Supply-side peacekeeping: theories and new evidence from a panel data analysis

Why do nations with heterogeneous economies, geographic positions and institutions agree to dispatch their troops to remote conflict areas? This paper explores the domestic and international determinants of countries' contribution to peacekeeping operations from 1999 to 2009. Individual nations make their decision about where, when and how to send their military personnel as well as the justifications on which they base their involvement in sovereign states. Moral imperative for peacekeeping may be universally accepted but a country decision to participate is also based on self-interest combined to the geo-strategic dimension and finally constrained by political and technical considerations. Empirical results suggest that at the domestic level technical forces, such as the sustainability of multiple missions and military capabilities, all play a role. At the international level peacekeeping contributions are driven by the security threat that a conflict poses and the number of displaced people

Drugs and Violence in Afghanistan: A Panel VAR with Unobserved Common Factor Analysis

This paper addresses the relationship between the level of violence and the opium market in Afghanistan’s provinces. We first provide an overview of the nature and extent of the Afghan drug trafficking. This is followed by a VAR analysis of the nexus opium-insurgency activities using monthly time-series data on opium prices and the number of security incidents for 15 Afghan provinces over the period 2004-2009. We use a multifactor error structure, the Common Correlated Effect (CCE), to include unobservable common factors; Impulse Response functions to describe the time path of the dependent variables in response to shocks; and the Mean Group Estimator to summarize our results across the provinces. Results suggest a conflict-induced reduction in opium prices, while the reverse opium-violence mechanism is mostly negligible. Moreover, unobservable common factors are the main drivers of opium prices and violence.Conflict; Opium; Afghanistan

Do You Think Your Risk Is Fair Paid? Evidence From Italian Labor Market

Starting from Adam Smith's intuition, compensating wage differentials are one of the most widespread explanation to describe why agents should bear occupational risk of injury and death. For nearly thirty years, economists have attempted to and empirical evidence on such wage differentials mostly relying on estimation of a simple wage equation. This paper claims to put one step forward. Using the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) 2004 we estimate for Italy the wage premium held by workers in risky occupations by means of the matching estimator. Such technique is desirable because it attempts to remove all the differences in wage coming from heterogeneity across individuals and not directly imputable to risk. Estimates suggest that net hourly wage premium is about 3% to manual workers and nearly null to non-manual workers. When we split the sample along the employer size, our findings show a heterogeneous treatment with respect to occupational status. Small firms tend to flatten out any risk premium to manual workers, while they recognize roughly 6% to non-manual workers; the opposite occurs when we look at medium-large firms wherein manual workers gain 1.5% to 5% more with respect their counterparts. Therefore, it seems that wage-risk trade off does not always emerge as hedonic wage theory would predict.wage differentials; risky jobs; value of a statistical life; propensity score matching.

Supplying peace : participation in and troop contribution to peacekeeping missions

We explore the supply side of peacekeeping – the determinants of a country’s voluntary contributions to peacekeeping operations. We focus on troop contribution and examine a large set of operations, from UN-led missions to operations led by NATO, the African Union, the European Union, and ad hoc coalitions. We rely on a theoretical model of the private provision of public goods and a dataset on troop contribution across 102 states and 45 operations from 1999 to 2009 to explain both the conditions under which third-party actors are more or less likely to intervene in peacekeeping operations and the factors determining the size of their personnel contribution. We use the characteristics of the conflict to identify which types of conflicts attract outside intervention and the characteristics of the intervener to identify the countries more willing to provide troops. We show that at the domestic level, contributions are driven by the comparative advantage in manpower – or the relative value of labor – and constrained by the tolerance of casualties and the sustainability of multiple and concurrent missions. At the international level, the most robust explanations of when states choose to intervene are the level of threat to global and regional stability, the proximity to the conflict area, and the number of displaced people. In particular, security and humanitarian concerns trigger nation-specific responses. Our empirical findings provide further evidence of the centrality of country-specific gains in explaining the participation in peacekeeping. However, contributor-specific benefits play the same role in UN and non-UN peacekeeping missions, in contrast with previous empirical studies on the financial burden-sharing

