Cross-Sectional Uncertainty and the Business Cycle: Evidence from 40 Years of Options Data

This paper presents a novel and unique measure of cross-sectional uncertainty constructed from stock options on individual firms. Cross-sectional uncertainty varied little between 1980 and 1995 and subsequently had three distinct peaks-during the tech boom, the financial crisis, and the coronavirus epidemic. Cross-sectional uncer-tainty has had a mixed relationship with overall economic activity, and aggregate uncertainty is much more powerful for forecasting aggregate growth. The data and moments can be used to calibrate and test structural models of the effects of uncertainty shocks. In interna-tional data, we find similar dynamics and a strong common factor in cross-sectional uncertainty. (JEL D21, D81, E23, E24, E32, G13, O34)

Immigration Law's Boundary Problem: Determining the Scope of Executive Discretion

In immigration law, executive discretion has become contested terrain. Courts, officials, and scholars have rarely distinguished between regulatory discretion, which facilitates exclusion and removal of noncitizens, and protective discretion, which safeguards noncitizens' reliance interests. Moreover, courts have long discerned an internal-external divide in discretion, deferring to executive measures that exclude noncitizens abroad, while reducing deference for measures concerning noncitizens who have already entered the United States. Immigration law needs a cohesive framework for executive discretion. This Article suggests a stewardship model to fill that gap.Recent developments have emphasized the need for a coherent model of discretion. The Trump Administration altered the landscape of executive discretion, seizing every chance to make the law harsher. The Biden Administration's efforts to correct this imbalance have been only partially successful. For example, the Biden Administration has issued a final rule supporting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and has issued enforcement guidelines that prioritize threats to national security and public safety and address recent irregular entries at the border. The Biden Administration has also sought to end the Trump Administration's "Remain in Mexico " program, which subjects tens of thousands of asylum seekers to peril. However, for over a year, President Biden retained the Title 42 program, which precluded asylum in the name of preventing the introduction of COVID-19. That program undercuts asylum and does not perform its ostensible public health mission. Only an unfavorable court decision in 2022 spurred efforts to terminate Title 42. At that point, another court enjoined Title 42's termination, illustrating yet again the confused state of executive discretion.A workable approach to executive discretion requires returning to first principles. To achieve these goals, the stewardship model highlights three factors: fit with the statutory framework, protection of reliance interests, and avoidance of adverse impacts on foreign relations. This Article applies these values to DACA, the Biden enforcement guidelines, Title 42, and the Remain in Mexico program.

COVID-19 and culture

The USA has been particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and a wide spatial variation can be seen in its spread and mortality. This raises the question of why some regions are more resilient to the pandemic than others? We hypothesize that the individualism-collectivism cleavage explains the disparity in COVID-19 cases observed across sub-national units in the USA. Cultural disparity among different groups of people leads to differences in how they perceive health crises and thereby shapes the way they respond to pandemics. A heightened sense of obligation and responsibility increases in-group sociability and interdependence and raises the perceived vulnerability towards disease transmission among collectivistic individuals, and this leads to greater adherence to containment measures and social distancing rules. Our results provide evidence that more individualistic states tend to have more COVID-19 cases across the USA.

A test for the welfare-partnership: Austria's nonprofit human service organizations in times of covid-19

ABSTRACT The pandemic has impeded Austrian NPHSOs on multiple levels: service delivery, income streams, costs, and human resources. To analyze the consequences, we tackle two questions: How has the neo-corporatist welfare-partnership between the government and NPHSOs passed this stress-test? What are the potential effects on the overall composition of the sector? Theoretically, we draw on social origins theory to explain the welfare-partnership in Vienna. Empirically, we analyze online-survey-data and interviews with NPHSO-executives from 2021. The results indicate that Vienna's welfare-partnership has passed this stress-test successfully, but overall in favor of large NPHSOs, thus forwarding concentration in the sector. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Are scientists conflating zoonotic origin of pathogens with zoonosis to the detriment of understanding, disease prevention and management?

