Ten year mortality from coronary heart disease in 17,718 middle aged men was related to their initial plasma cholesterol concentrations. The relative risk of death from coronary heart disease declined with age, but the absolute excess risk did not. The risk gradient was continuous over the whole range of cholesterol concentrations, the lowest mortality being among men with concentrations below ...

Entry costs vary dramatically across countries. To assess their impact we construct a model with endogenous entry and operation decisions by …rms and calibrate it to match the U.S. distribution of …rms by size. Higher entry costs lead to greater misallocation of productive factors and lower TFP and output. In the model, countries in the lowest decile of the entry costs distribution have 1.35 to...

The largest decile of commercial electricity customers comprises half of commercial sector electricity usage. We quantify a considerable split incentives problem that exists when these large firms are on electricity-included property lease contracts. Controlling for a rich set of variables that may correlate with selection into contract type, we use exogenous variation in weather shocks to show...

Although a large academic literature has discussed why the poverty rate is a poor summary index of trends in poverty, it is still used in much applied policy analysis. This paper begins by summarizing briefly why poverty intensity is a better measure of poverty. Using Luxembourg Income Study data on trends in poverty since the 1970s in Sweden, Canada, the USA and UK, it demonstrates that in abo...

The paper describes a new software package for automated estimation, display and analyses of various drought indices – continuous functions of precipitation that allow quantitative assessment of meteorological drought events to be made. The software at present allows up to five different drought indices to be estimated. They include the Decile Index (DI), the Effective Drought Index (EDI), the ...

BACKGROUND Identification of coronary ischemia may enable targeted diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for acute heart failure. We determined the risk of 30-day mortality associated with ischemic ECG abnormalities in patients with acute heart failure. METHODS AND RESULTS Among 8772 patients (53.4% women, median 78 years [Q1, Q3: 68,84]) presenting with acute heart failure to 86 hospital eme...

BACKGROUND Increased baseline heart rate is associated with cardiovascular risk and all-cause mortality in the general population. We hypothesized that elevated preoperative heart rate increases the risk of myocardial injury after non-cardiac surgery (MINS). METHODS We performed a secondary analysis of a prospective international cohort study of patients aged ≥45 yr undergoing non-cardiac sur...