Using partial identification methods to estimate the effect of violence against women on their children’s health outcomes

A growing literature in economics seeks to estimate the costs of violence against women by examining, for example, its impact on the health outcomes of their children. However, it is difficult to assign a causal interpretation to these nonexperimental studies due to the presence of unobservable characteristics affecting violence and health outcomes simultaneously. The lack of credible instrumental variables applicable in several countries further limits our knowledge. I address this gap by using new partial identification methods to estimate the relative size of the unobservables needed to eliminate the estimated effects in nonexperimental studies. I also expand the external validity of the analysis by using data from five standardized nationally representative household surveys in Latin America. Consistent with previous studies, cross-sectional estimates show large negative associations between violence against women and an array of child health outcomes. However, when accounting for omitted variable bias, at best, two-thirds of the estimates remain robust and they are concentrated on the outcomes with the largest cross-sectional estimated impacts.     

Space for virtue in the economics of Kenneth J. Arrow,Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom

Virtue ethics interprets human action as pursuing good ends through practices that develop qualities internal to those final goals. The philosophical approach has been identified as critical of economics, leading in turn to the innovative response that by viewing the market as mutually beneficial exchange, economic practice is in fact defendable on virtue ethics grounds. This defends economics using arguments drawn from virtue ethics, but there is a need also to explore space for virtue ethics within economic theory. Examining key contributions of Kenneth J. Arrow, Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, the article notes that virtue ethics’ appreciation of persons’ communicability of ends is increasingly being relied upon within economics, though sometimes under different names. Its strength to interdisciplinary work between economics and philosophy lies in presenting a methodology able to capture how human beings are capable of, though not fixated on, cooperation.     

Stock markets’ bubbles burst and volatility spillovers in agricultural commodity markets

Our paper focuses on commodity financialization and the gradual integration between commodity and financial markets, investigating to what extent shocks in stock markets impact commodity price volatility, and the persistency of the phenomenon. To this end, we estimate Volatility Impulse Response Function from stock markets to agricultural commodity markets over a symmetric window before and after two of the most important bubble bursts since the new millennium, the 2000 dot.com bubble and the 2008 financial crises. Results highlight that volatility spillover increased significantly after the 2008 financial crises, signalling a rising interconnection between financial and agricultural commodity markets.     

Multi-party computation mechanism for anonymous equity block trading: A secure implementation of turquoise plato uncross

Dark pools are financial trading venues where orders are entered and matched in secret so that no order information is leaked. By preventing information leakage, dark pools offer the opportunity for large volume block traders to avoid the costly effects of market impact. However, dark pool operators have been known to abuse their privileged access to order information. To address this issue, we introduce a provably secure multi-party computation mechanism that prevents an operator from accessing and misusing order information. Specifically, we implement a secure emulation of Turquoise Plato Uncross, Europe's largest dark pool trading mechanism, and demonstrate that it can handle real world trading throughput, with guaranteed information integrity.     

包西高速铁路引入鄂尔多斯地区方案研究

包西高速铁路作为我国"八纵八横"高速铁路通道中重要的纵向通道之一,建成后呼包鄂城市群和关中平原城市群将实现有效连接。鄂尔多斯市为典型的"一城双核"城市,包西高速铁路的引入将对地区客运布局产生较大影响,根据鄂尔多斯地区城市及铁路现状、城市总体规划及交通规划,结合地区客运量及特点,提出地区内包西高速铁路引入方案及车站设置方案,确定合理的引入及客站布点,研究地区内高速铁路客站布局,结合地区客流特点,确定高速铁路车站分工;合理确定引入地区线、站位方案将有助于完善鄂尔多斯铁路枢纽的客运铁路布局,有助于完善鄂尔多斯地区高速铁路网络,提升呼包鄂城市群的辐射效应,促进城市建设和经济发展。     

