Employers had to scramble to develop policies for their Wellness Incentives in time for their Fall, 2013 Open Enrollment deadlines, and are already refining policies for the 2014 Open Enrollment period. Employers are encouraged to consider six policy elements and to view all of them through four lenses. The policy elements are: (1) Number and Types of Behaviors and Outcomes to Target. (2) Cost-...

This paper applies insights from governance and multi-level governance (MLG) studies to the analysis of Social Partnership in order to: (1) outline a methodological approach for the study of Social Partnership over time; and (2) to provide neutral framework for analysis that will facilitate the collection of empirical evidence that may contribute (either positively or negatively) to the theoris...

Market-based climate change policy instruments, such as energy and carbon taxes, have frequently been proposed as efficient means to stimulate industrial energy efficiency improvements and to reduce carbon emissions. This paper presents an assessment of the impacts that energy and carbon taxes may have on energy use and emissions profiles of the US pulp and paper industry. Time series data and ...

Does support for tough policies against undocumented immigration reflect antiimmigrant sentiments or a neutral concern about upholding laws? This study addresses the question by examining the relationship between different expressions of national identification and ethnocentric enforcement bias—that is, support for punishment of law-breaking immigrants but not law-breaking American employers wh...

In this paper we follow the tradition of applied general equilibrium modelling of the Walrasian static variety to study the empirical viability of a double dividend (green, welfare, and employment) in the Spanish economy. We consider a counterfactual scenario in which an ecotax is levied on the intermediate and final use of energy goods. Under a revenue neutral assumption, we evaluate the real ...

First Sight, a vision system in labeling the outline of a moving human body, is proposed in this paper. The emphasis of First Sight is on the analysis of motion information gathered solely from the outline of a moving human object. Two main processes are implemented in First Sight. The first process uses a novel technique to extract the outline of a moving human body from an image sequence. The...

Knowledge of the relation between body posture and the perception of affect is limited. Existing studies of emotion attribution to static body postures vary in method, response modalities and nature of the stimulus. Integration of such results proves difficult, and it remains to be investigated how the relation can be researched best. In this study we focus on the role of stimulus realism. An e...

Back pain in children and adolescents is quite common, so developing preventive strategies for back pain is highly desirable. This article describes a planned school-based postural education project (PoSE) to promote healthy behaviors among middle school students and their families and to moderate postural diseases. As first step, we evaluated which aspects of postural behaviors were integrated...

“First, do no harm.” This principle is well known to physicians as part of the Hippocratic Oath. No similar oath is taken by politicians, of course. But suppose they did. Suppose that, before they pass any new health legislation, our political representatives were required to reexamine existing laws and make sure that government is not the cause of the very problems it attempts to solve. What w...

We develop a model in which investors must learn the distribution of asset returns over time. The process of learning is made more difficult by the fact that the distributions are not constant through time. We consider risk-neutral investors who have quadratic utility and are selecting between two risky assets. We determine the time at which it is optimal to update the distribution estimate and...