To help setting boundaries to infectious disease aspects of One Health science, there is a need to define clearly meanings for terms commonly used to describe aspects of the science. The One Health High-Level Expert Panel, convened by the International Health Agencies, has now defined One Health https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1010537 providing a basis for examining ontology of key terms frequently used in the subject area, in the past and in the future. For example, when describing pathogens of concern to humans, originating from animals, narratives in use are extremely loose and unspecific. This can lead to confusion on the role of animals in human infections (from genetic origins through to contemporary infection sources), and this can lead to inappropriate response or interventions, as well as mislead research priorities. From an ethical and welfare standpoint, misunderstanding of the role or significance of animal origins can also cause unnecessary persecution or destruction of animals, justified by perceived benefits of these actions to human health security. In this context, there has been a trend to emphasise the role of wildlife species as a source of human pathogens based seemingly on myth, speculation or assumption. The key terms for consideration for the question are as follows: emerging infection disease (of humans), zoonotic origin pathogens, zoonosis and zooanthroponosis. These terms have been more commonly in use since the last decades of the 20th Century, coincident with an apparent rise in novel human infectious viral diseases, such as HIV AIDs, Ebola Virus, human and zoonotic influenzas (H1N1, H5N1) and the coronaviruses. Language is fundamental in providing a logical framework for understanding and knowledge. For the new Science of One Health, this is the first step to ensuring clear research directions. We invite authors to explore the historic use of these terms and their ontologies and examine if they provide sufficient specificity to enable clear understanding and interpretation of disease origins and/or are adequate to communicate and scientifically describe the epidemiological role of animals in human disease occurrence. Examining how the evolution of language in science and communication might influence prioritisation for research on as well as prevention and response to infectious diseases will be a core element in answering this question.

Young people from popular neighbourhoods and engagements in Île de France. A look from the health crisis

This article discusses the activities and forms of engagement developed by the young people from popular neighbourhoods of the Parisian region in their experience of confinement by the pandemic COVID-19, in the spring of 2020. Does the social and urban situation of this youth give it a specificity? What forms and processes of engagement does it develop? From this point of view, what allows us to grasp the health crisis and its management in the popular neighbourhoods? Our results, based on a participatory research with young people, carried out between 2018 and 2021 in ten popular neighbourhoods, show how the health crisis has accentuated and made visible the situations of social inequality and discrimination in these neighbourhoods. They also stress the importance of the solidarity networks that were activated and the diversity of modalities of engagement of these young people, the vast majority of whom are of immigrant origin. © Marie-Hélène Bacquè.

Three Cases of Non-compliance: Challenges of Trust and Governmental Response Strategies

This study examines three noncompliant cases occurred in Wuhan, China during the outbreak of the COVID-19 in 2020, including the Li Wenliang (sic) case, the Chen Qiushi (sic) case, and the Huang Dengying (sic) case. These cases, albeit with different natures, broke out during the early stage of Wuhan (TM) s epidemic and posted threat and challenges to the Chinese authorities to different degrees. Based on open source information, this study focuses on the issues of trust and examines trust at three different levels (interpersonal trust, public trust, and political trust) among interactions by three groups of actors, including individuals involved in each case, the general public (e.g., how the public perceived and evaluated each case), and the authorities (e.g., how governments at the local and central levels perceived and handled each case). Two research questions are addressed: 1) How did trust at different levels play out in each case? 2) How did Chinese authorities respond to and handle threat and public trust challenges? Policy implications are drawn.

