Overweight is now a major public health problem in Tayside and, indeed, the whole of Scotland. More than half of the adult population can be classified as overweight or obese (severely overweight), while one in ten children are obese. Men are more likely to be overweight than women and older men are more at risk than younger men. Women from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to be obese than any other group in society.
The Tayside Healthy Weight Strategy seeks to explore the causes of overweight and the health risks linked to this condition. High quality published evidence is reviewed to highlight the interventions which could help prevent and treat overweight. Recommendations are made about the need for extra research where little good information exists. Existing work in policy and service provision in Tayside, and further afield, is acknowledged. Finally, a plan is proposed for tackling the causes of overweight in a range of settings.
The succession of financial crises in emerging markets since the mid 90’s raised awareness about the specific risks posed by financial globalization for a number of countries. This realization prompted an intense debate on the reform of the international financial architecture, and various far-reaching proposals have been discussed over the last decade in both academic and official circles. More often than not, this debate has revolved around the extent to which emerging markets crises have been primarily a result of failures in international financial markets or of mistaken policies.
Those stressing the importance of market failures have advocated for the creation of a meaningful official financial safety net articulated around the IMF acting as a pseudo-lender of last resort (Fisher, 1999). In turn, those stressing the importance of policy failures have prioritized the need to avoid distorting the incentives of both sovereign borrowers and private lenders, placing moral hazard at the centre of the discussion. Eventually, the debate has tended to result in the adoption of difficult compromises between the two camps, of which the Prague Framework for crisis resolution is a good example. According to this framework, adopted by the international community in 2001, liquidity crises ought to be resolved by combining limited and predictable official assistance, catalysis of private capital flows, and private sector involvement.
We examine the financing choices of undiversified entrepreneurs in a continuous-time model. Entrepreneurs’ financing choices as well as their dynamic equity stakes, which trade off their private benefits and the costs they incur due to their lack of diversification, are simultaneously and endogenously determined. We characterize the equilibrium of the structural model and calibrate its parameters to aggregate data on the financing choices of young firms. Leverage increases with the drift or expected growth rate of the firm’s earnings and decreases with its volatility. Debt maturity varies in a U-shaped manner with the project’s drift and with its volatility. The predicted variations of leverage and debt maturity with the actual drift (controlling for the risk-neutral drift) of earnings are key distinguishing implications of our theory. These implications arise from the incorporation of agency conflicts between undiversified entrepreneurs and well-diversified outside investors, and cannot, therefore, be obtained in traditional capital structure models in which all agents are well-diversified. We also derive additional novel implications that link entrepreneur-specific characteristics---their discount rate or “degree of myopia” and their cost of risk---to leverage and debt maturity.
We investigate the financing decisions of entrepreneurial firms in a continuous-time framework. Our model incorporates the effects of agency conflicts between undiversified entrepreneurs, who derive non-pecuniary private benefits from their ownership stakes, and well-diversified outside investors. In our symmetric information framework with no taxes or bankruptcy costs, a cash-constrained entrepreneur finances a firm’s projects with a combination of debt, inside equity and outside equity. The entrepreneur’s financing choices and her dynamic equity stake in the firm reflect the inter-temporal interplay among the private benefits she derives from her ownership stake, the costs she incurs due to her resulting lack of diversification, and the loss of private benefits due to bankruptcy.
