Bayesian analysis of a marked point process: Application in seismic hazard assessment

Point processes are the stochastic models most suitable for describing physical phenomena that appear at irregularly spaced times, such as the earthquakes. These processes are uniquely characterized by their conditional intensity, that is, by the probability that an event will occur in the infinitesimal interval (t, t+Δt), given the history of the process up tot. The seismic phenomenon displays different behaviours on different time and size scales; in particular, the occurrence of destructive shocks over some centuries in a seismogenic region may be explained by the elastic rebound theory. This theory has inspired the so-called stress release models: their conditional intensity translates the idea that an earthquake produces a sudden decrease in the amount of strain accumulated gradually over time along a fault, and the subsequent event occurs when the stress exceeds the strength of the medium. This study has a double objective: the formulation of these models in the Bayesian framework, and the assignment to each event of a mark, that is its magnitude, modelled through a distribution that depends at timet on the stress level accumulated up to that instant. The resulting parameter space is constrained and dependent on the data, complicating Bayesian computation and analysis. We have resorted to Monte Carlo methods to solve these problems.     

Public Multichannel Management – an Integrated Framework of Off- and Online Multichannel Government Services

Government institutions have introduced multichannel environments over time following trends and technological innovations. These public multichannel environments often neglect specific channel characteristics and potentials and thus miss the opportunity to make full use of a strategic channel integration and combination with a focus on customer value creation. This study offers a systematic approach to establish an integrated public multichannel system not only taking into account user preferences, habits and their environment, but also the respective channel issuer and the characteristics of channels and public interfaces. Against this background, the study presents a systematic approach to expand services and channels according to their capacities, and provides academics and practitioners with a framework on public multichannel strategies.     

Multidimensional Analysis of Deprivation and Fragility Patterns of Migrants in Lombardy,Using Partially Ordered Sets and Self-Organizing Maps

Social Indicators Research - In this paper, we present a multidimensional fuzzy analysis of the levels and the patterns of poverty and social fragility of migrants’ families, in the Italian...     

Lessons from Nigeria for improved thinking and working politically in the extractives sector

Despite the wealth that comes from being the biggest oil producer in Africa, Nigeria has some of the worst development indicators in the world. From 2011 to mid‐2016, the DFID‐funded Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) programme's unique design aimed to reduce incentives for the capture of oil revenue by elites and international oil companies, restoring the potential of those revenues to accelerate economic and social development. This article asks what lessons FOSTER's successes and failures offer for improved “thinking and working politically” (TWP). It examines the outcomes from five “clusters” of interventions: three viewed by the FOSTER team as successes and two as failures. The article identifies factors for successful TWP‐based programming, including the need for local ownership rooted in staff with a combination of technical expertise, a deep knowledge of the local political context and excellent networking abilities. The research used a qualitative and inductive approach. Field research was undertaken with 44 semi‐structured qualitative interviews during one month of fieldwork in Abuja and Lagos. The research also included reviews of FOSTER's internal documentation and evaluation frameworks, as well as analysis of newspaper articles and grey literature on the oil sector in Nigeria. The project offers important lessons for politically informed programming about how interventions were implemented (process), what was actually done (content) and how the project responded to changes in context that created or blocked opportunities for reform (responsiveness). The article identifies factors for successful TWP‐based programming, including the need for local ownership rooted in staff with a combination of technical expertise, a deep knowledge of the local political context and excellent networking abilities. The findings have important implications for programme design. They demonstrate the value of built‐in flexibility that allows staff to choose and switch the partners they work with and the channels they work through. They also show that a key aspect of TWP‐based programming is implicit acceptance that some failure may be unavoidable, since this permits staff to balance risk against opportunities. Finally, a better understanding of FOSTER's failures reveals the challenges of a TWP‐based approach and the trade‐offs it demands.     

How to Foster Toddlers' Mental‐State Talk,Emotion Understanding,and Prosocial Behavior: A Conversation‐Based Intervention at Nursery School

Recent years have seen the development and implementation of a range of training programs aimed at improving children's socio‐emotional skills. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted with toddlers attending nursery school. In this study, we adopted observational and experimental paradigms to examine the efficacy of an intervention based on conversing about emotions with small groups of 2‐ to 3‐year‐old children. The intervention was designed to promote toddlers' mental‐state talk, emotion understanding (EU), and prosocial behavior. The training group significantly outperformed the control group in the use of mental‐state language, especially emotional‐state lexicon, EU, and prosocial behavior toward peers. There was also a significant Group × Age interaction, with the older training group participants displaying greater gains in EU than the younger ones. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.     

Time‐Varying Risk Premium in Large Cross‐Sectional Equity Data Sets

We develop an econometric methodology to infer the path of risk premia from a large unbalanced panel of individual stock returns. We estimate the time‐varying risk premia implied by conditional linear asset pricing models where the conditioning includes both instruments common to all assets and asset‐specific instruments. The estimator uses simple weighted two‐pass cross‐sectional regressions, and we show its consistency and asymptotic normality under increasing cross‐sectional and time series dimensions. We address consistent estimation of the asymptotic variance by hard thresholding, and testing for asset pricing restrictions induced by the no‐arbitrage assumption. We derive the restrictions given by a continuum of assets in a multi‐period economy under an approximate factor structure robust to asset repackaging. The empirical analysis on returns for about ten thousand U.S. stocks from July 1964 to December 2009 shows that risk premia are large and volatile in crisis periods. They exhibit large positive and negative strays from time‐invariant estimates, follow the macroeconomic cycles, and do not match risk premia estimates on standard sets of portfolios. The asset pricing restrictions are rejected for a conditional four‐factor model capturing market, size, value, and momentum effects.     

Fuzzy epistemology: Decolonizing the social sciences

This article first argues that the social sciences need to be decolonized, as the current epistemologies and research methodologies are too narrowly based on the European and North American experiences and hence unable to adequately capture non-European experiences and realities. I then argue that decolonizing dominant social science epistemology means freeing it from its Aristotelian foundation. The next step undertaken is to discuss five non-Western epistemologies from West Africa, China, Melanesia, India, and South America. Building on the work of Jimi Adesina (2002), I find that all five share a fuzzy perception of reality, allowing for statements that are non-exclusive, non-discrete, and hence fuzzy. I propose an operationalization of these fuzzy epistemologies by applying Charles Ragin's Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fscqa).     

Measuring ambiguity preferences: A new ambiguity preference survey module

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - Ambiguity preferences are important to explain human decision-making in many areas in economics and finance. To measure individual ambiguity preferences, the...