Narrow Results

Using the panel urban households’ aggregate data at the province level in China, this paper attempts to identify the source of the rejection of permanent income hypothesis (PIH) in urban households’ consumption. We introduce liquidity constraints, myopia and loss aversion into testable hypotheses and document that: First, the PIH fails in urban China and the consumption is consistent with the liquidity constraints. Second, in regions with the high and moderate economic levels, the consumption behaviors show liquidity constraints in the early period of market-oriented economic reforms (i.e., 1980s). However, with time, the consumption pattern changed to myopia. Third, in region with low economic level, the reverse is observed: a period of myopia gave way to a period of liquidity constraints. Our results suggest that neither myopia nor liquidity constraints are an adequate characterization of consumption in different regions of urban China, and offer clear policy implications for governments who are concerned with boosting the household income and expanding domestic demand.

In this research, task errors were obtained during performance of a marker location task in which the markers were shown on a computer screen under nine LED lighting conditions; three illuminances (100, 300 and 500 lx) and three color temperatures (3000, 4500 and 6500 K). A total of 47 students participated voluntarily in these tasks. The results showed that task errors in the morning were small and nearly constant across the nine lighting conditions. However in the afternoon, the task errors were significantly larger and varied across lighting conditions. The largest errors for the afternoon session occurred when the color temperature was 4500 K and illuminance 500 lx. There were significant differences between task errors in the morning and afternoon sessions. No significant difference between females and males was found. Task errors for high myopia students were significantly larger than for the low myopia students under the same lighting conditions. In summary, the influence of LED lighting on task accuracy during office hours was not gender dependent, but was time of day and myopia dependent.

The article is about myopia in the Asia Pacific region.

The article is about the molecular biology of myopia. It discusses the characteristics of myopia and some of the drugs that slows down myopia.

The article is about the prevalence rates of myopia in Asian cities like Singapore.

The short article is about school myopia in Hong Kong and the high prevalence rates of myopia in primary school children.

The article is about a population-based prevalence survey of refractive error in Sumatra, Indonesia.

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Purpose: To provide a geographical map of choroidal thickness (CT) around the macular region among subjects with low, moderate and high myopia. Methods: 20 myopic subjects (n = 40 eyes) without other identified pathologies participated in this study: 20 eyes of ≤ 3 diopters (D) (low myopic), 10 eyes between -3 and -6D (moderate myopic), and 10 eyes of ≥ 6D (high myopic). The mean age of subjects was 30.2 years (± 7.6 years; range, 24 to 46 years). A 1050 nm spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) system, operating at 120 kHz imaging rate, was used in this study to simultaneously capture 3D anatomical images of the choroid and measure intraocular length (IOL) in the subject. The 3D OCT images of the choroid were segmented into superior, inferior, nasal and temporal quadrants, from which the CT was measured, representing radial distance between the outer retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layer and inner scleral border. Measurements were made within concentric regions centered at fovea centralis, extended to 5 mm away from fovea at 1 mm intervals in the nasal and temporal directions. The measured IOL was the distance from the anterior cornea surface to the RPE in alignment along the optical axis of the eye. Statistical analysis was performed to evaluate CT at each geographic region and observe the relationship between CT and the degree of myopia. Results: For low myopic eyes, the IOL was measured at 24.619 ± 0.016 mm. The CT (273.85 ± 49.01 μm) was greatest under fovea as is in the case of healthy eyes. Peripheral to the fovea, the mean CT decreased rapidly along the nasal direction, reaching a minimum of 180.65 ± 58.25μm at 5 mm away from the fovea. There was less of a change in thickness from the fovea in the temporal direction reaching a minimum of 234.25 ± 42.27 μm. In contrast to the low myopic eyes, for moderate and high myopic eyes, CTs were thickest in temporal region (where CT = 194.94 ± 27.28 and 163 ± 34.89 μm, respectively). Like the low myopic eyes, moderate and high myopic eyes had thinnest CTs in the nasal region (where CT = 100.84 ± 16.75 and 86.64 ± 42.6μm, respectively). High myopic eyes had the longest mean IOL (25.983 ± 0.021mm), while the IOL of moderate myopia was 25.413 ± 0.022 mm (**p < 0.001). The CT reduction rate was calculated at 31.28 μm/D (diopter) from low to moderate myopia, whilst it is 13.49 μm/D from moderate to high myopia. The similar tendency was found for the IOL reduction rate in our study: 0.265 mm/D from low to moderate myopia, and 0.137 mm/D from moderate to high myopia. Conclusion: The CT decreases and the IOL increases gradually with the increase of myopic condition. The current results support the theory that choroidal abnormality may play an important role in the pathogenesis of myopic degeneration.

Consistent with prior findings that obese individuals tend to be more risk-averse and myopic, we find that firms located in areas with higher obesity rates invest less, grow more slowly, are less profitable, and have higher stock volatility. We mitigate identification concerns by using an instrumental variables approach, testing for local managers and local shareholders as channels for these effects, and ruling out several alternative explanations, thereby favoring a causal interpretation of our results. Finally, both genetic and environmental factors appear to contribute to these effects. Our findings suggest that physical characteristics of the local population also affect the policies of local firms.

The agency paradigm is primarily concerned with compensation contracts that align the interests of top management with those of shareholders, but such alignment may be imperfect. In particular, if shareholders differ in their time-preferences, it will be impossible to find a contract that fully aligns manager interests with those of both long-term and short-term shareholders. In this study, we examine the relationship between the inter-temporal weighting on a CEO’s contract and shareholder welfare in a setting where shareholders liquidate choose to cash in their holdings in different time-periods. We show that the managerial compensation contract will typically create incentives for the manager to trade-off short-term price increases with long-term value creation and it is possible to design a second-best contract that is Pareto optimal. This analysis shows that the impact of earnings management is often mischaracterized as Pareto suboptimal even though it may be a requisite to make both long and short-term shareholders better-off on average.

We report on an experiment which enables us to infer how far people plan ahead when taking decisions in a dynamic risky context. Just over half of the subjects plan fully, while the rest do not plan ahead at all.