zero expenditures and the estimation of engel curves over the brief interview periods typical of budget surveys such as the u k family expenditure survey households recorded expenditures are liable to be misleading indicators of their underlying consumption most starkly a household may not be observed to purchase commodities that it nevertheless consumes this paper considers the implications of such measurement errors for the estimation of demand systems and derives a consistent estimator for the special case of linear engel curves

household food demand in burkina faso implications for food policy abstract chronic food production deficits since the early 1970s have prompted policymakers of burkina faso to emphasize technological research with the goal of increasing the production of the most consumed locally grown cereals sorghum millet and maize meanwhile urban consumers have been developing preferences for rice and wheat cereals that are primarily imported this study estimates demand relationships among food items in ouagadougou burkina the results of the estimation suggest that prices income household composition education marital status and urbanization were jointly important in explaining household expenditure allocations both local and imported cereal consumption responded positively to an income increase however incremental income changes would lead to relatively greater consumption of locally produced cereals by low income households whereas high income households would consume relatively more wheat and rice the household model is then used to demonstrate its relevance in addressing food policy issues by forecasting the levels of urban grain demand under alternative income and demographic scenarios with increased production due to advances in technology the urban demand levels do not exhaust the rural surplus of local cereals but deficits persist in the rice wheat sector the results underscore the importance of technological research since burkina could become self sufficient in at least the production of sorghum millet and maize

modeling food consumption decisions as a two step process this article evaluates the suitability of tobit analysis of food consumption patterns by comparing results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process two samples of adult women were selected from the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey and the 1985 continuing survey of food intakes by individuals results show strong statistical evidence for questioning tobit analysis in examining food consumption decisions determinants of the decision to consume food within a particular food group often differ from the determinants of how much to consume particularly for more highly defined food groupings analysis of u s food consumption patterns and their dietary aspects with respect to consumer behavior has a long history traditionally ordinary least squares ols or some variant has been used in many studies where ols was not appropriate the tobit method was applied tobit allows for a discrete mass point for observations as well as a continuous range of values for the dependent variable this nonlinear method has yielded good results in a variety of studies e g mccracken and brandt lane and devaney and fraker this article examines the suitability of the tobit method for analysis of food consumption patterns the tobit method assumes that the decision to consume a given food item is the same as the decision about the amount of the food to consume ignoring the two step nature of the decision process may hamper understanding of true behavioral patterns lead to erroneous conclusions and generate incorrect policy recommendations this article compares results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process in the next section the statistical methods used to test whether food consumption is a one or two step decision process are described the following sections discuss the variables and data present the results and consider the conclusions

tail dependence risk exposure and diversification potential of islamic and conventional banks this paper undertakes a rolling window comparative analysis of risks for portfolios consisting of gcc islamic and conventional bank indices we draw our empirical results by employing canonical dr

quality quantity and spatial variation of price this paper develops and implements a method for estimating price elasticities of demand using cross sectional household survey data geographically clustered households report unit values which when corrected for quality effects and for measurement error indicate the underlying spatial variation in prices and can be matched to variation in demand patterns a simple model of quality choice is proposed while the correction for measurement error exploits the clustered design of such surveys data from a 1979 household survey from the ivory coast are used to estimate price elasticities for beef meat fish cereals and starches copyright 1988 by american economic association

ces production functions and economic growth we examine inconsistencies and controversies related to the use of ces production functions in growth models first we show that not all variants of ces functions commonly used are consistently specified second using a simple growth model we find that a higher elasticity of substitution leads to a higher steady state and makes the emergence of permanent growth more probable it is also pointed out that the effect of a higher elasticity of substitution on the speed of convergence depends on the relative scarcity of the factors of production finally we discuss possible explanations of variations in the elasticity of substitution jel classification o41 o11

health behavior health knowledge and schooling the positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented one explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes that is schooling improves the household s allocative efficiency in producing health this empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes alcohol and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge however most of schooling s effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for

the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy we investigate the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy using a bayesian structural vector autoregression b svar approach we identify fiscal policy shocks via a partial identification scheme but also i include the feedback from government debt ii look at the impact on the composition of output iii assess the effects on asset markets iv use quarterly data and v analyse empirical evidence from the us the uk germany and italy the results show that government spending shocks in general have a small effect on gross domestic product gdp lead to important crowding out effects have a varied impact on housing prices and generate a quick fall in stock prices government revenue shocks generate a mixed effect on housing prices and a small and positive effect on stock prices the empirical evidence also suggests that it is important to explicitly consider the government debt dynamics in the model

