Who are the gatekeepers of economics? Geographic diversity, gender composition, and interlocking editorship of journal boards

Members of editorial boards play the role of gatekeepers of science because. This paper analyses the national distribution of editorial boards members of economics journal, their affiliation, and their gender. It studies also the interlocking editorship network generated by the presence of a same person on the editorial board of more than one journal. The analysis is based on a unique database comprising all the 1,516 journals indexed in the database EconLit with an active editorial board in 2019. For each journal, we manually collected the names of the board members along with their affiliation, obtaining a database containing more than 44,000 members from more than 6,000 institutions and 142 countries. These data allow to investigate the phenomenon of gatekeeping in contemporary economics on an unprecedented large scale. The obtained results highlight some common issues concerning the editorial gatekeeping, leading to the conclusion that in Economics the academic publishing environment is governed by an \'elite composed mainly of men affiliated with United States \'elite universities. Homophily in terms of geographic, institutional and gender distribution is higher in the most prestigious journal and among Editors-in-Chief. Finally, it appears that `strategic decisions' in the selection of board members reproduce this homophily.Comment: 23 pages, 23 table, 6 figure

Implementation of Road Safety Perception in Autonomous Vehicles in a Lane Change Scenario

Understanding human driving behavior is crucial to develop autonomous vehicles' algorithms. However, most low level automation, such as the one in advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS), is based on objective safety measures, which are not always aligned with what the drivers perceive as safe and their correspondent driving behavior. Finding the bridge between the subjective perception and objective safety measures has been analyzed in this paper focusing specifically on lane-change scenarios. Results showed statistically significant differences between what is perceived as safe by drivers and objective metrics depending on the specific maneuver and location of drivers

Method for Comparison of Surrogate Safety Measures in Multi-Vehicle Scenarios

With the race towards higher levels of automation in vehicles, it is imperative to guarantee the safety of all involved traffic participants. Yet, while high-risk traffic situations between two vehicles are well understood, traffic situations involving more vehicles lack the tools to be properly analyzed. This paper proposes a method to compare Surrogate Safety Measures values in highway multi-vehicle traffic situations such as lane-changes that involve three vehicles. This method allows for a comprehensive statistical analysis and highlights how the safety distance between vehicles is shifted in favor of the traffic conflict between the leading vehicle and the lane-changing vehicle.Comment: 6 page