US security strategy and the gains from bilateral trade

We explore the geo-strategic determinants of bilateral trade flows between the USA and the rest of the world. We develop a three-party model of security and trade patterns and use data on military assistance and troop deployments over the 1950–2009 period to validate its predictions. We find that security assistance has significant, positive impacts on the shares of bilateral trade between the USA and the recipient country, results that are robust to issues of reverse causality and hold across different sectors

Impact of long-term and short-term therapies on seminal parameters

Aim: The aim of this work was: i) to evaluate the prevalence of male partners of subfertile couples being treated with long/short term therapies for non andrological diseases; ii) to study their seminal profile for the possible effects of their treatments on spermatogenesis and/or epididymal maturation. Methods: The study group was made up of 723 subjects, aged between 25 and 47 years. Semen analysis was performed according to World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines (1999). The Superimposed Image Analysis System (SIAS), which is based on the computerized superimposition of spermatozoa images, was used to assess sperm motility parameters. Results: The prevalence of subjects taking pharmacological treatments was 22.7% (164/723). The prevalence was 3.7% (27/723) for the Short-Term Group and 18.9% (137/723) for the Long-Term Group. The subjects of each group were also subdivided into subgroups according to the treatments being received. Regarding the seminal profile, we did not observe a significant difference between the Long-Term, Short-Term or the Control Group. However, regarding the subgroups, we found a significant decrease in sperm number and progressive motility percentage in the subjects receiving treatment with antihypertensive drugs compared with the other subgroups and the Control Group. Conclusions: In the management of infertile couples, the potential negative impact on seminal parameters of any drugs being taken as Long-Term Therapy should be considered. The pathogenic mechanism needs to be clarified

Promiscuity of enhancer, coding and non-coding transcription functions in ultraconserved elements

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ultraconserved elements (UCEs) are highly constrained elements of mammalian genomes, whose functional role has not been completely elucidated yet. Previous studies have shown that some of them act as enhancers in mouse, while some others are expressed in both normal and cancer-derived human tissues. Only one UCE element so far was shown to present these two functions concomitantly, as had been observed in other isolated instances of single, non ultraconserved enhancer elements.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We used a custom microarray to assess the levels of UCE transcription during mouse development and integrated these data with published microarray and next-generation sequencing datasets as well as with newly produced PCR validation experiments. We show that a large fraction of non-exonic UCEs is transcribed across all developmental stages examined from only one DNA strand. Although the nature of these transcripts remains a mistery, our meta-analysis of RNA-Seq datasets indicates that they are unlikely to be short RNAs and that some of them might encode nuclear transcripts. In the majority of cases this function overlaps with the already established enhancer function of these elements during mouse development. Utilizing several next-generation sequencing datasets, we were further able to show that the level of expression observed in non-exonic UCEs is significantly higher than in random regions of the genome and that this is also seen in other regions which act as enhancers.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our data shows that the concurrent presence of enhancer and transcript function in non-exonic UCE elements is more widespread than previously shown. Moreover through our own experiments as well as the use of next-generation sequencing datasets, we were able to show that the RNAs encoded by non-exonic UCEs are likely to be long RNAs transcribed from only one DNA strand.</p

Assessing the aesthetic attractivity of European butterflies: A web-based survey protocol

Aesthetic attractivity stands as an underestimated yet fundamental feature of species in conservation biology, significantly driving disproportionate protection efforts towards charismatic species. Despite the evidence, few attempts sought to precisely quantify the impact of aesthetic attractivity in defining priority of species for conservation actions (e.g. inclusion in International Union for Conservation of Nature red lists and protection lists). This study protocol describes the setting of an online test (available from April 2022 to April 2023 at www.unveiling.eu) designed to i) quantify the aesthetic attractivity to humans of the 496 European butterfly species and ii) identify which features (both in the perceived animal and in the perceiver) influence the aesthetic attractivity of a given butterfly species. The test is divided in 5 sections (personal data, ranking, single morphological features, emotional engagement, dispositional variables) aimed at profiling the relation each participant has with the species examined. In the long-term, evaluating butterflies' aesthetic attractivity could facilitate the critical assessment of current conservation strategies, such as the process of selection of flag and umbrella species by research institutions, environmental associations and Non Governative Organizations. This is expected to provide the much-needed evidence to set up unbiased biodiversity conservation strategies and counteract the selective anthropogenic pressure which favours the extinction of unattractive species, being no or less protected compared to charismatic species