pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cyber Risk in Health Facilities: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Alberto Sardi, Alessandro Rizzi, Enrico Sorano, Anna Guerrieri
Date: 2021-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computer Security, Management, Systematic Literature Review

The current world challenges include issues such as infectious disease pandemics, environmental health risks, food safety, and crime prevention. Through this article, a special emphasis is given to one of the main challenges in the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, the cyber risk. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization has detected a dramatic increase in the number of cyber-attacks. For instance, in Italy the COVID-19 emergency has heavily affected cybersecurity; from January to April 2020, the total of attacks, accidents, and violations of privacy to the detriment of companies and individuals has doubled. Using a systematic and rigorous approach, this paper aims to analyze the literature on the cyber risk in the healthcare sector to understand the real knowledge on this topic. The findings highlight the poor attention of the scientific community on this topic, except in the United States. The literature lacks research contributions to support cyber risk management in subject areas such as Business, Management and Accounting; Social Science; and Mathematics. This research outlines the need to empirically investigate the cyber risk, giving a practical solution to health facilities. Keywords: cyber risk; cyber-attack; cybersecurity; computer security; COVID-19; coronavirus;information technology risk; risk management; risk assessment; health facilities; healthcare sector;systematic literature review; insurance
Increasing the price of a university degree does not significantly affect enrolment if income contingent loans are available: evidence from HECS in Australia
Authors: Fabio Italo Martinenghi
Date: 2021-02-08 00:00:00

I provide evidence that, when income-contingent loans are available, student enrolment in university courses is not significantly affected by large increases in the price of those courses. I use publicly available domestic enrolment data from Australia. I study whether large increases in the price of higher education for selected disciplines in Australia in 2009 and in 2012 was associated with changes in their enrolment growth. I find that large increases in the price of a course did not lead to significant changes in their enrolment growth for that course.
Mobility-based contact exposure explains the disparity of spread of COVID-19 in urban neighborhoods
Authors: Rajat Verma, Takahiro Yabe, Satish V. Ukkusuri
Date: 2021-02-07 00:00:00

The rapid early spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. was experienced very differently by different socioeconomic groups and business industries. In this study, we study aggregate mobility patterns of New York City and Chicago to identify the relationship between the amount of interpersonal contact between people in urban neighborhoods and the disparity in the growth of positive cases among these groups. We introduce an aggregate Contact Exposure Index (CEI) to measure exposure due to this interpersonal contact and combine it with social distancing metrics to show its effect on positive case growth. With the help of structural equations modeling, we find that the effect of exposure on case growth was consistently positive and that it remained consistently higher in lower-income neighborhoods, suggesting a causal path of income on case growth via contact exposure. Using the CEI, schools and restaurants are identified as high-exposure industries, and the estimation suggests that implementing specific mobility restrictions on these point-of-interest categories are most effective. This analysis can be useful in providing insights for government officials targeting specific population groups and businesses to reduce infection spread as reopening efforts continue to expand across the nation.
Prisoner Dilemma in maximization constrained: the rationality of cooperation
Authors: Shahin Esmaeili
Date: 2021-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

David Gauthier in his article, Maximization constrained: the rationality of cooperation, tries to defend the joint strategy in situations in which no outcome is both equilibrium and optimal. Prisoner Dilemma is the most familiar example of these situations. He first starts with some quotes by Hobbes in Leviathan; Hobbes, in chapter 15 discusses an objection by someone is called Foole, and then will reject his view. In response to Foole, Hobbes presents two strategies (i.e. joint and individual) and two kinds of agents in such problems including Prisoner Dilemma, i.e. straightforward maximizer (SM) and constrained maximizer(CM). Then he considers two arguments respectively for SM and CM, and he will show that why in an ideal and transparent situation, the first argument fails and the second one would be the only valid argument. Likewise, in the following part of his article, he considers more realistic situations with translucency and he concludes that under some conditions, the joint strategy would be still the rational decision.
Econometric model of children participation in family dairy farming in the center of dairy farming, West Java Province, Indonesia
Authors: Achmad Firman, Ratna Ayu Saptati
Date: 2021-02-05 00:00:00

