4,467 research outputs found

    Alcohol Addiction Recovery Experiences Among Christian African Immigrants

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    AbstractThe problem of alcohol addiction is heightened when other psychological factors are present, such as the stress of acculturation. The purpose of this research was to describe the experiences of Christian African immigrants in America who have used faith-based treatment approaches while in recovery from alcoholism and to determine how their faith may have been a way of coping with their recovery. In this hermeneutic qualitative phenomenological study, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with eight participants. The data were analyzed to explore the experiences of Christian African acculturating to America who endorse a faith-based approach to their recovery, and the following three main categories emerged: (a) acculturation stress and its relationship to alcoholism; (b) factors that affected recovery; and (c) integrating psychological, spiritual, and medical factors in recovery. In addition, 13 subcategories emerged: (a) job and settlement stress; (b) using alcohol to cope; (c) stress from helping people at home country; (d) culture shock, accent, communication, and respect differences; (e) social drinking/peer pressure; (f) family support; (g) church and related activities support; (h) personal faith/spiritual growth support; (i) spiritual leaders and relationship support; (j) role of spirituality; (k) the place of psychology and therapy; (l) the role of medication; and spiritual support system. The findings of this research will provide a better understanding of the experiences of participants who have endorsed faith as crucial to their recovery. This has potential implications for positive social change by providing a clearer understanding of this phenomenon, which can help with addiction counseling, especially for the population of the study

    How Personalized Networks Can Limit Free Riding: A Multi-Group Version of the Public Goods Game

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    People belong to many different groups, and few belong to the same network of groups. Moreover, people routinely reduce their involvement in dysfunctional groups while increasing involvement in those they find more attractive. The net effect can be an increase in overall cooperation and the partial isolation of free-riders, even if free-riders are never punished, excluded, or recognized. We formalize and test this conjecture with an agent-based social simulation and a multi-good extension of the standard repeated public goods game. Our initial results from three treatments suggest that the multi-group setting indeed raises overall cooperation and dampens the impact of freeriders. We extend our understanding of this setting by imposing greater heterogeneity between groups through interweaving automated bot players amongst human subjects; whereby initial sessions of this amplify the aforementioned effects

    Spectrum auctions: designing markets to benefit the public, industry and the economy

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    Access to the radio spectrum is vital for modern digital communication. It is an essential component for smartphone capabilities, the Cloud, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, and multiple other new technologies. Governments use spectrum auctions to decide which companies should use what parts of the radio spectrum. Successful auctions can fuel rapid innovation in products and services, unlock substantial economic benefits, build comparative advantage across all regions, and create billions of dollars of government revenues. Poor auction strategies can leave bandwidth unsold and delay innovation, sell national assets to firms too cheaply, or create uncompetitive markets with high mobile prices and patchy coverage that stifles economic growth. Corporate bidders regularly complain that auctions raise their costs, while government critics argue that insufficient revenues are raised. The cross-national record shows many examples of both highly successful auctions and miserable failures. Drawing on experience from the UK and other countries, senior regulator Geoffrey Myers explains how to optimise the regulatory design of auctions, from initial planning to final implementation. Spectrum Auctions offers unrivalled expertise for regulators and economists engaged in practical auction design or company executives planning bidding strategies. For applied economists, teachers, and advanced students this book provides unrivalled insights in market design and public management. Providing clear analytical frameworks, case studies of auctions, and stage-by-stage advice, it is essential reading for anyone interested in designing public-interested and successful spectrum auctions

    Measuring Vulnerability to Poverty: A Unified Framework

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    Essays on Household and Public Finance

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    Programa de Doctorado en EconomĂ­a por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Miguel Almunia Candela.- Secretaria: Nuarpear Lekfuangfu.- Vocal: Effrosyni Adamopoulo

    Counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues: Moving the needle on vaccines in a polarized United States

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    This paper reports results from a large-scale randomized controlled trial assessing whether counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines. The study used a 27-s video compilation of Donald Trump's comments about the vaccine from Fox News interviews and presented the video to millions of U.S. YouTube users through a $100,000 advertising campaign in October 2021. Results indicate that the number of vaccines increased in the average treated county by 103 (with a one-tailed P value of 0.097). Based on this average treatment effect and totaling across our 1014 treated counties, the total estimated effect was 104,036 vaccines

    Essays in behavioural finance

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    This thesis studies the role of contrast effects and biased expectations in financial decisionmaking and financial markets. The first study explores the role of skewness preferences in dynamic decision-making at the hands of salience theory. Previous research suggests that otherwise risk-averse people are willing to take risks if the outcome distribution is positively skewed. Salience theory can explain this by assuming that states with high contrasts between the outcomes attract attention and their probability is overestimated. Skewness preferences are particularly important in dynamic setups because these allow agents to endogenously create skewness through the choice of their stopping strategy. I extend salience theory to a dynamic setup and show that it predicts that agents will take gambles if the expected value is not too negative. Moreover, if they gamble they choose stopping strategies that yield positively skewed outcome distributions. These predictions differ both from expected utility theory and other behavioural models. I test the predictions experimentally and find broad support. In the second study, I examine whether the earnings forecasts of analysts after a firm announces its earnings depend on the earnings surprises of companies that announced shortly before the firm. Evidence from a plethora of domains suggests that the interpretation of information depends on how it compares to contrasting information. Thus, the earnings of a given firm might look worse the better other firms perform. I find that positive earnings surprises of other firms make analysts revise their forecast of a firm’s earnings upwards but, at the same time, make their forecast more pessimistic relative to the true earnings. This result is in line with a positive news channel in combination with a contrast effect channel of the other firms’ earnings surprise on the analysts’ forecasts. In the third study, I develop a method to test if a given return predictor reflects mispricing rather than risk. Asset pricing research has uncovered hundreds of characteristics that can predict the cross-section of returns, but the nature of many of these remains elusive. If a predictor is linked to returns through risk, it should be unrelated to changes in the market’s expectations about firm profits. Alternatively, return predictably can be explained by biased expectations. If a return predictor captures this form of mispricing, it should predict changes in expectations in addition to returns. I use the earnings forecasts of professional analysts as a proxy to the market’s expectations and test for 173 return predictors if they can also predict forecast revisions. I find that around 40% of predictors can do so and, thus, reflect mispricing
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