107159 research outputs found
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Measuring religion from behavior: violence, climate shocks and religious adherence in Afghanistan
No full textReligion plays a fundamental role in society but is often difficult to measure. We develop a novel method for measuring religious adherence that is based on decreases in digital activity during periods set aside for prayer. We apply this approach to a dataset of roughly 23 billion phone calls to study the determinants of religious practice in Afghanistan. We find that religious adherence declines after violent attacks by Islamist insurgents but increases in response to droughts in agricultural regions. This approach creates new avenues for studying religious behavior in contexts where conventional data are unavailable or unreliable
Vanishing point
No full textThis chapter explores some of the ways in which a constitutional order centred on popular authority depends on its citizens’ capacity and inclination to project into the future. The analysis focuses in particular on how the imagined world-to-come can act as a source of legitimacy, as an inspiration to collective self-rule, and also as a way to contend with political disagreement. As the chapter goes on to suggest, this perspective on constituent power brings out its character as a forward-looking process, while it also highlights some of the challenges that arise when confidence in the future wanes
LSE Print PhD theses 1905-2011
No full textThis dataset contains bibliographic data for LSE’s print PhD theses collection. The data originates from the LSE Library catalogue and has been enhanced with identifiers from external vocabularies and identifier registries. It is intended to complement the Wikidata thesis project which contains metadata for all of LSE’s electronically available PhD theses
Key debates in sustainable investment
No full textMany leading investment institutions, including asset managers, pension funds and insurance companies, have made commitments to sustainable investment or to the delivery of sustainability goals alongside their investment objectives. This mainstreaming of sustainable investment raises many important questions, such as the following: Do sustainable finance strategies lead to meaningful real-world change? Are fears about greenwashing justified? Does sustainable investment deliver better financial outcomes? And is it consistent with investors’ fiduciary duties? Can the sustainability data and ratings used in finance be trusted? Does sustainability information drive improved sustainability performance? How should sustainable investment be governed? What are the roles and responsibilities of public and private actors? This book unpacks the key terms, concepts and debates – both theoretical and applied – that underpin sustainable investment. Through evidence-based analysis, it cuts through the hype to critically explore sustainable finance’s transformative potential as well as its limitations. In doing so, the book enables public policymakers, financial institutions, companies, civil society organisations and academics to engage in a more informed discussion about the contribution that sustainable investment can make to sustainability goals
Political socialization and immigrants’ support for progressive politics: the case of green parties
Get PDFProgressive parties often advocate pro-immigration policies but do not attract equal support from all immigrant groups. Why is this the case? This study examines immigrants’ support for green parties, a key progressive party family in Western Europe. Our findings reveal that immigrants from established democracies are more likely to support green parties compared to those from (post-)authoritarian regimes. We attribute this disparity to socialization: Individuals from established democracies, where post-materialist values and environmental politics are more prominent, are more attuned to green issues. This heightened salience influences their political preferences after migration. Using entropy balancing on cross-national European surveys, we document this green support gap and provide evidence for our proposed mechanism. These results inform debates on how political preferences travel across contexts and the socialization effects of political institutions
Learn-to-distance: distance learning for detecting LLM-generated text
Get PDFModern large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, and Gemini have transformed the way we learn, work, and communicate. Yet, their ability to produce highly human-like text raises serious concerns about misinformation and academic integrity, making it an urgent need for reliable algorithms to detect LLMgenerated content. In this paper, we start by presenting a geometric approach to demystify rewrite-based detection algorithms, revealing their underlying rationale and demonstrating their generalization ability. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel rewrite-based detection algorithm that adaptively learns the distance between the original and rewritten text. Theoretically, we demonstrate that employing an adaptively learned distance function is more effective for detection than using a fixed distance. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments with over 100 settings, and find that our approach demonstrates superior performance over baseline algorithms in the majority of scenarios. In particular, it achieves relative improvements from 54.3% to 75.4% over the strongest baseline across different target LLMs (e.g., GPT, Claude, and Gemini). A python implementation of our proposal is publicly available at https://github.com/Mamba413/L2D
Joined at the hip: monetary and fiscal policy in a liquidity-dependent world
No full textWe study the effects of monetary and fiscal policies when both money and government bonds provide liquidity services. Because money is the unit of account, the price of money is the inverse of the price level. If prices are sticky, so is the price of money in terms of goods, and this is one important reason why money is liquid and attractive. By contrast, the price of government bonds is free to jump and often does, especially in response to news about changes in fiscal policy and the supply of bonds. Those movements in government bond prices affect available liquidity, and therefore aggregate demand, inflation, and output. Under these conditions, bond-financed fiscal expansions can be contractionary, causing deflation and a temporary recession. To avoid those effects, changes in bond supply must be matched by changes in money supply and in the interest rate on money. We conclude that in a liquidity-dependent world, fiscal and monetary policies are joined at the hip
The role of institutions in cultivating trust in science: a qualitative approach on a European scale
Get PDFHow do institutional actors perceive public trust in science and technology within their national contexts? How do institutional stakeholders view the cultures of research integrity and social integration, and how do they perceive such cultures to co-influence public trust in science? This chapter explores the role of institutions in fostering a research culture that reinforces trust in science. Based on the findings of a qualitative, participatory study carried out in 7 partner countries, it highlights key insights into institutional perspectives. Across countries, results indicate that professional stakeholders do not identify a general ‘crisis of trust’ in science but, nonetheless, variously raise emerging areas of concern and identify internal and external pressures on the science system that may negatively influence public trust in science and public perceptions of science and technology
Preventing financial ruin: how the West India trade fostered creativity in crisis lending by the Bank of England
No full textThis paper contributes to the understanding of the complex relationship between British economic performance during the Napoleonic wars and the ‘West Indies’, as the Caribbean slave colonies were called. Not only did profits from slave‐based commerce provide financing for the growth of the financial sector, as has been claimed, but the risk of financial instability created by the financial sector's investment in and exposure to the Caribbean slave economies made it necessary for the government – and the Bank of England – to support this trade. The Bank of England archival records demonstrate that the Bank developed lending facilities specifically for the purpose of supporting West India merchants through the financial crises of the 1790s and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Not only did the Bank engage in unconventional lending, explicitly providing loans of more than a year, but the Bank also made innovative crisis loans, both accepting goods as collateral and providing large loans that were protected by extensive third‐party guarantees. Furthermore, the 1799 loan is a documented instance of the Bank accepting consols as collateral for crisis lending. These innovations made it possible for the Bank to act alongside the government in supporting the West India merchants through the Napoleonic wars and may have been influenced by the growing number of directors of the Bank who were themselves West India merchants