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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of falling commodity prices on farm debt usage of corn and soybean farms, and how this debt usage differs based on the financial leverage of the farm.

Using panel data on farms surveyed at least twice in the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) from 1996 to 2015, this paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to measure the effect of low commodity price shocks on financially vulnerable farms. To account for the correlation in the error structure between the three dependent variables (real estate debt, non-real estate debt, and interest payments) we use a seemingly unrelated regression approach.

Following a commodity price shock, financially vulnerable farms (debt-to-asset ratio greater than 40 percent) were found to increase their non-real estate debt when compared with non-financially vulnerable farms. Off-farm business income was found to help farms reduce real estate debt and interest payments in the face of these shocks.

Data consist of corn and soybean farms surveyed more than once in the ARMS from 1996 to 2015 and are not representative of all US farms, but have similar characteristics to US commercial farms.

The results indicate that financially vulnerable commercial crop farms respond to lower prices by taking on non-real estate debt, increasing financial stress. Well-targeted federal programs could prevent further financial stress for this group.

This is the first paper to use unbalanced panel data from ARMS to examine how farm debt use responds to commodity prices. This paper can inform policymakers about the financial risks to farms resulting from the current low-price environment.

Incivility is widespread in the workplace and has been shown to have significant affective and behavioral consequences. However, the authors still have a limited understanding as to whether, how and when discrete incivility events impact team performance. Adopting a resource depletion perspective and focusing on the cognitive implications of such events, the authors introduce a multi-level model linking the adverse effects of such events on team members’ working memory – the “workbench” of the cognitive system where most planning, analyses, and management of goals occur – to team effectiveness. The model which the authors develop proposes that that uncivil interpersonal behavior in general, and rudeness – a central manifestation of incivility – in particular, may place a significant drain on individuals’ working memory capacity, affecting team effectiveness via its effects on individual performance and coordination-related team emergent states and action-phase processes. In the context of this model, the authors offer an overarching framework for making sense of disparate findings regarding how, why and when incivility affects performance outcomes at multiple levels. More specifically, the authors use this framework to: (a) suggest how individual-level cognitive impairment and weakened coordinative team processes may mediate these incivility-based effects, and (b) explain how event, context, and individual difference factors moderators may attenuate or exacerbate these cognition-mediated effects.

The United States’ population is rapidly aging. As older people require more expensive medical and nursing attention, health-care/nursing costs keep rising, to the extent that they are not sustainable. As a result, the USA is faced with an ethical dilemma. While egalitarian ethical principles and the provisions of the American Nurses Association (ANA) code of ethics require the provision of medical/nursing care to everyone regardless of age, severity of disease and productivity, utilitarians view that as impossible. Assuming that provisions ANA’s codes of ethics are the same as ethical principles, this paper aims to discuss the debate between those two sides in detail.

The paper, viewing the rise of health-care/nursing costs as the cause of the above ethical dilemma, discusses Daniel Callahan’s utilitarian argument that, given the ever-rising health/nursing costs as a percentage of GDP, the USA will be forced to ration health care/nursing on the basis of age. The ethical arguments opposing Callahan’s arguments will also be presented.

While the debate between those two viewpoints is bond to continue, some writers have tried to find a compromise, a solution by assuming that, through efficiency, health/nursing costs can be lowered, making Callahan’s age-based rationing unnecessary.

This paper is original as it, by including nursing costs as an inseparable component of health-care costs, makes the aforementioned debate applicable to nursing care.

The literature on international entrepreneurship offers two competing views on why new ventures internationalize: (a) the nature of the opportunity pulls them international or (b) the founder pushes the firm international. While these two internationalization drivers are not independent, they do represent unique causal mechanisms. Previously, the tools available to understand the entrepreneur’s disposition toward internationalization were limited. The present study uses the theoretical foundation of the international entrepreneurial orientation construct and from it develops and tests an attitudinally-based individual-level measure of disposition toward internationalization. To ensure the validity and reliability of the new measure, termed International Entrepreneurial Orientation Disposition, studies were conducted to: develop new scale items, examine their psychometric properties and construct validity, and demonstrate criterion validity. A strong measurement model is developed using structural equation modeling (CFI = 0.93, RMSEA = 0.07), and the measure is shown to be useful as a predictor of perceived international venture attractiveness.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.

