Dutch municipalities have the right to decide on Sunday shop opening hours since 1996. Despite positive effects on economic growth and employment, many municipalities restrict Sunday trading in one way or another. Based on 2003 data we show that especially religious and political affiliation, regional differences and the size of the municipalities explain the variation between municipalities. T...

The present study provides one of the first empirical investigations of adolescent dating aggression (ADA) in Britain. The survey found almost half of sampled boys, and more than half of sampled girls, experienced psychological, physical and/or sexual aggression. The study found no significant association between religious affiliation, household composition, age, social class or the use of alco...

OBJECTIVES Household food insecurity is a major determinant of undernutrition, yet there is little information on its prevalence in the South African population. This paper assesses household food insecurity in South Africa using a quantitative and objective measure, known as food poverty, and provides prevalence estimates by geographic area and socio-economic condition. DESIGN Secondary data...

BACKGROUND To improve the scope of the Youth Compendium of Energy Expenditures, a range of everyday activities of varying intensity should be measured. This study measures the energy cost of children undertaking common household chores, rollerblading and riding a foot-propelled scooter. METHODS Participants were 9- to 14-year-old children. A metabolic cart was used to measure oxygen cost (VO2...

According to the World Health Organization, human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) (sleeping sickness) caused the loss of approximately 1.5 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in 2002. We describe the effect of HAT during 2000-2002 in Buma, a rural community near Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We used retrospective questionnaire surveys to estimate HAT-related household c...

Farm households in developing countries are generally credit constrained. This forces them to simultaneously take production and consumption decisions. In this paper, a two-period lifecycle model of the farm household is constructed and the household’s investment response to changes in land and agricultural output prices are derived theoretically. It is shown that in the absence of credit marke...

This paper studies household financial choices: why are these decisions dependent on the education level of the household? A life-cycle model is constructed to understand a rich set of facts about decisions of households with different levels of educational attainment regarding stock market participation, the stock share in wealth, the stock adjustment rate and the wealth-income ratio. Model pa...