Measuring Organised Crime Presence at the Municipal Level

Social Indicators Research - While indicators assessing the quality of life often comprise measures of crime or fear of crime, these components usually refer to property or violent crimes. More...     

The dynamic stochastic topic block model for dynamic networks with textual edges

Statistics and Computing - The present paper develops a probabilistic model to cluster the nodes of a dynamic graph, accounting for the content of textual edges as well as their frequency. Vertices...     

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...     

TRUST,COORDINATION, AND THE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM

We study political activism by several interest groups with private signals. When their ideological distance to the policymaker is small, a “low‐trust” regime prevails: agents frequently lobby even when it is unwarranted, taking advantage of the confirmation provided by others' activism; conversely, the policymaker responds only to generalized pressure. When ideological distance is large, a “high‐trust” regime prevails: lobbying behavior is disciplined by the potential contradiction from abstainers, and the policymaker's response threshold is correspondingly lower. Within some intermediate range, both equilibria coexist. We then study the optimal organization of influence activities, contrasting welfare levels when interest groups act independently and when they coordinate. (JEL: D72, D78, D82)     

‘Non-interference’ implies equality

We propose a new principle of ‘non-interference’ applied to social welfare orderings. The principle, together with two other standard requirements, implies a strong egalitarian conclusion: the ordering must lexicographically maximize the welfare of the worst off. The first version of this paper was written when Mariotti was visiting Bocconi University. Their generous hospitality and financial support through a Research Fellowship is gratefully acknowledged. A previous version of this paper written by Mariotti alone was circulated with the title ‘Liberalism implies equality’. We thank Ken Binmore, Paola Manzini, Juan Moreno Ternero and two referees for helpful comments. The responsibility for any error is our own.     

Michael Thompson's contributions to making social science more social and scientific

Good social and political theory is parsimonious, cumulative, counter‐intuitive, and relevant to well‐intended efforts to solve gripping social problems. This introduction to the Festschrift shows that in developing ‘rubbish theory’ and ‘cultural theory’ the work of Michael Thompson meets all these criteria. Added is a ‘top 10’ of quotes from Thompson's work, an overview of his academic career, as well as a bibliography.     

WHY DO MOST ITALIAN YOUTHS LIVE WITH THEIR PARENTS? INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSFERS AND HOUSEHOLD STRUCTURE

More than 80% of Italian men aged 18–30 live with their parents. We argue that one contributing factor to this remarkably high rate of cohabitation is parents' tastes for coresidence. In order to investigate the role of parental preferences, we estimate the effect of exogenous changes in parental income on rates of cohabitation in Italy using Survey of Households' Income and Wealth (SHIW) micro data from 1989 to 2000. In order to identify a source of exogenous variation in parental income, we use changes in fathers' retirement age induced by the 1992 reform of the Italian Social Security system as an instrumental variable for parental income. By raising retirement age, this reform forced some fathers to remain in the labor market longer than they would have otherwise, therefore raising their disposable income. We use a two‐sample instrumental variable (TSIV) strategy. Our TSIV estimates indicate that a rise in parents' income significantly raises the children's propensity to live at home: A 10% increase in annual parental income results in approximately a 10% rise in the proportion of men living with their parents. Although we cannot definitely rule out alternative interpretations, these results are consistent with our hypothesis that cohabitation is a normal good for Italian parents. (JEL: J120, J610, H550)     

Predictors and Processes Associated with Home‐Based Family Therapists' Professional Quality of Life

This study examined whether home‐based family therapists' (HBFT) workload and clinical experience were associated with therapists' professional quality of life directly and indirectly through self‐care activities and frequency of clinical supervision. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling with a sample of 225 home‐based therapists. Results suggested that therapists' workload and HBFT experience significantly predicted therapists' professional quality of life. These associations between therapists' workload and HBFT experience were partially mediated through participation in self‐care and frequency of clinical supervision. Implications for improving therapists' quality of life are discussed as a function of therapists' workload, clinical experience, self‐care, and supervision.     

A Multicompartment SIS Stochastic Model with Zonal Ventilation for the Spread of Nosocomial Infections: Detection,Outbreak Management,and Infection Control

In this work, we study the environmental and operational factors that influence airborne transmission of nosocomial infections. We link a deterministic zonal ventilation model for the airborne distribution of infectious material in a hospital ward, with a Markovian multicompartment SIS model for the infection of individuals within this ward, in order to conduct a parametric study on ventilation rates and their effect on the epidemic dynamics. Our stochastic model includes arrival and discharge of patients, as well as the detection of the outbreak by screening events or due to symptoms being shown by infective patients. For each ventilation setting, we measure the infectious potential of a nosocomial outbreak in the hospital ward by means of a summary statistic: the number of infections occurred within the hospital ward until end or declaration of the outbreak. We analytically compute the distribution of this summary statistic, and carry out local and global sensitivity analysis in order to identify the particular characteristics of each ventilation regime with the largest impact on the epidemic spread. Our results show that ward ventilation can have a significant impact on the infection spread, especially under slow detection scenarios or in overoccupied wards, and that decreasing the infection risk for the whole hospital ward might increase the risk in specific areas of the health‐care facility. Moreover, the location of the initial infective individual and the protocol in place for outbreak declaration both form an interplay with ventilation of the ward.     

The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms’ decision to enforce access lockdowns and the throttling of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data collection. We argue that the governance shift from user communities to social media algorithms, along with social platforms’ intensive emphasis on generating revenue from user data, has eroded the mutual trust of networked publics and opened the way for dis/misinformation campaigns. We discuss the importance of open, public APIs for academic research as well as the unique challenges of collecting social media data to study highly ephemeral mis/disinformation campaigns. The introduction concludes with an assessment of the growing data access gap that not only hinders research of public interest, but that may also preclude researchers from identifying meaningful research questions as activity on social platforms becomes increasingly more inscrutable and unobservable.