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Preparing for uncertainty and health system responses: a new year for Health Economics, Policy and Law
Get PDFPublic engagement with eugenics in the academy exhibitions and events across higher education institutions
No full textThis collective report details the authors’ engagement with the legacies of eugenics through curating exhibitions and events at higher education institutions and museums in the UK and abroad. It details the practical experiences of uncovering and exploring historical eugenic affiliations among influential figures such as Francis Galton and William Beveridge and the challenges faced in addressing these legacies within institutional contexts, specifically University College London (UCL), the London School of Economics (LSE), the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Psychological Society. The authors, who are also the curators of exhibitions on the history of eugenics, highlight collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches drawing on archival collections, public programming, and responses from epistemic communities engaged with the topic. Rather than being an academic text, this piece reflects on the complex, evolving dialogue around reckoning with eugenics in public history and its relevance today through curatorial practice and collective personal reflection
The effects of the affordable care act on labor supply and other uses of time
Get PDFA vast literature studies the behavioral impacts of health care reforms, often coming to controversial conclusions. Here we examine the time allocation effects of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obama Care, focusing on two pillars, namely Medicaid expansion, which increased access to public health insurance, and the Tax Credit Premium, subsidizing the purchase of private health insurance. Using 2012–2015 daily diary data from the American Time Use Survey, we take a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, which exploits the cross-state variation in the timing of ACA implementation, together with differences in income eligibility thresholds, to identify the effects at stake. Considering a sample of childless adults aged 27–64, a group not eligible for public health insurance before ACA, we find that the Medicaid expansion reduced their labor supply by over an hour per day, increasing part-time work, while the Premium Tax Credit is associated with a slight increase in employment levels. The implications for other uses of time are also analyzed
No egalitarianism in the Wa hills: relative commensuration in kinship, sacrifice, and war
Get PDFThe autonomy of the United Wa State Army of Myanmar today is said to be based on the egalitarianism of Wa communities in the past. The analysis of commensuration in kinship, sacrifice, and war challenges these portrayals of autonomy and egalitarianism. In the past, the making and taking of lives could not be measured in absolute terms but required situationally specific and relational commensuration. Since the 1960s, commensuration has intensified with modern technologies and communication networks, especially in the context of military government, enabling new scales and benchmarks for measuring social relations. Military organization and cultural authenticity are based on absolute measures and exact equivalences, at least in theory. In practice, the levelling of human lives is resisted in the social relations of para‐militarism, and in the cultural production of para‐nationalism. Assessing the scale and violence of measurement, the article describes how relations of autonomy and mutuality changed from sacrificial exchange in the past to para‐nationalist sacrifice today, without ever becoming ‘egalitarian’ in the strict sense of the term
Global labor mobility between shrinking and growing labor forces
No full textFalling fertility and improved mortality create a powerful and inexorable demographic arithmetic of ageing in the coming decades around the world, with three patterns. The richest countries, along with China and the Former Soviet Union, will see absolute declines in the labor force aged (15-64) population and absolute rises in those 65 plus. All major developing country regions except for Africa: Latin America, South-East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, and West Asia/Middle East, will experience modest labor force growth to 2050 (less than 30 percent) aged combined with rapid growth of those over 65 (doubling or tripling). The fall in fertility in Africa (Sub-Saharan and North) started later and has fallen much less and hence, in standard scenarios for 2050, Africa will account for 80 percent of all global net growth in the world’s labor force aged. A fundamental feature of the global economy over the medium-run to 2050 is that that highest labor productivity countries will have absolutely fewer native-born workers and Africa, home to many of the world’s lowest productivity countries, will have 800 million more labor force aged. The combination makes possible gains on the order of trillions of dollars to policies that creating legal pathways to allow people, particularly youth, to move from low productivity, labor abundance places to high productivity, labor scarcity places. But, so far, politics has not found the way to “yes” for this win-win scenario
Limit order markets and Bayesian learning
