By 2020, two-thirds of the global burden of disease will be attributable to chronic non-communicable diseases (e.g. cardiovascular disease and diabetes), most of them strongly associated with diet. The pandemic of these diseases is likely, at least in part, to be due to a mismatch between our current dietary patterns (i.e. excessive calories and fat intake coupled with reduced dietary fiber intake) and those during man’s early stages of evolution which our genes were programmed to respond to. However, the interactions between our diet, genetic factors and the development of these diseases are not fully understood.
Several microarray transcription profiling studies have examined the effects of a high-fat, calorie-dense (HFC) diet but reported contradictory findings. One possible reason for these discrepant findings may be due to the varying lengths of the feeding period. We hypothesized that the HFC diet would initially elicit compensatory interrelated responses between feeding behaviour and gene expression levels and that such compensatory responses might diminish over time with the continued intake of a HFC diet.
Previous literature that relates predictions of proxies for real economic activity to financial variables has focused mainly on the information from the government debt market, the corporate debt market and the stock market. The prominent financial leading indicators for policy makers are the inverse of the slope of the nominal yield curve (e.g., term spread, defined as the difference between the 10-year Treasury bill rate and the 3-month Treasury bill rate), the paper-bill spread (defined as the difference between yields on the commercial paper and the Treasury bill) and the return on stock market indices.
It has been documented that these financial indicators have lost considerable forecasting power in recent years. More specifically, a worsening in the term spread predictive content regarding the US recession in the early 1990s has been documented by Haubrich and Dombrosky (1996) and Dotsey (1998). More recently, Stock and Watson (2003b) find that although the term spread did turn negative in advance of the 2001 recession, this inversion, however, was small by historical standards. Furthermore, the study of Friedman and Kuttner (1998) shows a poor forecasting performance of the paper-bill spread. Finally, Fama (1981) and Harvey (1989) show that the linkage between stock market indicators and output growth is unclear, while Stock and Watson (1989, 1999) and Estrella and Mishkin (1998) find evidence of little marginal forecasting content in stock prices.
Due to recent events in corporate America, including the recent Enron scandal and numerous cases of insider trading, the public’s faith in the fairness of the stock markets has been shaken. The current study suggests that public relations efforts that are designed to increase the public’s perception of the integrity of United States stock markets and lower public cynicism toward insider trading may be fruitful.
The contributions of this study are to identify what leads to insider trading and thereby identify methods to reduce it. Graduate student subjects are used to test the relationship between the intent to trade based on insider information and the deterrents and motivations for insider trading. The results of the study indicate that gain, certainty, cynicism, guilt, social stigma, and agreement with the law have a significant effect on an individual’s intent to take part in insider trading. The results do not provide conclusive support that increasing severity of punishment decreases the likelihood of trading based on insider information. The results also show that there are differences in the perceptions of male and female respondents with regard to the deterrence variables.
