Hyperthermia deaths in Finland in 1970-86

All cases in which hyperthermia had been determined as the basic cause of death during the period 1970-86 were collected from the records of the Central Statistical Office of Finland. Of the total of 230 cases, 228 were included in the present study; the two remaining victims died abroad, and no autopsy was performed in Finland. Most of the hyperthermia deaths occurred while the decedent was taking a sauna bath; most decedents were men aged 42-62 years. An increase in the total number of hyperthermia deaths, and of male victims, was noted from the beginning of the 1970s onward; the number of female victims remained at a relatively steady level throughout, with the exception of a slight rise in 1986. Acute alcohol consumption was detected in most of the victims; in some cases there was also a reference to chronic alcoholism or recent long-term heavy drinking. The findings suggest that in addition to the acute hazardous effect of ethanol on thermoregulatory mechanisms, the long-term consumption of alcohol may have promoted fatal hyperthermia in these subjects.     

Creating Broader Research Impacts through Boundary Organizations

Climate science research documents and predicts changes in the physical environment. This information informs policy decisions and public programs through the design of human interventions that promote adaptive management. Since the early 2000s, federal funding has led to the creation of transdisciplinary regional climate workgroups to facilitate integrative knowledge coproduction and promote shared use of research results by scientific and nonscientific stakeholders. Labeled “boundary organizations,” these workgroups are tasked with facilitating partnerships between climate science researchers and practitioners with expertise in multiple physical and social science disciplines. When these organizations are successful, scientific findings and practitioner experiences are integrated to synergistically create usable knowledge about adaptive management that provides direct public value and creates broader societal impacts. This article explores the broader impacts provided by these boundary organizations through the establishment of regional research agendas and the communication of research results in ways that influence regional public policy and promote adaptive management.     

What Gets Measured,Gets Done: Understanding and Addressing Middle‐Class Challenges

Middle‐class families face a range of challenges, including uneven income growth, imposing child care costs, and affordability gaps for higher education. The ideal policies by which policy makers and public administrators can aid the middle class are far from obvious. Policy solutions are likely to mirror our government and population, meaning that they will be decentralized and varied. Achieving a “growing and thriving middle class” requires understanding the composition of the middle class across the country. Benchmarking and measuring the middle‐class condition at the state and substate levels is critical to crafting and adopting effective policy solutions. This Viewpoint essay highlights the Colorado context to demonstrate the measurement of the middle class and tracking of its lived experiences.     

Do Competitive Examinations Promote Diversity in Civil Service?

The representative bureaucracy literature provides a growing body of empirical evidence that a representative public workforce enhances the efficacy and legitimacy of public services. However, little attention has been paid to the capacity of civil service competitive examinations to give equal opportunity of access to public jobs to equally competent citizens. To fill this gap, the authors use French databases to analyze whether competitive examinations comprising both written and oral tests ensure equality of treatment for all candidates regardless of gender, place of residence, or place of birth. The results challenge the capacity of these examinations to treat candidates equally, identifying inequalities in the written tests as well as evaluation biases in the oral tests. However, oral evaluation biases tend to offset inequalities in the written tests. Therefore, selection boards take a sort of affirmative action toward the sole successful members of groups suffering such inequalities.     

How Government Reactions to Violence Worsen Social Welfare: Evidence from Peru

Dissident violence inflicts many costs on society, but some of the longest‐lasting consequences for civilians may be indirect, due to the government's response. We explore how government policy responses affect social welfare, specifically through budgetary shifts. Using subnational violence and budgeting data for Peru, we demonstrate that attacks on soldiers during the budget negotiation period drive a shift from local social services, especially health, to defense. One soldier fatality implies a 0.13 percentage point reduction in the local health budget share (2008–12). Health budget cuts due to a single soldier fatality result in 76 predicted additional infant deaths 2 years later. We show that the effect on health budgeting operates through decreases in women's use of health facilities and postnatal services. We offer evidence that Peru's coercive response indirectly harms civilians due to butter‐to‐guns budgetary shifts. Our results identify a budgetary mechanism that translates dissident violence into a deterioration in social welfare.     

Is a problem shared a problem halved? Shared services and municipal efficiency

It has long been argued that shared services represent an efficacious means of securing efficiencies for municipalities. Indeed, pressures from fiscal austerity, taxation limitations, and the specter of forced amalgamations have resulted in an increasing uptake of shared service arrangements. However, the extant evidence is rather inconclusive and is largely restricted to analyzing the nett efficiency outcomes for the specific service shared. We broaden this evidential base by examining the association between shared service production and the efficiency of entire municipalities. Our analysis, employing a 5‐year panel of data, suggests that shared services are associated with a statistically significant reduction in overall municipal efficiency. We conclude by explicating on the public policy implications arising from our prima facie surprising results.     

Cost‐Effectiveness of Early Childhood Interventions to Enhance Preschool: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Head Start Centers Enrolling Historically Underserved Populations

We evaluate the cost‐effectiveness of two early childhood interventions that use instructional coaching and parent coaching as levers for improvement. The study design allows us to compare the individual effects of each intervention as well as their combined effect on student outcomes. We find that teachers receiving instructional coaching improve their use of evidence‐based instructional practices, while families receiving parent coaching show increases in numerous responsive parenting behaviors associated with positive child outcomes. Both interventions demonstrate positive impacts on students, but only parent coaching shows statistically significant effects across a range of student outcomes. Instructional coaching alone is substantially less costly and may therefore be the most cost‐effective of the three treatment conditions; however, small sample sizes limit our ability to reach definitive conclusions. Policy simulations suggest that implementing these interventions could raise the overall cost‐effectiveness of Head Start by at least 16 percent.     

The Effects of Women Officeholders on Environmental Policy

Studies show that women and girls consistently demonstrate higher levels of concern for the environment than men and boys. Separately, research also indicates that women officeholders pay particular attention to the issues prioritized by their female constituents. Interestingly, despite the consistency of the gender gap in attitudes to environmental issues the literature has paid scant attention to the role of women officeholders in the adoption of environmental policy. The goal of this paper was to start to address that lacuna. Using pooled cross‐sectional time series analyses of environmental standards in 18 Western parliamentary democracies (1990–2012), our initial findings indicate women officeholders are associated with the adoption of higher environmental standards.