No full textThis thesis explores two distinct research directions in mathematical finance and statistical learning. The first part develops microstructure models of trading in limit order markets with asymmetric information. The second part introduces a Bayesian deep learning framework designed to improve predictive performance and uncertainty quantification. The first part investigates equilibrium formation, belief updating, and price impact in markets where liquidity suppliers face uncertainty about the presence and number of informed traders. We begin with a one-period model in which equilibrium arises from a fixed-point mapping that accommodates general distributions for asset value and insider count. We show that the resulting market impact function exhibits a power law under fat-tailed fundamentals and a logarithmic form under light-tailed ones, with exponents and coefficients characterised by numerically solvable fixed-point equations. Extending to a multiperiod setting, we study sequential trading with myopic insiders and heavy-tailed t-distributed noise. The dynamic equilibrium is characterised by a recursive system of fixed-point equations, and we prove that liquidity suppliers’ beliefs about the asset value converge to the truth over time. The resulting price impact again follows a power-law decay, shaped by the noise tail index, insider competition, and the learning dynamics. The second part proposes a flexible framework for Bayesian neural networks by introducing probabilistic activation functions and mixture-of-experts architectures. Leveraging a semiparametric variational inference scheme, the model improves prediction accuracy, uncertainty quantification, and interpretability. Applications to real-world regression and classification tasks demonstrate performance gains over standard deep learning models
The returns to education: a meta-study
Get PDFThere have been many studies estimating the causal effect of an additional year of education on earnings. The majority employ administrative changes in the minimum school-leaving age as the mechanism allowing identification. Here, we survey 79 such estimates. However, remarkably, while the majority of these studies find substantial gains from education, a number of well-grounded studies find no effect. The average return from these studies still implies substantial average gains from an extra year of education: an average of 8.2%. But the pattern of reported returns shows clear evidence of publication biases: omission of studies where the return was not statistically significantly above 0, and where the estimated return was negative. Correcting for these omitted studies, the implied average causal returns to an extra year of schooling will be only in the range 0%–3%
Preaching to the choirs. Political parties' online targeting strategies in multi-party systems
No full textResearch suggests that political campaigns use online political microtargeting to mobilize a party’s existing voter base rather than to persuade new voters. However, most studies have been conducted in the US, where low turnout and high partisanship create optimal conditions for such a strategy. In this study, we analyze novel data on political parties’ use of targeting in Facebook and Instagram ads to examine the nature of microtargeting. The context of the 2022 Danish general election - with multiple parties, high voter turnout, and low partisanship - is a hard case for the mobilization thesis. Yet, in line with existing literature, we find that political parties focus their online targeting strategies on existing voters. However, the findings also suggest that political parties adjust their messages to conform with the presumed preferences of the targeted group, highlighting heterogeneity in the mobilization strategy
Measuring the impact of global research and development investment in product development partnerships: a case study on return on investment in antimalarial drug development
Get PDFBACKGROUND: Product development partnerships (PDPs) are non-profit organisations that bridge the gap between the need for new treatments for poverty-related diseases and the resources available to develop them, leveraging a mix of public, philanthropic, multilateral, and private sector funding. We aimed to calculate two financial metrics to estimate the return on investments of drugs developed by the PDP Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) as a case study. METHODS: The internal rate of return (IRR) and benefit-cost ratio (BCR) were used to estimate the economic return on investment for the PDP. IRR was based on total investments from 2000 to 2023 and health gains derived from PDP-supported drugs, measured as monetised disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) minus the delivery cost of the products. BCR was calculated by dividing the present value of monetised DALYs by the present value of cost, indicating the overall efficiency and impact of the investments received by MMV. FINDINGS: Total investment received was US785 million. The IRR for the base scenario was 52·13% (95% uncertainty interval 52·11-52·16) and the BCR 12·99 (12·92-13·06). INTERPRETATION: The substantial IRR and BCR generated by investment in antimalarial drug development suggest that the PDP model has a potentially pivotal role to play in global health
Reducing online harms requires radical transparency
Get PDFThe harms created by social media platforms have led Australia to enact a ban on social media for under-sixteens and to calls for similar regulation in the UK and Europe. Carolina Are argues that a realistic appraisal of social media’s entanglement with US interests and radical transparency are necessary for any regulation to be effective