a dual elasticity of substitution production function with an application to cross country inequality abstract this note first develops a production function with two elasticities of substitution between two input factors second the note gives an application regarding the unequal development of relative capital intensities and productivities across countries and tries to quantify it empirically

in quest of the slutsky diamond the slutsky equation can be constructed as a parallelogram a diamond the area of which is proportional to the elasticity of substitution this construction permits to show immediately that demand functions become concave on an interval if the elasticity of substitution increases sufficiently also the diamond sheds light on the fact that the production level increases with the elasticity of substitution as an application the author shows that the elasticity of substitution has a direct bearing not only on the rate of growth of an economy but also on the very existence of sustained growth copyright 1989 by american economic association

the relationship between smoking quitting smoking and obesity in australia a seemingly unrelated probit approach smoking and obesity are two leading causes of preventable death further understanding of the relationship between these two risk factors can assist in reducing avoidable morbidity and mortality this study investigates the empirical association between obesity and the propensity to smoke and to quit smoking using a seemingly unrelated sur probit approach that takes into consideration the potential for reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity using australian health survey data this article demonstrates the usefulness of the sur probit approach in generating information on the relationship between unobserved factors influencing both smoking behaviour and obesity and in providing estimates of the conditional probabilities of each risk factor results suggest the two risk factors are not independent the presence size and direction of correlation between the unobserved factors are found to vary by smoking behaviour and by gender estimates of conditional probabilities demonstrate smokers have a

demand for food commodities by income groups in indonesia an analysis of the structure of demand was performed on household data classified into income groups for urban indonesia a demographically augmented linearized almost ideal demand system was used to estimate the structural parameters of the demand equations endogenous switching regression techniques yielded unbiased and consistent demand parameter estimates for the low income group which had a large number of zeros for some food groups standard seemingly unrelated equation techniques were used to estimate the demand parameters for the other income groups the results showed demands for the medium to high and high income households to be responsive to prices income and demographic variables demands for the medium to low income households were responsive to income and prices only demands for low income households were responsive to income and prices of rice and fish only

economic growth and the elasticity of substitution two theorems and some suggestions at the beginning of the twentieth century the work of the swedish economist knut wicksell 1901 marked an important advance in our understanding of the relationship between the structure of production functions and income distribution wicksell had asked the following question among many others suppose that the marginal productivities are equal to the remuneration rates of each factor what then should be the form of the corresponding production function he pointed out p 125 that the general integral of the partial differential equation implied by this relationship was of the form y lf kil which meant in turn that the product y was necessarily a homogeneous of degree one function of capital k and labor l as an example he gave a function where the shares of k and l in y were constant and wrote down the function which would be rediscovered decades later by charles w cobb and paul h douglas 1928 however it is only half a century later in robert m solow s nobel prize winning 1956 essay that implications between the structure of the production function and long run equilibrium or disequilibrium of the economy were drawn in his classic article a contribution to the theory of economic growth solow had considered three cases analytically other cases were also discussed geometrically using a phase diagram he had labeled the two first cases 1hlarrod domar and cobb douglas respectively and he referred to the third type of production function as offering a bit of variety it was y ak 2 l 2 2 a particular case of y akp lp 1p in those early days solow had not pointed out to the reader that his cases could have been numbered 0 1 and 2 following the elasticity of substitution of the corresponding production function it would be only five years later in 1961 that with his coauthors kenneth j arrow et al he would find the general form of the two factor constant elasticity of substitution ces production function by integrating the differential equation corresponding to the observed relationship between output per capita and the wage rate solow s third case was indeed highly interesting since it allowed the possibility of everincreasing income per head even without any technical progress indeed solow showed that due to the efficiency of the system entailed by the particular production function he had chosen there existed a threshold for the savings rates s to generate investment per head large enough for income per head to grow forever that threshold was s nla2 where n is the growth rate of the population it was then natural to ask whether one could express that threshold in terms of the elasticity of substitution a the value of that threshold was determined by de la grandville 1989 to be equal to s no3 or where a is k s coefficient in a normalized ces function equal to a in solow s third case where u 2 for any s and n values this relationship gives also the threshold value in implicit form by the solution of ao1 1 log 3q or ilog nls by totally differentiating the last relationship one could observe that the threshold for the elasticity of substitution to entail ever sustained growth was an in klump faculty of mathematics and economics university of ulm helmholtzstrasse 20 d 89081 ulm germany de la grandville department of economics university of geneva 102 boulevard carl vogt ch 1211 geneva 4 switzerland we gratefully acknowledge the comments of seminar participants at stanford university and at the universities of stuttgart hohenheim and munich where parts of the paper were presented also we would like to thank without implicating in any way robert solow for his insightful remarks and an anonymous referee for very helnfuil supgestions wicksell cobb and douglas would no doubt burst with pride if they knew that one of our first year students wrote in a paper of his of course we recognize here a kirk douglas production function

