1,048 research outputs found
The Long-Term Effects of the Chernobyl Catastrophe on Subjective Well-Being and Mental Health
This paper assesses the long-term subjective well-being and mental health toll of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 in the general Ukrainian population and estimates the monetary differential necessary to compensate victims of the catastrophe. The analysis is based on two nationally representative Ukrainian data sets and reveals that even 20 years after the accident subjective well-being is negatively associated with self-reported assessments of having been affected by the catastrophe. The causal long-term effect of the disaster on life satisfaction is established by exploiting variation in official radiation data which are linked to survey respondents through information on their place of living in 1986. We find higher depression and trauma rates as well as poorer subjective life expectancy among those stronger affected by Chernobyl. Expressed in monetary terms, the estimated amount of income required to compensate for the experienced utility loss amounts to an annual cost of seven percent of Ukraine's GDP.Chernobyl catastrophe, subjective well-being, mental health, instrumental variable
No evidence for synchronization of the solar cycle by a "clock"
The length of the solar activity cycle fluctuates considerably. The temporal
evolution of the corresponding cycle phase, that is, the deviation of the
epochs of activity minima or maxima from strict periodicity, provides relevant
information concerning the physical mechanism underlying the cyclic magnetic
activity. An underlying strictly periodic process (akin to a perfect "clock"),
with the observer seeing a superposition of the perfect clock and a small
random phase perturbation, leads to long-term phase stability in the
observations. Such behavior would be expected if cycles were synchronized by
tides caused by orbiting planets or by a hypothetical torsional oscillation in
the solar radiative interior. Alternatively, in the absence of such
synchronization, phase fluctuations accumulate and a random walk of the phase
ensues, which is a typical property of randomly perturbed dynamo models. Based
on the sunspot record and the reconstruction of solar cycles from cosmogenic
C14, we carried out rigorous statistical tests in order to decipher whether
there exists phase synchronization or random walk. Synchronization is rejected
at significance levels of between 95% (28 cycles from sunspot data) and beyond
99% (84 cycles reconstructed from C14, while the existence of random walk in
the phases is consistent with all data sets. This result strongly supports
randomly perturbed dynamo models with little inter-cycle memory.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics, in pres
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