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Latent transition analysis for longitudinal studies of post-acute infection syndromes
No full textPost-Acute Infectious Syndromes (PAIS) refer to the symptoms persisting months after initial infection. Clinical research studies on this topic often collect rich, multi-modal datasets. Yet, the complexity of the datasets and the lack of a precise clinical case definition pose difficulties in creating comprehensive analyses. Here, we present a generalisable framework for analysing data from longitudinal studies of PAIS using Latent Transition Analysis (LTA). It enables the identification of disease phenotypes and the patient-level analysis of transitions between them, without relying on predefined clinical categorisations. Furthermore, we introduce a method for incorporating covariate information, which enables exploration of how patient characteristics influence disease trajectories. We apply this methodology to the ORCHESTRA dataset, composed of individuals affected by SARS-CoV-2 infection from multiple European centres, for investigation into Post-COVID-19 condition (PCC). 5094 patient assessments were collected at SARS-CoV-2 infection, and at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months of follow-up. Our model identifies distinct PCC phenotypes with patient trajectories impacted by age and sex. Our results highlight how LTA can enhance the interpretability of complex, time-resolved clinical data, support personalized patient monitoring and management, and accelerate therapeutic development for other PAISs, too
Free movement of inventors: open-border policy and innovation in Switzerland
No full textWe study the innovation effects of the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, signed by Switzerland and the European Union in 1999. We exploit a quasi-experimental setting created by Switzerland’s implementation of the treaty, which initially eased entry restrictions only for commuters from neighboring countries, thereby inducing a large inflow of “cross-border inventors” in regions close to the border. We find that the treaty increased patenting in such regions relative to comparable ones farther away from the border. We find no evidence indicating the displacement of native inventors or a reduction in the patenting activity of Switzerland’s neighboring countries. We also find that incumbent inventors in regions next to the border increased their productivity, thanks to patents in collaboration with cross-border inventors. We provide evidence suggesting that cross-border inventors contributed to Swiss patenting by enabling R&D laboratories to enlarge, albeit without increasing the productivity of local peers outside direct collaborations
Embedded courts under campaign-style enforcement: how top-down reforms reshape conditional justice in China
Get PDFDrawing on over 360,000 Chinese court records, we employ a regression-discontinuity-in-time (RDiT) design to examine a top-down reform intended to prevent local governments from pressuring courts to decline administrative litigation cases upon submission. We find that while the total number of cases spiked briefly following the reform, increases in the volume of sensitive land-related disputes have remained stable. Meanwhile, while cases are increasingly dismissed without a formal judgment, plaintiffs who reach trial are significantly more likely to win. Combining quantitative results with qualitative evidence, we argue that Chinese local courts strategically utilize top-down mandates to pursue a subnational separation of powers. Such campaign-style reforms can produce lasting change by allowing the judiciary to gain leverage over the executive branch. While citizens' access to justice remains subject to selective gatekeeping, the continued practice of conditional justice suggests a reduced political embeddedness of local courts
Strengthening environmental governance for sustainable development: appraising the impact of local government in rural Bangladesh
Get PDFIn an era defined by escalating climate change, Bangladesh stands as one of the world's most vulnerable nations, where the well-being of millions and the prospects for sustainable development is intrinsically linked to the health of its environment. This research was undertaken to address a critical question at the heart of this challenge: How effective is local government in strengthening environmental governance and building resilience at the grassroots level? With such a basic unit of rural governance as the Union Parishad, this study evaluates the role, influence of the institution and the systemic pressures that limits its performance. The results indicate a deep and disturbing paradox. A majority of the rural communities agreed that environmental degradation, which is coming in the form of massive floods, uncontrollable erosion of rivers and globally advancing salinity is a grave and imminent danger to their lives and livelihood. Such strong local action should in theory have a strong mandate because of this high level of public concern. However, the study also revealed a very profound and widespread sense of disillusionment between the people and the very establishments that are supposed to defend the people. The paper has concluded that, this disjoint is not due to indifference of the citizens, but is the effect of a malfunctioning system of governance. The Union Parishad, which in theory is the foundation stone of local action, is substantively disempowered and in practice emasculated by three kinds of paralysing problems: a debilitating shortage of financial resources, the corrosive effects of corruption which eats away at its credibility, and the unwarranted political interference which eats away at the proper planning and fair action. These fundamental problems are further enhanced by the inferior institutional capacity, insufficient technical skills and inability of the local, regional and national organizations to coordinate their efforts
