sj-pdf-1-smr-10.1177_00491241221092725 - Supplemental material for Improving Estimates Accuracy of Voter Transitions. Two New Algorithms for Ecological Inference Based on Linear Programming

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-smr-10.1177_00491241221092725 for Improving Estimates Accuracy of Voter Transitions. Two New Algorithms for Ecological Inference Based on Linear Programming by Jose M. Pavía and Rafael Romero in Sociological Methods & Research

Data from the GIPEyOP online election poll for the 2015 Spanish General election.

Abstract The general elections of 2015 in Spain took place in the middle of the Great Recession after several years of austerity economic policies. This election caused a political earthquake that shook the Spanish party system. During the campaign of that election, GIPEyOP (Elections and Public Opinion Research Group from University of Valencia) conducted a survey to collect relevant data about the electorate beliefs, intentions and motivations. This article describes the data set attained, which comprises 71 variables after removing, to ensure full anonymity, those variables that would potentially allow respondents to be identified. Respondents answered a self-administered online question…

Abstención sexual durante la Cuaresma en Andalucía a lo largo del siglo XX y su impacto en la estacionalidad de los nacimientos

Durante siglos ha permanecido vigente en las poblaciones católicas un precepto religioso que prohibía las relaciones sexuales durante la Cuaresma. Esta interdicción repercutía en una disminución de concepciones y en un repunte tras dicho periodo, ambos difíciles de detectar porque, en poblaciones que no ejercían un control efectivo de la fecundidad, también se registraba un pico de concepciones durante la primavera. En la actualidad este precepto ha desaparecido como consecuencia de un proceso de erosión que no conocemos suficientemente. Con los datos anonimizados de todas las personas nacidas en Andalucía y supervivientes a 1 de enero de 2003 (n=8.397.206), este trabajo pretende determinar…

DETERMINANTS OF PROFITABILITY IN SPANISH FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS. COMPARING AIDED AND NON-AIDED ENTITIES

The last financial crisis has led to the greatest contribution of public funds ever made to Spanish banks. This paper studies why the need for support has been asymmetric, with not all of the institutions requiring aid. Based on profitability of assets (ROA), we determine using panel data econometric and logit response models the components of profit and loss accounts that generated profitability as well as the factors leading to some entities to ask for aid. The analyses show that before the beginning of the crisis there were significant differences between entities that needed aid and those that did not. The most profitable banks grounded their success in the traditional revenue component…

Electoral Rules and Proportionality in Spain: Estimating the Impact of some Swedish Rules Through the 2011 Electoral Data

In democratic countries policy making is always framed by many procedures and rules. Some of these rules are particularly critical for allowing more or less proportionality in legislative chambers, though the behavior of political actors also matter. The rules used for technically converting votes into political representatives often exercise such an important role in western countries. In this chapter we provide an estimation of the impact upon proportionality between seats and votes that might have resulted in the 2011 Spanish general elections if some Swedish electoral rules had been applied, ceteris paribus. As we are aware that electoral reforms favouring proportionality may hinder the…

Federalism, Proportionality, and Popular Will in US Presidential Elections: Did Colorado Have the Right Idea?

As is well known, the United States is a federal country composed of 50 states plus the District of Columbia, where the individual states and the country as a whole are each sovereign jurisdictions. This is reflected everywhere in its political-administrative structure, including the election of the US President, who is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the people; an issue that provokes a confrontation between abolishers of the Electoral College and supporters of the current system each time a candidate not winning the most popular votes is elected President (last time in 2000 elections). Between both extremes, there are intermediate solutions that, while continuing to r…

Incorporating big microdata in life table construction: A hypothesis-free estimator

Abstract The IT revolution, now more than ever, offers a cheaper and faster way to collect, store, transmit and process data. Detailed microdata of dates of death, migration and birth are already becoming available for general populations. In this paper, we develop within the family of period-based estimators a new, assumption-free estimator for constructing life tables. The estimator proposed exploits all the detailed data available and is free of the theoretical inconsistencies that the estimators currently used by most official statistical agencies have. We compute the proposed estimator for a real database and test the suitability of the hypotheses on which the estimators used so far re…