rising cigarette prices and rising obesity coincidence or unintended consequence economists have begun to debate if the rise in cigarette prices in the u s in recent decades has contributed to the nation s rise in obesity reaching conclusions that are surprisingly sensitive to specification i show that allowing for the effect to occur gradually over several years leads to the conclusion that a rise in cigarette prices is actually associated with a long run reduction in body mass index and obesity this result is robust to the different methodologies used in the literature i also provide evidence that indirect effects on exercise and food consumption may explain the counterintuitive result

uncertainty assessment in socially responsible and islamic stock markets in the short and long terms an ardl approach abstractthis study measures financial uncertainty for two classes of alternative financial assets dow jones islamic and dow jones sustainability indexes and the conventional us stock market dow jones industrial index for the period of 1999 2017 using an asymmetric exponential garch model using an ardl model we propose an intertemporal dynamic analysis of uncertainty for islamic and socially responsible stock markets our findings show that first conventional and ethical investments present high comparable levels of uncertainty for which the dynamics is time varying second uncertainty in the conventional us stock market has a significant and positive effect on the uncertainty in alternative stock markets thus uncertainty characterizes conventional and ethical stock markets both in the short and long terms in particular while the short term uncertainty of ethical markets might be associated with their characteristics the long term aspect of uncertainty for ethical funds is rather associated

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

are islamic stock markets efficient a time series analysis this article investigates the weak form informational efficient hypothesis for three major islamic stock markets world emerging and developed unlike previous studies we applied different parametric and nonparametric tests to investigate efficiency in the short and long horizons using recent data over the period may 2002 june 2012 we developed a time series analysis of islamic stock price dynamics in the context of the recent global financial crisis 2008 2009 our analysis offers two interesting results first emerging islamic stock markets seem to be less efficient than developed islamic markets suggesting interesting investment opportunities and diversification benefits from this region in both the short run and the long run second nonrejection of the cointegration hypothesis for developed islamic markets and the global conventional stock market point to efficiency for the former in the long term even if it is inefficient in the short term this finding has at least two economic and politic

an econometric analysis of urban households animal products consumption in turkey people in developing countries are increasing their consumption from the very low levels of the past and they have a long way to go before coming near developed country averages in this study households animal products consumption patterns are analysed by using linear approximation of almost ideal demand system la aids and survey data collected from households in urban areas in turkey according to the results of the study annual per capita consumption of animal products were 48 18 kg for milk 26 89 kg for yogurt 18 55 kg for cheese 6 45 kg for meat 22 11 kg for poultry and 10 05 kg for fish price elasticities were found to be lower than 1 for milk yogurt cheese poultry and fish and higher than 1 for meat moreover the impacts of socio demographic factors on the demand for animal products were found to be very low determination of production targets and formulation of polices are possible by obtaining the proper information related to the livestock products

purchasing behaviour of higher and lower income shoppers a look at breakfast cereals scanner data for breakfast cereals are used to estimate demand elasticities for six supermarket stores in two distinct socioeconomic areas three stores are in lowincome locations and three are in high income locations a time series cross section model is estimated for five product categories across six cross sections over forty two weeks results show lower income shoppers to have more elastic demands for four of the five product categories private label cold cereals the top ten brands of cold cereals all other brands of cold cereals and hot cereals price is not statistically significant for a fifth product category snack cereals

the demand for dairy products structure prediction and decomposition this article presents an analysis of the demand for dairy products first the structure of dairy product demand is estimated using the household food consumption survey data under the assumption of a two stage budgeting procedure a complete demand system for food incorporating demographic effects is estimated next using the demand relations estimated from cross section data prediction interval tests utilizing time series data are performed for milk and butter last factors affecting consumption are classified into economic and demographic effects and a decomposition of the causes of changes in demand over time is performed

