Dust storms and wildfires occur frequently in southeastern Australia. Their effects on ecology, environment and population exposure have been the focus of many studies recently. Dust storms do not ...emit ground-sequestered carbon but wildfires emit significant quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. However, both natural events promote phytoplankton growth in water bodies because carbon, and other trace elements such as iron, deposit on the surface water of oceans and promote phytoplankton growth. Carbon di-oxide is reabsorbed by phytoplankton via photosynthesis. The carbon balance of dust storms and wildfires are not well known.This study focusses on the association of dust storms and wildfires in southeastern Australia with phytoplankton growth in the Southern Ocean and Tasman Sea due to the February 2019 dust storm event and the 2019-2020 black summer wildfires. The results show the similarities and differences in phytoplankton growth patterns and carbon reabsorption amount from these events.
We examine the short‐term impact of COVID‐19 on consumption spending and its underlying mechanisms using individual‐level monthly panel data from Singapore. Although Singapore's case fatality rate ...was one of the lowest in the world in the early stage of the pandemic (0.05%), we find that the COVID‐19 pandemic reduced household consumption spending by almost one quarter at its peak, with a larger response from households with above‐median wealth. We show that the reduction in consumption spending is associated with the nationwide lockdown policy, heightened economic uncertainty and reduced income. In addition, we find a substantial increase in monthly savings among households without income losses, suggesting a substantial rebound in consumption spending after the lifting of the lockdown. The results from June 2020 confirm this conjecture, as we find that consumption spending rebounded by about 10 percentage points in that month.
Résumé
Incidence de la COVID‐19 à court terme sur les dépenses de consommation et leurs mécanismes sous‐jacents : l’exemple de Singapour. À l'aide de données de panel mensuelles recueillies au niveau individuel, nous analysons l'impact de la COVID‐19 à court terme sur les dépenses de consommation et leurs mécanismes sous‐jacents à Singapour. Bien que le taux de létalité dans le pays ait été l'un des plus faibles au monde au début de la pandémie (0,05 %), nous avons observé une diminution de la consommation des ménages de près de 25 % lors du pic épidémique avec une réaction plus importante des foyers à revenus supérieurs à la médiane. Nous montrons que la baisse des dépenses de consommation est corrélée à la politique de confinement du pays, au contexte économique de plus en plus incertain et à la baisse des revenus. Nous constatons également que la baisse des revenus ne constitue vraisemblablement pas le facteur moteur dans la diminution globale de la consommation. En outre, nous observons une augmentation substantielle de l’épargne mensuelle des foyers n'ayant pas subi de perte de revenus, laissant entrevoir un net rebond des dépenses dès la levée du confinement. Les données de juin 2020 confirment cette hypothèse puisque les dépenses de consommation ont augmenté d'environ 10 % au cours de ce même mois.
Abstract
We provide new evidence on the level and probability distribution of consumers’ long-term expectations of inflation in the euro area and the Netherlands, using a new monthly representative ...Dutch survey before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that consumers’ expectations of euro area and Dutch inflation 10 years ahead have not been well anchored at the ECB’s inflation aim of below, but close to 2%. Median expectations have remained elevated above the European Central Bank's (ECB) inflation aim throughout the pandemic. Moreover, individual probability distributions show that expected probabilities of higher inflation (4% or higher) have continuously been larger than those of lower inflation (0% or lower). While policymakers are currently concerned about a possible de-anchoring of inflation expectations on the downside, our results suggest that from a consumer’s point of view de-anchoring of long-term inflation expectations is mainly due to expected high inflation rather than low inflation.
Abstract
We examine whether the COVID-19 crisis affects women and men differently in terms of employment, working hours, and hourly wages, and whether the effects are demand or supply driven. ...COVID-19 impacts are studied using administrative data on all Dutch employees up to December 2020, focussing on the national lockdowns and emergency childcare for essential workers in the Netherlands. First, the impact of COVID-19 is much larger for non-essential workers than for essential workers. Although female non-essential workers are more affected than male non-essential workers, on average, women and men are equally affected, because more women than men are essential workers. Second, the impact for partnered essential workers with young children, both men and women, is not larger than for others. Third, single-parent essential workers respond with relatively large reductions in labour supply, suggesting emergency childcare was insufficient for them. Overall, labour demand effects appear larger than labour supply effects.
This study investigates the different impacts of monetary and nonmonetary incentives on energy‐saving behaviors using a field experiment conducted in Japan. We find that the average reduction in ...electricity consumption from the rebate is 4%, whereas that from the nudge is not significantly different from zero. Applying a novel machine learning method for causal inference (causal forest) to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects at the household level, we demonstrate that the nudge intervention's treatment effects generate greater heterogeneity among households. These findings suggest that selective targeting for treatment increases the policy efficiency of monetary and nonmonetary interventions.