Determinants of interest margins in Spanish credit institutions before and after the 2008 financial crash

As interest margins of credit institutions affect economic performance of countries, finding out which are the main determinants of their evolution is a research task of great interest at current times. This is the purpose of the present paper as regards to the Spanish case over the period 2004-2012. Based on the econometric contributions by Ho and Saunders (1981) and some of its extensions, the authors develop a model that includes as explanatory variables the factors usually examined in the literature and other singular variables that might be relevant. Particularly, the rate of leverage, the quality of their assets measured according to their risk, and the profit obtained from the sellin…

Voting Transitions in the 2019 Valencian Autonomous Community’s Elections

The political fragmentation following the 2008 Financial Crisis and its economic, social, political and institutional fall-out have led to a growing left-right polarisation of politics and a weakening of the middle ground. The effective number of parliamentary parties is at an all-time high both inthe Spanish Parliament (Congreso) and in the Valencian Autonomous Parliament (Corts). Voters are spoilt for choice and switch party more often. This paper uses transfer matrices to analyse the shifting voting patterns in the European, General, Regional, and Local elections held during 2019 in The Valencian Country. The most salient result is the ever-shifting pattern at each end of the political s…

Humanities Data inR

Improving predictive accuracy of exit polls

Abstract Exit polls are best known for their use in election forecasting. In recent years, however, some prominent mistaken predictions have been made, undermining public confidence in the accuracy of both exit polls and survey methods. Nonresponse bias has been claimed as being one of the main reasons for inaccurate projections. Traditionally, the issue has been handled through an age–race–sex adjustment at the national and state levels. An alternative solution is suggested and detailed in this paper. A two-step strategy is proposed to reduce nonresponse bias and improve predictions. First, “vote-remembering” (vote recall) is used to correct party proportion estimates at polling locations;…

Is the cardholder an efficient alarm system to detect credit card incidents?

There is a growing tendency in credit card industry to increase the contribution of the smallest players, the cardholders, in the detection of card incidents. This article examines whether cardholders are efficient at detecting/communicating incidents of theft, loss or fraudulent use of their cards. The analysis focuses on whether they demonstrate enough speed of response to support a risk control subsystem by the issuer. The research follows a completely new approach showing how the issue can be handled by applying the concept of elasticity, a notion just recently exported from economics to the field of statistics by linking it with the reverse hazard rate. The issue is focused on the anal…

sj-pdf-1-smr-10.1177_00491241221092725 - Supplemental material for Improving Estimates Accuracy of Voter Transitions. Two New Algorithms for Ecological Inference Based on Linear Programming

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-smr-10.1177_00491241221092725 for Improving Estimates Accuracy of Voter Transitions. Two New Algorithms for Ecological Inference Based on Linear Programming by Jose M. Pavía and Rafael Romero in Sociological Methods & Research

The Level of Mortality in Insured Populations

In the actuarial field, life tables are used in reserving and pricing processes. They are commonly built from aggregate data and incorporate margins as a prudent measure to ensure the insurance company’s viability. Solvency II requires insurance companies to calculate technical provisions using best-estimate assumptions for future experience (mortality, expenses, lapses, etc) to separate (i) the risk-free component from (ii) adverse deviation of claims. Nowadays, however, the methods used by insurance companies (in most countries, included Spain) do not guarantee that these components can be separated. Many companies build their own tables from general insured population life tables, assumi…

Introducing migratory flows in life table construction

The purpose of life tables is to describe the mortality behav iour of particular groups. The construction of general life tables is based on death statis tics and census figures of resident populations under the hypothesis of closed demographic sys tem. Among other assumptions, this hypothesis implicitly assumes that entries (immigrants) a nd exits (emigrants) of the population are usually not significant (being almost of the same magnitu de for each age compensating each other). This paper theoretically extends the classical sol ution to open demographic systems and studies the impact of this hypothesis in constructing a life table. In particular, using the data of residential variations m…

