This paper explores the effect of risk and socioeconomic factors on maternal mortality at the community level in Madagascar using a unique, nationwide panel of communes (i.e., counties). Previous work in this area uses individual or cross-country data to study maternal mortality, however, studying maternal mortality at the community level is imperative because this is the level at which most po...

OBJECTIVES Several US states have legalized or decriminalized physician-assisted suicide (PAS) while others are considering permitting PAS. Although it has been suggested that legalization could lead to a reduction in total suicides and to a delay in those suicides that do occur, to date no research has tested whether these effects can be identified in practice. The aim of this study was to fil...

There has always been a trend in India for doctors to go abroad. They g to developing countries for an international exposure and training in their job. Doctors as well as their countries of origin do benefit from this exposure. A large number of doctors however settle abroad and never return to their country of origin. I have tried to do an in depth analysis of numbers, socioeconomic factors, ...

Race-ethnic differences in a range of childbearing behaviors are long-standing and well-documented, and these differences are attenuated, but not eliminated, when accounting for socioeconomic disparities. The residual differences are often attributed to vague and untested variation across race-ethnic groups in knowledge, attitudes, psychological attributes, normative beliefs, and social context...

The process of acquiring an infection has two components: first, exposure through proximity to another infected individual, and second, transmission of the disease. Earlier studies of the socioeconomic factors that affect the probability of acquiring an illness assume uniform exposure to infected individuals and may therefore result in biased estimates. This paper develops an empirical model, c...

Forests provide important ecosystem services, and protected areas around the world are intended to reduce human disturbance on forests. The question is how forest cover is changing in different parts of the world, why some areas are more frequently disturbed, and if protected areas are effective in limiting anthropogenic forest disturbance. The Carpathians are Eastern Europe's largest contiguou...

STUDY OBJECTIVES There is limited information regarding sleep duration and determinants in Switzerland. We aimed to assess the trends and determinants of time in bed as a proxy for sleep duration in the Swiss canton of Geneva. METHODS Data from repeated, independent cross-sectional representative samples of adults (≥ 18 years) of the Geneva population were collected between 2005 and 2011. Sel...

This article probes into the health of migrants with a focus on the situation in the Nordic universal welfare states. The Nordic welfare states are further compared to each other with a comparison to the EU28 if possible, including investigation of the differences among the four Nordic countries. This is done by analyzing central parameters related to access to and inequality in health care. Th...

Spatial variation in plant diversity has been attributed to heterogeneity in resource availability for many ecosystems. However, urbanization has resulted in entire landscapes that are now occupied by plant communities wholly created by humans, in which diversity may reflect social, economic, and cultural influences in addition to those recognized by traditional ecological theory. Here we use d...

This study examined the intergenerational effects of parental conviction of a substance-related charge on children's academic performance and, conditional on a conviction, whether completion of an adult drug treatment court (DTC) program was associated with improved school performance. State administrative data from North Carolina courts, birth records, and school records were linked for 2005-2...