Subsidizing global decarbonization: how Chinese state support for clean technologies enables and (potentially) obstructs a worldwide green transition
Get PDFOver the last decade, green technologies have been deployed at record-breaking speeds across the world. No actor has been more important to this process than China, which now dominates what is considered the ‘new three’ technologies (batteries, electric vehicles, solar). In this viewpoint article, we identify a two-step phenomenon that is reshaping global climate politics. First, we contend that, in effect, China is subsidizing a global green transition. While climate policy scholarship provides detailed accounts of China’s state support, it does not capture the critical ramifications of China’s approach to the green transition for other countries. Second, we argue that internal competition within China is increasingly having an impact outside of China. This two-step phenomenon jointly creates a yet underexplored tension at the heart of climate policy between the ability to compete with China and meeting climate targets. We therefore argue that the implications of Chinese dominance present dilemmas for the EU, the US, as well as other countries, and, by extension, avenues for the literature on global climate policy for decades to come
Why cities are the engine of growth in developing countries
Get PDFUrban areas now house half of the world’s population, and within twenty-five years, that proportion will surpass two-thirds – yet cities continue to receive far less attention than they deserve, including in rapidly urbanising parts of Africa and Asia. With cities driving economic growth, proactive investment and strengthening urban governance must become a national priority
Policy legacies and cueing in the European Union during COVID-19
Get PDFHow can government elites influence public support for EU crisis policies? Policy legacies (memories of ‘deeds’, i.e., policy interventions of the EU) are one such crucial channel, but so far we have little evidence of their effects. By contrast, the literature has marshalled solid evidence on cueing (‘words’, i.e., how politicians talk about the EU influences citizens’ policy attitudes). We look at a crucial policy which may have a lasting legacy: the adoption of the pathbreaking NGEU package during COVID-19. We operationalise policy legacy with past policy satisfaction and by priming individuals with information about the positive and negative effects of the policy. We operationalise cues by randomly assigning individuals to conditions where they are exposed to messages from their national government. Overall, we observe a negativity bias for both policy legacies and cues, underlining the fragility of positive legitimacy-building efforts through both policy legacies and cues. While the effects of cues and legacies may compound, they do not seem to depend on each other. Concerning effect heterogeneity, EU trust and attitudes towards EU integration moderate the effect of cues and legacies but not left–right political ideology. Finally, cue effects are also stronger in creditors states
VODKA-Score: evaluating students' philosophical understanding in allegorical reflections via LLM-distilled QA models
Get PDFPost-class reflections are a valuable tool for promoting deeper learning and metacognitive development. However, their open-ended and interpretive nature, particularly in subjects like philosophy, makes timely and consistent assessment difficult. This lack of immediate feedback may contribute to learning anxiety and reduce the effectiveness of reflection as a formative practice. In this study, we assume that when a student’s reflection is sufficiently complete, it should provide enough semantic information to answer related quiz questions. Based on this idea, we introduce the VODKA-Score, a question-answering (QA) based metric that serves as a proxy indicator, evaluating student understanding by identifying answers within their reflections in response to course-related queries, along with DistilledPlatoBERT, a fine-tuned semantic model distilled from five large language models (LLMs) to generate accurate VODKA-Scores. Experiments with 107 students in a philosophy course show that the best-performing model achieved an accuracy between 0.87 and 0.99 and aligned closely with human scoring under specific conditions, reaching a Cohen’s Kappa (κ) above 0.6 and a Spearman correlation (ρ) above 0.5, both statistically significant. Findings suggest that QA-based scoring models can support efficient evaluation in students writing. This study was conducted in a Chinese-language setting and under a fixed reflective writing task, including a predefined prompt, word-count range, writing time, and True/False-based post-test. These conditions limit the cross-linguistic generalizability of the VODKA-Score and should be examined in further studies
When the East goes West: the impact of GATT on socialist countries
Get PDFThere is a growing body of literature on the economic history of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, thereby mainly trying to explain the demise of the Eastern bloc by discussing a range of different aspects. Trade has been largely excluded so far, even though Socialist countries were participating in international trade. This paper aims to discuss the impact of one of the most remarkable events in this period, the accession of four Socialist countries into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which is an explicitly Capitalist trade treaty, between 1966 and 1973. The results suggest that the signing of GATT is associated with a 48–56 per cent increase in export volume, depending on the type of specification. However, the paper finds modest welfare gains for these countries, which can be explained by their comparatively closed economies and other barriers to trade beyond tariffs. Given the methodological limitations, the results should be understood as the lower boundary of the actual impact of GATT on Socialist countries, thereby suggesting that trade deals between countries with different economic and political structures can be beneficial