     

Beyond the Return on Advertising: Elasticity of the Return on Advertising as a Diagnostic Metric to Maximize Profit

With increased marketing expenditures, managers need to be equipped with valid and reliable measures capable of showing links between marketing investments and a firm's profitable performance. In this paper we demonstrate that traditional return on advertising (ROA) can be a misleading metric if a firm's goal is profit maximization. Then, we introduce a new diagnostic tool: the elasticity of ROA and show how this metric can help marketing managers to choose more profitable levels of advertising. This new measure has the same virtues as other traditional measures of elasticity and provides real advantages over the conventional metrics.     

The Market Value of Reducing Cancer Risk: Hedonic Housing Prices with Changing Information

In this paper, we use housing price changes occurring after the release of a regulatory agency's environmental risk information to estimate the value people place on cancer risk reduction. Using a large original data set on the repeal sales of houses, matched with detailed data on hazardous waste cancer risk and newspaper publicity, we find that housing prices respond in a rational manner to changes in information about risk. Since the new information indicated that the sites in our sample pose relatively low cancer risk, the informational release led residents to lower their risk beliefs, resulting in an average housing price increase of $56 to $87. This price change implies a statistical value per case of cancer of $4.3 million to $8.3 million, which is similar to the estimates obtained in labor market studies of the value of a statistical life. Newspaper publicity about the local sites increased housing prices, suggesting that residents perceived the news as good.