This paper surveys what we have learned on financial literacy and its relation to financial behavior from data collected in the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) Household Survey, a project done in collaboration with academics. A pioneering survey fielded in 2005 included an extensive set of financial literacy questions and questions that can serve as instruments for financial literacy in regression analyses to assess the causal effect of financial literacy on behavior. We describe how this survey spurred a series of research papers demonstrating the crucial role of financial literacy in stock market participation, retirement planning, and wealth accumulation. This inspired various follow-up studies and experiments based on new data collections in the DNB Household Survey. Researchers worldwide have used these data for innovative studies, and other surveys have included similar questions. This case study exemplifies the essential role of data in empirical research, showing how innovative data collections can inspire new research initiatives and significantly contribute to our understanding of household financial decision-making.

Promoting access to suitable and affordable financial products and tackling financial exclusion has become a prominent feature of the political agenda in the UK, as the second annual ‘Financial Inclusion Report’ was published in November 2020 by the Department for Work and Pensions. This study provides an empirical analysis on financial exclusion and its association with ethnicity, using data from the UK’s Family Resources Survey. The analysis offers important new evidence on the significance of ethnicity, and it further identifies gender, family type and income as other key factors associated with access to financial products. The findings provide a valuable, new empirical dimension to our current understanding of financial exclusion and its links to ethnicity, inform the relevant political debate, and offer key evidence in support of policy initiatives targeted at enhancing financial security and well-being.

A recently published paper in this journal (Choi, 2021) establishes a statistical link between, on the one hand, Islamist terrorist campaigns – including terrorist attacks and online propaganda – and, on the other the growth of the Muslim population. The author explains this result by stating that successful campaigns lead some individuals to convert to Islam. In this commentary, we intend to reply to this article by focusing on the impact of terrorist attacks on religious conversion. We first show that Choi's results suffer from theoretical flaws – a failure to comprehensively unpack the link between violence and conversion – and methodological shortcomings – a focus on all terrorist groups over a period where Islamist attacks were rare. This leads us to replicate Choi's analysis by distinguishing Islamist and non-Islamist terror attacks on a more adequate timeframe. By doing so, we no longer find empirical support for the relationship between terror attacks and the growth of the Muslim population. However, our analyses suggest that such a hypothesis may hold but only in contexts where the level and intensity of political violence are high.

Whether or not nationalism fuels terrorist violence by ethnic groups is an important yet underexplored research question. This study offers a theoretical argument, empirical analysis and a case study. When political leaders such as presidents and prime ministers use nationalism to shore up legitimacy, they threaten the existence of disfavored ethnic groups. In turn, those groups are more likely to respond with terrorist attacks. The author tests this argument using a sample of 766 ethnic groups across 163 countries from 1970 to 2009. The multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression results provide evidence that leader nationalism is a significant driver of ethnic terrorism. The detrimental effect of nationalism remains the same after using a generalized method of moments method to account for possible reverse causality. A case study of Sinhalese nationalist leaders versus Tamil Tigers also supports the nationalism and terrorism nexus.

The world population of Muslims has increased exponentially in the past decade. Why is the world's Muslim population growing so quickly? This study offers a new theoretical perspective: the growth of the worldwide Muslim population is a result of a series of terrorist campaigns that inspire non-Muslims to convert to Islam. For empirical testing, this study employs a cross-national, time-series analysis of 152 countries from 1970 to 2007. Although there is lack of data on conversions that follow terrorist campaigns for a direct test of the theory, this study finds a correlation between terrorist attacks and growth of the Muslim population. This finding is robust and consistent even after controlling for salient demographic reasons for growth, such as the level of fertility and immigration.