On the relationship between the reversed hazard rate and elasticity

Despite hazard and reversed hazard rates sharing a number of similar aspects, reversed hazard functions are far less frequently used. Understanding their meaning is not a simple task. The aim of this paper is to expand the usefulness of the reversed hazard function by relating it to other well-known concepts broadly used in economics: (linear or cumulative) rates of increase and elasticity. This will make it possible (i) to improve our understanding of the consequences of using a particular distribution and, in certain cases, (ii) to introduce our hypotheses and knowledge about the random process in a more meaningful and intuitive way, thus providing a means to achieving distributions that …

Elasticity function of a discrete random variable and its properties

ABSTRACTElasticity (or elasticity function) is a new concept that allows us to characterize the probability distribution of any random variable in the same way as characteristic functions and hazard and reverse hazard functions do. Initially defined for continuous variables, it was necessary to extend the definition of elasticity and study its properties in the case of discrete variables. A first attempt to define discrete elasticity is seen in Veres-Ferrer and Pavia (2014a). This paper develops this definition and makes a comparative study of its properties, relating them to the properties shown by discrete hazard and reverse hazard, as both defined in Chechile (2011). Similar to continuou…

The formation of aggregate expectations: wisdom of the crowds or media influence?

ABSTRACTThe general elections of 2015 in Spain were elections of change. Two new parties for which voters had no previous historical reference points burst onto the parliamentary scene. Two (partially) opposed theories vie to offer an explanation as to how voters build their aggregate electoral expectations. In this paper, we investigate which mechanism has the greatest influence on the formation of expectations: published opinion or social interactions. Likewise, we also study if there is an ideological bias in the voters’ perception of the future results of the electoral battle. Based on analysis of microdata from a survey (sample size = 14,262) conducted in Spain on the occasion of the g…

On the relationship between knowledge creation and economic performance

An empirical two-equation dynamic panel-data model system with fixed effects is proposed to analyze the relationship between knowledge creation and economic performance across regions over time. Estimates of the model for Spanish regions show that (i) knowledge creation depends on local R&D effort, on the amount of knowledge in use, and on knowledge creation in neighboring regions; and (ii) assimilation of new knowledge depends on local knowledge creation and on assimilation of knowledge in neighboring regions. Both processes include region-specific context fixed effects and region-specific time effects, representing region-specific dynamic influences. The results imply that (a) efficie…

ei.Datasets: Real Data Sets for Assessing Ecological Inference Algorithms

Ecological inference models aim to infer individual-level relationships using aggregate data. They are routinely used to estimate voter transitions between elections, disclose split-ticket voting behaviors, or infer racial voting patterns in U.S. elections. A large number of procedures have been proposed in the literature to solve these problems; therefore, an assessment and comparison of them are overdue. The secret ballot however makes this a difficult endeavor since real individual data are usually not accessible. The most recent work on ecological inference has assessed methods using a very small number of data sets with ground truth, combined with artificial, simulated data. This arti…

Gender Inequalities and Social Sustainability. Can Modernization Diminish the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge?

The gender gap in political knowledge is a classical problem of Western democracies. In the 21st century, political knowledge is still unequally distributed between men and women, as many cross-section studies have shown. This is an indicator of women’s disempowerment and the distance which remains to be covered to achieve an inclusive and sustainable society. Could public policies and gender equality laws change the situation? Using a longitudinal database in which 600,000 survey responses are analysed from 1996 to 2017, this case study of Spain aims to shed some light on this question. It combines sociological and political approaches in line with the development theory of the gender gap …

Updating input–output matrices: assessing alternatives through simulation

A problem that frequently arises in economics, demography, statistics, transportation planning and stochastic modelling is how to adjust the entries of a matrix to fulfil row and column aggregation constraints. Biproportional methods in general and the so-called RAS algorithm in particular, have been used for decades to find solutions to this type of problem. Although alternatives exist, the RAS algorithm and its extensions are still the most popular. Apart from some interesting empirical and theoretical properties, tradition, simplicity and very low computational costs are among the reasons behind the great success of RAS. Nowadays computer hardware and software have made alternative proce…

Combining Benford's Law and machine learning to detect money laundering. An actual Spanish court case.