The involvement of children in the family dairy farming is pivotal point to reduce the cost of production input, especially in smallholder dairy farming. The purposes of the study are to analysis the factors that influence children's participation in working in the family dairy farm. The study was held December 2020 in the development center of dairy farming in Pangalengan subdistrict, West Java Province, Indonesia. The econometric method used in the study was the logit regression model. The results of the study determine that the there were number of respondents who participates in family farms was 52.59% of total respondents, and the rest was no participation in the family farms. There are 3 variables in the model that are very influential on children's participation in the family dairy farming, such as X1 (number of dairy farm land ownership), X2 (number of family members), and X6 (the amount of work spent on the family's dairy farm). Key words: Participation, children, family, dairy farming, logit model
Does Collateral Value Affect Asset Prices? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Texas
Authors: Albert Alex Zevelev
Date: 2021-02-05 00:00:00

Does the ability to pledge an asset as collateral, after purchase, affect its price? This paper identifies the impact of collateral service flows on house prices, exploiting a plausibly exogenous constitutional amendment in Texas which legalized home equity loans in 1998. The law change increased Texas house prices 4%; this is price-based evidence that households are credit-constrained and value home equity loans to facilitate consumption smoothing. Prices rose more in locations with inelastic supply, higher pre-law house prices, higher income, and lower unemployment. These estimates reveal that richer households value the option to pledge their home as collateral more strongly.
How the Massachusetts Assault Weapons Ban Enforcement Notice Changed Firearm Sales
Authors: Meenakshi Balakrishna, Kenneth C. Wilbur
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00

The Massachusetts Attorney General issued an Enforcement Notice in 2016 to announce a new interpretation of a key phrase in the state's assault weapons ban. The Enforcement Notice increased sales of tagged assault rifles by 616% in the first 5 days, followed by a 9% decrease over the next three weeks. Sales of Handguns and Shotguns did not change significantly. Tagged assault rifle sales fell 28-30% in 2017 compared to previous years, suggesting that the Enforcement Notice reduced assault weapon sales but also that many banned weapons continued to be sold. Tagged assault rifles sold most in 2017 in zip codes with higher household incomes and proportions of white males. Overall, the results suggest that the firearm market reacts rapidly to policy changes and partially complies with firearm restrictions.
Airport Capacity and Performance in Europe -- A study of transport economics, service quality and sustainability
Authors: Branko Bubalo
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

The purpose of this dissertation is to present an overview of the operational and financial performance of airports in Europe. In benchmarking studies, airports are assessed and compared with other airports based on key indicators from a technical and an economic point of view. The interest lies primarily in the question, which key figures can best measure the perception of quality of service from the point of view of the passenger for the services at an airport.
Matching Function Equilibria with Partial Assignment: Existence, Uniqueness and Estimation
Authors: Liang Chen, Eugene Choo, Alfred Galichon, Simon Weber
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Discrete Choice Models

We argue that models coming from a variety of fields, such as matching models and discrete choice models among others, share a common structure that we call matching function equilibria with partial assignment. This structure includes an aggregate matching function and a system of nonlinear equations. We provide a proof of existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium and propose an efficient algorithm to compute it. For a subclass of matching models, we also develop a new parameter-free approach for constructing the counterfactual matching equilibrium. It has the advantage of not requiring parametric estimation when computing counterfactuals. We use our procedure to analyze the impact of the elimination of the Social Security Student Benefit Program in 1982 on the marriage market in the United States. We estimate several candidate models from our general class of matching functions and select the best fitting model using information based criterion.
A survey of some recent applications of optimal transport methods to econometrics
Authors: Alfred Galichon
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Econometrics

This paper surveys recent applications of methods from the theory of optimal transport to econometric problems.
Reinventing the Utility for DERs: A Proposal for a DSO-Centric Retail Electricity Market
Authors: Rabab Haider, David D'Achiardi, Venkatesh Venkataramanan, Anurag Srivastava, Anjan Bose, Anuradha M. Annaswamy
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

The increasing penetration of intermittent renewables, storage devices, and flexible loads is introducing operational challenges in distribution grids. The proper coordination and scheduling of these resources using a distributed approach is warranted, and can only be achieved through local retail markets employing transactive energy schemes. To this end, we propose a distribution-level retail market operated by a Distribution System Operator (DSO), which schedules DERs and determines the real-time distribution-level Locational Marginal Price (d-LPM). The retail market is built using a distributed Proximal Atomic Coordination (PAC) algorithm, which solves the optimal power flow model while accounting for network physics, rendering locationally and temporally varying d-LMPs. A numerical study of the market structure is carried out via simulations of the IEEE-123 node network using data from ISO-NE and Eversource in Massachusetts, US. The market performance is compared to existing retail practices, including demand response (DR) with no-export rules and net metering. The DSO-centric market increases DER utilization, permits continual market participation for DR, lowers electricity rates for customers, and eliminates the subsidies inherent to net metering programs. The resulting lower revenue stream for the DSO highlights the evolving business model of the modern utility, moving from commoditized markets towards performance-based ratemaking.
The Impacts of the Gender Imbalance on the Marriage Market: Evidence from World War II in Japan
Authors: Kota Ogasawara, Erika Igarashi
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

