Analysis of Blogs,Forums, and Social Networks

It is impossible to imagine the contemporary Internet without social media. Government agents, commercial, state, and social organizations, the opposition, and other citizens use social media as a giant turbine. Unfortunately, this turbine can also be used to spread disinformation as well as hostile propaganda on a mass scale. In this article we show how vulnerable social media are to infiltration by botnets with the goal of launching information attacks.     

Alternative diff-in-diffs estimators with several pretreatment periods

This paper deals with the identification of treatment effects using difference-in-differences estimators when several pretreatment periods are available. We define a family of identifying nonnested assumptions that lead to alternative difference-in-differences estimators. We show that the most usual difference-in-differences estimators imply equivalence conditions for the identifying nonnested assumptions. We further propose a model that can be used to test multiple equivalence conditions without imposing any of them. We conduct a Monte Carlo analysis and apply our approach to several recent papers to show its practical relevance.     

Ethnic and religious differentials in Bulgarian mortality, 1993-98

We investigated ethnic/religious mortality differentials in Bulgaria during the 1990s. The analyses employed a unique longitudinal data-set covering the entire population of Bulgaria from the census of 1992 until 1998. The mortality of Roma is very high compared to all other ethnic/religious groups. The excess applies to nearly every cause of death examined and is not entirely explained by the adverse location of Roma on social and economic variables. For young men, Muslim mortality is substantially lower than that of non-Muslims when socio-economic differences are controlled. An analysis of causes of death suggests that lower consumption of alcohol may contribute to this 'Muslim paradox'. For older Turkish women, a significant mortality disadvantage remains after controls are imposed. Suicide mortality is lower for Muslims than for Christian groups of the same ethnicity. Consistent with deteriorating economic conditions over the study period, mortality was rising, particularly for women.     

Fertility Decline in Russia in the Early and Mid 1990s: The Role of Economic Uncertainty and Labour Market Crises

This paper analyses the fertility decline in Russia during theearly and mid 1990s from both a macro- and micro-perspective and presents astriking divergence between these two empirical viewpoints. While the formersuggests that the fertility decline after 1989 is associated with theeconomic hardship accompanying the transition to a market economy, themicro-evidence using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey is to thecontrary. There is no negative association between labour market uncertaintyor a labour market crisis and fertility, and frequently there is even apositive association. That is, women or couples who are themselves affectedby labour market crises often had a higher probability of having anotherchild in the period 1994–1996 than women/couples who were less affected bysuch crises. The lack of a negative association, and the presence of apositive association in many instances, is surprising from the standpoint ofeconomic fertility theory. It is also contrary to many explanatory theoriesabout the recent fertility decline in Central and Eastern European countriesthat are built on a more or less direct connection between the labour marketor an economic crisis and low fertility.     

Newcomers to Like‐Minded Aid and Donor Darlings: The Strange Case of Spain in Vietnam

This article analyses the motives behind the relations between Spain as a donor and Vietnam as a recipient of international aid. The main hypothesis is that this relationship does not respond to the traditional causes for international aid, as identified by the academic literature. On the basis of qualitative data collected in interviews with elites, the article suggests instead that a ‘learning factor’ and an ‘image factor’ might be at play in the Spanish presence, as well as herd behaviour on the part of the donor community.     

Is this the end of globalization (as we know it)?

ABSTRACT

According to different media and analysts, globalization could be in a phase of ‘slowbalization’, de-globalization or even secular stagnation. After surveying academic proposals for defining, classifying and measuring globalization, by means of the Elcano Global Presence Index, this paper explores to what extent globalization has stagnated and/or whether it has changed its nature. Our results show that globalization has slowed down, but not retrenched. However, economic globalization has lost traction (something that probably explains the general perception on de-globalization) while soft projection has become the main driver of globalization.     

The role of international remittances in health outcomes in Ecuador: prevention and response to shocks

This article evaluates the impact of remittances on health outcomes in Ecuador using an instrumental-variables approach. Although we do not find significant impacts on long-term child health variables, we find that remittances do have an impact on health expenditures, and on some preventive issues such as de-worming and vaccination. In addition, we find significant effects of remittances on medicine expenditures when illness occurs. In this regard, remittances are used for both preventive and emergency situations. Interestingly, we also find a significant and positive effect of remittances on health knowledge.     

Closed Sequential and Multistage Inference on Binary Responses With or Without Replacement

Logistic regression is used by practitioners and researchers in many fields, but is undoubtedly used most frequently in medical and biostatistical applications. Maximum likelihood is generally the estimation method of choice, but we show that maximum likelihood can produce very poor results under certain conditions. Specifically, the poor performance of maximum likelihood in the case of rare events is known and we review research on this topic. We primarily examine the performance of maximum likelihood in the presence of near separation, which has apparently not been studied. Exact logistic regression is the logical alternative to maximum likelihood. We offer a comparison of the two methods of estimation.