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AbstractBlack box machine learning models are currently being used for high-stakes decision making in various parts of society such as healthcare and criminal justice. While tree-based ensemble methods such as random forests typically outperform deep learning models on tabular data sets, their built-in variable importance algorithms are known to be strongly biased toward high-entropy features. It was recently shown that the increasingly popular SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values suffer from a similar bias. We propose debiased or "shrunk" SHAP scores based on sample splitting which additionally enable the detection of overfitting issues at the feature level.
AbstractThis paper examines the influence of the six World Governance Indicators (WGIs), as defined by the World Bank, on the real GDP growth of five emerging markets, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries, and three advanced economies, the United States, Germany and Japan. The analysis is based on a panel data set containing the six WGIs along with further macroeconomic variables (government debt, external debt, current account balance, trade balance, budget balance, foreign exchange rate and short-term interest rate), with annual data from 1996 to 2018. We find that regulatory quality has a positive impact on economic growth, an effect that remains stable across all robustness tests. This indicates that a sound regulatory environment stimulates economic growth. We also find a negative impact of rule of law on economic growth, but this effect is not robust. The literature, however, documents a negative effect from income to rule of law, expressing that higher income does not necessarily lead to a demand for better institutions. A principal component analysis on the WGIs shows that governance is diverse across countries, while stable over time. The first two PCs capture more than 95% of the WGIs variance and are able to cluster emerging and developed markets.
In this article, the main events of political life in Portugal are discussed. It includes a report on general elections in 2022, the formation of a new Socialist absolute majority government led by Prime Minister Antonio Costa, and major parliamentary decisions and debates. The year 2022 started with early general elections, strengthening the ruling Socialist Party, which won a majority of seats in the national Parliament. However, it took some time for the new government to learn to govern in the new context.
Shark incidents are rare and graphic events, and their
consequences can influence the behavior of beach users,
including bathers, to a great extent. These incidents can
be thought of as a fearsome risk that may lead decision
makers to overreact or respond with inaction. This paper
examines the reaction of recreational beach users, includ-
ing bathers, to changes in the risk of shark incidents. In
addition to valuing recreational visits to Durban Beach,
South Africa, we study the reaction of beach visitors to a
hypothetical scenario in which protective shark nets,
deployed in coastal waters to protect bathers, are to be
removed. To examine potential heterogeneity of the treat-
ment effect in a travel cost-contingent behavior model, we
develop a semiparametric multivariate Poisson lognormal
(MPLN) model to jointly analyze observed and stated visit
counts. Results show that removing protective shark nets
at Durban beach would decrease recreational visits by
more than 20%. Applying the semiparametric MPLN
model we further find that both the value of a recreational
visit and the predicted change in visitation rates vary as a
function of whether recreationists usually enter the water,
whether they have heard of previous shark incidents, and
their general risk attitude.
This paper examines empirically the importance of equity
preferences for the formation of international environmen-
tal agreements (IEA) for transboundary pollution control.
Although it has been shown theoretically that the existence
of equity preferences among countries considering an IEA
increases the chances for formation and stability of a coali-
tion, empirical assessments of such preferences have been
limited to climate change mitigation and single-country
studies. We consider the case of marine plastic pollution, of
which a large share consists of food and beverage con-
tainers, representing a transboundary pollution control
problem of increasing policy concern, with properties that
lead to distinct considerations for equity and the sharing of
abatement costs. We employ a coordinated choice experi-
ment in the United Kingdom and United States to assess
preferences for abatement-cost allocations in a marine plas-
tics IEA. Pairs of cooperating countries and the relative
allocation of abatement costs are varied experimentally.
Results show systematic aversion to both advantageous and
disadvantageous inequality with respect to abatement costs
but also that the relative strength of advantageous and dis-
advantageous inequality aversion differs across countries.
Across both countries, there is evidence that left-leaning
voters generally favor more equal international sharing of
abatement costs. Differences of these results from the case
of greenhouse gas emission reduction, and implications for
current efforts to establish a legally binding global treaty on
marine plastic pollution, are discussed.
In 2021, Portuguese politics was strongly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this constraining context, the Portuguese population went twice to the polls in presidential and local elections. Moreover, the Portuguese government was the holder of the presidency of the Council of the European Union. Throughout the year, the Portuguese government negotiated with the political parties to get the 2022 budget approved. However, most opposition parties rejected the budget for different reasons. Therefore, the President of the Republic dissolved Parliament and announced early elections for 30 January 2022. Although it was a difficult year, Portugal was able to implement an aggressive vaccination programme, which led to a high vaccination coverage of 80 per cent of the population.
Purpose
In a service society, the assessment of climate-relevant environmental impacts of services is of increased importance. In the few Product Category Rules (PCRs) for cleaning services available to date, it is noticeable that employee mobility and service-related management are excluded from the assessment. This practice is critically questioned in the following study. The aim is to show that a calculation of the carbon footprint of services that integrates employee mobility and service-related management provides a better basis for finding ways to reduce their environmental impact.
Methods
Key figures on the CO2e emissions of services are examined in exemplary case studies using the example of cleaning, maintenance and reception with regard to the possible share of emissions caused by employee mobility and service-related management activities. For the case studies located in Germany, characteristic values of the equipment, operating materials or mobility used for the service are obtained from available Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). In the absence of EPDs, a simplified estimate is made according to the VERUM method based on the proportion of materials in the product. The case studies compare the carbon footprint of a service by omitting and including employee mobility and service-related management.
Results
The analysed case studies show an impact share between 32 and 69% for employee mobility and between 10 and 26% for service-related management activities in an integrated carbon footprint of services. The emissions caused by employee mobility and service-related management therefore have a dimension that should not be neglected.
Conclusions
From these findings, the necessity is derived to include the emissions from the mobility of operational staff and service-related management in future PCRs for services in order to improve the comparability of services. Optimisation efforts of companies must also start at these points of the service organisation.
The author investigates the different influences of labor shortage on wages in firms with or without collective bargaining agreements. In addition to training, technological solutions, and organizational flexibility, employers can also offer higher wages at a constant employment level to fill vacancies if the current payments are lower than the marginal revenue of the workers. Firms with collective bargaining agreements probably already pay wages according to marginal revenue or, in the case of rent sharing, above it, and the remuneration is probably also not adjusted. Using wage regressions with panel data for German establishments, this paper shows that collective bargaining and a lack of skilled workers can lead to higher wages. However, the latter only applies to firms that are not bound by collective agreements. Hence, wage differentials between these firms decrease, providing further explanation for a countercyclical development of the wage premium from the collective bargaining agreement.
This paper assesses the relationship between decision util-ity and experienced utility of recreational nature visits.The former is measured as the travel cost to reach that siteas routinely used by the travel cost method (TCM), andthe latter is operationalized through visit-related subjec-tive well-being (SWB). As such, the analysis is a test ofconvergent validity by examining whetherex anteTCM-based assessment of recreational value reflecting decisionutility corresponds to statedex postSWB, reflecting expe-rienced utility. It explores to what extent utility revealedby counts of nature visits are associated with self-reported,visit-related SWB relating to that same visited site. Theanalysis uses two existing datasets providing informationon (i) 3672 recreational visits to green/blue spaces inEngland over the course of four years and (ii) 5937 recrea-tional visits to bluespace sites across 14 European coun-tries over one year. Results show a positive associationbetween travel cost and visit-related SWB while control-ling for trip frequency and a large set of covariates,suggesting convergent validity of the two utility concepts.A breakdown by travel mode suggests this relationshiponly holds for trips involving motorized transport and isnot present for habitual, chore-like walking visits to therecreational site.