Consumers' awareness,acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey

The aim of the present study was to investigate consumers' awareness, acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey. Eight hundred and eight people participated in this study: aged between 20 and 80 years, 38.5% were male and 61.5% were female. Participants were given a questionnaire and were asked to fill it in by themselves to minimize the influence of the interviewer. Results indicated that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education level and income level are important indicators of consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. The results show that the female respondents were 2.987 times more aware of functional food than the male respondents. Similarly, the likelihood of respondents having awareness of functional food was 1.431 times greater among those who had a higher educational level than among those with a lower educational level. Consumers who used vitamin supplements were 1.228 times more aware of functional food than other consumers. The results show that older respondents were 3.395 times more aware of functional food than younger respondents. Respondents with a history of familial diseases were more likely than others to have consumed margarine with plant sterol, fruit juices fortified with vitamin C, and breakfast cereals fortified with vitamins and minerals. Those with a diet‐related problem were more likely to have consumed cholesterol‐lowering products than those without a problem. As a conclusion, this study has shown that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education and income levels, and prices are important indicators that influence consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. These results suggest that this type of knowledge could affect consumers' interest in functional foods, and therefore educational strategies might be necessary to encourage the consumption of functional foods.     

Does obligational contracting lead to better performance? A comparison of global carmakers’ supply chain management approaches in Australia

Supply chain management (SCM) has been recognised as key to automobile manufacturers’ (‘buyers’) competitive advantage. However, the performance implication of two different approaches towards SCM, obligational contracting (OCR) vs. arm’s length contracting (ACR), remains inconclusive in the current literature. By focusing on examining how multiple global automobile manufacturers’ SCM practices result in different performance outcomes in the one-country setting of Australia, we are able to ascertain the direct impact of SCM approaches on buyers’ performance. We also provide detailed analysis on the specific influence of each distinguishing feature of the OCR/ACR approaches on different aspects of performance. Through a more nuanced investigation of the links between SCM approaches and automobile manufacturers’ performance at the firm level, this research contributes to a better understanding of the topic with managerially applicable insights.     

Preference aggregation and atoms in measures

This paper examines the aggregation of preferences with a finitely additive measure space of agents. We consider three types of non-dictatorship axioms: non-dictatorship, coalitional non-dictatorship, and atomic non-dictatorship. First, we show that the existence of an atom is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a social welfare function that satisfies weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and coalitional non-dictatorship. Second, we simultaneously impose non-dictatorship and coalitional non-dictatorship, and specify a necessary and sufficient condition for the finitely additive measure that guarantees the compatibility among the axioms. Third, we impose all non-dictatorship axioms and show that the corresponding measure is extremely restricted.     

Brexit: Tracking and disentangling the sentiment towards leaving the EU

On 23 June, 2016, the UK held a referendum to decide whether to stay in the European Union or leave. The uncertainty surrounding the outcome of this referendum had major consequences for public policy, investment decisions, and currency markets. We discuss some of the subtleties involved in smoothing and disentangling poll data in light of the problem of tracking the dynamics of the intention to Brexit, and propose a multivariate singular spectrum analysis method that produces trendlines on the unit simplex. The trendline yield via multivariate singular spectrum analysis is shown to resemble that of local polynomial smoothing, and singular spectrum analysis presents the nice feature of disentangling the dynamics directly into components that can be interpreted as changes in public opinion or sampling error. The merits and disadvantages of some different approaches for obtaining smooth trendlines on the unit simplex are contrasted, in terms of both local polynomial smoothing and multivariate singular spectrum analysis.     

Crime prediction by data-driven Green’s function method

We develop an algorithm that forecasts cascading events, by employing a Green’s function scheme on the basis of the self-exciting point process model. This method is applied to open data of 10 types of crimes happened in Chicago. It shows a good prediction accuracy superior to or comparable to the standard methods which are the expectation–maximization method and prospective hotspot maps method. We find a cascade influence of the crimes that has a long-time, logarithmic tail; this result is consistent with an earlier study on burglaries. This long-tail feature cannot be reproduced by the other standard methods. In addition, a merit of the Green’s function method is the low computational cost in the case of high density of events and/or large amount of the training data.