This study uses the unprecedented changes in the sex ratio due to the losses of men during World War II to identify the impacts of the gender imbalance on marriage market outcomes in Japan. Using newly digitized census-based historical statistics, we find evidence that men have a stronger bargaining position in the marriage market than women do. Under the conditions of relative male scarcity, women are less likely to marry. Although the entry of younger cohorts with a natural gender balance into the marriage market attenuated its magnitude, this tendency persisted until the mid-1950s. Widowed women facing male scarcity are particularly unable to remarry. Our results suggest that reinstating military pensions in the early 1950s further reduced their incentive to remarry.
Controlling volatility of wind-solar power
Authors: Hans Lustfeld
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00

The main advantage of wind and solar power plants is the power production free of CO2. Their main disadvantage is the volatility of the generated power. According to the estimates of H.-W. Sinn[1], suppressing this volatility requires pumped-storage plants with a huge capacity, several orders of magnitude larger than the present available capacity in Germany[2]. Sinn concluded that wind-solar power can be used only together with conventional power plants as backups. However, based on German power data[3] of 2019 we show that the required storage capacity can significantly be reduced, provided i) a surplus of wind-solar power plants is supplied, ii) smart meters are installed, iii) partly a different kind of wind turbines and solar panels are used in Germany. Our calculations suggest that all the electric energy, presently produced in Germany, can be obtained from wind-solar power alone. And our results let us predict that wind-solar power can be used to produce in addition the energy for transportation, warm water, space heating and in part for process heating, meaning an increase of the present electric energy production by a factor of about 5[1]. Of course, to put such a prediction on firm ground the present calculations have to be confirmed for a period of many years. And it should be kept in mind, that in any case a huge number of wind turbines and solar panels is required.
Ramadan and Infants Health Outcomes
Authors: Hossein Abbaszadeh Shahri
Date: 2021-01-09 00:00:00

Previous studies show that prenatal shocks to embryos could have adverse impacts on health endowment at birth. Using the universe of birth data and a difference-in-difference-in-difference strategy, I find that exposure to Ramadan during prenatal development has negative birth outcomes. Exposure to a full month of fasting is associated with 96 grams lower birth-weight. These results are robust across specifications and do not appear to be driven by mothers selective fertility.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Scientific Research in the Life Sciences
Authors: Massimo Riccaboni, Luca Verginer
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00

The COVID-19 outbreak has posed an unprecedented challenge to humanity and science. On the one side, public and private incentives have been put in place to promptly allocate resources toward research areas strictly related to the COVID-19 emergency. But on the flip side, research in many fields not directly related to the pandemic has lagged behind. In this paper, we assess the impact of COVID-19 on world scientific production in the life sciences. We investigate how the usage of medical subject headings (MeSH) has changed following the outbreak. We estimate through a difference-in-differences approach the impact of COVID-19 on scientific production through PubMed. We find that COVID-related research topics have risen to prominence, displaced clinical publications, diverted funds away from research areas not directly related to COVID-19 and that the number of publications on clinical trials in unrelated fields has contracted. Our results call for urgent targeted policy interventions to reactivate biomedical research in areas that have been neglected by the COVID-19 emergency.
Social Mobility in India
Authors: A. Singh, A. Forcina, K. Muniyoor
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Rapid rise in income inequality in India is a serious concern. While the emphasis is on inclusive growth, it seems difficult to tackle the problem without looking at the intricacies of the problem. Social mobility is one such important tool which helps in reaching the cause of the problem and focuses on bringing long term equality in the country. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of social background and education attainment in generating occupation mobility in the country. By applying an extended version of the RC association model to 68th round (2011-12) of the Employment and Unemployment Survey by the National Sample Survey Office of India, we found that the role of education is not important in generating occupation mobility in India, while social background plays a critical role in determining one's occupation. This study successfully highlights the strong intergenerational occupation immobility in the country and also the need to focus on education. In this regard, further studies are needed to uncover other crucial factors limiting the growth of individuals in the country.
Recruitment, effort, and retention effects of performance contracts for civil servants: Experimental evidence from Rwandan primary schools
Authors: Clare Leaver, Owen Ozier, Pieter Serneels, Andrew Zeitlin
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00