In the epigraph of the paper, Aristotle reminds us that confusion and inconsistency arise when people attach more than one meaning to any particular term (“name”). It seems that Aristotle could not have better described the situation with the connotation of Jewishness in the contemporary world.

The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact of the variation of microstructural features on macroscopic and microscopic fields. The application of multi-scale methods in the context of constitutive modeling of microheterogeneous materials requires the choice of a representative volume element (RVE) of the considered microstructure, which may be based on some idealized assumptions and/or on experimental observations. In any case, a realistic microstructure within the RVE is either computationally too expensive or not fully accessible by experimental measurement techniques, which introduces some uncertainty regarding the microstructural features.

In this paper, a systematical variation of microstructural parameters controlling the morphology of an RVE with an idealized microstructure is conducted and the impact on macroscopic quantities of interest as well as microstructural fields and their statistics is investigated. The study is carried out under macroscopically homogeneous deformation states using the direct micro-macro scale transition approach.

The variation of microstructural parameters, such as inclusion volume fraction, aspect ratio and orientation of the inclusion with respect to the overall loading, influences the macroscopic behavior, especially the micromechanical fields significantly.

The systematic assessment of the impact of microstructural parameters on both macroscopic quantities and statistics of the micromechanical fields allows for a quantitative comparison of different microstructure morphologies and a reliable identification of microstructural parameters that promote failure initialization in microheterogeneous materials.

Patient engagement has been a focus of patient-centered care in recent years, encouraging health care organizations to increase efforts to facilitate a patient's ability to participate in health care. At the same time, a growing body of research has examined the impact that social determinants of health (SDOH) have on patient health outcomes. Additionally, health care equity is increasingly becoming a focus of many organizations as they work to ensure that all patients receive equitable care. These three domains – patient engagement, SDOH, and health care equity – can intersect in the implementation of social needs screenings among health care organizations. We present a case study on a two-phase social needs screening implementation project and describe how this process focuses on equity. As health care organizations seek to increase patient engagement, address SDOH, and improve health equity, we highlight the need to move away from a siloed approach and view these efforts as interrelated. By approaching efforts to address these challenges and barriers as the duty of all those involved in the patient care process, there may be larger strides made toward equitable health care.

As a result of the aging of American society, health care costs have been and will continue to rise, to the extent that they are not sustainable. Obviously, this trend will continue in spite of the 2010 health care reform. As a result of this uncontrollable problem, writers such as Daniel Callahan have proposed age‐based rationing of health care while utilizing the utilitarian notions of ethics and justice. However, other writers, utilizing more egalitarian notions of justice, have opposed this. This suggests an ethical dilemma, which has to be debated in the future. The author believes professors teaching health care related courses will be instrumental in this debate, explaining why she decided to seek the opinion of a sample of 18 professors regarding this issue. The purpose of this paper is to report on the results of this research.

Qualitative methodology, specially grounded theory, was used in this study that sought to explore the views of 18 full‐time professors who teach health care policy and administration in Northeast Pennsylvania about age‐based rationing of health care. Qualitative research is very useful uncovering the views of individuals as they relate to their experiences. In the study, professors were asked 14 questions by the author, four of these being demographic. The remaining ten questions, open ended ones, sought the opinions of these professors about their support or opposition to age‐based rationing.

The author's interviews of those 18 professors and the analysis of the responses, which revealed the complexity and multidimensional nature of the issue, led to the emergence of eight different themes.

The author used a qualitative method of research, interviewing 18 professors, to uncover personal views not previously published.