cutting through the smoke separating the effect of price on smoking initiation relapse and cessation i employ a large national representative dataset current population survey tobacco use supplements to investigate how cigarette prices affect smoking decisions a standard econometric approach is to estimate the relationship between cigarette prices and smoking participation at a point in time i extend this approach to model past year decisions to start resume or quit smoking considering reverse causality i apply an instrumental variable excise taxes for cigarette prices i include an index of state level anti smoking sentiment to control for omitted variable bias after estimating separate models for smoking initiation relapse and cessation and for different age groups i find no evidence that increasing taxes on cigarettes can prevent the onset of youth smoking neither does it effectively induce young smokers to quit however cigarette prices do play an important role to prevent relapse and encourage quitting at older ages

food expenditures at home and away from home in the united states a switching regression analysis the results of this study showed that the decision to eat away from home was positively affected by income while the amount spent away from home was only affected by income again positively at higher levels of household income food expenditures at home were similarly affected by income only at higher levels of household income provided the household also ate away from home if the household did not eat away from home food expenditures at home were positively affected by income at all levels the effect decreasing in magnitude with the level of income a significant economic trend in recent vdecades is the declining share of consumer expenditures on food expenditures for food fell steadily from 20 0 of disposable personal income in 1960 to 16 1 in the third quarter of 1983 usda this drop occurred as a result of a decline in the share of consumer expenditures on food purchased for consumption at home the share of consumer expenditures on meals purchased at restaurants cafeterias and fast food chains remained constant at about 4 of disposable personal income hence the consumption of purchased meals away from home has become more important relative to food consumed at home a number of studies on food consumption at home and away from home have been made houthakker and taylor 1970 obtained results that indicate away from home food expenditures were more responsive to total consumption expenditures than at home expenditures based on 1960 61 household budget data time series data were also employed by houthakker and taylor to investigate the dynamics of food consumption prochaska and schrimper 1973 found that along with income the opportunity cost of time is an important factor in determining away from home food consumption fishe et al 1979 employing simple and heteroscedastic tobit models found that income and household specific circumstances are important determinants of restaurant expenditures lamm 1982 estimated a translog demand system for food consumed at home purchased meals and non food items his results indicated that consumers have been eating away from home more often primarily as a result of increases in their incomes recently huang and raunikar 1984 estimated engel equations for at home and away from home food expenditures using ordinary least squares and tobit regressions respectively in their study huang and raunikar found that in general at home food consumption is less income responsive than away from home food consumption the major objective of huang and raunikar s study was to investigate the importance to household food expenditures of consigned income for committed expenditures this study further investigates food consumption at home and away from home employing a switching regression model the same basic data analyzed by huang and rauniker hr are also analyzed here however since the hr study focused on consigned income households not reporting complete information with regard to committed expenditures e g rent or mortgage or after tax income were not included in their study in this study the emphasis is placed on the household s choice of whether to eat out and the factors affecting consequent away from home and at home food expenditures the sample includes all households that reported before tax income and is significantly larger than the sample used in the hr study

statistical models for zero expenditures in household budgets household budget surveys are an important source of data on consumer s expenditure not just for individual consumers but also for estimating national aggregates however it is a widespread finding that for certain commodities most notably tobacco and alcohol the estimate from the household survey falls short of the known consumption total calculated with some confidence from data on production imports exports and excise duties for example in the british family expenditure survey with which we shall largely be concerned total tobacco expenditure was underestimated in 1976 by 21 percent see kemsley redpath and holmes 1980 p 51 much of this understatement together with that on alcohol is thought to occur because of the design of the survey which excludes many persons amongst whom consumption of such items is thought to be atypically high e g prisoners hoteliers and their residents merchant seamen even so the possibility remains that some of the understatement is due to various types of misreporting by households included in the survey in this paper we consider a model in which the standard tobit specification tobin 1958 is supplemented by the operation of a simple binary censor the tobit model is essentially a linear regression model in which non positive observations of the dependent variable are replaced by zero we take this specification as our starting point but add a second censoring process that randomly replaces a fraction of the observations generated by the tobit model bv zeroes the combined model can serve as a representation of several types of

