Importing country standards emerge as an effective trade barrier when they exceed those of the exporting country’s domestic market. We introduce a new concept: bridge to cross (BTC), the regulatory gap between the exporting and importing countries. Importer regulations cannot be identified in...

Worksite wellness programs improve the health and quality of life of workers, and result in higher productivity. Data from a regional health survey suggests that more than $32 million of labor income is lost annually because of poor health, effectively increasing unemployment by more than 40% in...

Replaced with revised version of paper 01/26/06.

This paper examined cost efficiency differences between rural hospitals participating in the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) Program and a group of non-converting, prospectively paid rural hospitals using both a two-stage semi-parametric approach as well as stochastic frontier analysis (SFA)....

Recent trend depicts that tomatoes and tomatoes products rank 2nd most important vegetable crop in the United States after potatoes and potatoes products contributing 20 percent of total vegetable production. More-so, tomato is equally ranked 2nd in the United States in terms of production...

Combustion-generated pollutants, principally those from solid-fuels including biomass and coal when cooking and heating, bring out a significant public health hazard in both developed and developing countries. Most of the existing studies addressing this issue focus on developing countries, and...

Aspects of the built environment may be contributing to the upward trend in obesity through constrained availability and affordability of healthful foods. The neighborhood food environment factors such as the availability of food retail stores is increasingly being recognized as playing an...

This paper takes an empirical approach to determining the effect that a critical access hospital (CAH) has on local retail activity. Previous research on the relationship between hospitals and economic development has primarily focused on single-case, multiplier oriented analysis. The positive...