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Written by: Lake County News reports

Published: 09 November 2023

State Controller Malia M. Cohen has published the 2022 self-reported payroll data for fairs, expositions and First 5 commissions on the Government Compensation in California website.

The data cover 2,299 positions and a total of more than $41.8 million in 2022 wages.

The newly published data include 1,593 positions at 20 fairs and expositions, and 706 positions at 32 First 5 commissions.

The Lake County Fair has 45 employees — most of them seasonal — with total wages reported at $244,156 and retirement and health contributions totaling $81,377.

Lake County’s First 5 Commission has 12 employees listed, only two of which — the executive director and health program support specialist — are paid, with total payroll at $105,035 and retirement and health contribution at $11,169.

California law requires cities, counties, and special districts to annually report compensation data to the State Controller.

Controller Cohen also maintains and publishes state government and California State University salary data.

No statutory requirement exists for superior courts, UC, community college districts, fairs, expositions, First 5 commissions, or K-12 education providers; their reporting is voluntary.

A list of entities that did not file or filed incomplete reports is available here.

The site contains pay and benefit information on more than two million government jobs in California, as reported annually by each entity.

As the chief fiscal officer of California, Controller Cohen is responsible for accountability and disbursement of the state’s financial resources.

The controller has independent auditing authority over government agencies that spend state funds. She is a member of numerous financing authorities, and fiscal and financial oversight entities including the Franchise Tax Board. She also serves on the boards for the nation’s two largest public pension funds.

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Written by: Elizabeth Fernandez

Published: 09 November 2023

We all know that a lousy night’s sleep can leave us feeling drained the next day. Now a study by UC San Francisco has found another reason to catch more Z’s: poor sleep is tied to significantly higher odds of experiencing atrial fibrillation, or A-Fib — irregular heartbeats that can lead to blood clots, heart failure, stroke and other heart-related problems — the following day.

A bad night of sleep was associated with a 15% greater risk of having an A-Fib episode, and continued poor sleep was associated with longer episodes of A-Fib.

The researchers noted that it is important to treat underlying disease that may be causing A-Fib, which is the most common type of arrythmia – when the heart beats too fast or too slow or irregularly.

The new study shows that strategies to improve general sleep quality also may help.

“Treating insomnia can be challenging, but in many cases, there are things within an individual’s control that can meaningfully improve sleep quality,” said corresponding author Gregory M. Marcus, MD, MAS, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist at UCSF Health.

He suggested going to bed at a reasonable and at a consistent time, avoiding alcohol and caffeine before bedtime, using the bed only for sleep or romance, exercising regularly, keeping the room cool, avoiding naps and waking up at the same time each day.

Sleep quality: the good, the bad and the horrible

UCSF has long been a leader in cardiology treatment, including for heart rhythm disorders. Although the risks associated with A-Fib have been extensively investigated, this is the first time that researchers have seen an immediate connection to poor sleep.

The study tracked 419 patients in the I-STOP-AFIB trial. They rated their sleep quality each night, as either “amazing,” “good,” “average,” “bad” or “horrible,” and used mobile electrocardiograms to measure A-Fib episodes the following day.

The study appears in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology.

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Written by: Huan Kuang, Bryant University and Ying (Cathy) Zheng, Bryant University

Published: 09 November 2023

 

Climate change poses the biggest risks to the most vulnerable people, and the same is true for businesses: Highly leveraged companies – those that have accumulated too much debt – are uniquely susceptible to climate shocks. That’s what we found in a forthcoming study in The Review of Corporate Finance that analyzed data from more than 2,500 U.S. publicly listed companies over 16 years.

As professors who study climate finance and corporate governance, we wanted to understand how climate change affects businesses, and how stakeholders – people who have a stake in a firm’s success, such as consumers, employees and investors – respond to it.

So we and our colleagues Sadok El Ghoul at the University of Alberta and Omrane Guedhami at the University of South Carolina conducted a study to examine how climate risk affects indebted companies.

We found that climate change delivers a one-two punch to highly leveraged firms by intensifying the costs that stakeholders impose on them.

Consider consumers. Researchers know that climate change can push people to mix up their purchasing patterns – by buying greener products, for example, or by engaging in boycotts. And while evolving consumer preferences pose a challenge to all businesses, it’s harder for a company that’s deep in debt to adapt.

Our study suggested as much. Two years after facing intense climate change exposure, highly indebted firms saw sales growth fall by about 1.4% on average, we found. In monetary terms, that translates into an average US$59.7 million loss per company.

Climate change also worries investors, we found. Companies exposed to climate risk face the threat of financial and operational disruptions that may drain lenders’ funds, particularly for firms already burdened with high debt. By examining capital issuance within our sample of companies, we found that climate exposure reduced firms’ net debt issuance – meaning new debt minus retired debt – by around $457 million per firm on average. This is an additional hurdle for indebted businesses trying to raise money.

Why it matters

Researchers have long known that indebted companies are at greater risk of product failures and losing market share when economic conditions go south. Having too much debt can even force companies out of business, as some analysts contend happened with Toys R Us.

Our research suggests that climate change, which the World Economic Forum predicts will endanger about 2% of global financial assets by 2100, will push already shaky companies to the brink. It underscores the immense and asymmetric effects global warming will have on businesses – and the reality that the most vulnerable firms are set to endure the worst.

What’s next

Our study highlights the disproportionate impacts of climate change on financially fragile businesses. Moving forward, we plan to explore the influence of climate change on firms’ business behaviors, particularly in terms of their ethical conduct.

Regarding climate solutions, one of us (Huan Kuang) has shown how companies can use innovation to reduce their climate vulnerabilities. In a working paper co-authored with Bing Liang of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, every 1% increase in climate-related innovation – as measured by patent data – was found to reduce firm-level carbon emissions growth by around 100,000 metric tons.

However, indebted firms may not rush to invest in new technologies without some prodding. That means policy incentives will be key to success, and further research is needed to determine what they should look like.

Climate change could also have more complicated economic effects than many people realize. For example, if it forces companies that aren’t viable out of business, that would be a good thing for the economy – at least in theory, as one of us (Ying Zheng) explored in a recent paper on a related subject.

Many questions remain unanswered, but it’s already clear that climate change will have important and multifaceted effects on the future of business. We encourage other researchers to investigate further.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Huan Kuang, Assistant Professor of Finance, Bryant University and Ying (Cathy) Zheng, Associate Professor of Finance, Bryant University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.