have efforts to reduce smoking really contributed to the obesity epidemic i introduction two of the most notable trends in public health over the past 30 yr are the reductions in smoking rates and the rapid increase in obesity rates based on data from the national health interview survey the smoking rate among adult americans was roughly 37 in the early 1970s and is 21 today a reduction of more than 40 in contrast the adult obesity rate increased 135 from 14 in the early 1970s to 32 2 in 2004 national health and nutrition examination survey nhanes 71 04 figure 1 because the medical literature has shown that smoking cessation is associated with weight gain these trends have given rise to a puzzling question have efforts to reduce smoking rates in the united states inadvertently caused increases in rates of obesity there is substantial evidence that at least in the short term smoking and obesity are not independent klesges and shumaker 1992 found that reductions in smoking and or quitting altogether is associated with increases in dietary intake as well as metabolic changes that promote weight gain as a result weight gain is often an unwanted side effect of quitting smoking the 1990 surgeon general s report the health benefits of smoking cessation concluded that the average weight gain after smoking cessation was about 5 pounds or 2 3 kg u s department of health and human services 1990 however there is additional evidence that this increase may be short lived mizoue et al 1998 found that given enough time the weight of former smokers inevitably returns to that of never smokers as a result the long term impact on weight of efforts to reduce smoking rates may be negligible figure 1 omitted to date three articles have attempted to quantify what proportion of the increase in obesity rates over the past several decades is caused by efforts to reduce smoking chou grossman and saffer 2004 used repeated cross sections from 1984 to 1999 behavioral risk factor surveillance system brfss data to estimate the impact of several state level measures on body mass index bmi and on the probability of being obese including increases in state level cigarette prices figure 1 the results of this study suggest that increases in cigarette prices may be responsible for as much as 20 of the increase in bmi and trends in obesity rates over this period this finding is used to argue that rising obesity rates are an unintended consequence of the success of the antismoking movement gruber and frakes 2006 extended the models presented in chou grossman and saffer 2004 using the same data set they examined the relationship between cigarette taxes and body weight and argue that cigarette taxes are a more appropriate measure than prices because price changes may be driven by market factors that affect the rates of smoking and eating their specification also includes several other differences including controls for state and year effects gruber and frakes found that cigarette taxes are negatively associated with body weight suggesting that increases in cigarette taxes result in reductions in bmi this result is in direct contrast with the findings of chou grossman and saffer however not even the authors find their result plausible p 196 flegal 2007 presents yet another analysis of the link between smoking and obesity using nhanes data the author models the contemporaneous relationship between smoking and weight and then reestimates the current prevalence of obesity under the assumption that past smoking levels had remained unchanged using this approach she concludes that decreases in the prevalence of cigarette smoking had only a small effect less than 1 percentage point on the overall prevalence of obesity in this article we revisit the analyses presented by chou grossman and saffer and gruber and frakes to explain the dichotomy of results and provide further evidence of the relationship between antismoking efforts and increases in bmi

are islamic finance innovations enough for investors to escape from a financial downturn further evidence from portfolio simulations does islamic finance constitute a promising solution for the current global financial crisis and are islamic financial innovations enough to reassure investors stabilize financial systems and provide them with a means of escaping from financial downturns this article addresses these questions while investigating the dynamics of islamic and conventional stock prices over the last few years in particular we apply multivariate vector autoregressive var tools to test the interaction between conventional and islamic financial products and implement the granger causality test to specify the dependence orientation of feedback between islamic and conventional stock prices our article differs from previous work on the topic in that it develops portfolio simulations to determine whether islamic finance can supplant conventional finance by generating investment and diversification opportunities during periods of crisis in addition we develop optimal portfolio strategies and investment proportions for conve

food consumption and economic development in turkey and european union countries this study investigates the relationship between food consumption and economic development in turkey and european union countries differences in food diets are analysed by using data on per capita consumption in caloric terms based on the period from 1970 to 2000 the cluster analysis is employed to derive country grouping on the basis of similarities in dietary structure in the 1970 and 2000 existence of a trend towards a common european diet is explored with beta convergence the empirical results show that per capita food consumption is becoming less responsive to changes in income and appears to be reaching a ceiling in the majority of eu countries and turkey however the share of animal products in food consumption diet is low and income expenditure elasticity of animal products is higher with 0 84 values in turkey than that in european countries in 2000 there are great differences in dietary structure between turkey and the european union differences also exist between european union countries

estimating food demand in paraguay from household survey data we estimate a food demand system in paraguay based on the 1997 national household survey considering 12 food categories to obtain demand elasticity estimates from household survey data accounting for quality effects measurement errors and censored observations price indexes are obtained from ordinary least squares predictions of changes in unitary values caused by spatial and temporal variations and the two step estimation procedure shonkwiler and yen 1999 is applied our approach yields reasonable estimates of combined quantity and quality responses with respect to price results suggest distinct consumption behavior in urban and rural areas particularly for chicken eggs dairy and fats and oils which are likely because of differences in the food distribution system and availability of nonmarket food sources

