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In spite of growing interest in democratization and electoral competition after ethnic conflict, we know little about the impact of ethnic violence on voter choice in post-conflict societies. This article uses an original dataset of local-level electoral results, communities' exposure to war violence, and candidates' ethnicity derived from names in contemporary Croatia to uncover the relationship between local post-conflict ethnic distribution, ethnic violence, and the electorate's ethnic bias. Our analysis points to the presence of ethnic bias that is determined by local interethnic balance and exposure to war violence - particularly for communities populated by the Serb minority.

Do macroprudential regulations on residential lending influence commercial lending behavior too? To answer this question, we identify the compositional changes in banks' supply of credit using the variation in their holdings of residential mortgages on which extra capital requirements were uniformly imposed by the countercyclical capital buffer (CCB) introduced in Switzerland in 2012. We find that the CCB's introduction led to higher growth in commercial lending, in particular to small firms, although this was unrelated to conditions in regional housing markets. The interest rates and fees charged to these firms concurrently increased. We rationalize these findings in a model featuring both private and firm-specific collateral. The corresponding imperfect substitutability between private and commercial credit for the entrepreneur's relationship bank is then shown to give rise to the compositional patterns we empirically document.

While the languages of the world vary greatly, they exhibit systematic patterns, as well. Semantic universals are restrictions on the variation in meaning exhibit cross-linguistically (e.g., that, in all languages, expressions of a certain type can only denote meanings with a certain special property). This paper pursues an efficient communication analysis to explain the presence of semantic universals in a domain of function words: quantifiers. Two experiments measure how well languages do in optimally trading off between competing pressures of simplicity and informativeness. First, we show that artificial languages which more closely resemble natural languages are more optimal. Then, we introduce information-theoretic measures of degrees of semantic universals and show that these are not correlated with optimality in a random sample of artificial languages. These results suggest both that efficient communication shapes semantic typology in both content and function word domains, as well as that semantic universals may not stand in need of independent explanation.

Abstract The post-Cold War period has seen the rise of international liberal peacebuilding, as an overarching framework for international interventions in intrastate conflicts. In contrast, the current period is marked by decline of liberal peacebuilding, and a simultaneous rise of domestic illiberal peacebuilding. This has created a gap between the predominant theoretical and policy framework and the actual form of peacebuilding in many conflict-ridden societies. The present article addresses this challenge through a contextual case study of illiberal peacebuilding in Myanmar. The case study shows how a dominant state actor – the military (Tatmadaw) – has used both coercion and co-optation to contain armed resistance against militarized and centralized statebuilding and thereby strengthen the state's territorial control and authority. While the SLORC/SPDC military junta (1988–2011) sought to contain ethnic armed organizations through military offensives, ceasefire agreements and illiberal peacebuilding, the military based USDP-government (2011–2015) institutionalized a hybrid regime as a framework for political transformation of EAOs, and tolerated a degree of dual territorial, administrative and resource control at the local scale. These clientelist measures failed to address the substantive issues behind Myanmar's multiple and protracted conflicts. They were also combined with military offensives against non-ceasefire groups and war by other means in ceasefire areas. Moreover, the case study demonstrates that the Tatmadaw used its tutelary power to obstructs substantive conflict resolution through negotiated state reforms. Myanmar's peace initiatives during the last three decades should thus be understood as illiberal strategies for containing ethnic armed organizations rather than attempts at substantive conflict resolution.

Abstract While European integration has predominantly been addressed in terms of its common market and through questions of European identity, this article explores alternate perspectives of environment in peripheral landscapes as a practice through which European center-periphery relations are negotiated. Drawing on two case studies, namely the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and the arid regions of Almeria in southeast Spain, we highlight how these landscapes have been variously framed as explicitly European spaces through either developmental narratives or environmental activism and advocacy. We argue that European integration is realized and contested through the discursive and material transformation of landscapes. With this, we contribute to an understanding of environmentalism and the politics of the environment as instrumental in addressing broader and parallel political concerns. Combining southern and eastern European perspectives on the political geography of the environment, we show that the landscape functions as an intrinsically political arena that materializes and discursively frames the different meanings and interests of European integration at stake.

