Explore the vast range of titles available.

Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our theoretical argument builds on idiosyncratic and common risks aggravating each other. When this is the case, individuals have a greater incentive to mutually insure against idiosyncratic risk when greater common risk makes the worst case scenario of bad realizations of common and idiosyncratic risks more likely. Our empirical analysis exploits common rainfall risk as a source of common county-level agricultural risk in the 19th-century United States. We find that a greater share of the population was organized in religious communities in counties with greater common agricultural risk, holding expected agricultural output constant. The link between rainfall risk and membership in religious communities is stronger among more agricultural counties and counties exposed to greater rainfall risk during the growing season. We also find that among the historically more agricultural counties, more than 1/3 of 19th-century differences in religious membership associated with rainfall risk persist to the turn of the 21st century.

We document that countries with higher initial education levels experienced faster value-added and employment growth in schooling-intensive industries in the 1980s and 1990s. This effect is robust to controls for other determinants of international specialization and becomes stronger when we focus on economies open to international trade. Our finding is consistent with schooling fostering the adoption of new technologies if such technologies are skilled-labor augmenting, as was the case in the 1980s and the 1990s. In line with international specialization theory, we also find that countries where education levels increased rapidly experienced stronger shifts in production toward schooling-intensive industries.

Background Mucosal healing (MH) evaluated by endoscopy is a novel target of therapy in UC as it is associated with improved long-term outcomes. It is defined based on the Mayo endoscopic score (MES), but it is still to define whether a value of MES 0 or 1 should be the target. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a systematic review with meta-analysis which compares long-term outcomes of patients in steroid-free clinical remission with MES 0 with those with MES 1. Methods A systematic electronic search of the literature was performed using Medline, Scopus, and CENTRAL through December 2020 (PROSPERO n:CRD42020179333). The studies concerned UC patients, in steroid-free clinical remission, with MES of 0 or 1, and with at least 12-months of follow-up. Results Out of 4611 citations, 15 eligible studies were identified. Increases in clinical relapse among patients with MES 1 were observed in all the studies included in this review, suggesting that MES of 1 have a higher risk of relapse than a score of 0. MES 0 patients displayed a lower risk of clinical relapse (OR 0.33; 95% CI 0.26–0.43; I 2 13%) irrespective of the follow-up time (12-months or longer). On the other hand, no differences were found comparing MES 0 versus MES 1 about the risk of hospitalization or colectomy. Conclusions MES 0 is associated with a lower rate of clinical relapse than is MES 1. For this reason, MES 0, rather than MES 0–1, should be considered the therapeutic target for patients with UC.

We estimate the aggregate long-run elasticity of substitution between more educated workers and less educated workers (the slope of the inverse demand curve for more relative to less educated workers) at the U.S. state level. Our data come from the (five) 1950-1990 decennial censuses. Our empirical approach allows for state and time fixed effects and relies on time- and state-dependent child labor and compulsory school attendance laws as instruments for (endogenous) changes in the relative supply of more educated workers. We find the aggregate long-run elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers to be around 1.5.

Edward Miguel Shanker Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti (2004), henceforth MSS, argue that lower rainfall levels and negative rainfall shocks increase conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa, This conclusion rests on their finding of a negative correlation between conflict in t and rainfall growth between t — 1 and t — 2. I show that this finding is driven by a (counterintuitive) positive correlation between conflict in t and rainfall levels in t — 2. If lower rainfall levels or negative rainfall shocks increased conflict, MSS's finding should have been due to a negative correlation between conflict in t and rainfall levels in t — 1. In the latest data, conflict is unrelated to rainfall.

Jones (2014) examines development accounting with imperfect substitutability between different types of skills in the production of output. He finds that human capital variation can account for the totality of the variation in income across countries. We show that this finding is entirely due to an assumption that the relative wage of skilled workers is solely determined by attributes of workers (once the supply of skilled workers is accounted for). If skill premia are predominantly determined by technology, institutions, and other features of the economic environment, human capital differences explain none of the variation in income per worker.

The identification of aggregate human-capital externalities is still not fully understood. The existing (Mincerian) approach confounds positive externalities with wage changes due to a downward sloping demand curve for human capital. As a result, the Mincerian approach yields positive externalities even when wages equal marginal social products. We propose an approach that identifies human-capital externalities, whether or not aggregate demand for human capital slopes downward. Another advantage of our approach is that it does not require estimates of the individual return to human capital. Applications to U.S. cities and states between 1970 and 1990 yield no evidence of significant average-schooling externalities.

We show that democratic change may be triggered by transitory economic shocks. Our approach uses within-country variation in rainfall as a source of transitory shocks to sub-Saharan African economies. We find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. This result is consistent with the economic approach to political transitions, where transitory negative shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Instrumental variables estimates indicate that following a transitory negative income shock of 1 percent, democracy scores improve by 0.9 percentage points and the probability of a democratic transition increases by 1.3 percentage points.

Sleep disturbances often result from inappropriate lifestyles, incorrect dietary habits, and/or digestive diseases. This clinical condition, however, has not been sufficiently explored in this area. Several studies have linked the circadian timing system to the physiology of metabolism control mechanisms, energy balance regulation, and nutrition. Sleep disturbances supposedly trigger digestive disorders or conversely represent specific clinical manifestation of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases. Poor sleep may worsen the symptoms of GI disorders, affecting the quality of life. Conversely, short sleep may influence dietary choices, as well as meal timing, and the circadian system drives temporal changes in metabolic patterns. Emerging evidence suggests that patients with inappropriate dietary habits and chronic digestive disorders often sleep less and show lower sleep efficiency, compared with healthy individuals. Sleep disturbances may thus represent a primary symptom of digestive diseases. Further controlled trials are needed to fully understand the relationship between sleep disturbances, dietary habits, and GI disorders. It may be also anticipated that the evaluation of sleep quality may prove useful to drive positive interventions and improve the quality of life in a proportion of patients. This review summarizes data linking sleep disorders with diet and a series of disease including gastro-esophageal reflux disease, peptic disease, functional gastrointestinal disorders, inflammatory bowel diseases, gut microbiota alterations, liver and pancreatic diseases, and obesity. The evidence supporting the complex interplay between sleep dysfunction, nutrition, and digestive diseases is discussed.

Does cutting red tape foster entrepreneurship in industries with the potential to expand? We address this question by combining the time needed to comply with government entry procedures in 45 countries with industry-level data on employment growth and growth in the number of establishments during the 1980s. Our main empirical finding is that countries where it takes less time to register new businesses have seen more entry in industries that experienced expansionary global demand and technology shifts. Our estimates take into account that proxying global industry shifts using data from only one country-or group of countries with similar entry regulations-will in general yield biased results.