Social Tolerance and Economic Development

Trust is a social capital with burgeoning research interests from diverse disciplines in the social sciences, behavioral sciences and health fields. Despite these abundant literatures, trust research in sub-Saharan Africa is limited. The overwhelming area of interest on trustworthiness have also been focused on the trustee, with little consideration of the extent to which individuals perceive themselves to be trustworthy and the factors that may predict trustworthiness. The present study examined the contributions of personality and religiosity to propensity to trust and trustworthiness in a Nigerian student sample. Data was obtained using self-report measures of the Big Five Personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience), religiosity (operationalised as attendance to religious activities), trust, and trustworthiness. Results showed that agreeableness predicted increased trust, whereas conscientiousness and neuroticism predicted lower trust. Neither trust nor trustworthiness was significantly predicted by extraversion and openness to experience. Greater trustworthiness was predicted by high agreeableness, while high conscientiousness predicted reduced trustworthiness. Neuroticism did not predict trustworthiness. Religious involvement did not predict trust, but greater frequency of attendance to religious activities predicted lower trustworthiness. Findings suggest that agreeableness and conscientiousness may be important traits of interest in relation to trust and trustworthiness among youth in the sub-Saharan African context. Externalities of religion such as regular attendance to religious worship may not result to trust and may not foster trustworthiness. Researchers should give more attention to this area of research in order to clearly show their implications for social policy in developing countries.

     

Social capital and health at the country level

This study examines the relationship between social capital and health. We use various estimation methods such as pooled OLS, a split-sample approach, a quadratic regression, and fixed effects model to investigate country-level unbalanced panel data of 194 countries for the time period 1990–2015. The results support the negative effect of bonding social capital and the positive effect of bridging social capital on health. The effects are more pronounced in low income countries. The first contribution of the paper is to better explain the mixed results of previous studies by focusing on the distinction between the two types of social capital. The second contribution of the paper is to address endogeneity and nonlinearity problems and to capture dynamic change by using various econometric methods. The findings imply that the socio-economic effects of social capital are different depending on the type of social capital.     

Modeling and simulation of a nonhomogeneous poisson process having cyclic behavior

In this paper we develop a unified approach to modeling and simulation of a nonhomogeneous Poisson process whose rate function exhibits cyclic behavior as well as a long-term evolutionary trend. The approach can be applied whether the oscillation frequency of the cyclic behavior is known or unknown. To model such a process, we use an exponential rate function whose exponent includes both a polynomial and a trigonometric component.Maximum likelihood estimates of the unknown continuous parameters of this function are obtained numerically, and the degree of the polynomial component is determined by a likelihood ratio test. If the oscillation frequency is unknown, then an initial estimate of this parameter is obtained via spectral analysis of the observed series of events; initial estimates of the remaining trigonometric (respectively, polynomial) parameters are computed from a standard maximum likelihood (respectively, moment-matching) procedure for an exponential-trigonometric (respectively, exponential-polynomial) rate function. To simulate the fitted process by the method of thinning, we present (a) a procedure for constructing an optimal piecewise linear majorizing rate function; and(b)a "piecewise thinning" simulation procedure based on the inverse transform method for generating events from a piecewise linear rate function. These procedures are applied to the storm-arrival process observed at an off-shore drilling site.     

Civilian protection in counterinsurgency warfare

This paper investigates how democracies protect the lives of enemy civilians in counterinsurgency warfare. A theoretical model is developed where the elected leaders’ decisions are influenced by what is known as “endowment effect” or “memory effect” in cognitive psychology. It is shown that too many civilians are killed in equilibrium as the leaders choose to pass some of the long-term costs of civilian casualties to their successors. The bias becomes more pronounced when the leaders are subject to binding term limits. The existing law of war is interpreted and evaluated using the theoretical framework. The analysis shows that the law falls short of the optimal constraint as it regulates the relative rather than absolute size of civilian casualties.