Abstract Objectives This paper is based on the analysis of the database of operations from a macro-case on money laundering orchestrated between a core company and a group of its suppliers, 26 of which had already been identified by the police as fraudulent companies. In the face of a well-founded suspicion that more companies have perpetrated criminal acts and in order to make better use of what are very limited police resources, we aim to construct a tool to detect money laundering criminals. Methods We combine Benford’s Law and machine learning algorithms (logistic regression, decision trees, neural networks, and random forests) to find patterns of money laundering criminals in the conte…

Spatial Vote Redistribution in Redrawn Polling Units

Summary A large proportion of electoral analyses using geography are performed on a small area basis. In each new election there are always modifications to the previously existing polling units. The use of past voting results in small area aggregate data electoral forecasting models and political analyses therefore requires establishing a correspondence between old and new polling units. Traditionally, the task of tracking changes to assign an electoral history to the new units properly has been carried out by hand, comparing unit codes and census figures. This is an extremely cumbersome task that cannot always be performed, as when a massive (geographically intense) reorganization of poll…

La mobilitat electoral en les eleccions de 2019 a la Comunitat Valenciana

La fragmentacio politica derivada de la crisi economica, social, politica i institucional que va viure Espanya durant la Gran Recessio ha generat un panorama electoral en que l'oferta partidista, tant a a dretes com a esquerres, ha crescut de manera significativa. El numero efectiu de partits parlamentaris es el mes gran de la historia, tant al Congres dels Diputats com a les Corts Valencianes. Els electors disposen de mes alternatives de vot i canvien la seua opcio electoral amb mes frequencia. En aquest escenari, aquest treball estima i analitza, a traves de les matrius de transferencia de vot, els moviments electorals que es van produir en les eleccions europees, generals, autonomiques i…

Classifying Regions for European Development Funding

Structural and cohesion funds play a prominent role in European Union regional policy, which aims to reduce gaps in development between regions and disparities in well-being between European citizens. The regions and areas eligible for funding — 308,000 million during the 2007—13 period — are chosen according to regional GDP per inhabitant as the variable of reference. Despite the great importance of this indicator, the complex socioeconomic reality of regions cannot be fully explained by means of a single variable. Hence, using the large number of variables on economic, political, cultural and demographic characteristics available at regional level, this article groups European regions in…

Encuestas a pie de urna en España. ¿Error muestral o sesgo de no respuesta?

Countless examples of misleading forecasts on behalf of both pre-election and exit polls can be found all over the world. Non-representative samples due to differential nonresponse have been claimed as being the main reason for inaccurate exit-poll projections. In real inference problems, it is seldom possible to compare estimates and true values. Electoral forecasts are an exception. Comparisons between estimates and final outcomes can be carried out once votes have been tallied. In this paper, we examine the raw data collected in seven exit polls conducted in Spain and test the likelihood that the data collected in each sampled voting location can be considered as a random sample of actua…

Supplemental Material - COVID-19 and the Housework Gender Division: Traditional or New Gender Patterns?

Supplemental Material for COVID-19 and the Housework Gender Division: Traditional or New Gender Patterns? by Beatriz Larraz, Rosa Roig, Cristina Aybar, and Jose M. Pavía in Journal of Family Issues

Using Parametric Bootstrap to Introduce and Manage Uncertainty: Replicated Loaded Insurance Life Tables

Insurance companies develop loaded life tables to protect themselves against deviations, for example, in the number of expected deaths or in the (residual) expectation of life of their insured. In ...

COVID-19 and the Housework Gender Division: Traditional or New Gender Patterns?

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the gender dimension of its more visible socio-economic impacts has been the topic of study by several researchers. The current paper takes this further by focusing on the invisible chores done in the families at home. This paper studies how people’s behavior towards housework changed during and after the confinement period in Spain. We analyze whether people did more housework during the lockdown period than before it, the way this housework was distributed between women and men, and whether this has changed since the end of lockdown. The empirical analyses point to a new trend in the housework gender gap: differences between men and women have…

Más allá de la brecha salarial de género

espanolLa desigualdad de genero, y en particular la desigualdad salarial de genero, ha sido considerada una prioridad politica en muchos paises durante las ultimas decadas, con el foco puesto en reducir la llamada brecha salarial, es decir, en buscar una convergencia en media para los salarios de hombres y mujeres. Una aproximacion de medias, sin embargo, no implica distribuciones salariales mas justas (totales y de genero). Utilizando los microdatos de una muestra nacionalmente representativa de la poblacion ocupada de Espana (N = 216,769), descomponemos la desigualdad salarial total en desigualdad salarial femenina y masculina (intra-grupos) y desigualdad de genero (entre-grupos) y explor…

Elasticity as a measure for online determination of remission points in ongoing epidemics.

