Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: The Well-Being of the Italians (1861–2011)

Social Indicators Research - As a part of the international debate on Beyond the GDP, this paper describes the temporal trend of the multidimensional well-being of the Italians from 1861 to 2011....     

The Effects of Presenting Imprecise Probabilities in Intelligence Forecasts

How to assess and present analytic uncertainty to policymakers has emerged as an important topic in risk and policy analysis. Due to the complexity and deep uncertainty present in many forecasting domains, these reports are often fraught with analytic uncertainty. In three studies, we explore the effect of presenting probability assessments and analytic uncertainty through probability ranges. Participants were presented with mock intelligence forecasts that include narrative evidence as well as numerical probability assessments. Participants were sensitive to the ambiguity communicated through the confidence range. The narrative appeared to have a smaller effect on judgments when accompanied by a probability range as opposed to a point assessment. In one study, participants also thought that the probability range was more useful for decision making at a higher probability whereas the point estimate was more useful at a lower probability. When evaluating a forecast in hindsight, decisionmakers tended to report lower levels of blame and higher levels of source credibility for forecasts that reported ranges as compared to point assessments. These findings suggest that decisionmakers are not necessarily “ambiguity averse” in the forecasting context. Presenting ranges of probability may have distinct advantages as a way to communicate probability and analytic confidence to decisionmakers.     

Determining the effect of urbanization on generalist butterfly species diversity in butterfly gardens

This study investigates the effects of urbanization on local butterfly populations and the role of butterfly gardens in preserving regional butterfly diversity. Data are from 135 butterfly gardens of varying size, location, and number of blooming plants in the Washington DC metropolitan area observed during 2001 and 2002. We investigated the species diversity for comparable gardens in rural, suburban, and urban locations to determine whether the landscape matrix surrounding otherwise suitable habitat affects the diversity found in the habitat. We hypothesized that, once factors such as garden size and number of blooming plant species were taken into account, butterfly diversity for 12 generalist species would decrease as urbanization increased. We found that there were systematic decreases (with one exception) in diversity from rural to suburban to urban gardens only for medium-sized gardens (0.10 to 0.20 ha) with one to ten types of blooming plants, and large gardens (>0.20 ha) with over 20 types of blooming plants. Gardens of other sizes or plant communities showed some decreases in diversity from rural to suburban to urban sites, but these differences were not consistent across the urban/rural gradient. Results of this study indicate that local butterfly diversity is negatively affected by increasing levels of human population, but that the matrix is just one factor determining generalist species diversity.     

ON THE HETEROGENEOUS EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF OFFSHORING: IDENTIFYING PRODUCTIVITY AND DOWNSIZING CHANNELS

This article examines the channels through which offshoring affects employment in a representative sample of German establishments, using a difference‐in‐differences matching approach. Offshoring is measured by an increase in the share of foreign to total intermediate inputs at the plant‐level. We identify a positive productivity effect and isolate a negative downsizing effect from offshoring on employment, by exploiting differences between offshoring plants that do and do not simultaneously restructure. Furthermore, we cannot find evidence of negative indirect employment effects on domestic suppliers or competitors. (JEL F16, J23, F23, C21)     

Repeated screening with inspection error and no false positive results with application to pharmaceutical pill production

Summary.  Repeated screening is a 100% sampling inspection of a batch of items followed by removal of the defective items and further iterations of inspection and removal. The reason for repeating the inspection is that the detection of a defective item happens with probability p <1. A missed defective item is a false negative result. The no false positive result is contemplated in this paper, which is motivated by a problem coming from the production of pharmaceutical pills. Bayesian posterior distributions for the quality of the lot are obtained for the case of both p known and p unknown. Batch rejection and batch acceptance control limits for the number of defective items at subsequent iterations can then be calculated. Theoretical connections to the problem of estimating the number-of-trials parameter of a binomial distribution are drawn.     

The Social shaping of the economy: An inquiry

This essay aims to discuss the notion of the ‘social shaping of the economy’. The interest for such a question stems from the growing attention this concept has received in the recent sociological literature. The principal concern has been to look at the foundations of this concept and to identify viable developments of the debate. By discussing the regulative properties of the market, the author calls attention upon four arguments in support of the concept of the social regulation of the economy. On this basis, recent contributions are reviewed in an attempt to grasp conceptual and terminological clearness.     

Unified Bayesian conditional autoregressive risk measures using the skew exponential power distribution

Statistical Methods & Applications - Conditional Autoregressive Value-at-Risk and Conditional Autoregressive Expectile have become two popular approaches for direct measurement of market risk....     

Mutual halo effects in cultural production: the case of modernist architecture

Previous research has suggested that in cultural production fields the concatenation of eminence explains success, defined as influence and innovation. We propose that individuals in fields as diverse as philosophy, literature, mathematics, painting, or architecture gain visibility by cumulating the eminence of others connected to them across and within generations. We draw on interaction ritual chain and social movement theories, and use evidence from the field of modernist architecture, to formulate a model of how networks of very strong ties generate motivations and emotional enthusiasm, change reputations, and form collective movements that over time transform the structure of cultural fields. Because major aesthetic innovations break sharply with older styles, they need very strong group solidarity over a long period of time to propagate a new standard of practice. We propose mutual halo effects, i.e., the reciprocal reinforcement of upstream and downstream prestige on a given individual node, as the key factor accounting for success in a cultural production field. We discuss the relevance of these results for building a model of influence and innovation in cultural production fields in which networks??reshaped by shifting technological, political, and economic conditions??trigger new styles.     

Crisis and public intellectuals: From the transnational intellectual field to the digital global public circuit

We examine the modes of intervention of global public intellectuals at times of crisis. In critical situations, public intellectuals take positions on matters that affect the societies they inhabit and, eventually, all humanity. To this end, they take advantage of the opportunities afforded by new communications technologies, establishing an important distinction between the “analog” intellectual (who relies on the slow time of books, opinion columns, and bookstores) and the “digital” intellectual who uses modern information and communications technologies. To study the activities of global public intellectuals and their political influence, we propose to leave aside the notion of “transnational intellectual field” in favor of an understanding of a transnational intellectual stage peopled by a certain type of intellectual agent whose symbolic and cultural production is disseminated through a digital global public circuit. To illustrate the functioning of a circuit of this type, we take the example of the Project Syndicate platform.