As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid 1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households, such as mortgages, second mortgages, mutual funds, student loans, car loans,
The 5 articles included in this special section are reviewed in this article. The studies encompassed were all focused on pre-or early adolescents, and samples were generally from inner-city areas, with 1 involving rural youth. Considered collectively, the results point to 3 major conclusions: Many children in America are regularly exposed to violence in communities; such exposure carries risk for psychopathology; and parents and other adults can provide valuable support but are limited in how much they can offset the effects of ongoing violence exposure. Intervention implications are, foremost, that community violence itself must be reduced and, second, that positive relationships with significant adults should be fostered to the degree possible among children living in high-risk, violence-prone communities.The five articles on violence exposure within this special section reflect several strengths, including the focus on rural as well as urban children, the use of multiple methods and respondents in assessments, and the exploration of diverse potentially protective processes, including different parenting domains and high perceived support from various people in the child's life. Considered in tandem, the results of these studies point to a series of three major conclusions.
Abstract:The current crisis in the mortgage securitization industry highlights significant failures in our models of how markets work and our political will, organizational capability, and ideological desire to intervene in markets. This paper shows that one of the main sources of failure has been the lack of a coherent understanding of how these markets came into existence, how tactics and strategies of the principal firms in these markets have evolved over time, and how we ended up with the economic collapse of the main firms. It seeks to provide some insight into these processes by compiling both historical and quantitative data on the emergence and spread of these tactics across the largest investment banks and their principal competitors from the mortgage origination industry. It ends by offering some policy proscriptions based on the analysis.
Background: Thymosin α 1 (Tα 1 ), a synthetic version of a thymic-derived biological response modifier was the first of the thymosins in clinical use. Tα 1 is approved in over 35 countries for the treatment of hepatitis B and C, and as an immune stimulant and adjuvant. Tα 1 is also in late-stage clinical testing in the United States and Europe for hepatitis C and stage IV melanoma. Objective/methods: Novel applications and other recently completed trials point to much broader clinical applications of Tα 1 in the treatment of life-threatening and chronic diseases, and are the subject of this review. Result/conclusions: The most recent reports of clinical trials with Tα 1 are pointing to important, hitherto unrecognized, applications in a number of diseases and disorders, including septic shock, acute respiratory distress syndrome, peritonitis, acute cytomegalovirus infection, TB, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and lung infections in critically ill patients. It is also emerging as a promising chemoprotection agent in patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Research on financialization has been constrained by limited suitable measures for cases outside of the for-profit sector. Using the case of US higher education, we consider financialization as both increasing reliance on financial investment returns and increasing costs from transactions to acquire capital. We document returns and costs across four types of transactions: (i) revenues from endowment investments, (ii) interest payments on institutional borrowing by colleges, (iii) profits extracted by investors in for-profit colleges and (iv) interest payments on student loan borrowing by households. Estimated annual funding from endowment investments grew from $16 billion in 2003 to $20 billion in 2012. Meanwhile financing costs grew from $21 billion in 2003 to $48 billion in 2012, or from 5 to 9% of the total higher education spending, even as interest rates declined. Increases in financial returns, however, were concentrated at wealthy colleges whereas increases in financing costs tended to outpace returns at poorer institutions. We discuss the implications of the findings for resource allocation, organizational governance and stratification among colleges and households.
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