A Privacy-Preserving Approach to Identify COVID-19 Infection Origins via Volunteered Share of Health Data Records by Mobile Users

Human-beings are suffering from the rapid spread of COVID-19 throughout the world. In order to quickly identify, quarantine and cure the infected people, and to stop further infections, it is crucial to expose those origins who have been infected but are asymptomatic. However, this task is not easy, especially when the rigid security and privacy constraints on health records are taken into consideration. In this paper, we develop a new method to solve this problem. In the outbreak of a disease like COVID-19, the proposed method can find hidden infected people (or communities) through volunteered share of health data by some mobile users. Such volunteers only reveal whether they are healthy or infected e.g. through they mobile apps. This approach minimises health data disclosure and preserves privacy for the others. There are three steps in the proposed method. First, we borrow the idea from traditional epidemiology and design a novel algorithm to estimate the number of infection origins based on a Susceptible-Infected model. Second, we introduce the concept of 'heavy centre' to locate those origins. The probability of each node being infected will then be derived by building a spreading model based on the origins. To evaluate our method, we conduct a series of experiments on various networks with different structures. We examine the performance in estimating the number of origins as well as their origins. The results show that the proposed method yields higher accuracies than the existing methods, even when the fraction of volunteers is small. © 2001-2012 IEEE.

Students' resilience and mental health in the dental curriculum.

OBJECTIVES: Dental education is perceived as a source of students' psychological and occupational stress. Resilience has been proposed as a protective factor that may support students' in managing that stress. The objectives of this study were twofold: to map the mental health and well-being content in the curriculum of the Faculty of Dentistry (FoD) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and to investigate factors influencing resilience levels amongst dental students at UBC. METHODS: The curricular database and website of UBC's FoD were used to gather information on mental health content. A survey with the Connor-Davidson 10-Item Resilience Scale was distributed to dental students at UBC (N = 289). Students' de-identified demographic data were also collected. RESULTS: Two main mental health and well-being curricular components were identified: one didactic session on stress management and one interactive workshop on resilience. The response rate for the survey was 68.2%. Students who did not receive any mental health content (2020/21 year 1 students) had higher resilience scores (p = .043) when compared to students who received both components (2019/20 year 1 students and 2018/19 year 2 students). The multiple regression analysis highlighted North American/European ethnic origins as a predictor for higher resilience levels (p = .008). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study showed that ethnic origins and major life events, such as the pandemic, influenced resilience. Curricular activities promoting resilience seemed to not necessarily impact students' resilience. Further longitudinal studies are needed to assess the curricular and non-curricular activities influence over dental students' well-being.

The feasibility of a digital health approach to facilitate remote dental screening among preschool children during COVID-19 and social restrictions.

BACKGROUND: Tele-dentistry can be useful to facilitate screening of children, especially those living in rural and remote communities, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. AIM: This study evaluated the feasibility of tele-dental screening for the identification of early childhood caries (ECC) in preschoolers using an app operated by their parents with remote review by oral-health therapists. DESIGN: This cross-sectional study was a sub-project nested in ORIGINS Project, a longitudinal birth cohort study in Western Australia. Initially, children were visually examined by a paediatric dentist (gold standard). Subsequently, dental photographs were taken by parents using a smartphone camera. Two trained oral health professionals asynchronously evaluated dental photographs. The presence of dental caries was recorded as per the International Caries Detection and Assessment System-II classification. The diagnostic accuracy and reliability of the tele-dental screening and the gold standard dental examinations were then compared. RESULTS: Forty-two children aged <4 years were enrolled in the study. Twenty-five per cent of examined children had dental caries (mean dmfs = 0.7). A total of 370 dental photographs were obtained. Parents were able to take good-quality photographs, with 90% of photographs rated as good to fair quality. Tele-dental screening demonstrated high specificity (>=95.5%) for both reviewers compared to the gold standard dental examination. However, the sensitivity scores for the two reviewers varied, ranging from 44% to 88.4%. CONCLUSION: Tele-dental screening for ECC was shown to be a feasible approach following a brief training for primary caregivers. This approach can offer a potential low-cost and sustainable alternative for visual dental examinations for young children, particularly in times of COVID-19-related restrictions.