elasticities in aids models in the literature a variety of approaches have been used to calculate demand elasticities in almost ideal demand system aids models of demand it is common to estimate the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids instead of the aids when the la aids is estimated all of the previously reported approaches to compute elasticities are theoretically incorrect this paper presents correct formulas for la aids elasticities and illustrates the potential errors from using incorrect computing the almost ideal demand system aids of deaton and muellbauer 1980a b has become popular in recent years anderson and blundell blanciforti and green 1983a b blanciforti green and king chalfant eales and unnevehr fujii khaled and mak fulponi heien and willett murray parsons ray a variety of approaches to computing elasticities has been used and some of the approaches may lead to significant errors this paper clarifies the differences between alternative approaches to estimating demand elasticities in aids models

social interactions and the contemporaneous determinants of individuals weight obesity and overweight are central issues in the public health debate in most developed countries in this debate some of the socio economic determinants of obesity and overweight are still relatively unexplored this paper presents an empirical examination of the possible influence of social interactions on contemporaneous obesity and over underweight a joint estimation model for obesity and self image is applied to a sample for spain taken from the european union household panel for 1998 the results suggest that obesity might be in part a social phenomenon connected to individuals social life

estimation of a two level demand system with limited dependent variables a two level demand model was derived from a strongly separable conditional indirect utility function to analyze dominican rural and urban household consumption at different income levels for samples with significant zero consumption a multivariate limited dependent variable model utilizing the concept of virtual prices was used to obtain consistent estimates of consumption parameters results show that households with higher incomes tend to be less responsive to own price and income changes in consumption of most food and nonfood commodities for demographic variates the elasticities of rice and aggregate food with respect to household composition variables are all positive with few exceptions price and income responses of household food and nonfood consumption have significant policy importance this study provides insights into the consumption behavior of rural and urban dominican households within the framework of a complete demand system three basic groups of determinants of household consumption are explored commodity prices household total expenditure and demographic variables our treatment of these fundamental issues involves the application to demand analysis of a a classical theoretical result about commodity decentralization and price aggregation and b an econometric technique to deal with limited dependent variables in the demand system framework the analysis of detailed commodities is often prohibitive because increasing the size of the demand system substantially increases the number of unknown parameters to estimate a relatively large number of parameters in this study the theoretical implications of twostage budgeting and perfect price aggregation are used to construct a two level demand model that is consistent with constrained util

how islamic is islamic banking abstract islamic banks hold well over us 700 billion in assets and are growing at over 15 p a islamic banking and finance ibf involves wider ethical and moral issues than simply interest free transactions its advocates argue that these make it more economically efficient than conventional banking and promote greater economic equity and justice to what extent then do actual islamic banking practices live up to the ideal and how different are they from conventional banking a preliminary investigation shows that three decades after its introduction there remain substantial divergences between ibf s ideals and its practices and much of ibf still remains functionally indistinguishable from conventional banking this runs counter to claims by ibf advocates that it would rapidly differentiate itself from conventional banking however despite not providing an alternative to conventional banking and finance ibf does strengthen a distinctly islamic identity by providing the appropriate islamic terminology for de facto conventional financial transactions

schooling health knowledge and obesity the connection between schooling and health is well documented an important empirical issue that needs to be examined however is whether schooling s effects are due to individual health knowledge differences this empirical study examines this issue with an increasingly important health indicator obesity since provision of health knowledge is a major tool of public agencies promoting health this empirical study uses a new direct measure of health knowledge to test this hypothesis the results show that knowledge is inversely related to the probability that an individual is obese schooling s effects on relative weight and the probability of being obese are explained by differences in knowledge this result may imply that schooling s effect on the allocative efficiency of the household production of health is the main reason schooling is linked to health behaviour the result also may imply that the most effective method of health education is to highlight the disease element of poor dietary habits a

demand analysis of fresh and frozen finfish and shellfish in the united states household expenditures for at home consumption on three species of shellfish and five species of finfish were analyzed factors explaining the variation of expenditures on seafood commodities were own price household income coupon value household size geographic region urbanization race and seasonality own price elasticities ranged from 0 45 flounder sole to 1 13 oysters expenditures on fishery products were more sensitive to changes in household size than to changes in household income cross price effects of red meat and poultry were not statistically significant for comparison purposes estimates of own price income and household size elasticities from the literature were made with this set of elasticities