107159 research outputs found
Sort by
The public health approach to violence reduction: stories, movements, and hope
Get PDFIn recent years, the UK has seen the emergence of a new approach to violence reduction—the public health approach. This method prioritises early intervention and holistic support to prevent violence upstream. This movement, based in part on a perceived success story in Scotland, has led to the founding of more than twenty Violence Reduction Units in England and Wales, and more than £200m of funding to support evidence-based interventions. This book is based on a four-year, multi-method study of the public health approach to violence reduction in Scotland and England. Drawing on 190 interviews with leading professionals working in violence reduction, The Public Health Approach to Violence Reduction provides an empirical case study of the effects of the public health approach to violence reduction in the UK. It traces the evolution of the approach through different scales of policymaking and scrutinises the claims of its potential, using the Scottish model as a case study. The volume makes the case that the public health approach to violence reduction is not a single entity but an assorted set of principles, practices, and discourses that alter as they enter different contexts. Informed by insights from the young people directly affected, The Public Health Approach to Violence Reduction aims to anchor policy in everyday life, thereby creating a roadmap for future policy that is deeply rooted in community experience. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations
Vaccination preferences and predictors of vaccine hesitancy in Brazil: a discrete choice experiment
Get PDFObjective This study investigates the extent to which individual characteristics and preferences towards vaccine attributes and societal restrictions influence vaccination behaviour in a representative Brazilian population. Method We conducted a discrete choice experiment (DCE) involving 3,001 Brazilian respondents from July to September 2022 through an online panel. The DCE involved five vaccine features and two social restriction features. Participants were presented to a sequence of binary choices of hypothetical vaccination programs, with an option to opt-out. We performed multiple regression models to investigate the predictors of vaccination and opt-out decisions. We also performed a latent class logit model to estimate trade-offs between vaccination attributes and societal restrictions across groups. Results Our regression results identified that gender, religiosity, income, political orientation and trust in public health institutions were important predictors of vaccination decisions in Brazil. Our latent class models indicated significant heterogeneity and detected four main classes: (i) left-leaning, pro restrictions, who showed strong preferences for vaccine features such as its effectiveness (62.4%); (ii) left-leaning, pro mandates, who showed strong support for societal restrictions (19.5%); (iii) centrists, pragmatics, who were opposed to restrictions but supportive of vaccine features (11.4%); (iv) right-leaning, vaccine refusers, who showed a willingness to opt-out from vaccination programmes and did not show any preferences for vaccine features (6.7%). Conclusions Our findings suggest that the Brazilian population had overall high willingness to accept vaccines and displayed high trust in public health authorities. Nonetheless, the presence of a non-negligible proportion of cautious and hesitant groups may prevent the effectiveness of vaccination campaigns in the future. Lay summary This study investigated the factors that influence people’s decisions to get vaccinated in Brazil. We asked 3,001 participants to choose between different vaccination programs with various features, including vaccine effectiveness and the presence of social restrictions. We found that factors such as gender, income, religion, political views, and trust in public health institutions affected people’s vaccination decisions. The study also identified four groups: one strongly supports vaccines and their characteristics, one supports both vaccines and social restrictions, another prefers vaccines but dislikes restrictions, and a fourth is more hesitant-refuser about vaccines and more likely to opt out of vaccination. Overall, most Brazilians showed high trust in vaccines and public health advice. However, a small but significant group remains hesitant and refusing, which could pose challenges for future vaccination efforts and public health policies. Understanding these groups can help design better strategies to improve vaccination rates and protect public health
The distribution of investor beliefs, stock ownership, and stock returns
No full textWe study the relationship between the distribution of investor beliefs, the breadth of ownership, and expected returns in a model where stocks differ in the intensity of disagreement and in the extent to which beliefs are polarized, as measured by the number of optimists and pessimists relative to moderates. Polarization explains the size-dependent relationship between breadth and expected returns that we find empirically: positive for large stocks and negative for small stocks. We also find empirical support for the underlying mechanism: polarized stocks earn lower expected returns and are held more broadly if small and less broadly if large
When survival becomes politics: necessity activism and identity work under precarity
Get PDFCollective action is essential for tackling social, institutional, and environmental challenges, often fueled by shared identities, common norms, and a belief in the possibility of change. However, the impact of participating in collective action on individual identities, and how this knowledge can shape future efforts to maintain engagement and promote positive change, remains underexplored. This study uses a liminal and identity work approach to examine how precarious Spanish activists, involved in long‐term struggles against precarity, develop and negotiate their identities as activists through protest participation. Based on a qualitative study spanning over 9 years, this research focuses on the experiences of activists from two collectives in Seville, Spain, that emerged in response to the Great Recession. Our findings introduce the concept of necessity activism to describe political engagement driven by survival needs rather than ideological commitment. We show how activists facing precarity undergo a three‐phase identity transformation: forced separation, intensive identity work, and varied outcomes including burnout, withdrawal, or adaptive re‐engagement. This process highlights the emotional and material costs of activism and the ongoing reconstruction of activist identities under the liminal conditions created by precarity
