How Is Power Shared in Africa?

Is African politics characterized by concentrated power in the hands of a narrow group (ethnically determined) that then fluctuates from one extreme to another via frequent coups? Employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence, we show that African ruling coalitions are surprisingly large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the analysis to the subsample of the most powerful ministerial posts. We argue that the likelihood of revolutions from outsiders and coup threats from insiders are major forces explaining allocations within these regimes. Alternative allocation mechanisms are explored. Counterfactual experiments that shed light on the role of Western policies in affecting African national coalitions and leadership group premia are performed.     

Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism

Political transnationalism covers a wide range of phenomena and can be studied using a variety of approaches. In migration research the focus is mostly on migrants' networks and activities that involve them in politics oriented towards their country of origin. The article argues for a wider conception of political transnationalism from a political theory perspective. It proposes a terminological distinction between international, multinational, supranational and transnational relations and phenomena. What is specific about migrant transnationalism is that it creates overlapping memberships between territorially separated and independent polities. In this understanding, political transnationalism is not only about a narrowly conceived set of activities through which migrants become involved in the domestic politics of their home countries; it also affects collective identities and conceptions of citizenship among the native populations in both receiving and sending societies. Within this general framework the article suggests a set of hypotheses for an explanatory and normative analysis of sending country relations to their emigrants, a task that has hitherto been neglected in political theory.     

Block‐threshold‐adapted Estimators via a Maxiset Approach

We study the maxiset performance of a large collection of block thresholding wavelet estimators, namely the horizontal block thresholding family. We provide sufficient conditions on the choices of rates and threshold values to ensure that the involved adaptive estimators obtain large maxisets. Moreover, we prove that any estimator of such a family reconstructs the Besov balls with a near‐minimax optimal rate that can be faster than the one of any separable thresholding estimator. Then, we identify, in particular cases, the best estimator of such a family, that is, the one associated with the largest maxiset. As a particularity of this paper, we propose a refined approach that models method‐dependent threshold values. By a series of simulation studies, we confirm the good performance of the best estimator by comparing it with the other members of its family.     

Optimal Designs for Additive Linear Models

In additive linearr models optimal designs can be constructed as a product of those marginal designs which have certain optimality properties in the corresponding single-factor models. In particular, these results are obtained for the reduced parameter vector without constant term and for the parameters associated with single factors.     

Optimal design for discrete choice experiments

In this paper we derive locally optimal designs for discrete choice experiments. As in Kanninen (2002) we consider a multinomial logistic model, which contains various qualitative attributes as well as a quantitative one, which may range over a sufficiently large interval. The derived optimal designs improve upon those given in the literature, but have the feature that every choice set contains alternatives, which coincide in all but the quantitative attributes. The multinomial logistic model will then lead to a response behavior, which is apparently unrealistic.     

Family Location and Caregiving Patterns from an International Perspective

We conduct a cross‐national econometric analysis of intra‐family location and caregiving patterns. Using European data, we first assess, from an international perspective, the relationship between family structure and the geographic proximity between adult children and their parents. We then examine whether differences in family structure are related to the amount of informal care adult children provide to their elderly parents. Lastly, we look for cross‐country differences in family location and caregiving patterns, and interpret observed differences in terms of heterogeneous institutional solutions to elderly care. Our results not only provide a new empirical perspective on the geography of the family, but also provide insights into how family‐related and institutional factors shape patterns of time transfers from adult children to elderly parents.