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Currently, there is a limited understanding of how data privacy concerns vary across the world. The Cambridge Analytica scandal triggered a wide-ranging discussion on social media about user data collection and use practices. We conducted…
We propose a new approach to identifying geographical clustering and hotspots of inequality from decadal census data. We use diffusion mapping to study the 181,408 Output Areas in England and Wales, which allows us to decompose the feature…
Which level of voting costs is optimal in a democracy? This paper argues that intermediate voting costs - what we term a "Midcost democracy" - should be avoided, as they fail to ensure that electoral outcomes reflect the preferences of the…
A prominent media topic in the UK in the early 2020s is the energy crisis affecting the UK and most of Europe. It brings into a single public debate issues of energy dependency and sustainability, fair distribution of economic burdens and…
We use novel nonparametric techniques to test for the presence of non-classical measurement error in reported life satisfaction (LS) and study the potential effects from ignoring it. Our dataset comes from Wave 3 of the UK Understanding…
Existing estimates of human migration are limited in their scope, reliability, and timeliness, prompting the United Nations and the Global Compact on Migration to call for improved data collection. Using privacy protected records from three…
We argue that frequent sampling of the fraction of infected people (either by random testing or by analysis of sewage water), is central to managing the COVID-19 pandemic because it both measures in real time the key variable controlled by…
The success of public health policies aimed at curtailing the COVID-19 pandemic have relied on large-scale and protracted compliance by the public. A series of studies have recently argued that previous voting patterns are important…
This paper explores whether unconventional monetary policy operations have redistributive effects on household wealth. Drawing on household balance sheet data from the Wealth and Asset Survey, we construct monthly time series indicators on…
This paper develops a sufficient-statistic formula for the unemployment gap -- the difference between the actual unemployment rate and the efficient unemployment rate. While lowering unemployment puts more people into work, it forces firms…
Against a backdrop of tensions related to EU membership, we find levels of online abuse toward UK MPs reach a new high. Race and religion have become pressing topics globally, and in the UK this interacts with "Brexit" and the rise of…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
On October 6, 2018, the US Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh with the narrowest margin for a successful confirmation since 1881 and where the senators voted overwhelmingly along party lines. In this paper, we examine whether the political…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
Behavioural economics provides labels for patterns in human economic behaviour. Probability weighting is one such label. It expresses a mismatch between probabilities used in a formal model of a decision (i.e. model parameters) and…
Senders of messages prefer to communicate uncertainty verbally (e.g., something is likely to happen) rather than numerically (such as 75%), leaving receivers with imprecise information. While it is well established that receivers translate…
Since the 1940s, population projections have in most cases been produced using the deterministic cohort component method. However, in 2015, for the first time, in a major advance, the United Nations issued official probabilistic population…
We investigate majority rule dynamics in a population with two classes of people, each with two opinion states $\pm 1$, and with tunable interactions between people in different classes. In an update, a randomly selected group adopts the…
Aims: A common objective of epidemiological surveys is to provide population-level estimates of health indicators. Survey results tend to be biased under selective non-participation. One approach to bias reduction is to collect information…
We study ballot exhaustion in multiwinner single transferable vote (STV) elections using a dataset of 1,070 Scottish local government elections comprising over 5.4 million ballots. While ballot exhaustion has been studied extensively in…