Markets, birth-rates, watchdogs: the evolving fiscal constraint in advanced economies
Get PDFOver the past 5 years, the policy constraint posed by the sovereign bond market has strengthened. Across the G7, governments have been forced into rapid policy reversals, often due to sharp and unexpected rises in bond yields. The fact that the bond market acts as a constraint on policy—particularly on long-term investment—is well known. What has become apparent is that this market constraint has sharpened and now shapes G7 policymaking outside periods of acute crisis. This paper examines the bond market constraint, and how it has evolved in recent years. The past 5 years have seen a striking evolution, with record levels of G7 debt issued. Focusing on the United States and the United Kingdom, we outline two key empirical puzzles: first, for both, bond yields appear higher than justified by benchmark models; second, in the United Kingdom, yields have become highly (and surprisingly) volatile. We then review candidate explanations for these changes. We posit and examine new forces—demographic shocks, news coverage of fiscal watchdogs, the role of hedge funds and stablecoins. Finally, we use a simple econometric framework to provide a first test of whether these forces may explain bond yields. We find indicative evidence that they do. However, much remains unexplained, suggesting the importance of further work to understand the implications of the higher debt costs across the G7. As part of this analysis, we introduce a new dataset of fiscal watchdog media salience and publication patterns, which we make available to support future research
Understanding the householder solar panel consumer: a Markovian model and its societal implications
Get PDFHousehold adoption of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems is central to the green energy transition, yet diffusion depends on social influence and behavioral biases, as well as payback economics. This study develops a parsimonious Markovian model in which households move sequentially from being unengaged (“Carbon”) to informed, to planning, and finally to adoption (“Green”). Transition rates are micro-founded by two mechanisms: (i) social contagion/communication, proxied by the current share of adopters, and (ii) economic profitability, proxied by payback time computed from a Net Present Value framework. Novel to this diffusion setting, bounded rationality is introduced via hyperbolic discounting, creating a procrastination loop that delays adoption even when PV is economically attractive in a long-run perspective. Calibrated on the Italian residential PV diffusion path (2006–2020) and assessed in national and regional applications, the model reproduces observed trajectories and enables forward-looking scenario analysis (2020–2026). Results show that policies yielding similar payback improvements can produce different outcomes once present bias is accounted for and that behaviorally informed intervention are stronger. The findings contribute a micro-to-macro bridge between behavioral economics and technology diffusion modeling and imply that effective policy portfolios (and PV business models) should complement incentives with commitment devices and social-norm peer strategies to accelerate PV uptake and its spillover emissions benefits
Beyond the green rhetoric: the marketability of sustainability in electric vehicles
No full textElectric Vehicles (EVs) are promoted as a sustainable way of transport claiming to be environmentally friendly, with different governments in India launching several schemes to promote them. Recent studies reveal that EVs release more toxic emissions than their non-electric counterparts. Furthermore, the batteries result in the extraction of minerals from the Global South. In this article, we draw from Marxist criticisms of consumerism, sustainable development, and technological fetishism to interrogate how notions of sustainability are legitimised to support EV consumption in India. Dependency theory has been employed to study how policies to provide a sustainable means of life for a few are enacted at the expense of most. By examining India's EV policies within global dependency relations, the article demonstrates how EV promotion represents a form of commodity fetishism reproducing unequal development patterns
Gendered and racialized politics of mercury contamination in extractivist mining geographies in Colombia
No full textThis article investigates the local politics of mercury contamination in artisanal gold mining communities in Colombia. Drawing on mixed-methods research conducted in La Toma between 2019 and 2020, we examine the shortcomings of the reductionist technological and biomedical understanding of mercury pollution that informs the Minamata Convention. We build on feminist political ecologies and geographies and suggest that mercury contamination elicits a process of everyday embodied dispossession of the body-territory that inscribes uneven racialized and gendered power relationships onto Afrocolombian bodies. This process, however, is resisted by women from La Toma who have engaged in collective efforts in the defense of life and territory. Este artículo investiga las políticas locales de la contaminación por mercurio en comunidades de minería aurífera artesanal en Colombia. A partir de una investigación de métodos mixtos realizada en La Toma entre 2019 y 2020, examinamos las limitaciones del enfoque reduccionista, de carácter tecnológico y biomédico, sobre la contaminación por mercurio que sustenta el Convenio de Minamata. Apoyándonos en los aportes de las ecologías políticas y las geografías feministas, sostenemos que la contaminación por mercurio da lugar a un proceso de desposesión corporal cotidiana del cuerpo-territorio, mediante el cual se inscriben relaciones de poder desiguales, racializadas y generizadas, sobre los cuerpos afrocolombianos. Este proceso, sin embargo, es resistido por las mujeres de La Toma, quienes han impulsado esfuerzos colectivos en defensa de la vida y del territorio
Integrating financial risk into cardiometabolic prevention: from price transparency to patient-level insights into diabetes-related spending
Get PDFCardiometabolic disease remains a leading driver of morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs in the United States. While clinical risk models have advanced, parallel frameworks to quantify financial exposure and vulnerability remain underdeveloped. Such insights are critical to support risk-informed coverage design and development of cost-effective interventions within cardiometabolic care pathways