Whither the evolution of the contemporary social fabric? New technologies and old socio‐economic trends

This article considers whether societies are witnessing another industrial revolution in the light of an assessment of the impact of technological change on today's socio‐economic fabric, especially with respect to employment, income distribution, working conditions and labour relations. The authors argue that the processes of innovation and the spread of what they term “intelligent automation” are likely to exacerbate incumbent patterns of uneven income distribution and power, some of which existed well before the arrival of the technologies concerned, while others have emerged over the past 30 to 40 years. They venture to consider policy implications on the basis of such developments.     

Perceived Corruption and Individuals’ Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Institutional Trust

Social Indicators Research - Corruption degrades the quality of institutions, increases economic inequality and limits growth. Recent studies indicate that corruption is also associated with lower...     

A Bayesian model for cross-study differential gene expression

In this paper we define a hierarchical Bayesian model for microarray expression data collected from several studies and use it to identify genes that show differential expression between two conditions. Key features include shrinkage across both genes and studies, and flexible modeling that allows for interactions between platforms and the estimated effect, as well as concordant and discordant differential expression across studies. We evaluated the performance of our model in a comprehensive fashion, using both artificial data, and a "split-study" validation approach that provides an agnostic assessment of the model's behavior not only under the null hypothesis, but also under a realistic alternative. The simulation results from the artificial data demonstrate the advantages of the Bayesian model. The 1 - AUC values for the Bayesian model are roughly half of the corresponding values for a direct combination of t- and SAM-statistics. Furthermore, the simulations provide guidelines for when the Bayesian model is most likely to be useful. Most noticeably, in small studies the Bayesian model generally outperforms other methods when evaluated by AUC, FDR, and MDR across a range of simulation parameters, and this difference diminishes for larger sample sizes in the individual studies. The split-study validation illustrates appropriate shrinkage of the Bayesian model in the absence of platform-, sample-, and annotation-differences that otherwise complicate experimental data analyses. Finally, we fit our model to four breast cancer studies employing different technologies (cDNA and Affymetrix) to estimate differential expression in estrogen receptor positive tumors versus negative ones. Software and data for reproducing our analysis are publicly available.     

Surveiller en éradiquant : l’importance des « médiateurs de la surveillance » et des réseaux informels dans la surveillance des risques sanitaires et environnementaux

Surveillance measures, now a major form of public action in relation to health and environmental risks, often rely on cooperation among parties with contradictory interests. This cooperation is analyzed in cases when neither coercion nor incentives suffice to obtain it. A study of an attack by a virus on crops has brought to light arrangements that contrast with the formal setup for surveillance. These arrangements made it possible for health-related information to circulate. They were facilitated by the activity of “surveillance mediators” who were able — thanks to their durable local roots and their technical qualifications — to relate to different social worlds. Light is thus shed on the need both to take into account the political nature of the data collected during surveillance activities and to examine the many forms they take — forms that are the very conditions for data collection.     

Intervention Research as Management Research in Practice: Learning from a Case in the Fashion Design Industry

Research in the field of management and organizational sciences has yielded a deeper understanding of many emerging business issues. However, the relevance of the contributions has been increasingly criticized, in both the academic and public spheres. We propose the intervention research approach – originally developed by the research group at Ecole des Mines de Paris – as a design science approach able to address both the relevance gap issue and the growing complexity of management practice. It is argued that increasing our understanding of management requires research that is more insightful, influential and immediately applicable. This in turn requires closer collaboration between management and researchers during the inquiry process, which is not always easy to achieve. An illustrative case study of an intervention research project focusing on creativity, conducted in Italy in collaboration with a fashion company, demonstrates how intervention research can be rigorous and relevant to practitioners, and how it can advance theoretical knowledge in management science.     

Biopharmaceutical and chemical firms’ R&D disclosure,and cost of equity: The impact of the regulatory regime

Based on the proprietary costs theory, this paper aims to survey whether the regulatory regime (mandatory versus voluntary) of research and development (R&D) narrative disclosures impacts, by the means of a reduced information asymmetry, on the cost of equity capital. In order to construct a disclosure index to investigate the extent and the comprehensiveness of R&D information, the methodology adopted was the content analysis of 77 biopharmaceutical and chemical listed companies’ management reports from eight Western European countries across the period 2005–2009. Hence, we obtained an (unbalanced) panel data of 309 observations. The cost of capital has subsequently been regressed on the disclosure index. Results confirm a larger amount of R&D disclosures whereas information is more regulated, but they do not confirm an inverse relation with the cost of capital.     

Some measures of kurtosis and their inference on large datasets

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - This paper deals with the estimation of kurtosis on large datasets. It aims at overcoming two frequent limitations in applications: first, Pearson's...