1,721,039 research outputs found
The political cycle of road traffic accidents
No full textRoad traffic accidents mean lost productivity and medical expenditures. We explain trends in traffic accidents as a function of the political cycle using municipal data from Italy. We show that during municipal election years, the accident rate increases by 1.5%, with a 2% increase in the injury rate but no effect on the fatality rate. The effects are stronger in the quarter prior to the election quarter, when the electoral campaign is at its zenith, and in the second quarter after the election for the new elected mayor. We show that this is the result of a decrease in tickets for traffic violations (rate and revenues) during election years. Our results are robustly driven by the municipal political cycle defined in different ways, and their magnitude and direction are not explained by the spillover effects between municipalities. Proximity to a national police station reduces the impact of local elections on injury rates. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Territorial differences in access to prenatal care and health at birth
No full textWe assess the impact of prenatal care on health at birth using birth certificates from the Czech Republic. We use a predictive machine learning algorithm to identify the observables affecting birth health outcomes. We control for those observables in our empirical analysis, which indicates that a more intense use of prenatal care is positively correlated with better health outcomes at birth. Exploiting the Czech adhesion to the EU in 2004, we construct an instrument to capture the geographical heterogeneous access to prenatal care across districts. Differently from the OLS results, the IV results do not capture any significant effect of prenatal care, leaving room for the hidden role of unobservable mothers’ characteristics when it comes to health behaviors during pregnancy
Mortality Inequality in the Czech Republic*
No full textWe examine the evolution of mortality and mortality inequality among the 77 Czech districts ranked by a new poverty index, from 1994 to 2016. The country experienced dramatic improvements in mortality for all age categories and both genders, but with very little variation in inequality. Mortality inequality has remained substantially stable increasing only for females aged 20 to 64
In Medio Stat Virtus: Effective Communication and Preferences for Redistribution in Hard Times
Full text linkThis paper evaluates the effects of statistical information on preferences for redistribution of scarce public resources. We refer to scarce resource with reference to the COVID-19 emergency: allocation of the first round of vaccine and the allocation of financial resources provided by the Italian national government to fight the economic emergency triggered by the pandemic. Randomly allocating the information through an online experiment, we show that treated respondents tend to prioritize the group targeted by the information, and they are more likely to do so if they are "in the middle", in terms of age, political preferences, religiosity and education
Birth outcomes in hard times among minority ethnic groups
No full textCombining a unique dataset of birth records with municipal-level real estate information,
we assess the impact of the 2008 recession on the health of immigrants’
newborns in Italy. Health at birth (e.g., low birth weight) of children born to immigrants
deteriorated more than health at birth of children born to Italian natives. The
negative effects on immigrants are not equally distributed across ethnicities, but
rather are driven by the main economic activity of the ethnic group and its related network
at the municipal level. Immigrants whose ethnic group is mainly employed in
the sectors most affected during the recession suffered the most. Living in a municipality
where their ethnic network is organized through more registered immigrant
associations mitigates the recession hardship for immigrants. The characteristics of
ethnic groups and their organization at the municipal level do not explain the heterogeneous
effects on Italian newborns, which confirms the presence of network effects
rather than neighborhood effect
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