COVID-19 impact on socio-economic and health interventions : A gaps and peaks analysis using clustering approach

A quantifiable model to describe the peaks and gaps during the several waves of COVID-19 is generated and applied to the progression of 120 countries. The number of waves encountered and how many more to be encountered is a question which is currently explored by all the scientific communities. In the same quest, an attempt has been made to quantitatively model the peaks and the gaps within them which have been encountered by 120 most affected countries from February 2020 - December 2021. These 120 countries were ranked based on the number of confirmed cases and deaths recorded during this period. This study further clustered these countries based on socio-economic and health interventions to find an association with three dependent features of COVID-19 i.e. number of confirmed cases, deaths and death-infectivity rate. The findings in this study suggests that, every wave had multiple peaks within them and as the number of peaks increased, predicting their growth rate or decline rate turns to be extremely difficult. However, considering the clusters which share the common features even with diverse countries, there is some possibility to predict what might be coming next. This study involves exhaustive analysis of reliable data which are available in open access and marks an important aspect to the COVID-19 research communities.

Social Origins Theory: Untapped Potential and the Test by the Pandemic Crisis

The paper examines the explanatory potential of the social origins theory advanced by L. Salamon and H. Anheier. This examination follows two tracks. The first track is a comparative investigation of the conceptual affinity between the social origins, on one hand, and the theories of welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism, on the other. We argue that the conceptual affinity between these three theories lies in the fact that they explore what could be referred to as vertical and horizontal interactions between state and market. Vertical interactions are based on the legitimate coercion by government authorities, while horizontal relations develop at the initiative of their autonomous members. The social origins approach introduces yet another essential dimension, that of civic self-organization, into the analysis of vertical and horizontal interactions embodied in state/market relationships. Similarity of underlying conceptual foundations might suggest that all three theories would generate similarly strong academic interest in reexamining their analytical tools and applying their approaches to the diversity of new social and economic realities. The literature indicates that both the welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism have generated robust academic discussions, whereas the conceptual and analytical potential of the social origins remains relatively less explored. It has become particularly evident in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which gave rise to a number of studies that apply the frameworks of the welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism to examine cross-country differences in government social welfare policies. However, the social origins theory seems not to have generated comparably rich research testing its explanatory power in the new conditions triggered by the pandemic challenges. To address this gap, the paper follows a second track which investigates pandemic-induced transformations in nonprofit sectors of Germany, Austria, UK and USA – countries representing three "basic” nonprofit regimes immediately corresponding to Esping-Andersen's welfare state typology: welfare partnership, social democratic and liberal. Applying the analytical lens of the social origins approach, we look at how the impact of the pandemic moved the measurable parameters of nonprofit sectors: the scope of the third sector, the volunteer share of the workforce, the extent of nonprofits' engagement in the provision of social services, and the share of government financial support for the sector. We further look at the pandemic-induced changes in the composition of the "tool kit” employed in government-nonprofit cooperation. Thus, testing the explanatory potential of the social origins approach, we observe that responses to pandemic challenges have contributed to a degree of convergence of both liberal and social democratic nonprofit regimes with the welfare partnership pattern. However, path dependency, which is suggested by the regimes' "moorings” embedded in the social origins approach, remains strong enough to explain the observed viability of the core features typical of "basic” nonprofit regimes in times of the pandemic crisis. [ FROM AUTHOR]

The Impact of Long-Term Orientation Traits on Pandemic Fatigue Behavior: Evidence from the Columbian Exchange.

Leveraging exogenous variation in time preferences, we measure the causal effects of culturally embodied long-term orientation traits on voluntary social distancing behavior, COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and mortality outcomes in 2020 in the United States. We establish that long-term orientation traits with bio-geographical origins causally reduce measures of COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalization, inpatient bed utilization, and age-specific excess deaths. Mobility indicators measuring voluntary decisions to socially distance, comprising measures of visitors/visits to recreational locations, and mobility proxy measuring duration of hours away from home show that a lower prevalence of long-term orientation traits explains persistent resistance to social distancing. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10887-022-09218-0.

Pandemic origins and a One Health approach to preparedness and prevention: Solutions based on SARS-CoV-2 and other RNA viruses.

