This paper explores the relationship between economic openness and income per person using crosscountry data. To address endogeneity concerns we extend the instrumental-variables strategy first used by Frankel and Romer (1999). First, we show that bilateral geographic characteristics of countries such as distance, contiguity and commonality of language are successful in predicting openness to i...

This is an analysis of the spatial structure of political participation in the United States using spatial econometric techniques and newly available geo-coded data. The results provide strong evidence that political participation is geographically clustered, and that this clustering cannot be explained entirely by social network involvement, individual-level characteristics, such as race, inco...

Green space is important for the maintenance of the ecological dimension of a sustainable urban landscape. Therefore, in order to figure out the relationship between the greening of urban parks and bird diversity, we used 5 avian ecological diversity indexes, such as Species richness, Abundance, ShannonWeiner diversity index, Evenness, and Margalef’s richness indices, to evaluate the functional...

Reliable statistical information is important to make political decisions on a sound basis and to help measure the impact of policies. Unfortunately, statistics offices in developing countries have scarce resources and statistical censuses are therefore conducted sporadically. Based on mobile phone communications and history of airtime credit purchases, we estimate the relative income of indivi...

We study the consequences of introducing individual nonconformity in social interactions, based on Axelrod’s model for the dissemination of culture. A constraint on the number of situations in which interaction may take place is introduced in order to lift the unavoidable homogeneity present in the final configurations arising in Axelrod’s related models. The inclusion of this constraint leads ...

A high degree of topical diversity is often considered to be an important characteristic of interesting text documents. A recent proposal for measuring topical diversity identifies three elements for assessing diversity: words, topics, and documents as collections of words. Topic models play a central role in this approach. Using standard topic models for measuring diversity of documents is sub...

This document explains diversity related methods in vegan. The methods are briefly described, and the equations used them are given often in more detail than in their help pages. The methods discussed include common diversity indices and rarefaction, families of diversity indices, species abundance models, species accumulation models and beta diversity, extrapolated richness and probability of ...

This study examines the effects of smallholder milk market participation on household and intra-household dietary diversity and on nutritional status of young children in Ethiopia. Using the FAO dietary diversity questionnaire, 164 households were followed for two consecutive days and all food items consumed by five household members were recorded. T-test and propensity score matching were used...