This paper reports on a two-tiered experiment designed to separately identify the selection and effort margins of pay-for-performance (P4P). At the recruitment stage, teacher labor markets were randomly assigned to a 'pay-for-percentile' or fixed-wage contract. Once recruits were placed, an unexpected, incentive-compatible, school-level re-randomization was performed, so that some teachers who applied for a fixed-wage contract ended up being paid by P4P, and vice versa. By the second year of the study, the within-year effort effect of P4P was 0.16 standard deviations of pupil learning, with the total effect rising to 0.20 standard deviations after allowing for selection.
Understanding the uneven spread of COVID-19 in the context of the global interconnected economy
Authors: Dimitrios Tsiotas, Vassilis Tselios
Date: 2021-01-26 00:00:00

Using network analysis, this paper develops a multidimensional methodological framework for understanding the uneven (cross-country) spread of COVID-19 in the context of the global interconnected economy. The globally interconnected system of tourism mobility is modeled as a complex network, where two main stages in the temporal spread of COVID-19 are revealed and defined by the cutting-point of the 44th day from Wuhan. The first stage describes the outbreak in Asia and North America, the second one in Europe, South America, and Africa, while the outbreak in Oceania is spread along both stages. The analysis shows that highly connected nodes in the global tourism network (GTN) are infected early by the pandemic, while nodes of lower connectivity are late infected. Moreover, countries with the same network centrality as China were early infected on average by COVID-19. The paper also finds that network interconnectedness, economic openness, and transport integration are key determinants in the early global spread of the pandemic, and it reveals that the spatio-temporal patterns of the worldwide spread of COVID-19 are more a matter of network interconnectivity than of spatial proximity.
The Market Measure of Carbon Risk and its Impact on the Minimum Variance Portfolio
Authors: Théo Roncalli, Théo Le Guenedal, Frédéric Lepetit, Thierry Roncalli, Takaya Sekine
Date: 2021-01-26 00:00:00

Like ESG investing, climate change is an important concern for asset managers and owners, and a new challenge for portfolio construction. Until now, investors have mainly measured carbon risk using fundamental approaches, such as with carbon intensity metrics. Nevertheless, it has not been proven that asset prices are directly impacted by these fundamental-based measures. In this paper, we focus on another approach, which consists in measuring the sensitivity of stock prices with respect to a carbon risk factor. In our opinion, carbon betas are market-based measures that are complementary to carbon intensities or fundamental-based measures when managing investment portfolios, because carbon betas may be viewed as an extension or forward-looking measure of the current carbon footprint. In particular, we show how this new metric can be used to build minimum variance strategies and how they impact their portfolio construction.
Exploring the Complicated Relationship Between Patents and Standards, With a Particular Focus on the Telecommunications Sector
Authors: Nikolaos Athanasios Anagnostopoulos
Date: 2021-01-26 00:00:00

While patents and standards have been identified as essential driving components of innovation and market growth, the inclusion of a patent in a standard poses many difficulties. These difficulties arise from the contradicting natures of patents and standards, which makes their combination really challenging, but, also, from the opposing business and market strategies of different patent owners involved in the standardisation process. However, a varying set of policies has been adopted to address the issues occurring from the unavoidable inclusion of patents in standards concerning certain industry sectors with a constant high degree of innovation, such as telecommunications. As these policies have not always proven adequate enough, constant efforts are being made to improve and expand them. The intriguing and complicated relationship between patents and standards is finally examined through a review of the use cases of well-known standards of the telecommunications sector which include a growing set of essential patents.
How COVID-19 influences healthcare workers' happiness: Panel data analysis in Japan
Authors: Eiji Yamamura, Yoshiro Tsutsui
Date: 2021-01-25 00:00:00

Healthcare workers are more likely to be infected with the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) because of unavoidable contact with infected people. Although they are equipped to reduce the likelihood of infection, their distress has increased. This study examines how COVID-19 influences healthcare workers' happiness, compared to other workers. We constructed panel data via Internet surveys during the COVID-19 epidemic in Japan, from March to June 2020, by surveying the same respondents at different times. The survey period started before the state of emergency, and ended after deregulation. The key findings are as follows. (1) Overall, the happiness level of healthcare workers is lower than that of other workers. (2) The biggest disparity in happiness level, between healthcare workers and others, was observed after deregulation and not during the state of emergency. After deregulation, the difference was larger by 0.26 points, on an 11-point scale, than in the initial wave before the state of emergency.