Is Land Grabbing Always What It Is Supposed to Be? Large‐scale Land Investments in sub‐Saharan Africa

The term ‘land grabbing’ has recently attracted widespread, and sometimes agitated, attention, and its literature grows at exponential speed. At the same time, the concept remains little understood concerning both its meaning, magnitude and consequences and even who the grabbers are. Different attempts to define land grabbing appear to reflect ideological lenses and pre‐defined positions rather than a genuine ambition to find out what is actually going on. Based on a comprehensive literature review, this article aims at presenting a more nuanced understanding of this disputed topic and therefore a less biased account of what land‐grabbing and/or private investments in land represent.     

The Influence of Divorcing Mothers' Demeanor on Custody Evaluators' Assessment of Their Domestic Violence Allegations

A gap exists between empirical evidence demonstrating the risks posed by domestic violence (DV) and the weight that evidence is given by custody evaluators. This gap may result from common beliefs about DV that diminish or deny its seriousness, which include that mothers often make false allegations to gain advantage and that DV and high conflict are synonymous and do not require differential approaches. Using a multiple segment factorial vignette design, we systematically assessed how these beliefs influenced custody evaluators' (N = 603) recommendations and judgments of the believability of allegations. Mother's demeanor (i.e., hostile vs. pleasant) was the most consistent predictor of evaluators' recommendations and judgments of credibility. Findings have implications for providing research-based education and training for evaluators.     

Implementation of maximin efficient designs in dose‐finding studies

This paper considers the maximin approach for designing clinical studies. A maximin efficient design maximizes the smallest efficiency when compared with a standard design, as the parameters vary in a specified subset of the parameter space. To specify this subset of parameters in a real situation, a four‐step procedure using elicitation based on expert opinions is proposed. Further, we describe why and how we extend the initially chosen subset of parameters to a much larger set in our procedure. By this procedure, the maximin approach becomes feasible for dose‐finding studies. Maximin efficient designs have shown to be numerically difficult to construct. However, a new algorithm, the H‐algorithm, considerably simplifies the construction of these designs. We exemplify the maximin efficient approach by considering a sigmoid Emax model describing a dose–response relationship and compare inferential precision with that obtained when using a uniform design. The design obtained is shown to be at least 15% more efficient than the uniform design. © 2014 The Authors. Pharmaceutical Statistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

The flexible firm

In this article an attempt is made at giving a more concrete meaning to the notion of flexibility of a firm. The relationship between the dynamics of the environment on the one hand and the chosen strategy and organizational structure of the firm on the other, will be further analysed The aiming at flexibility is considered to be a separate economic basic goal next to rentability and independence, as firms increasingly happen to be in a turbulent environment. Special attention is given to the flexibility of a number of different organizational structures.It appears that a number of global recommendations can be made concerning the choice of strategy and organizational structure while explicitly taking the flexibility goal into account.     

A sequential approach to testing seasonal unit roots in high frequency data

In this paper we introduce a sequential seasonal unit root testing approach which explicitly addresses its application to high frequency data. The main idea is to see which unit roots at higher frequency data can also be found in temporally aggregated data. We illustrate our procedure to the analysis of monthly data, and we find, upon analysing the aggregated quarterly data, that a smaller amount of test statistics can sometimes be considered. Monte Carlo simulation and empirical illustrations emphasize the practical relevance of our method.     

Why one person one vote?

We provide a simple justification as to why the core principal in liberal democracies the one-person-one-vote is desirable. We compare two possible constitutions. In a fixed democracy, each individual has one vote and the same opportunity to propose public projects. In a flexible democracy, those that set the agenda can additionally propose to limit future participation in voting and agenda-setting. We show that a fixed democracy restricts majorities from taxing minorities to a greater extent than a flexible democracy. A flexible democracy may be more suited to enable a polity to undertake public projects. This possible advantage may be too small to outweigh taxation distortions and citizens unanimously favor the one-person-one-vote rule ex ante.I am grateful to Ami Glazer, Ulrich Erlenmaier, Tobias Kleinschmidt, seminar participants in Heidelberg and Konstanz, and in particular to an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions and comments.     

A temporary equilibrium model for international migration

This paper is concerned with the existence of temporary equilibria of migration with an overlapping generation structure and analyzes some of its properties. In the first part of the paper sufficient conditions for the existence of a temporary equilibrium of migration (in a given period) are given. In the second part some interesting properties of migration equilibria are analyzed. In particular the effects of differing degrees of information of the individuals on migration equilibria are investigated. Furthermore, it is shown that incomplete information alone suffices to induce migration flows even between countries that can be regarded as identical from an economic point of view.The paper was partly written during a research stay at the Sonderforschungsbereich 178 (University of Konstanz). Financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is gratefully acknowledged. We wish to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments.     

Laypeople''s and Experts'' Perception of Nanotechnology Hazards

Public perception of nanotechnology may influence the realization of technological advances. Laypeople's (N=375) and experts' (N=46) perception of 20 different nanotechnology applications and three nonnanotechnology applications were examined. The psychometric paradigm was utilized and applications were described in short scenarios. Results showed that laypeople and experts assessed asbestos as much more risky than nanotechnology applications. Analyses of aggregated data suggested that perceived dreadfulness of applications and trust in governmental agencies are important factors in determining perceived risks. Similar results were observed for experts and laypeople, but the latter perceived greater risks than the former. Analyses of individual data showed that trust, perceived benefits, and general attitudes toward technology influenced the perceived risk of laypeople. In the expert sample, confidence in governmental agencies was an important predictor of risks associated with nanotechnology applications. Results suggest that public concerns about nanotechnology would diminish if measures were taken to enhance laypeople's trust in governmental agencies.     

PubPredict: Prediction of progression and survival in oncology leveraging publications and early efficacy data

In oncology/hematology early phase clinical trials, efficacies were often observed in terms of response rate, depth, timing, and duration. However, the true clinical benefits that eventually support registrational purpose are progression-free survival (PFS) and/or overall survival (OS), the follow-up of which are typically not long enough in early phase trials. This gap imposes challenges in strategies for late phase drug development. In this article, we tackle the question by leveraging published study to establish a quantitative link between early efficacy outcomes and late phase efficacy endpoints. We used solid tumor cancer as disease model. We modeled the disease course of a RECISTv1.1 assessed solid tumor with a continuous Markov chain (CMC) model. We parameterize the transition intensity matrix of a CMC model based on published aggregate-level summary statistics, and then simulate subject-level time-to-event data. The simulated data is shown to have good approximation to published studies. PFS and/or OS could be predicted with the transition intensity matrix modified given clinical knowledge to reflect various assumptions on response rate, depth, timing, and duration. The authors have built a R shiny application named PubPredict, the tool implements the algorithm described above and allows customized features including multiple response levels, treatment crossover and varying follow-up duration. This toolset has been applied to advise phase 3 trial design when only early efficacy data are available from phase 1 or 2 studies.