Statistical modelling of citation exchange among statistics journals

Scholarly journal rankings based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to the discrepancy between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings

Evolution in Economic Geography: Institutions, Regional Adaptation and Political Economy

Economic geography has, over the last decade or so, drawn upon ideas from evolutionary economics in trying to understand processes of regional growth and change, with the concept of path dependence assuming particular prominence. Recently, some prominent researchers have sought to delimit and develop an evolutionary economic geography (EEG) as a distinct approach, aiming to create a more coherent and systematic theoretical framework for research. This paper contributes to debates on the nature and development of EEG. It has two main aims. First, we seek to restore a broader conception of social institutions and agency to EEG, informed by the recent writings of institutional economists like Geoffrey Hodgson. Second, we link evolutionary concepts to political economy approaches, arguing that the evolution of the economic landscape must be related to the broader dynamics of capital accumulation, centred upon the creation, realisation and geographical transfer of value. As such, we favour the utilisation of evolutionary and institutional concepts within a geographical political economy approach rather than the construction of a separate and theoretically ‘pure’ EEG; evolution in economic geography, not an evolutionary economic geography

Progress in AI Planning Research and Applications

Planning has made significant progress since its inception in the 1970s, in terms both of the efficiency and sophistication of its algorithms and representations and its potential for application to real problems. In this paper we sketch the foundations of planning as a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence and the history of its development over the past three decades. Then some of the recent achievements within the field are discussed and provided some experimental data demonstrating the progress that has been made in the application of general planners to realistic and complex problems. The paper concludes by identifying some of the open issues that remain as important challenges for future research in planning

Conservative reasoning about epistemic uncertainty for the probability of failure on demand of a 1-out-of-2 software-based system in which one channel is “possibly perfect”

In earlier work, (Littlewood and Rushby 2012) (henceforth LR), an analysis was presented of a 1-out-of-2 software-based system in which one channel was “possibly perfect”. It was shown that, at the aleatory level, the system pfd (probability of failure on demand) could be bounded above by the product of the pfd of channel A and the pnp (probability of non-perfection) of channel B. This result was presented as a way of avoiding the well-known difficulty that for two certainly-fallible channels, failures of the two will be dependent, i.e. the system pfd cannot be expressed simply as a product of the channel pfds. A price paid in this new approach for avoiding the issue of failure dependence is that the result is conservative. Furthermore, a complete analysis requires that account be taken of epistemic uncertainty – here concerning the numeric values of the two parameters pfdA and pnpB. Unfortunately this introduces a different difficult problem of dependence: estimating the dependence between an assessor’s beliefs about the parameters. The work reported here avoids this problem by obtaining results that require only an assessor’s marginal beliefs about the individual channels, i.e. they do not require knowledge of the dependence between these beliefs. The price paid is further conservatism in the results

A participatory approach for assessing alternative climate change adaptation responses to cope with flooding risk in the upper Brahmaputra and Danube river basins

This work illustrates the preliminary findings of a participatory research process aimed at identifying responses for sustainable water management in a climate change perspective, in two river basins in Europe and Asia. The paper describes the methodology implemented through local workshops, aimed at eliciting and evaluating possible responses to flooding risk. Participatory workshops allowed for the identification of four categories of possible responses and a set of nine evaluation criteria, three for each of the three pillars of sustainable development. The main result of such activities consists in the ranking of broad response categories, to contribute to the orientation of the Brahmatwinn research project towards the identification of Integrated Water Resource Management Strategies (IWRMS) well grounded upon the issues and preferences elicited from local experts. The mDSS tool was used to facilitate transparent and robust management of the information collected through Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and the communication of the outputs.Participatory process, Climate Change, Flooding Risk, Decision Support System, MCDA

Human capital, technical change and the welfare state

I study the interactions between the distribution of human capital, technological choice, and redistributive institutions. I first ask what makes alternative social contracts such as a European-style "welfare state" and US-style "laissez-faire" sustainable, and in particular how each is affected by skill-biased technical change. I then endogenize technological or organizational choice, and show that firms respond to greater human capital heterogeneity with more flexible technologies that further exacerbate wage equality. I then analyze the simultaneous determination of technology, income distribution, and redistributive institutions, and as well as spillovers between the social contracts of different countries.inequality, welfare state, technical change, skill bias, human capital, redistribution, social contract

What does a technology shock do? A VAR analysis with model-based sign restrictions

This paper estimates the effects of technology shocks in VAR models of the U.S., identified by imposing restrictions on the sign of impulse responses. These restrictions are consistent with the implications of a popular class of DSGE models, with both real and nominal frictions, and with sufficiently wide ranges for their parameters. This identification strategy thus substitutes theoretically-motivated restrictions for the atheoretical assumptions on the time-series properties of the data that are key to long-run restrictions. Stochastic technology improvements persistently increase real wages, consumption, investment and output in the data; hours worked are very likely to increase, displaying a hump-shaped pattern. Contrary to most of the related VAR evidence, results are not sensitive to a number of specification assumptions, including those on the stationarity properties of variables.technology shocks, DSGE models, bayesian VAR methods, identification