The correct identification of change-points during ongoing outbreak investigations of infectious diseases is a matter of paramount importance in epidemiology, with major implications for the management of health care resources, public health and, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, social live. Onsets, peaks, and inflexion points are some of them. An onset is the moment when the epidemic starts. A "peak" indicates a moment at which the incorporated values, both before and after, are lower: a maximum. The inflexion points identify moments in which the rate of growth of the incorporation of new cases changes intensity. In this study, after interpreting the concept of elasticity of a random va…

Properties of the elasticity of a continuous random variable. A special look at its behavior and speed of change

ABSTRACTBelzunce et al. (1995) define the elasticity for non negative random variables as the reversed proportional failure rate (RPFR). Veres-Ferrer and Pavia (2012, 2014b) interpret it in economic terms, extending its definition to variables that can also take negative values, and briefly present the role of elasticity in characterizing probability distributions. This paper highlights a set of properties demonstrated by elasticity, which shows many similar properties to the reverse hazard function. This paper pays particular attention to studying the increase/decrease and the speed of change of the elasticity function. These are important properties because of the characterizing role of e…

The “Big Bang” of the populist parties in the European Union: The 2014 European Parliament election

A significant number of voters are turning their backs on traditional parties. The stability of European party systems is being defied by a growing number of (new) radical parties, whose presence i...

Key Electoral Institutions and Rules Influencing Proportionality and Partisan Bias in Spanish Politics

The current paper focuses on the Spanish electoral rules governing political competition for the central “Congreso de los Diputados”. It is well-documented that the system as a whole has traditionally favoured one or the other of the two main political parties (PP and PSOE) at the expense of proportionality and the remaining political parties. This paper focuses on some key Spanish electoral rules and investigates how much the observed biases could be altered by introducing some alternative rules taken from the Swedish electoral system, ceteris paribus. Measures of disproportionality are made through the Loosemore–Hanby index and the Gallagher index. The electoral raw data used for our esti…

Assessing uncertainty of voter transitions estimated from aggregated data. Application to the 2017 French presidential election

[EN] Inferring electoral individual behaviour from aggregated data is a very active research area, with ramifications in sociology and political science. A new approach based on linear programming is proposed to estimate voter transitions among parties (or candidates) between two elections. Compared to other linear and quadratic programming models previously published, our approach presents two important innovations. Firstly, it explicitly deals with new entries and exits in the election census without assuming unrealistic hypotheses, enabling a reasonable estimation of vote behaviour of young electors voting for the first time. Secondly, by exploiting the information contained in the model…

Political communication in election processes: an overview

Influenced by both the impact of digital technologies and the social and political changes experienced in Western societies, the processes of political communication have undergone profound transfo...

Credit card incidents and control systems

Abstract Credit and debit cards have spread and skyrocketed all around the world to become the most popular means of payments in many countries. Despite their enormous popularity, cards are not free of risk. Technology development and e-commerce have exponentially increased internal credit card incidents. This paper identifies and quantifies the different types of credit card fraud and puts into question the effectiveness of the role assigned to cardholders in its detection.

