A case-study in the clinical epidemiology of psoriatic arthritis: multistate models and causal arguments

In psoriatic arthritis, permanent joint damage characterizes disease progression and represents a major debilitating aspect of the disease. Understanding the process of joint damage will assist in the treatment and disease management of patients. Multistate models provide a means to examine patterns of disease, such as symmetric joint damage. Additionally, the link between damage and the dynamic course of disease activity (represented by joint swelling and stress pain) at both the individual joint level and otherwise can be represented within a correlated multistate model framework. Correlation is reflected through the use of random effects for progressive models and robust variance estimation for non-progressive models. Such analyses, undertaken with data from a large psoriatic arthritis cohort, are discussed and the extent to which they permit causal reasoning is considered. For this, emphasis is given to the use of the Bradford Hill criteria for causation in observational studies and the concept of local (in)dependence to capture the dynamic nature of the relationships.     

On the Measurement of Corporatism

ABSTRACT: It is noticed that in both theoretical and empirical analyses concerning the relationship between corporatism and economic performance, the role of government is kept rather implicit. This article aims to incorporate government into the analysis in a more explicit way by analyzing whether government policies differ between corporatist and non-corporatist countries. The empirical results of the research reveal that corporatist countries are not only characterized by centralization or coordination of wage bargaining, but also by relatively high government expenditure, tax revenues, a higher ratio of active to passive labour market policies and also higher average unemployment benefits.     

Daisee: Adaptive importance sampling by balancing exploration and exploitation

We study adaptive importance sampling (AIS) as an online learning problem and argue for the importance of the trade-off between exploration and exploitation in this adaptation. Borrowing ideas from the online learning literature, we propose Daisee, a partition-based AIS algorithm. We further introduce a notion of regret for AIS and show that Daisee has $𝒪(\sqrt{T}{(\log T)}^{\frac{3}{4}})$ cumulative pseudo-regret, where $T$ is the number of iterations. We then extend Daisee to adaptively learn a hierarchical partitioning of the sample space for more efficient sampling and confirm the performance of both algorithms empirically.     

REVEALED PERFORMANCES: WORLDWIDE RANKINGS OF ECONOMISTS AND ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS, 1990–2000

In this paper, I study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists. Worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications. These rankings reveal a dominant position of the United States in the production of economics literature. Over time, however, the extent of this dominance is decreasing. (JEL: A10, A14)