The links between parental smoking and childhood obesity: data of the longitudinal study of Australian children.

Childhood obesity is one of the most concerning public health issues globally and its implications in mortality and morbidity in adulthood are increasingly important. This study uses a unique dataset of Australian children aged 4-16 to examine the impact of parental smoking on childhood obesity. It confirms a significant link between parental smoking (stronger for mothers) and higher obesity risk in children, regardless of income, age, family size, or birth order. Importantly, we explore whether heightened preference for unhealthy foods can mediate the effect of parental smoking. Our findings suggest that increased consumption of unhealthy foods among children can be associated with parental smoking.

Valuing Australian football league draft picks.

To ensure uncertainty in match outcomes, professional sporting leagues have used various competitive balance policies, including player salary caps, revenue sharing among teams and player drafts. The Australian Football League (AFL) introduced a player draft in 1986, and to refine its operation, a draft value index (DVI) was introduced in 2015. The DVI allocates a numeric value to each individual player draft pick, with these values determined by the AFL using historic player compensation or wage and salary data. The AFL DVI plays an essential role in the operation of its player draft; however, other research has questioned the validity of such indexes. This paper aims to produce an alternative to the AFL DVI. The former index uses career compensation as the determinant of value, whereas we use other measures of player performance. First, various models were developed to predict on-field performance, such as games played (both in a recruit's career and season) after a draftee was selected for the first time by a team. This was then retrofitted to the pick used to select these draftees to create the new DVIs. Even though the predicted DVI followed an inverse monotonic function like the existing index, the decline in value for the DVI produced here was less steep, unlike the AFL's. This allowed us to conclude that players' salaries did not always strongly correlate to performance. The change in performance between players selected at different points in the draft did not vary as much as their wages. Though this scheme is applied to the AFL, the underlying concept could be directly exported to other player drafts.

The effect of parental smoking on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

Economic research emphasises the importance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in children for long-term labour market, health and social outcomes. In contrast to previous studies that focus on the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy, we contribute to the literature by examining whether parental current smoking impacts on children's cognitive and non-cognitive development. We exploit data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and address potential endogeneity and self-selectivity bias using robust estimation methods. Overall, we find evidence that parental smoking results in worse development outcomes in children. Specifically, our fixed-effects estimates indicate that children living with parents who are smokers exhibit lower cognitive outcomes ranging between 0.09 and 0.17 standard deviation, while the impacts on non-cognitive outcomes range between 0.06 and 0.80 standard deviation. We also provide insights on some of the mechanisms of transmission. Our findings suggest that campaigns, programs and policies that reduce tobacco consumption may have positive externalities in terms of improving children's cognitive and non-cognitive development, and long-term labour market outcomes.

Misreporting and econometric modelling of zeros in survey data on social bads: An application to cannabis consumption.

When modelling "social bads," such as illegal drug consumption, researchers are often faced with a dependent variable characterised by a large number of zero observations. Building on the recent literature on hurdle and double-hurdle models, we propose a double-inflated modelling framework, where the zero observations are allowed to come from the following: nonparticipants; participant misreporters (who have larger loss functions associated with a truthful response); and infrequent consumers. Due to our empirical application, the model is derived for the case of an ordered discrete-dependent variable. However, it is similarly possible to augment other such zero-inflated models (e.g., zero-inflated count models, and double-hurdle models for continuous variables). The model is then applied to a consumer choice problem of cannabis consumption. We estimate that 17% of the reported zeros in the cannabis survey are from individuals who misreport their participation, 11% from infrequent users, and only 72% from true nonparticipants.

Oral Health, Dental Insurance and Dental Service use in Australia.

This study uses data from the 2004-2006 Australian National Survey of Adult Oral Health and a simultaneous equation framework to investigate the interrelationships between dental health, private dental insurance and the use of dental services. The results show that insurance participation is influenced by social and demographic factors, health and health behaviours. In turn, these factors affect the use of dental services, both directly and through insurance participation. Our findings confirm that affordability is a major barrier to visiting the dentist for oral health maintenance and treatment. Our results suggest that having supplementary insurance is associated with some 56 percentage points higher probability of seeing the dentist in the general population. For those who did not have private insurance cover, we predict that conditional on them facing the same insurance conditions, on average, having insurance would increase their visits to the dentist by 43 percentage points. The uninsured in the survey have lower income, worse oral health and lower rates of preventive and treatment visits. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Persistent Post-radiotherapy Pain and Locoregional Recurrence in Head and Neck Cancer-Is There a Hidden Link?

BACKGROUND: To explore the relationship between persistent post-radiotherapy pain and locoregional recurrence in head and neck cancer patients. METHODS: Five year retrospective data was reviewed of 86 patients of head and neck cancer treated with radiotherapy who continued to have pain at 6 weeks after completion of treatment. At follow-up after 3 months, these patients were stratified into: Group A (n = 39) constituted of patients whose pain subsided and Group B (n = 47) were patients who continued to have persistent pain. RESULTS: At median follow-up time of 25 months (range: 8-47), one patient (2.6%) and 18 (38.3%) patients in group A and group B had locoregional recurrence respectively (P < 0.0001). Furthermore, group B patients had higher mean pain score levels as compared to group A (P = 0.03). Patients in whom pain subsided within 3 months had statistically much greater disease-free survival in comparison to those with persistent pain (P < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Pain in head and neck cancer is an important symptom and should be considered a poor prognostic factor. In the current study, the majority of the patients with persistent pain had recurrent disease as compared to those in whom pain subsided within 3 months of post-treatment. It is suggested that patients with persistent pain need more intense follow-up and should be investigated thoroughly to detect recurrence at an early stage to provide a better quality of life.