The elasticity of a random variable as a tool for measuring and assessing risks

Elasticity is a very popular concept in economics and physics, recently exported and reinterpreted in the statistical field, where it has given form to the so-called elasticity function. This function has proved to be a very useful tool for quantifying and evaluating risks, with applications in disciplines as varied as public health and financial risk management. In this study, we consider the elasticity function in random terms, defining its probability distribution, which allows us to measure for each stochastic process the probability of finding elastic or inelastic situations (i.e., with elasticities greater or less than 1). This new tool, together with new results on the most notable p…

Dataset of the COVID-19 lockdown survey conducted by GIPEyOP in Spain

This article introduces a dataset that captures relevant in- formation about the living conditions, feelings, and habits of residents in Spain during ninety nine days of home confinement. This and other measures, imposed by the Government of Spain to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the population, have brought with them important economic, labor, and social changes, which have been accompanied by various modifications (some only temporary) in Spaniards habits and behaviours. Data collection was carried out through the implementation of a questionnaire with 33 questions, which was sent by email to the collaborators of GIPEyOP (Elections and Public Opinion Research Group from the Unive…

Spatial aggregation and resampling expansion of big surveys: An analysis of wage inequality

Income inequality is becoming a growing concern, worldwide, with wage inequality being the root cause of its recent escalation. With the aim of adding to the knowledge on this subject, this paper focuses on the spatial dimension of the problem, an aspect which has received less attention in the literature. We identify the determinants of inequality in wage distribution in Spain at a provincial level using the microdata of the Structure of Earnings Survey (N = 216,769) and estimate their impact from a spatial perspective. Spatial computation of wage concentrations, however, reduces the sample size to just 52 observations, leading to model challenges. To overcome this problem, we adopt a supe…

An entropy-based machine learning algorithm for combining macroeconomic forecasts

This paper applies a Machine Learning approach with the aim of providing a single aggregated prediction from a set of individual predictions. Departing from the well-known maximum-entropy inference methodology, a new factor capturing the distance between the true and the estimated aggregated predictions presents a new problem. Algorithms such as ridge, lasso or elastic net help in finding a new methodology to tackle this issue. We carry out a simulation study to evaluate the performance of such a procedure and apply it in order to forecast and measure predictive ability using a dataset of predictions on Spanish gross domestic product.

Testing Goodness-of-Fit with the Kernel Density Estimator: GoFKernel

To assess the goodness-of-fit of a sample to a continuous random distribution, the most popular approach has been based on measuring, using either L∞ - or L2 -norms, the distance between the null hypothesis cumulative distribution function and the empirical cumulative distribution function. Indeed, as far as I know, almost all the tests currently available in R related to this issue (ks.test in package stats, ad.test in package ADGofTest, and ad.test, ad2.test, ks.test, v.test and w2.test in package truncgof) use one of these two distances on cumulative distribution functions. This paper (i) proposes dgeometric.test, a new implementation of the test that measures the discrepancy between a s…

Can Dasymetric Mapping Significantly Improve Population Data Reallocation in a Dense Urban Area?

The issue of reallocating population figures from a set of geographical units onto another set of units has received a great deal of attention in the literature. Every other day, a new algorithm is proposed, claiming that it outperforms competitor procedures. Unfortunately, when the new (usually more complex) methods are applied to a new data set, the improvements attained are sometimes just marginal. The relationship cost-effectiveness of the solutions is case-dependent. The majority of studies have focused on large areas with heterogeneous population density distributions. The general conclusion is that as a rule more sophisticated methods are worth the effort. It could be argued, however…

Spanish electoral archive. SEA database

This paper introduces the SEA database (acronym for Spanish Electoral Archive). SEA brings together the most complete public repository available to date on Spanish election outcomes. SEA holds all the results recorded from the electoral processes of General (1979–2019), Regional (1989–2021), Local (1979–2019) and European Parliamentary (1987–2019) elections held in Spain since the restoration of democracy in the late 70 s, in addition to other data sets with electoral content. The data are offered for free and is presented in a homogeneous and friendly format. Most of the databases are available for download with data from various electoral levels, including from the ballot box level. This…

Data granularity in mid-year life table construction

[EN] Life tables have a substantial influence on both public pension systems and life insurance policies. National statistical agencies construct life tables from death rate estimates (𝑚���𝑥���), or death probabilities (𝑞���𝑥��� ), after applying various hypotheses to the aggregated figures of demographic events (deaths, migrations and births). The use of big data has become extensive across many disciplines, including population statistics. We take advantage of this fact to create new (more unrestricted) mortality estimators within the family of period-based estimators, in particular, when the exposed-to-risk population is computed through mid-year population estimates. We use actual d…

