Search results

The article addresses Chile's status as an innovator & international model of social policy reform in the 1970's & 1980's. Discussed are reasons why the establishment of an effective system of unemployment insurance remained beyond Chile's scope for many years, including the barriers created by infrastructure in Chile's labor market & financial economy, as well as the overall market neutrality that discouraged companies from hiring labor for long term employment. B. Boyce

By using a synthetic cohort methodology, this paper contributes to the analysis of the evolution of female labour force participation in Chile over the last forty years. It decomposes the participation rate in terms of age, year and cohort effects. The results of the estimations show that the age effect significantly explains the participation rate. Cohort variables are also important, enabling the authors to identify cohort effects associated with both, the number of children and the level of schooling of the group. In turn, contemporary variables are relevant, in particular the cyclical component. All this indicates that the changes in the participation rate may be due in the first place to increases in the number of women in the age groups where the participation rate is higher. Secondly, the increase in the participation rate is due to effects that are associated with different behaviours in the succeeding cohorts of women; and, finally, contemporary variables seemingly have very small importance. (InWent/DÜI)

This study isolates the causal effects of financial literacy and schooling on wealth accumulation using a new household dataset and an instrumental variables (IV) approach. Financial literacy and schooling attainment are both strongly positively associated with wealth outcomes in linear regression models, whereas the IV estimates reveal even more potent effects of financial literacy. They also indicate that the schooling effect only becomes positive when interacted with financial literacy. Estimated impacts are substantial enough to imply that investments in financial literacy could have large wealth payoffs.

Summarization: The ban on the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feeds in the European Union has stimulated research on potential alternatives. Recently, propyl-propane thiosulfonate (PTSO), a stable organosulfurate compound of garlic, was purified. The objectives of the current study were to investigate the potential effects of PTSO on rumen microbial fermentation and to define effective doses. Two experiments were conducted using dual-flow continuous culture fermenters in 2 replicated periods. Each experimental period consisted of 5 d for adaptation of the ruminal fluid and 3 d for sampling. Temperature (39°C), pH (6.4), and liquid (0.10 h−1) and solid (0.05 h−1) dilution rates were maintained constant. Samples were taken 2 h after feeding and from the 24-h effluent. Samples were analyzed for volatile fatty acids (VFA) and nitrogen fractions, and degradation of nutrients was calculated. In addition, 24-h effluents from experiment 2 were analyzed for their fatty acid (FA) profile. Treatments in experiment 1 included a negative control without additive, a positive control with monensin (12 mg/L), and PTSO at 30 and 300 mg/L. The addition of 30 mg/L did not affect any of the measurements tested. The addition of 300 mg/L reduced microbial fermentation, as suggested by the decreased total VFA concentration, true degradation of organic matter and acid detergent fiber, and a tendency to decrease neutral detergent fiber degradation. Experiment 2 was conducted to test increasing doses of PTSO (0, 50, 100, and 150 mg/L) on rumen microbial fermentation. At 2 h postfeeding, total VFA and molar proportion of propionate responded quadratically, with higher values in the intermediate doses. Molar proportions of butyrate increased and branched-chain VFA decreased linearly as the dose of PTSO increased. In the 24-h effluents, total VFA, acetate, and branched-chain VFA concentrations decreased linearly and those of propionate responded cubically with the highest value at 100 mg/L. Saturated FA decreased and ...

Wild horses thrived across Eurasia until the Last Glacial Maximum to collapse after the beginning of the Holocene. The interplay of climate change, species adaptability to different environments, and human domestication in horse history is still lacking coherent continental-scale analysis integrating different lines of evidence. We assembled temporal and geographical information on 3070 horse occurrences across Eurasia, frequency data for 1120 archeological layers in Europe, and matched them to paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental simulations for the Late Quaternary. Climate controlled the distribution of horses, and they inhabited regions in Europe and Asia with different climates and ecosystem productivity, suggesting plasticity to populate different environments. Their decline in Europe during the Holocene appears associated with an increasing loss and fragmentation of open habitats. Europe was the most likely source for the spread of horses toward more temperate regions, and we propose both Iberia and central Asia as potential centers of domestication. ; M.L. was supported by a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF-657852). This work was supported by the Danish National Research Foundation (grant no. DNRF94); Initiative d'Excellence Chaires d'attractivité, Université de Toulouse (OURASI); and the Villum Fonden miGENEPI research project. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 681605). K.G. and D.N.-B. thank Sapere Aude EliteForsk, DFF (Det Frie Forskningsråd), and the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF96). A.M., M.K., and R.M.B. were supported by the European Research Council Consolidator grant 647787-LocalAdaptation.