Subjective Well-Being in the Southern Cone: Health, Income and Family

The happiness literature provides evidence on various factors, other than money, that do seem to contribute to individual happiness. As one explores the produced “happiness economics” literature, it is direct to understand the difficulty to find proper information on developing countries reality. In our analysis we investigate the relationship between income, family composition, health and religion over subjective well-being in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay). Specifically, we analyze data from the SABE survey a study conducted among people who are 60 years old or over, in various Latin American countries. Main obtained results show a positive correlation between higher levels of income and health,being married and the frequent religion practice and higher levels of subjective well-being. On the contrary, malnutrition has a negative impact on happiness indicators. In order to add robustness to our results and to deal with endogeneity issues, this paper uses different indicators of well-being, alternative estimation models such as a semiparametric one and a propensity score approach for the treatment of marriage.well-being, happiness, elderly, health, family; Latin America

The Effect of Pok\'emon Go on The Pulse of the City: A Natural Experiment

Pok\'emon Go, a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques, received unprecedented media coverage due to claims that it allowed for greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of people out on the streets, and generally improving health, social, and security indices. However, the true impact of Pok\'emon Go on people's mobility patterns in a city is still largely unknown. In this paper, we perform a natural experiment using data from mobile phone networks to evaluate the effect of Pok\'emon Go on the pulse of a big city: Santiago, capital of Chile. We found significant effects of the game on the floating population of Santiago compared to movement prior to the game's release in August 2016: in the following week, up to 13.8\% more people spent time outside at certain times of the day, even if they do not seem to go out of their usual way. These effects were found by performing regressions using count models over the states of the cellphone network during each day under study. The models used controlled for land use, daily patterns, and points of interest in the city. Our results indicate that, on business days, there are more people on the street at commuting times, meaning that people did not change their daily routines but slightly adapted them to play the game. Conversely, on Saturday and Sunday night, people indeed went out to play, but favored places close to where they live. Even if the statistical effects of the game do not reflect the massive change in mobility behavior portrayed by the media, at least in terms of expanse, they do show how "the street" may become a new place of leisure. This change should have an impact on long-term infrastructure investment by city officials, and on the drafting of public policies aimed at stimulating pedestrian traffic.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures. Published at EPJ Data Scienc

Assessment of the Distributive Impact of National and External Trade Reforms in Brazil

This paper quantifies the distributional and poverty effects of national and external trade reform in Brazil using household survey data. We estimate the consumption and labor impact of the Mercosur trade reform following the methodology suggested by Porto (2006). In order to analyze the impact of external trade reforms over the Brazilian economy, we focus a major exported good: broiler. Results show that trade liberalization benefits more low income individuals. This result is largely explained by two major observations: the fact that consumption good prices decreased as Brazil enter Mercosur and a close to zero labor income effect. Additionally, we find that poverty indicators decreased after national trade liberalization (both for women and men). We obtained no significant inequality effects after national trade reforms. We analyze the impact on poverty and inequality of a 10% increase the broiler world price. In general terms, we find an increase in poverty of two points and no effect on income inequality. --internal and external trade reform,poverty,inequality

Parallel Construction of Wavelet Trees on Multicore Architectures

The wavelet tree has become a very useful data structure to efficiently represent and query large volumes of data in many different domains, from bioinformatics to geographic information systems. One problem with wavelet trees is their construction time. In this paper, we introduce two algorithms that reduce the time complexity of a wavelet tree's construction by taking advantage of nowadays ubiquitous multicore machines. Our first algorithm constructs all the levels of the wavelet in parallel in $O(n)$ time and $O(n\lg\sigma + \sigma\lg n)$ bits of working space, where $n$ is the size of the input sequence and $\sigma$ is the size of the alphabet. Our second algorithm constructs the wavelet tree in a domain-decomposition fashion, using our first algorithm in each segment, reaching $O(\lg n)$ time and $O(n\lg\sigma + p\sigma\lg n/\lg\sigma)$ bits of extra space, where $p$ is the number of available cores. Both algorithms are practical and report good speedup for large real datasets.Comment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sk{\l}odowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 69094

The spatial distribution of parking policy and usage: A case study of Melbourne, Australia

Few cities have a Metropolitan wide parking policy. More often than not the planning of parking is undertaken by decentralised urban local governments with broad central guideline on parking supply rates. The provision of parking is thus generally opportunistic, aimed at facilitating and encouraging the decentralisation of travel and urban development. This paper documents the spatial distribution of policy and demand for parking in Melbourne, Australia, in order to obtain an indication of the spatial variations in parking policy and usage. It briefly reviews parking policy literature. It then reviews the spatial pattern of existing parking policy in Melbourne showing the increase in quality with distance from the central city. Parking usage is then studied, again showing a tendency towards greater parking activity as one moves away from the city centre and the relationship to activity levels in suburban areas. The paper reinforces the view that the focus on central city parking policy and the lack of a co-ordinated parking policy for outer suburbs encourages travel and urban development in outer suburbs. The paper calls for further research in other cities to confirm these trends

Love in the Time of COVID: Perceived Partner Responsiveness Buffers People from Lower Relationship Quality Associated with COVID-Related Stressors

External stressors can erode relationship quality, though little is known about what can mitigate these effects. We examined whether COVID-related stressors were associated with lower relationship quality, and whether perceived partner responsiveness—the extent to which people believe their partner understands, validates, and cares for them—buffers these effects. When people in relationships reported more COVID-related stressors they reported poorer relationship quality at the onset of the pandemic (N = 3,593 from 57 countries) and over the subsequent three months (N = 1,125). At the onset of the pandemic, most associations were buffered by perceived partner responsiveness, such that people who perceived their partners to be low in responsiveness reported poorer relationship quality when they experienced COVID-related stressors, but these associations were reduced among people who perceived their partners to be highly responsive. In some cases, these associations were buffered over the ensuing weeks of the pandemic