Ethnic and religious polarization and social conflict

In this paper we examine the link between ethnic and religious polarization and conflict using interpersonal distances for ethnic and religious attitudes obtained from the World Values Survey. We use the Duclos et al (2004) polarization index. We measure conflict by means on an index of social unrest, as well as by the standard conflict onset or incidence based on a threshold number of deaths. Our results show that taking distances into account significantly improves the quality of the fit. Our measure of polarization outperforms the measure used by Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005) and the fractionalization index. We also obtain that both ethnic and religious polarization are significant in explaining conflict. The results improve when we use an indicator of social unrest as the dependent variable.

Educational pathways of minority youth in Norway: intersections of gender, ethnicity and social class

Educational aspirations during lower secondary school and choice of upper secondary education are important for young people’s future trajectories into higher education and labour market positions. In line with ideas about reflexive, autonomous individuals (Giddens, 1991), choice of education is often represented as a young person’ individual decision, and educational guidance as aimed at discovering what ‘fits’ an individual’s personality, interests and abilities. Educational aspirations and choices are also social patterns that are reproduced. Some population categories represent exceptions from expected patterns of social reproduction of educational level and professions. In several countries, one such category is young people from families with migration experiences (Lauglo, 2000; Modood, 2004). In Norway, students have a legal right to non-compulsory upper secondary schooling and 96 percent of the students continue from lower to upper secondary school. In spite of positive developments regarding minority youths’ completion of upper secondary and higher education in later years, studies still persistently show lower educational attainment among minority youth, particularly among boys (Fekjaer, 2006). However, in lower secondary school, minor ity youth tend to have markedly higher educational aspirations and stronger learning motivation than their majority peers, as well as greater effort in school and strong adherence to school values (Lauglo, 2000) despite lower educational attainment or lower socio-economic backgrounds. In addition, gender differences in educational aspirations seem to be smaller among minority youth. The principal objective of the study in progress that will be presented in this paper, is to describe how processes relating to gendered, ethnic and class-based identities influence young people’s educational choices. The study is undertaken as a PhD project in social anthropology. The methodological approach is ethnographic longitudinal fieldwork in two multicultural lower secondary schools in Oslo. The study is part of a larger project that also include quantitative analyses of longitudinal data covering 9th graders in Oslo 2006 through four data collections during lower and upper secondary school.

OER in Portugal as agent of curriculum innovation and technological change. Inducing practices of "new" teaching standards

This research project aimed the following goal: promote the creation, use and disclosure of OER in a Group of Schools, involving schools and teachers from different learning levels, expecting to test and validate the use of OER, in a learning-teaching model towards curricular innovation. Defining as a starting point different subjects and teachers from distinct academic areas, we have implemented a set of activities leading to the creation of OER supported, when possible, in FLOSS tools. We adopted an action research methodology with a dual purpose: to act within a community of teachers and students, while increasing at the same time their knowledge, as well as the researcher's. The activity was developed cooperatively in order to process a certain reality of the teaching-learning process, through practical/reflective action towards it and inducing its implementation by others in the Portuguese School System, based on the production and sharing OER.

Clustering algorithms for anti-money laundering using graph theory and social network analysis

HEMOLIA (a project under European community’s 7th framework programme) is a new generation Anti-Money Laundering (AML) intelligent multi-agent alert and investigation system which in addition to the traditional financial data makes extensive use of modern society’s huge telecom data source, thereby opening up a new dimension of capabilities to all Money Laundering fighters (FIUs, LEAs) and Financial Institutes (Banks, Insurance Companies, etc.). This Master-Thesis project is done at AIA, one of the partners for the HEMOLIA project in Barcelona. The objective of this thesis is to find the clusters in a network drawn by using the financial data. An extensive literature survey has been carried out and several standard algorithms related to networks have been studied and implemented. The clustering problem is a NP-hard problem and several algorithms like K-Means and Hierarchical clustering are being implemented for studying several problems relating to sociology, evolution, anthropology etc. However, these algorithms have certain drawbacks which make them very difficult to implement. The thesis suggests (a) a possible improvement to the K-Means algorithm, (b) a novel approach to the clustering problem using the Genetic Algorithms and (c) a new algorithm for finding the cluster of a node using the Genetic Algorithm.

Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars

Importa si una guerra civil es combat com un conflicte irregular, convencional o simètric no convencional? En altres paraules, tenen les “tecnologies de la rebel·lió” un impacte sobre la gravetat d’una guerra, la seva durada o el seu resultat? Aquest treball mostra que els conflictes irregulars duren més que els altres tipus de conflicte, mentre els convencionals tendeixen a ser més greus en termes de letalitat al camp de batalla. D’altra banda, els conflictes irregulars tendeixen a ser guanyats pels governs, mentre els altres són més propensos a acabar en empat. Substancialment, aquests resultats ens ajuden a donar sentit a l’evolució de les guerres civils, les quals tendeixen a ser més curtes, més intenses i més difícils per als governs. Teòricament, aquests resultats donen suport a la importància de la tecnologia de rebel·lió a l’estudiar la gravetat, la durada i els resultats de les guerres civils; a més, contribueixen a una millor comprensió de la contribució històrica de la guerra irregular a la construcció de l’Estat i al canvi social.

Biodiversity and global change in Mediterranean benthic communities: perspectives over large spatial and long temporal scales

Many terrestrial and marine systems are experiencing accelerating decline due to the effects of global change. This situation has raised concern about the consequences of biodiversity losses for ecosystem function, ecosystem service provision, and human well-being. Coastal marine habitats are a main focus of attention because they harbour a high biological diversity, are among the most productive systems of the world and present high anthropogenic interaction levels. The accelerating degradation of many terrestrial and marine systems highlights the urgent need to evaluate the consequence of biodiversity loss. Because marine biodiversity is a dynamic entity and this study was interested global change impacts, this study focused on benthic biodiversity trends over large spatial and long temporal scales. The main aim of this project was to investigate the current extent of biodiversity of the high diverse benthic coralligenous community in the Mediterranean Sea, detect its changes, and predict its future changes over broad spatial and long temporal scales. These marine communities are characterized by structural species with low growth rates and long life spans; therefore they are considered particularly sensitive to disturbances. For this purpose, this project analyzed permanent photographic plots over time at four locations in the NW Mediterranean Sea. The spatial scale of this study provided information on the level of species similarity between these locations, thus offering a solid background on the amount of large scale variability in coralligenous communities; whereas the temporal scale was fundamental to determine the natural variability in order to discriminate between changes observed due to natural factors and those related to the impact of disturbances (e.g. mass mortality events related to positive thermal temperatures, extreme catastrophic events). This study directly addressed the challenging task of analyzing quantitative biodiversity data of these high diverse marine benthic communities. Overall, the scientific knowledge gained with this research project will improve our understanding in the function of marine ecosystems and their trajectories related to global change.

Gender inequality in health among elderly people in a combined framework of socioeconomic position, family characteristics and social support

This study analyses gender inequalities in health among elderly people in Catalonia (Spain) by adopting a conceptual framework that globally considers three dimensions of health determinants : socio-economic position, family characteristics and social support. Data came from the 2006 Catalonian Health Survey. For the purposes of this study a sub-sample of people aged 65–85 years with no paid job was selected (1,113 men and 1,484 women). The health outcomes analysed were self-perceived health status, poor mental health status and long-standing limiting illness. Multiple logistic regression models separated by sex were fitted and a hierarchical model was fitted in three steps. Health status among elderly women was poorer than among the men for the three outcomes analysed. Whereas living with disabled people was positively related to the three health outcomes and confidant social support was negatively associated with all of them in both sexes, there were gender differences in other social determinants of health. Our results emphasise the importance of using an integrated approach for the analysis of health inequalities among elderly people, simultaneously considering socio-economic position, family characteristics and social support, as well as different health indicators, in order fully to understand the social determinants of the health status of older men and women.

Personal and household care giving for adult children to parents and social stratification

Using SHARE database the paper explores the factors conditioning personalcare giving from adult children to their parents. Frequency and intensity ofpersonal care is contrasted with the reciprocal expectations that children haveabout wealth inheritance from their parents and with the opportunity costs of helping, as well as with the capacity of parents of getting help from othersources of personal care. The results may help to understand how inequalitiesin accessing to formal services relate with intergenerational solidarity.

Occupational sex-composition and earnings : individual and social effects

This paper investigates the micro and macro-level factors affecting the empirical association between occupational sex-composition and individual earnings. This is done in two analytical steps using data from the second round of the European Social Survey. In a first step, country-fixed-effects regressions are used to test the extent to which job-specialization, gender attitudes and the relative supply of domestic work can account for the impact of occupational sex-composition on earnings. In accordance with previous research, it is found that all these micro-level variables have a significant effect on the analyzed association, yet only job-specialization can explain it away by itself. In a second analytical step, macro-level interactions are tested under the hypothesis that defamilialization policies reduce the pay-offs of sphere specialization by sex, generating incentives for all types of women to invest in the labor market. Empirical results suggest that gender attitudes and the relative supply of housework are much more loosely associated to earning in social-democratic and former communist societies than in conservative or liberal regimes. This finding is interpreted as consistent with the defamilialization hypothesis.

