News by Subject Business & Economics

Whether you decided to engage in social distancing in the early stages of COVID-19 depended on how much information your working memory could hold. Researchers found individuals with higher working memory capacity have an increased awareness of benefits over costs of social distancing and show more compliance with recommended social distancing guidelines during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. The UC Riverside-led study offers potential strategies to mitigate social-distancing noncompliance in a public-health crisis.

As of May 2020, nursing home residents account for a staggering one-third of the more than 80,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the U.S. This pandemic has resulted in unprecedented threats--like reduced access to resources needed to contain and eliminate the spread of the virus--to achieving and sustaining care quality even in the best nursing homes. Active engagement of nursing home leaders in developing solutions responsive to the unprecedented threats to quality standards of care delivery is required.

A team of researchers from Aarhus University have, for the first time ever, linked 40 years of productivity data from the construction industry with the actual work done. The results show that productivity in the construction industry has been declining since the 1970s. The results also explain the decline and how to achieve far more efficient construction in North America and Europe. The study has just been published in the scientific journal Construction Engineering and Management.

Medical researchers in the UK and Australia have identified a new marker which could support the search for novel preventative and therapeutic treatments for dementia. In an innovative new study, coordinated by Flinders University and University of Aberdeen, the researchers investigated the role of asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA), a blood marker associated with atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease in epidemiological studies, on temporal changes in cognition in an established cohort of human ageing (the 1936 Aberdeen Birth Cohort).

The most vulnerable residents of the nation's 10th most populous state say their health improved significantly after they enrolled in Michigan's expanded Medicaid program, a new study finds. Michiganders with extremely low incomes, those with multiple chronic health problems, and those who are Black, got the biggest health boosts year over year among enrollees in the safety-net health coverage program. But participants of almost all ages, backgrounds and geographic regions reported improvements in health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an estimated global consumption loss of $3.8 trillion, as well as significant job and income loss. However, these socioeconomic effects are accompanied by notable estimated reductions in air pollution. Manfred Lenzen of the University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 9, 2020.

A new Cornell University study finds that when small-scale farmers are trained in food safety protocols and develop a farm food safety plan, new markets open up to them, leading to an overall gain in revenue.

Researchers from Bentley University, in partnership with Pine Street Inn, New England's largest homeless shelter, have been exploring the ideas of process modeling to better understand and improve triage practices at homeless shelters.

The science community should withdraw from involvement in international tests such as PISA because they have forced schools to adopt 'narrow' curricula and pedagogies, a study says.

A study co-authored by MIT scholars contains bad news and good news about Covid-19 misinformation -- and a new insight that may help reduce the problem.