Discovering community structure in complex networks is a mature field since a tremendous number of community detection methods have been introduced in the literature. Nevertheless, it is still very challenging for practitioners to determine which method would be suitable to get insights into the structural information of the networks they study. Many recent efforts have been devoted to investigating various quality scores of the community structure, but the problem of distinguishing between different types of communities is still open. In this paper, we propose a comparative, extensive, and empirical study to investigate what types of communities many state-of-the-art and well-known community detection methods are producing. Specifically, we provide comprehensive analyses on computation time, community size distribution, a comparative evaluation of methods according to their optimization schemes as well as a comparison of their partitioning strategy through validation metrics. We process our analyses on a very large corpus of hundreds of networks from five different network categories and propose ways to classify community detection methods, helping a potential user to navigate the complex landscape of community detection.

This study investigates household expenditures on magico-religious powers in Southern Benin, with a novel focus on malevolent powers. Of 126 households, 18 percent reported expenditures on malevolent powers within the previous thirteen years. Investment in such powers for malevolent purposes was found to be significantly less frequent than for cure or protection. In line with existing literature, the following factors were found to be positively correlated with investment in malevolent powers: (1) living with a partner; (2) jealousy of economic success; (3) conflict within a social circle. Expenditures on powers for cure and protection are positively correlated with expenditures on malevolent uses.

Trained features of a convolution neural network (CNN) at different convolution layers is analyzed using two quantitative metrics in this work. We first show mathematically that the Gaussian confusion measure (GCM) can be used to identify the discriminative ability of an individual feature. Next, we generalize this idea, introduce another measure called the cluster purity measure (CPM), and use it to analyze the discriminative ability of multiple features jointly. The discriminative ability of trained CNN features is validated by experimental results. Research on CNNs utilizing GCM and CPM tools offers important insights into its operational mechanism, including the behavior of trained CNN features and good detection performance of some object classes that were considered difficult in the past. Finally, the trained feature representation is compared between different CNN structures to explain the superiority of deeper networks.

Corporate law shapes the fundamental business environment and affects various stakeholders. It is possible to determine the behaviour of various stakeholders by examining the politics of the reform process of corporate law. In order to understand the process, this paper uses the notice-and-comment procedure (public-comment procedure). Under this procedure, people submit comments to the Ministry of Justice; some of the comments are reflected in the final Bill, while others are not. The paper performs a quantitative analysis of a hand-collected dataset from two recent public-comment procedures on corporate law reform. The results showed that the bureaucrats are rigid and not willing to take public comments seriously. However, on some technical issues, legal academics, and legal professionals influence the behaviour of the bureaucrats. In addition, the bureaucrats employed these comments to honour the technical views of professionals. In other cases, corporate managers significantly influence the reform process.

This article analyzes anomalous patterns of agent, adjuster, and producer claim outcomes and determines the most likely pattern of collusion that is suggestive of fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal crop insurance program. Log–linear analysis of Poisson-distributed counts of anomalous entities is used to examine potential patterns of collusion. The most likely pattern of collusion present in the crop insurance program is where agents, adjusters, and producers nonrecursively interact with each other to coordinate their behavior. However, if a priori an intermediary is known to initiate and coordinate the collusion, a pattern where the producer acts as the intermediary is the most likely pattern of collusion evidenced in the data. These results have important implications for insurance program design and compliance.

This paper extends the empirical analysis on the determinants of judicial behaviour by measuring the ideal points for the Justices of the Philippine Supreme Court for 1986−2010. The Philippines is an interesting case given the US influence in designing the Supreme Court while the political and social context differs significantly. The estimated ideal points allow us to focus on political coalitions based on presidential appointments. We find strong evidence to support the existence of such coalitions along a government-opposition policy space. Implications for comparative judicial politics are discussed.

This article provides a detailed empirical assessment of British public opinion on the issue of the disestablishment of the Church of England, one of the most important questions concerning relations between church and state. It uses a nationally representative survey conducted in 2011. It finds that, in socio-structural terms, those more supportive of disestablishment are men, those living in Scotland and those with a degree-level education. In political and ideological terms, Liberal Democrat party identifiers and those with left-wing and liberal policy preferences are more supportive of disestablishment. There are also significant differences on the basis of newspaper readership, with Guardian readers most supportive. The findings contribute to existing empirical research on this topic and demonstrate the need for further analysis of how religious orientations shape public attitudes on this debate.