This paper explores the dynamics of (dis)trust among experts, journalists, and audiences through the case study of an inaccurate exit poll aired on a leading Israeli television channel. It combines ...empirical data from the Israeli April 2019 elections with a conceptual view of exit polls as both sources of information and national rituals to address public discourse on the polls and its underlying suspicions. A multi-method approach yielded a corpus consisting of focus groups with citizens, in-depth semi-structured interviews with journalists, pollsters and experts, and qualitative textual analysis of news reports. Using inductive-qualitative analysis, we identified three types of public narratives, each casting blame for the erroneous exit poll projection on a different type of actor. The statistical and biased-media narratives tally with declining trust in the news media and assume misbehavior by pollsters and news creators respectively. The deception narrative, on the other hand, suggests that right-wing voters systematically sabotaged the exit poll projections. By extending trust beyond journalistic information, this narrative foregrounds the cultural meaning of election night rituals. Taken together, the narratives found in this study delineate (dis)trust as an interplay of active participants in the creation, reception, and interpretation of news. Our findings thus touch upon key attitudes towards both media and democracy and have implications for further studies on collective rituals and information evaluations in an era of eroding trust.
La teologia deve apportare un contributo essenziale all’adempimento del compito del ristabilimento dell’unità tra i cristiani, compito impellente per tutta la Chiesa, rivolgendo un interesse ...particolare alla formazione ecumenica, secondo gli orientamenti dei documenti specifici, che prevedono, oltre ad un corso specifico sull’ecumenismo, la dimensione ecumenica nell’insegnamento di ogni disciplina teologica. Il presente contributo focalizza ciò che si richiede concretamente a due discipline teologiche: la scienza liturgica e la teologia del diritto canonico.
La liturgia, in particolare la dossologia, e la lode liturgica a Dio, portano alla luce la vera essenza del dialogo ecumenico che è uno scambio arricchente di doni, poiché le varie Chiese e Comunità ecclesiali preservano i loro doni più belli proprio nella loro vita liturgica. La storia attesta che uno scambio di doni liturgici ha già avuto luogo. Questo scambio ecumenico di doni liturgici fa affiorare anche l’intima corrispondenza tra la vita liturgica e l’ecumenismo spirituale.
Per quanto attiene alla teologia del diritto canonico, San Giovanni XXIII prospettò una riforma del diritto canonico e San Giovanni Paolo II riteneva che la ricomposizione dell’unità dei cristiani era strettamente legata alla questione della codificazione del diritto canonico della Chiesa universale. Secondo l’attuale Diritto canonico il compito di promuovere l’ecumenismo è implicito nel ministero pastorale stesso del Vescovo, che è essenzialmente un servizio all’unità, intesa in maniera più ampia della semplice unità della propria comunità diocesana e che comprende anche i battezzati non cattolici. Ancora più esplicito di quello contenuto nel Codice del 1983 per la Chiesa latina è l’obbligo giuridico ecclesiologico di partecipare al movimento ecumenico formulato nel Codice dei Canoni delle Chiese cattoliche orientali. Se prendiamo sul serio il dovere fondamentale di tutti i battezzati di partecipare al movimento ecumenico sancito dal diritto canonico, è evidente che gli sviluppi futuri nella convivenza ecumenica tra i cristiani condurranno anche a ulteriori sviluppi a livello di norme giuridiche.
In sintesi, la teologia assolve il proprio compito e la propria missione ecclesiale soltanto se si pone al servizio della ricomposizione dell’unità della Chiesa, e se vi apporta il suo insostituibile contributo.
In this paper, we study and analyze the community detection algorithms and the related evaluation metrics to explore the clustering characteristics of China's stock market. We build the stock market ...network by the constituent companies of the CSI 300 index and study the tightness between nodes. We first choose an appropriate adjacency matrix, which is obtained by the relation coefficient. Then, based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the adjacency matrix, we analyze the optimal network based on the directed spectral clustering on the ratio of eigenvectors and the spectral clustering followed by local refinement. The optimal network is chosen based on the best clustering effect according to the clustering effectiveness indexes Calinski–Harabasz and Davies–Bouldin. We explore the community structure in the stock market and study the influence of each community. Through the index out‐degree and in‐degree, we also obtain the most important companies in the market. Different from the traditional strategies that are always based on qualitative methods and undirected networks, this paper explores the characteristics of how to detect China's stock market. Specifically, we offer suitable strategies and measurements to evaluate the clustering results objectively and fairly. The qualities of community detection are measured too. Based on the above analysis, we further provide valuable insights by exploring the characteristics of the stock market.
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