Background: The air traffic management (ATM) system has historically coped with a global increase in traffic demand ultimately leading to increased operational complexity. When dealing with the impact of this increasing complexity on system safety it is crucial to automatically analyse the losses of separation (LoSs) using tools able to extract meaningful and actionable information from safety reports. Current research in this field mainly exploits natural language processing (NLP) to categorise the reports,with the limitations that the considered categories need to be manually annotated by experts and that general taxonomies are seldom exploited. Methods: To address the current gaps,authors propose to perform exploratory data analysis on safety reports combining state-of-the-art techniques like topic modelling and clustering and then to develop an algorithm able to extract the Toolkit for ATM Occurrence Investigation (TOKAI) taxonomy factors from the free-text safety reports based on syntactic analysis. TOKAI is a tool for investigation developed by EUROCONTROL and its taxonomy is intended to become a standard and harmonised approach to future investigations. Results: Leveraging on the LoS events reported in the public databases of the Comisión de Estudio y Análisis de Notificaciones de Incidentes de Tránsito Aéreo and the United Kingdom Airprox Board,authors show how their proposal is able to automatically extract meaningful and actionable information from safety reports,other than to classify their content according to the TOKAI taxonomy. The quality of the approach is also indirectly validated by checking the connection between the identified factors and the main contributor of the incidents. Conclusions: Authors' results are a promising first step toward the full automation of a general analysis of LoS reports supported by results on real-world data coming from two different sources. In the future,authors' proposal could be extended to other taxonomies or tailored to identify factors to be included in the safety taxonomies.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile communication networks, and behaviour-based approaches for citizen engagement play a key role in making future cities sustainable and tackling persistent problems in high-density urban areas. In the context of Sharing Cities, an EU-funded programme aiming to deliver smart city solutions in areas such as citizen participation and infrastructure improvements of buildings and mobility, a prominent intervention has been the deployment and monitoring of a Digital Social Market (DSM) tool in Milan (Italy). The DSM allows cities to engage with residents and encourage sustainable behaviours by offering non-monetary rewards. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the DSM approach to promote active travel (cycling and walking) by analysing the data collected through the app as well as through participant surveys. Our model results show that a broader engagement with the DSM app (number of claps to posts, number of posts made, non-monetary rewards earned by participating in non-travel events) is positively correlated with the monitored level of active travel. Lifestyles, attitudes, and social influence also explain the variability in cycling and walking. This highlights the importance of investigating these factors when replicating such initiatives on a large scale.

This article considers the interdisciplinary opportunities and challenges of working with digital cultural heritage, such as digitized historical newspapers, and proposes an integrated digital hermeneutics workflow to combine purely disciplinary research approaches from computer science, humanities, and library work. Common interests and motivations of the above-mentioned disciplines have resulted in interdisciplinary projects and collaborations such as the NewsEye project, which is working on novel solutions on how digital heritage data is (re)searched, accessed, used, and analyzed. We argue that collaborations of different disciplines can benefit from a good understanding of the workflows and traditions of each of the disciplines involved but must find integrated approaches to successfully exploit the full potential of digitized sources. The paper is furthermore providing an insight into digital tools, methods, and hermeneutics in action, showing that integrated interdisciplinary research needs to build something in between the disciplines while respecting and understanding each other's expertise and expectations. Peer reviewed

This paper estimates a model of cultural transmission by looking at the type of rst names given by parents to their newborn children. We focus on the transmission of Arabic name versus Non-Arabic name in the French society and disentangle the relative contribution of vertical transmission of parental culture, horizontal transmission from the neighborhood’s culture and the economic penalty associated with names that sound culturally distinctive in the French society. We use the French Labor Force Survey which is based on data collection of names and socio-economic characteristics for all individuals living within the same residential block of 20 neighboring households. To get rid of endogenous residential sorting, our estimates are based on the sample of households who are randomly allocated across public housings dwellings. We nd that parents do take into account the expected economic cost that they inict to their child by choosing a culturally distinctive name. Our estimates imply that the parents are ready to abandon one year of expected average income for their child in order to transmit their cultural trait.

To counter misinformation, regulators can exercise control over the costs that media outlets incur for misreporting policy-relevant news, e.g. by imposing fines. This paper analyzes the welfare implications of those types of interventions that affect misreporting costs. I study a model of strategic communication between an informed media outlet and an uninformed voter, where the outlet can misreport information at a cost. The alternatives available to the voter are endogenously championed by two competing candidates before communication takes place. I find that there is no clear nexus between the voter's welfare and informational distortions: interventions that benefit the voter might be associated with more misreporting activity and persuasion; relatively low misreporting costs yield full revelation but minimize the voter's welfare because they induce large policy distortions. Interventions that increase misreporting costs never harm the voter, but lenient measures might be wasteful. Electoral incentives distort the process of regulation itself, resulting in sub-optimal interventions that are detrimental to the voter's welfare.