Addressing the Epidemic of Childhood Obesity Through School-Based Interventions: What Has Been Done and Where Do We Go From Here?

Schools are ideal settings for implementing multi-component programs to prevent and control childhood obesity. Thoughtful improvements to proven strategies, coupled with careful evaluation, can contribute to accumulation of evidence needed to design and implement the next generation of optimal interventions.     

The Private Interests of Public Officials: Financial Regulation in the US Congress

Legislators' private financial holdings affect policy decisions. Due to financial self‐interest, we theorize that legislators whose personal investment portfolios include equities from firms affected by proposed policies vote for legislation that benefits those firms. We also theorize that legislators with greater personal exposure to equity investments support policies that benefit equities markets generally. We create a novel data set of legislators' personal stock investments and examine major congressional actions since the 1990s on financial deregulation and market intervention. US House members who own stocks in firms who benefit from financial deregulation vote for deregulation. House members with greater exposure to financial and automotive stocks support the financial and auto bailouts, respectively. General exposure to equities markets is also associated with support for key legislation boosting markets. The normative implications are significant, as legislators' private interests influence decisions in the public sphere.     

The Demand for Protectionism: Democracy,Import Elasticity,and Trade Barriers

Numerous studies suggest that democracies employ lower trade barriers than nondemocracies. In this article, we examine the conditioning role that the elasticity of import demand at the commodity level plays on the relationship between democracy and import barriers. Beginning with the assumption that democracies are more responsive than nondemocracies to the preferences of mass publics, we demonstrate that the value of free trade as a public good depends on the elasticity of import demand. When import demand for a given commodity is inelastic, trade barriers are more harmful to consumers; as such, democracies will employ lower trade barriers than nondemocracies. However, as import demand becomes more elastic, publics find it easier to adjust to higher prices; as a result, the difference in imposed trade barriers by regime type decreases. We find support for this argument in statistical analyses of crosssectional data covering 4,656 commodities imported by 73 countries Furthermore, we find that democracies raise higher trade barriers than nondemocracies on commodities for which import demand is very elastic.