COVID-19 is the latest zoonotic RNA virus epidemic of concern. Learning how it began and spread will help to determine how to reduce the risk of future events. We review major RNA virus outbreaks since 1967 to identify common features and opportunities to prevent emergence, including ancestral viral origins in birds, bats, and other mammals; animal reservoirs and intermediate hosts; and pathways for zoonotic spillover and community spread, leading to local, regional, or international outbreaks. The increasing scientific evidence concerning the origins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is most consistent with a zoonotic origin and a spillover pathway from wildlife to people via wildlife farming and the wildlife trade. We apply what we know about these outbreaks to identify relevant, feasible, and implementable interventions. We identify three primary targets for pandemic prevention and preparedness: first, smart surveillance coupled with epidemiological risk assessment across wildlife-livestock-human (One Health) spillover interfaces; second, research to enhance pandemic preparedness and expedite development of vaccines and therapeutics; and third, strategies to reduce underlying drivers of spillover risk and spread and reduce the influence of misinformation. For all three, continued efforts to improve and integrate biosafety and biosecurity with the implementation of a One Health approach are essential. We discuss new models to address the challenges of creating an inclusive and effective governance structure, with the necessary stable funding for cross-disciplinary collaborative research. Finally, we offer recommendations for feasible actions to close the knowledge gaps across the One Health continuum and improve preparedness and response in the future.

Does COVID-19 threat relate to intergroup attitudes? A test in the U.K

Social and evolutionary psychologists propose that humans have acquired an evolutionary mechanism that facilitates pathogen avoidance behavior: the behavioral immune system (BIS). Previous studies have revealed that the BIS yields negative attitudes toward out-group members. Given the clear relevance of pathogen-avoidance psychology to individuals' reactions to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the present research examined whether attitudes toward potentially pathogenic outgroups during the pandemic would reflect the BIS. Using large-scale panel data (N = 1,548) collected in May 2020 in 3 of the U.K.'s devolved nations (England, Scotland, and Wales), we examined whether perceived COVID-19 threat was associated with negative attitudes toward 2 different national out-groups linked to the initial outbreak (Italy and China), as well as the in-group (the U.K.). Failing to support the BIS hypothesis, mini-meta-analyses on results from the 3 nations revealed that COVID-19 threat was only very weakly associated with attitude toward the U.K., Italy, and China. Results suggest that implications from pathogen psychology might be more limited than previously thought and apply only to specific out-group members.

A Privacy-Preserving Approach to Identify COVID-19 Infection Origins via Volunteered Share of Health Data Records by Mobile Users

Human-beings are suffering from the rapid spread of COVID-19 throughout the world. In order to quickly identify, quarantine and cure the infected people, and to stop further infections, it is crucial to expose those origins who have been infected but are asymptomatic. However, this task is not easy, especially when the rigid security and privacy constraints on health records are taken into consideration. In this paper, we develop a new method to solve this problem. In the outbreak of a disease like COVID-19, the proposed method can find hidden infected people (or communities) through volunteered share of health data by some mobile users. Such volunteers only reveal whether they are healthy or infected e.g. through they mobile apps. This approach minimises health data disclosure and preserves privacy for the others. There are three steps in the proposed method. First, we borrow the idea from traditional epidemiology and design a novel algorithm to estimate the number of infection origins based on a Susceptible-Infected model. Second, we introduce the concept of ’heavy centre’to locate those origins. The probability of each node being infected will then be derived by building a spreading model based on the origins. To evaluate our method, we conduct a series of experiments on various networks with different structures. We examine the performance in estimating the number of origins as well as their origins. The results show that the proposed method yields higher accuracies than the existing methods, even when the fraction of volunteers is small. IEEE

At the Dawn of a Free and United Europe. For the Eighty Years of the Ventotene Manifesto (1941-2021)