Organizational Choice and Environmental Change

We explain the choice between franchising and vertical integration by estimating a model of relative performance in a sample of 250 Spanish car distributors, controlling for self-selection and including environmental factors. The method allows us to estimate performance counterfactuals. Organizational choice seemingly aims to contain moral hazard for both distributors and manufacturers but it is subject to start-up constraints and switching costs. While the market for franchises remained underdeveloped, information asymmetries led to the opening of integrated outlets. Their subsequent conversion into franchised outlets probably involved prohibitive transaction costs. Consequently, they performed worse than would have been expected had they been independent, as confirmed by the systematic improvement observed when they were in fact converted. The timing of such conversions suggests that switching costs were prohibitive until firms developed a substantial cushion of temporary contracts, previously forbidden by regulation.

Optimal Contracts, Adverse Selection, and Social Preferences: An Experiment

It has long been standard in agency theory to search for incentive-compatible mechanisms on the assumption that people care only about their own material wealth. However, this assumption is clearly refuted by numerous experiments, and we feel that it may be useful to consider nonpecuniary utility in mechanism design and contract theory. Accordingly, we devise an experiment to explore optimal contracts in an adverse-selection context. A principal proposes one of three contract menus, each of which offers a choice of two incentive-compatible contracts, to two agents whose types are unknown to the principal. The agents know the set of possible menus, and choose to either accept one of the two contracts offered in the proposed menu or to reject the menu altogether; a rejection by either agent leads to lower (and equal) reservation payoffs for all parties. While all three possible menus favor the principal, they do so to varying degrees. We observe numerous rejections of the more lopsided menus, and approach an equilibrium where one of the more equitable contract menus (which one depends on the reservation payoffs) is proposed and agents accept a contract, selecting actions according to their types. Behavior is largely consistent with all recent models of social preferences, strongly suggesting there is value in considering nonpecuniary utility in agency theory.

Austerity and anarchy: Budget cuts and social unrest in Europe, 1919-2008

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? Using cross-country evidencefor the period 1919 to 2008, we examine the extent to which societies becomeunstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear correlation between fiscalretrenchment and instability. Expenditure cuts are particularly potent infueling protests; tax rises have only small and insignificant effects. We test ifthe relationship simply reflects economic downturns, using a recently-developedIMF dataset on exogenous expenditure shocks, and conclude that this is not thecase. While autocracies and democracies show broadly similar responses to budgetcuts, countries with more constraints on the executive are less likely to seeunrest after austerity measures. Growing media penetration does not strengthenthe effect of cut-backs on the level of unrest. We also find that austerity episodesthat result in unrest lead to quick reversals of fiscal policy.

Pre-play communication and credibility: A test of Aumann's conjecture

The effectiveness of pre-play communication in achieving efficientoutcomes has long been a subject of controversy. In some environments,cheap talk may help to achieve coordination. However, Aumannconjectures that, in a variant of the Stag Hunt game, a signal forefficient play is not self-enforcing and concludes that an "agreementto play [the efficient outcome] conveys no information about what theplayers will do." Harsanyi and Selten (1988) cite this example as anillustration of risk-dominance vs. payoff-dominance. Farrell and Rabin(1996) agree with the logic, but suspect that cheap talk willnonetheless achieve efficiency. The conjecture is tested with one-waycommunication. When the sender first chooses a signal and then anaction, there is impressive coordination: a 94% probability for thepotentially efficient (but risky) play, given a signal for efficientplay. Without communication, efforts to achieve efficiency wereunsuccessful, as the proportion of B moves is only 35%. I also test ahypothesis that the order of the action and the signal affects theresults, finding that the decision order is indeed important. WhileAumann s conjecture is behaviorally disconfirmed when the signal isdetermined initially, the signal s credibility seems to be much moresuspect when the sender is known to have first chosen an action, andthe results are not statistically distinguishable from those whenthere is no signal. Some applications and issues in communication andcoordination are discussed.

Strategy communication and measurement systems

Organizations often face the challenge of communicating their strategiesto local decision makers. The difficulty presents itself in finding away to measure performance wich meaningfully conveys how to implement theorganization's strategy at local levels. I show that organizations solvethis communication problem by combining performance measures in such away that performance gains come closest to mimicking value-added asdefined by the organization's strategy. I further show how organizationsrebalance performance measures in response to changes in their strategies.Applications to the design of performance metrics, gaming, and divisionalperformance evaluation are considered. The paper also suggests severalempirical ways to evaluate the practical importance of the communicationrole of measurement systems.