Intersensory Perception at Birth: Newborns Match Nonhuman Primate Faces and Voices

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is present at birth. To test this possiblity, we investigated whether newborns can match monkey facial and vocal gestures. Using a paired preference procedure, in Experiment 1 we presented pairs of different visible monkey calls in silence and then in the presence of one or the other corresponding audible call and compared preferences across the silent and in‐sound conditions. In Experiment 2 , we presented the same monkey visible calls but this time together with a tone analog of the natural calls in the in‐sound trials. We found that newborns looked longer at the matching visible call in the in‐sound condition than in the silent condition in both experiments. These findings indicate that multisensory perceptual tuning is so broad at birth that it enables newborns to integrate the facial and vocal gestures of other primates and that integration is based on newborns’ detection of audio‐visual temporal synchrony relations.     

NORMS OF PUNISHMENT: EXPERIMENTS WITH STUDENTS AND THE GENERAL POPULATION

Norms of cooperation and punishment differ across societies, but also within a single society. In an experiment with two subject pools sharing the same geographical and cultural origins, we show that opportunities for peer punishment increase cooperation among students but not in the general population. In previous studies, punishment magnified the differences across societies in people's ability to cooperate. Here, punishment reversed the order: with punishment, students cooperate more than the general population while they cooperate less without it. (JEL C72, C90, Z13)     

Play and learn: Children's agency through the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique

Social distancing, one of the measures adopted in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, profoundly impacted on the lives of children. The consequences were, however, not homogenous. By focusing on the daily practices of 41 Mozambican children aged 3–10, we consider how differences in socioeconomic backgrounds led children to respond to the social restrictions in ways that made sense to them. Inspired by Abebe (2019), we identify how the interruptions of daily routines enabled specific instances of agency on children's part. These, we argue, produce new forms of continuity.     

Semiautomatic robust regression clustering of international trade data

The purpose of this paper is to show in regression clustering how to choose the most relevant solutions, analyze their stability, and provide information about best combinations of optimal number of groups, restriction factor among the error variance across groups and level of trimming. The procedure is based on two steps. First we generalize the information criteria of constrained robust multivariate clustering to the case of clustering weighted models. Differently from the traditional approaches which are based on the choice of the best solution found minimizing an information criterion (i.e. BIC), we concentrate our attention on the so called optimal stable solutions. In the second step, using the monitoring approach, we select the best value of the trimming factor. Finally, we validate the solution using a confirmatory forward search approach. A motivating example based on a novel dataset concerning the European Union trade of face masks shows the limitations of the current existing procedures. The suggested approach is initially applied to a set of well known datasets in the literature of robust regression clustering. Then, we focus our attention on a set of international trade datasets and we provide a novel informative way of updating the subset in the random start approach. The Supplementary material, in the spirit of the Special Issue, deepens the analysis of trade data and compares the suggested approach with the existing ones available in the literature.

     

Combining Achievement and Well-Being in the Assessment of Education Systems

Countries’ education systems are often compared using academic achievement measures from large-scale assessments like PISA. These exercises are criticized because achievement is but one of the aims of education and comparisons don’t take into account each country’s socio-demographic composition, cultural and historical background and organizational features. We use data from OECD countries to assess countries that can serve as models for education policy to promote both high mathematics achievement and student well-being. We adopt a novel methodological approach based on imputation methods to simultaneously estimate mathematics achievement and students’ sense of belonging while taking into account countries’ socio-demographic and organizational features. Results indicate that, in general, education systems have been able to organize and use their resources to promote either mathematics performance or student well-being, but not both simultaneously. The East Asian approach to education is successful in promoting student achievement in mathematics while Austria, Norway and Spain have greater success in promoting students’ sense of belonging.     

Parametric Versus Nonparametric Inference on Zenga Index of Inequality: Issues and Evidence From Survey Data

Recent growing disparities suggests to move from inequality measures based on comparing the incomes of the less fortunate with the overall mean, as the Gini, to the new Zenga index, which instead contrasts the means of the less and the more wealthy subpopulations. After providing a thorough analysis of the theoretical and practical aspects of obtaining parametric and non-parametric confidence intervals for the Zenga inequality measure, we develop a cross-regional study based on the Swiss Income and Consumption Survey, wave 2005. Results show that coverage accuracy and average length of confidence intervals improve when the parametric model offers a good fit to the data.     

A comparison between VAR processes jointly modeling GDP and Unemployment rate in France and Germany

Statistical Methods & Applications - Investigating the relationship between Gross Domestic Product and unemployment is one of the most important challenges in macroeconomics. In this paper, we...     

A Fuzzy Index and Severity Scale to Measure Violence Against Women

Social Indicators Research - Measuring and comparing levels of violence against women across individuals or countries are controversial exercises, and yet they remain essential to understanding the...