News 2019

Countries relying on the world's biggest and most established source of renewable electricity have seen their poverty, corruption and debt levels rise and their economy slow at significantly greater rates than nations which use other energy resources over the last three decades, a major new study has found.

Police at a crime scene in Leyton, east London after a man in his twenties was stabbed to death in March of this year. Credit: PA. Police at a crime scene in Leyton, east London after a man in his twenties was stabbed to death in March of this year. Credit: PA. Knife crime data from a 12-month period could be used to help forecast the London neighbourhoods most likely to suffer a fatal stabbing the following year, according to latest research.

PA. Female contestants in the reality show Big Brother are unpopular among viewers in countries across the globe, according to a new study. The findings could have important implications for the existence of gender discrimination in the entertainment industry. Women contestants proved particularly unpopular in the UK, where being female roughly doubled a housemate's probability of losing any given audience vote during the show's 18-year life-span.

Study measures how much free online goods are worth to consumers. Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson speaks with Sabri Ben-Achour of Marketplace about his work quantifying the economic benefits of goods and services that GDP does not measure. "We haven't been measuring the value of the environment or digital goods," says Brynjolfsson.

More needs to be done to tackle modern slavery in supply chains in Brazil - one of the world's biggest suppliers of beef and an important source of timber. Whilst some businesses in Brazil are already putting measures in place to tackle modern slavery in their supply chains, there is a lack of consistency in approach, action is voluntary, and initiatives are frequently limited to specific communities or locations, according to new research.

A film and texting campaign can increase anticorruption reports from citizens, study shows. They don't give an Academy Award for this, but a Nigerian feature film, "Water of Gold," made viewers significantly more likely to report corruption, according to a new paper co-authored by an MIT researcher.

An Economic Study Conducted by Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Connecticut No 054/2019 from Mar 12, 2019 According to a study, the market value of a company can rise if it reacts quickly to negative publicity from a celebrity endorser. The study by Professor Sascha Raithel from Freie Universität Berlin and Professor Stefan J. Hock from the University of Connecticut shows that if a company responds to an endorser's gaffe within 72 hours, their market value can increase by 2.1% over the next four weeks of trading.

Researchers find vast gains in productivity after countries democratize. As long as democracy has existed, there have been democracy skeptics - from Plato warning of mass rule to contemporary critics claiming authoritarian regimes can fast-track economic programs. But a new study co-authored by an MIT economist shows that when it comes to growth, democracy significantly increases development.

Stanford researchers examining the veterans' appeals process find that legal errors and due process mistakes while processing claims are much higher than publicly reported. A new study by Stanford scholars and their colleagues shines a stark spotlight on governance issues that have plagued a cornerstone of the nation's administrative system for years: rampant errors and a backlog of appeals cases involving veterans' benefits.

The efforts of developed economies to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by boosting the use of renewable energy sources and increasing energy efficiency are beginning to pay off. This is the result of a study conducted by an international team of researchers that includes scientists from Heidelberg.

Improving schedule stability in the retail sector means better sleep for sales associates, according to a new study co-authored by a leading UChicago scholar of work-life issues. The study was a randomized experiment conducted at Gap Inc., designed to improve multiple aspects of scheduling practices in hourly retail jobs-from predictability to consistency to workers' input.

When it comes to time off, America is definitely not a world leader. A review of mandated vacation policy in 21 countries with advanced economies by the Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that the United States is the only country that doesn't guarantee workers paid time off, and about one quarter of U.S. workers don't receive paid holidays and vacation days.

Small and medium-sized towns are increasingly appearing on the radar of policy makers all over Europe. Findings from a project on the role and significance of these towns in Switzerland show that national policy and planning overlook their potential. For a long time, policy and research on urban development have primarily focused on large cities.

In the 1990s, the endangered status of the short-tailed albatross catalyzed efforts to reduce the number of birds accidentally killed as bycatch in Alaska, home to the country's biggest fisheries.

Time-shift television, a technology that allows people to watch TV shows they missed without presetting devices to record content, is becoming more widely available, giving those with the feature the opportunity and flexibility to view previously aired programs. A new study looked at whether this technology has affected how people watch TV.

The amount of information and data which workers find themselves confronted with every day has increased enormously over the past few years. Globalisation and digitalisation have led to a steady increase in the complexity of work and business processes. Anything that is up-to-date today can already be outdated tomorrow.

Across developing economies, most workers and agricultural producers are paid are paid on a daily basis. This has a negative impact on their ability to generate savings for large expenses. Researchers from UZH show dairy farmers and agricultural workers prefer to be paid once at the end of the month, rather then daily, because monthly payments schemes are an efficient tool to increase saving.

The early promise and excitement of social media ' its ability to connect people around the world and inspire grass-roots activism ' has given way to fears that it is making us depressed and more politically polarized than ever. But is that really happening? In one of the largest-ever randomized evaluations of Facebook's broader social impacts, Stanford economists look at common assumptions about the platform and its effects on individuals and society.

Researchers have found strong evidence that oil palm production gains in Cameroon are coming from extensification instead of intensification. Possible solutions for reversing the trend include improving crop and processing yields by using more high-yielding seed types, replanting old plantations and upgrading milling technologies.

Researchers have taken strides in understanding how human feet evolved to enhance walking and running, setting us apart from species such as chimpanzees. Findings from The University of Queensland and University of Exeter study could be used to improve exercises for foot-related injuries, understanding of conditions such as flat feet, and the design of footwear.