Assessing implicit hypotheses in life table construction

AbstractMortality figures are of capital importance for policy-making and public planning, as in forecasting financial provisions in public pension systems. General population life tables are constructed from aggregated statistics, an issue that usually entails adopting some (implicit) assumptions in their construction, such as the hypothesis of closed demographic system or the hypotheses of uniform distributions of death counts (and migration events) by age and calendar year. As microdata have become more abundant and reliable, these hypotheses could be assessed and more assumption-free estimators employed. Using a real database from Spain, we show that the above hypotheses are not appropr…

Improving Estimates Accuracy of Voter Transitions. Two New Algorithms for Ecological Inference Based on Linear Programming

The estimation of RxC ecological inference contingency tables from aggregate data is one of the most salient and challenging problems in the field of quantitative social sciences, with major solutions proposed from both the ecological regression and the mathematical programming frameworks. In recent decades, there has been a drive to find solutions stemming from the former, with the latter being less active. From the mathematical programming framework, this paper suggests a new direction for tackling this problem. For the first time in the literature, a procedure based on linear programming is proposed to attain estimates of local contingency tables. Based on this and the homogeneity hypot…

On distributing quarterly national growth among regions

In many countries a very important fraction of public expenditure is managed by regional authorities. However, in a world where economic life has quickened and become more turbulent, subnational institutions rarely have a timely regional macroeconomic picture at their disposal. The authors propose a guide to a method for estimating quarterly accounts of regions from the national quarterly and annual regional accounts, by the use of a temporal structure which eliminates possible spurious jumps. The robustness of the process and suggested practicalities are tested, and the proposal is also shown to produce better estimates than other uniregional methods often used in this framework.

Dasymetric distribution of votes in a dense city

[EN] A large proportion of electoral analyses using geography are performed on a small area basis, such as polling units. Unfortunately, polling units are frequently redrawn, provoking breaks in their data series. Previous electoral results play a key role in many analyses. They are used by political party workers and journalists to present quick assessments of outcomes, by political scientists and electoral geographers to perform detailed scrutinizes and by pollsters and forecasters to anticipate electoral results. In this paper, we study to what extent more complex geographical approaches (based on a proper location of electors on the territory using dasymetric techniques) are of value in…

Rich regions, poor regions and bank branch deregulation in Spain

Rich regions, poor regions and bank branch deregulation in Spain. Regional Studies. The links between financial deregulation and economic performance are evaluated in a European context. Specifically, the study analyses the relaxation of bank branching restrictions in Spain, which triggered a remarkable interregional expansion of savings banks that coincided with an unprecedented period of sustained economic expansion. Although related questions have been widely investigated for the United States, experiences in Europe have received far less research attention. An additional contribution of the paper lies in its use of quantile regression, which enables the investigation of the possibility …

R Graphics (3rd Edition)

Forecasting : theory and practice

Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The large number of forecasting applications calls for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle real-life challenges. This article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We provide an overview of a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a varie…

On Introducing Proportionality in American Presidential Elections: An Historical Analysis, 1828-2008

It is well known that the President of the United States is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the population. Every time a candidate who does not win the most popular votes is elected President, detractors of the Electoral College call for its abolishment and supporters extol its undoubtedly merits. This article investigates what would have happened if a solution halfway between both extremes (a direct national election and the current system) had been used in historical Presidential elections; namely, a proportional rule with thresholds to assign electors in each state. This system would generate electoral colleges closer to popular will, reduce the risk of electing a mi…

Assessing uncertainty of voter transitions estimated from aggregated data. Application to the 2017 French presidential election

Inferring electoral individual behaviour from aggregated data is a very active research area, with ramifications in sociology and political science. A new approach based on linear programming is proposed to estimate voter transitions among parties (or candidates) between two elections. Compared to other linear and quadratic programming models previously published, our approach presents two important innovations. Firstly, it explicitly deals with new entries and exits in the election census without assuming unrealistic hypotheses, enabling a reasonable estimation of vote behaviour of young electors voting for the first time. Secondly, by exploiting the information contained in the model resi…