Too Many Probabilities: Statistical Evidence of Tort Causation

Medical scientific testimony is often expressed in terms of two different probabilities: 1. The increased probability of harm if a person is exposed, for example, to a toxin. 2. The observed relationship is an artifact of the experimental method. This article demonstrates that neither probability, taken alone or together, measures whether the preponderance of the evidence test is met

Complexity in daily life – a 3D-visualization showing activity patterns in their contexts

This article attacks the difficulties to make well informed empirically grounded descriptions and analyses of everyday life activity patterns. At a first glance, everyday life seems to be very simple and everybody has experiences from it, but when we try to investigate it from a scientific perspective, its complexity is overwhelming. There are enormous variations in interests and activity patterns among individuals, between households and socio-economic groups in the population. Therefore, and in spite of good intentions, traditional methods and means to visualize and analyze often lead to over-simplifications. The aim of this article is to present a visualization method that might inspire social scientists to tackle the complexity of everyday life from a new angle, starting with a visual overview of the individual's time use in her daily life, subsequently aggregating to time use in her household, further at group and population levels without leaving the individual out of sight. Thereby variations and complexity might be treated as assets in the interpretation rather than obstacles. To exemplify the method we show how activities in a daily life project are distributed among household members and between men and women in a population.household division of labour, time-geography, 3D method, visualization, diaries, everyday life, activity patterns. Complexity in daily life – a 3D-visualization showing activity patterns in their contexts

Exploring time diaries using semi-automated activity pattern extraction

Identifying patterns of activities in time diaries in order to understand the variety of daily life in terms of combinations of activities performed by individuals in different groups is of interest in time use research. So far, activity patterns have mostly been identified by visually inspecting representations of activity data or by using sequence comparison methods, such as sequence alignment, in order to cluster similar data and then extract representative patterns from these clusters. Both these methods are sensitive to data size, pure visual methods become too cluttered and sequence comparison methods become too time consuming. Furthermore, the patterns identified by both methods represent mostly general trends of activity in a population, while detail and unexpected features hidden in the data are often never revealed. We have implemented an algorithm that searches the time diaries and automatically extracts all activity patterns meeting user-defined criteria of what constitutes a valid pattern of interest for the user’s research question. Amongst the many criteria which can be applied are a time window containing the pattern, minimum and maximum occurrences of the pattern, and number of people that perform it. The extracted activity patterns can then be interactively filtered, visualized and analyzed to reveal interesting insights. Exploration of the results of each pattern search may result in new hypotheses which can be subsequently explored by altering the search criteria. To demonstrate the value of the presented approach we consider and discuss sequential activity patterns at a population level, from a single day perspective.Time-geography, diaries, everyday life, activity patterns, visualization, data mining, sequential pattern mining

Political conflicts over public policy in local governments

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays on different conflicts shaping local government policy. The first essay examines how population aging affects the generosity of public long-term care. Aging may directly affect long-term care policy as the elderly become a more important voter group. However, concerns for other citizens may dampen the political importance of the elderly. Fixed effects regressions on municipality-level panel data for 1999-2007 suggest that long-term care generosity slightly decreases in response to an aging population. In particular, a smaller share of elderly become entitled to long-term care. The remaining three essays consider determinants of local fiscal performance. The second essay examines a case in which the Swedish central government granted financial assistance to 36 municipalities in financial trouble. The possibility to be bailed out by the central government is often argued to undermine local governments' incentives for fiscal discipline. However, the conditions attached to the grant under study may have reduced the attractiveness of the bailout option. We estimate fixed effects models of operating costs and net revenues during the decade following the announcement of the grant. The estimation sample consists of the municipalities affected by the program and suitable comparison units identified by the synthetic control method. The estimates suggest that the development of operating costs is largely unaffected by the program for most of the admitted municipalities. However, several have increased costs less than expected, and the development of net revenues is favorable for the group as a whole. Thus, we find little evidence that participation in this conditional bailout program undermined subsequent fiscal performance. The third essay examines how fiscal performance is affected by specific institutions aimed at encouraging the budget discipline of agents responsible for policy implementation. We emphasize that these institutions should be of greater importance in municipalities where there is a substantial conflict of interest between the two levels of the municipal hierarchy concerning the importance of fiscal discipline. Regressions on unique survey data from 265 of the 290 Swedish municipalities confirm that the correlation between institutions and fiscal performance depend on the reported strength of conflict between the two levels. A centralized budget process, a credible threat of replacement of managers running deficits, and surplus carry-over rules are all positively correlated to net revenues - but only in municipalities that report substantial conflicts of interest between the two hierarchical levels. However, a deficit carry-over rule is positively correlated to net revenues in municipalities reporting minor conflicts of interest. The fourth essay explores potential determinants of the conflicts of interest reported in the survey. The main findings are that (i) conflicts between the two hierarchical levels are less likely if members of the executive committee chair the local committees; (ii) conflicts are less common in municipalities with fewer committees; and (iii) conflicts are more likely in municipalities with recent experience of deteriorations of the general economic conditions. The first two findings suggest that the center of the municipal hierarchy may use its discretion over appointments and over the number of committees to resolve these conflicts of interests in some instances. However, as the general economic environment is beyond political control, it is difficult to fully prevent conflicts between the central and local level

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Information, Switching Costs, and Consumer Choice : Evidence from Two Randomized Field Experiments in Swedish Primary Health Care

Consumers of services that are financed by a third party, such as publicly financed health care or firm-sponsored health plans, are often allowed to freely choose provider. The rationale is that consumer choice may improve the matching of consumers and providers and spur quality competition. Such improvements are contingent on consumers having access to comparative information about providers and acting on this information when making their choice. However, in the presence of information frictions and switching costs, consumers may have limited ability to find suitable providers. We use two large-scale randomized field experiments in primary health care to examine if the choice of provider is affected when consumers receive comparative information by postal mail and small costs associated with switching are reduced. The first experiment targeted a subset of the general population in the Swedish region Skåane, and the second targeted new residents in the region, who should have less prior information and lower switching costs. In both cases, the propensity to switch provider increased significantly after the intervention. The effects were larger for new residents than for the general population, and were driven by individuals living reasonably close to alternative providers