Using clustering to extract personality information from socio economic data

It has become apparent that models that have been applied widely in economics, including Machine Learning techniques and Data Mining methods, should take into consideration principles that derive from the theories of Personality Psychology in order to discover more comprehensive knowledge regarding complicated economic behaviours. In this work, we present a method to extract Behavioural Groups by using simple clustering techniques that can potentially reveal aspects of the Personalities for their members. We believe that this is very important because the psychological information regarding the Personalities of individuals is limited in real world applications and because it can become a useful tool in improving the traditional models of Knowledge Economy

Mobile Communication Signatures of Unemployment

The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to assess; thus the speed of which policies can be designed and evaluated is limited. However, recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data as an enabling methodology for demographic modeling and measurement. In this work, we investigate whether indicators extracted from mobile phone usage can reveal information about the socio-economical status of microregions such as districts (i.e., average spatial resolution < 2.7km). For this we examine anonymized mobile phone metadata combined with beneficiaries records from unemployment benefit program. We find that aggregated activity, social, and mobility patterns strongly correlate with unemployment. Furthermore, we construct a simple model to produce accurate reconstruction of district level unemployment from their mobile communication patterns alone. Our results suggest that reliable and cost-effective economical indicators could be built based on passively collected and anonymized mobile phone data. With similar data being collected every day by telecommunication services across the world, survey-based methods of measuring community socioeconomic status could potentially be augmented or replaced by such passive sensing methods in the future

The Bigger the Children, the Bigger the Worries: Are Preschoolers and Adolescents Affected Differently by Family Instability with Regard to Non-cognitive Skills?

Substantial research on the relationship between family structures and child outcomes represents a considerable part of the literature. However, family structure provides a rather static view of the relationship of children's living arrangements and their well-being, revealing hardly anything about the stability of a family for a longer period. This paper focuses on the impact of family instability on children. In light of human capital accumulation, we hypothesize that a stable family (either a two parent or a single parent family) might be beneficial for child outcomes, in particular for non-cognitive skills. We use skills, such as socio-emotional behavior or locus of control, as our primary measure of child outcomes. The paper focuses on the potential impact of family instability occurring at different childhood stages on non-cognitive skills of preschoolers (aged five to six) and of adolescents (aged seventeen). Our analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Family instability is defined by yearly observed maternal partnership variations. Our results suggest that differences in family stability account for some of the gradient in social-behavioral difficulties for preschool children. By using sibling differences for our adolescents' sample, we find that multiple partnership transitions experienced early in life are negatively correlated with non-cognitive skills in adolescence, e.g., such adolescents are less likely to be active or self-determined in life.Child development, family dynamics, locus of control, non-cognitive skills

What can happiness research tell us about altruism? Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and altruism between parents and adult children who moved away from home in particular. We introduce an appropriate econometric methodology and, using data from the German SocioEconomic Panel for the years 2000-2004, find that the parents’ self-reported happiness depends positively on the happiness of their adult children. A one standard deviation move in the child’s happiness has the same effect as a 45 percent move in household income.utility interdependence, sympathy, extended family, fixed effects

Objects of Desire: Consumer Behaviour in Shopping Centre Choices

What determines where people shop? Why would people visit one shopping centre rather than another? These questions are important to developers, backers, planners and Government. In addition, there is a need to understand shopping as a fundamental feature of modern society. Attributes such as transport links, parking and choice of major stores are well known as determinants of shopping centre success - but some centres are only 50% let twelve months after opening. This paper is based on an empirical investigation, carried out over a three-year period, of four UK shopping centres, ranging in size from a large out-of town regional centre to a small in-town sub-regional centre. Further data are added from a related study, the total number of respondents at all six centres being 287. Other researchers have used questionnaire surveys based on the respondents’ perceptions of the importance or ratings of attributes of shopping centres. Another approach is the attempt to measure the distinctiveness of attributes. This study combines importance, rating and distinctiveness. A further innovation is to weight attributes according to the degree of association with shoppers' spending. A methodology is thus proposed for identifying the most critical attributes. Some differences have been observed between shopper groups such as male/female or type of transport, and these differences can be used in planning a shopping centre marketing strategy. Many of the critical attributes are not consistent between centres and the results indicate ways in which each centre might have scope for improvement