Of Religion and Redemption: Evidence from Default on Islamic Loans (Replaces CentER DP 2010-136)

Abstract: We compare default rates on conventional and Islamic loans using a comprehensive monthly dataset from Pakistan that follows more than 150,000 loans over the period 2006:04 to 2008:12. We find robust evidence that the default rate on Islamic loans is less than half the default rate on conventional loans. Islamic loans are less likely to default during Ramadan and in big cities if the share of votes to religious-political parties increases, suggesting that religion – either through individual piousness or network effects – may play a role in determining loan default.Loan Default;Islamic Loans;Religion;Duration Analysis

Of Religion and Redemption:Evidence from Default on Islamic Loans (Replaces CentER DP 2010-136)

Abstract: We compare default rates on conventional and Islamic loans using a comprehensive monthly dataset from Pakistan that follows more than 150,000 loans over the period 2006:04 to 2008:12. We find robust evidence that the default rate on Islamic loans is less than half the default rate on conventional loans. Islamic loans are less likely to default during Ramadan and in big cities if the share of votes to religious-political parties increases, suggesting that religion – either through individual piousness or network effects – may play a role in determining loan default.

Of Religion and Redemption:Evidence from Default on Islamic Loans (Replaces EBC DP 2010-032)

We compare default rates on conventional and Islamic loans using a comprehensive monthly dataset from Pakistan that follows more than 150,000 loans over the period 2006:04 to 2008:12. We find robust evidence that the default rate on Islamic loans is less than half the default rate on conventional loans. Islamic loans are less likely to default during Ramadan and in big cities if the share of votes to religious-political parties increases, suggesting that religion – either through individual piousness or network effects – may play a role in determining loan default.

At War or Saving Lives? On the Securitizing Semantic Repertoires of Covid-19

This is the author accepted manuscript.This paper offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the ways and extent to which the US president and UK prime minister have securitized the Covid-19 pandemic in their public speeches. This assessment rests on, and illustrates the merits of, both an overdue theoretical consolidation of Securitization Theory’s (ST) conceptualization of securitizing language, and a new methodological blueprint for the study of "securitizing semantic repertoire". Comparing and contrasting the two leaders’ respective securitizing semantic repertoires adopted in the early months of the coronavirus outbreak shows that securitizing language, while very limited, has been more intense in the UK, whose repertoire was structured by a biopolitical imperative to “save lives” in contrast to the US repertoire centered on the “war” metaphor

Online Bayesian phylodynamic inference in BEAST with application to epidemic reconstruction

Reconstructing pathogen dynamics from genetic data as they become available during an outbreak or epidemic represents an important statistical scenario in which observations arrive sequentially in time and one is interested in performing inference in an 'online' fashion. Widely-used Bayesian phylogenetic inference packages are not set up for this purpose, generally requiring one to recompute trees and evolutionary model parameters de novo when new data arrive. To accommodate increasing data flow in a Bayesian phylogenetic framework, we introduce a methodology to efficiently update the posterior distribution with newly available genetic data. Our procedure is implemented in the BEAST 1.10 software package, and relies on a distance-based measure to insert new taxa into the current estimate of the phylogeny and imputes plausible values for new model parameters to accommodate growing dimensionality. This augmentation creates informed starting values and re-uses optimally tuned transition kernels for posterior exploration of growing data sets, reducing the time necessary to converge to target posterior distributions. We apply our framework to data from the recent West African Ebola virus epidemic and demonstrate a considerable reduction in time required to obtain posterior estimates at different time points of the outbreak. Beyond epidemic monitoring, this framework easily finds other applications within the phylogenetics community, where changes in the data -- in terms of alignment changes, sequence addition or removal -- present common scenarios that can benefit from online inference.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

A diachronic cross-platforms analysis of violent extremist language in the incel online ecosystem

This is the final version. Available from Routledge via the DOI in this record. The emergence and growth of incel subculture on the internet has triggered a considerable body of research to date, most of which analysing its worldview or mapping its position and connections within the broader manosphere. While this research has considerably enhanced our understanding of the incel phenomenon, it tends to offer a somewhat static, one-dimensional portrayal of what is – like all online subcultures and communities – a highly dynamic and multi-layered environment. Consequently, we lack insufficiently nuanced answers to what is arguably the critical question for law enforcement and academics alike: is this a violent extremist ideology? Using a uniquely extensive corpus covering a range of online spaces constitutive of the incelosphere (forums, sub-Reddits, Instagram channels, blogs, wiki pages) spanning several years, we analyse the evolution of incel language across both time and platforms. Specifically, we test whether this language has grown more extreme over time as online spaces shut down and others emerged. Our findings demonstrate that, while levels of violent extremist language do vary across the incelosphere, they have steadily increased in the main online spaces over the past 6 years. Further, we demonstrate that, while activity on these online spaces is responsive to offline events such as major acts of incel-inspired violence and the COVID-19 lockdowns, the impact of these on violent extremist ideation is not uniform.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Macroeconomic Regimes

We estimate a New-Keynesian macro model accommodating regime-switching behavior in monetary policy and in macro shocks. Key to our estimation strategy is the use of survey-based expectations for inflation and output. Output and inflation shocks shift to the low volatility regime around 1985 and 1990, respectively. However, we also identify multiple shifts between accommodating and active monetary policy regimes, which play an as important role as shock volatility in driving the volatility of the macro variables. We provide new estimates of the onset and demise of the Great Moderation and quantify the relative role played by macro-shocks and monetary policy. The estimated rational expectations model exhibits indeterminacy in the mean square stability sense, mainly because monetary policy is excessively passive

ISIS’ clash of civilizations: Constructing the ‘West’ in terrorist propaganda

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.Depictions of the West abound in the propaganda produced by the self-proclaimed "Islamic State," presenting to potentially sympathetic audiences an overwhelmingly negative image of a supposedly homogeneous political entity. Combining quantitative and qualitative language and visual analysis, we systematically expose the various facets of this image and analyze the overall picture. Drawing on the "clash of civilizations" literature as well as on research on extremist language, we conceptualize this presentation of the West as a powerful radicalizing voice shaping today’s global civilizational politics.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC