Related papers: Calculating effective gun policies
Privacy risk assessments aim to analyze and quantify the privacy risks associated with new systems. As such, they are critically important in ensuring that adequate privacy protections are built in. However, current methods to quantify…
The difference in COVID 19 death rates across political regimes has caught a lot of attention. The "efficient autocracy" view suggests that autocracies may be more efficient at putting in place policies that contain COVID 19 spread. On the…
We derive the most probable distribution of resources for a simple society. We find that a probabilistic analysis forbids both too much and too less equity, and selects instead a minimally ordered state. We give the detailed calculations…
There have been many claims in the media and a bit of respectable research about the causes of variation in firearm sales. The challenges for causal inference can be quite daunting. This paper reports an analysis of daily handgun sales in…
This paper evaluates the dynamic impact of various policies adopted by US states on the growth rates of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths as well as social distancing behavior measured by Google Mobility Reports, where we take into…
We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use…
We recently described a dynamic causal model of a COVID-19 outbreak within a single region. Here, we combine several of these (epidemic) models to create a (pandemic) model of viral spread among regions. Our focus is on a second wave of new…
Estimation of excess deaths due to a natural disaster is an important public health problem. The CDC provides guidelines to fill death certificates to help determine the death toll of such events. But, even when followed by medical…
We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such "abrupt transitions" for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all…
We present and analyze a mathematical model to study the feedback between behavior and epidemic spread in a population that is actively assessing and reacting to risk of infection. In our model, a population dynamically forms an opinion…
Epidemics of infectious diseases are among the largest threats to the quality of life and the economic and social well-being of developing countries. The arsenal of measures against such epidemics is well-established, but costly and…
Widespread population aging has made it critical to understand death rates at old ages. However, studying mortality at old ages is challenging because the data are sparse: numbers of survivors and deaths get smaller and smaller with age. We…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism in the beginning phase of an epidemic when the vaccines are not yet available. It enables the public health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases from the population, thereby limiting the…
Unveiling the relationships between crime and socioeconomic factors is crucial for modeling and preventing these illegal activities. Recently, a significant advance has been made in understanding the influence of urban metrics on the levels…
Pandemic response is a complex affair. Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19 including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing and contact tracing. We argue that some non-trivial factors behind…
The large majority of inferences drawn in empirical political research follow from model-based associations (e.g. regression). Here, we articulate the benefits of predictive modeling as a complement to this approach. Predictive models aim…
It is critical to understand and model the behavior of individuals in a pandemic, as well as identify effective ways to guide people's behavior in order to better control the epidemic spread. However, current research fails to account for…
An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, i.e., a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and…
Understanding the number of individuals who have been infected with the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the extent to which social distancing policies have been effective at limiting its spread, are critical for effective policy going…
Income inequality and redistribution policies are modeled with a minimal, endogenous model of a simple foraging economy. Significant income inequalities emerge from the model for populations of equally capable individuals presented with…