Between 1939 and 1943 the small island of Ventotene in the Tyrrhenian Sea - where about 800 opponents of the fascist regime were confined - paradoxically became a creative workshop and a place where a group of prisoners could plan the future of Europe. The Ventotene Manifesto, whose full title is «For a Free and United Europe. A draft manifesto», was drawn up in Ventotene by Altiero Spinelli and by Ernesto Rossi (who wrote the first part of the third chapter) in 1941, distributed in mimeographed form from 1943. A clandestine edition, by Eugenio Colorni, of the Manifesto appeared in Rome in January 1944. While Europe was under the Nazi yoke, immediately after the aggression against the USSR, Spinelli, Rossi, Colorni, Ursula Hirschmann and others paved the way for a new vision of Europe. The authors of the manifesto guessed that a pragmatic federalist strategy could be possible after the war thanks to new conditions. Only a European framework, overcoming the absolutism of national sovereignty, would have guaranteed peace and economic and social development. A political and conceptual revolution was needed to achieve the goal of a free and united Europe. 80 years after the Ventotene manifesto - and especially after the dramatic period of the Covid-19 pandemic - the ideas and words of Spinelli and Rossi written in 1941 resonate as a warning and a stimulus for our own future: «The time has now come to get rid of these old cumbersome burdens and to be ready for whatever turns up, usually so different from what was expected, to get rid of the inept among the old and create new energies among the young». © 2021 Societa Editrice il Mulino. All rights reserved.

Could COVID-19's Aftermath on Children's Health Be Felt into the 22nd Century?

The COVID-19 pandemic has massively affected people's health, societies, and the global economy. Our lives are no longer as they were before COVID-19, and, most likely, will never be the same again. We hypothesize that the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on population health and the economy will last for a very long time and will still be felt in the 22nd century. Our hypothesis is based on evidence from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, the Dutch famine during the Second World War, and the 2007-2008 economic crisis, as well as from the rationally predicted impact of COVID-19 on human development. We expect that the COVID-19 pandemic, including the mitigation measures taken against it, will affect children's development in multiple ways, including obesity, both while in utero and during critical and sensitive windows of development, including the early childhood years and those of puberty and adolescence. The psychosocial and biological impact of this effect will be considerable and unequally distributed. The implications will last at least a lifetime, and, through inter-generational transmission, will likely take us to future generations, into the 22nd century. We argue for the urgent need of designing and initiating comprehensive longitudinal cohort studies to closely monitor the long-term effects of COVID-19 on children conceived, born, and raised during the pandemic. Such an approach requires a close and effective collaboration between scientists, healthcare providers, policymakers, and the younger generations, and it will hopefully uncover evidence necessary to understand and mitigate the impact of the pandemic on people's lives in the 21st and 22nd centuries.

Estimation of the Origin-Destination Matrix for Trucks That Use Highways: A Case Study in Chile

Nowadays, freight transport is crucial in the functioning of cities worldwide. To dig further into the understanding of urban freight transport movements, in this research, we conducted a case study in which we estimated an origin-destination matrix for the trucks traveling on Autopista Central, one of Santiago de Chile’s most important urban highways. To do so, we used full real-world vehicle-by-vehicle information of freight vehicles’ movements along the highway. This data was collected from several toll collection gates equipped with free-flow and automatic vehicle identification technology. However, this data did not include any vehicle information before or after using the highway. To estimate the origins and destinations of these trips, we proposed a multisource methodology that used GPS information provided by SimpliRoute, a Chilean routing company. Nevertheless, this GPS data involved only a small subset of trucks that used the highway. In order to reduce the bias, we built a decision tree model for estimating the trips’ origin, whose input data was complemented by other public databases. Furthermore, we computed trip destinations using proportionality factors obtained from SimpliRoute data. Our results showed that most of the estimated origins belonged to outskirt municipalities, while the estimated destinations were mainly located in the downtown area. Our findings might help improve freight transport comprehension in the city, enabling the implementation of focused transport policies and investments to help mitigate negative externalities, such as congestion and pollution.