FSI's scholars tackle a range of issues, from longstanding concerns like nuclear nonproliferation and military defense to new challenges such as cybersecurity, biosecurity and emerging regional conflicts.
Research Spotlight
Particulate Plutonium Released from the Fukushima Daiichi Meltdowns
A new study reveals particles that were released from nuclear plants damaged in the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami contained small amounts of radioactive plutonium.
Upon request by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), researchers reviewed a data set of social media posts that Facebook provided to SSCI.
Living in Fear: The Dynamics of Extortion in Mexico’s Drug War
Using new survey data from Mexico, including list experiments to elicit responses about potentially illegal behavior, this article measures the prevalence of extortion and assistance among drug trafficking organizations.
Many studies document low rates of financial literacy and suboptimal levels of participation in financial markets. These issues are particularly acute among women. Does this reflect a self-reinforcing trap? If so, can a nudge to participate in financial markets generate knowledge, confidence, and further increase informed participation? We conduct a large field experiment that enables and incentivizes working-age men and women---a challenging group to reach with standard financial training programs---to trade stocks for four to seven weeks. We provide no additional educational content. We find that trading significantly improves financial confidence, as reflected in stock market participation, objective and subjective measures of financial knowledge, and risk tolerance. These effects are especially strong among women. Participants also become more self-reliant and consult others less when making financial decisions.
American Purpose editorial board member Patrick Chamorel draws parallels between two French presidents of the center, Giscard and Macron. Can Macron modernize the economy, keep the EU together, and stop his country from falling apart?
This article examines the AKP’s youth politics in the aftermath of the 2013 Gezi Protests. It focuses on a seemingly mundane cultural practice of essay writing and student essay competitions to investigate the party’s message and methods in addressing young people. In particular, it examines the politics of history and emotional politics in the party's effort to construct and administer youth publics. The article argues that the AKP’s power is embedded in and reproduced by the articulation of political differences and mobilization of emotions, which play a significant role in the party’s broader bid to reorganize society, redefine collective identity, and control dissent.
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy,
February 1, 2021
I study team decisions among physician trainees. Exploiting a discontinuity in team roles across trainee tenure, I find evidence that teams alter decision-making, concentrating influence in the hands of senior trainees. I also demonstrate little convergence in variation of trainee effects despite intensive training. This general pattern of trainee effects on team decision-making exists in all types of decisions and settings that I examine. In analyses evaluating mechanisms behind this pattern, I find support for the idea that significant experiential learning occurs during training and that teams place more weight on judgments of senior trainees in order to aggregate information.
Crop yield maps estimated from satellite data increasingly are used to understand drivers of yield trends and variability, yet satellite-derived regional maps are rarely compared with location-specific yields due to the difficulty of acquiring sub-field ground truth data at scale. In commercial agricultural systems, combine harvesters with onboard yield monitors collect real-time yield data during harvest with high spatial resolution, generating a large ground dataset. Here, we leveraged a yield monitor dataset of over one million maize field observations across the United States Corn Belt from 2008 to 2018 to evaluate the Scalable Crop Yield Mapper (SCYM). SCYM uses region-specific crop model simulations and climate data to interpret vegetation indices from satellite observations, thus enabling efficient sub-field yield estimation across large regions and multiple years without reliance on ground data calibration. We used the ground dataset to compare alternative SCYM model implementations, define minimum required satellite observation criteria, and evaluate the sensitivity of satellite-based yield estimates to on-the-ground variation in management, soil, and annual weather. We found that smoothing annual time series data with harmonic regression increased 30 m pixel-level accuracy from r2 = 0.31 to 0.40 and reduced dependency on specific satellite observation timing, enabling robust yield estimation on 97% of annual maize area using only Landsat data. Agreement improved as the assessment was aggregated to field-level (r2 = 0.45) and county-level (r2 = 0.69) scales, demonstrating the need for fine-resolution ground truth data to better assess sub-field level accuracy in high resolution products. We found that SCYM and ground data showed a similar yield response to management and environmental variation, particularly capturing linear and nonlinear responses to sowing density, soil water holding capacity, and growing season precipitation. However, sensitivity to factors like soil quality and planting date was muted for SCYM estimates compared to ground-based yields. Random forest models were able to match SCYM performance when trained on at least 1000 ground observations, but performed poorly when tested on years and locations not represented in the training data. Our results demonstrate that satellite yield maps can provide much-needed information on multidecadal yield trends and inform yield gap analyses.
An assessment of Russia that suggests that we should look beyond traditional means of power to understand its strength and capacity to disrupt international politics.
Climate change and human activities exert a wide range of stressors on urban coastal areas. Synthetical assessment of coastal vulnerability is crucial for effective interventions and long-term planning. However, there have been few studies based on integrative analyses of ecological and physical characteristics and socioeconomic conditions in urban coastal areas. This study developed a holistic framework for assessing coastal vulnerability from three dimensions - biophysical exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity - and applied it to the coast of Bohai Economic Rim, an extensive and important development zone in China. A composite vulnerability index (CVI) was developed for every 1 km2 segment of the total 5627 km coastline and the areas that most prone to coastal hazards were identified by mapping the distribution patterns of the CVIs in the present and under future climate change scenarios. The CVIs show a spatial heterogeneity, with higher values concentrated along the southwestern and northeastern coasts and lower values concentrated along the southern coasts. Currently, 20% of the coastlines with approximately 350,000 people are highly vulnerable to coastal hazards. With sea-level rises under the future scenarios of the year 2100, more coastlines will be highly vulnerable, and the amount of highly-threatened population was estimated to increase by 13–24%. Among the coastal cities, Dongying was categorized as having the highest vulnerability, mainly due to poor transportation and medical services and low GDP per capita, which contribute to low adaptive capacity. Our results can benefit decision-makers by highlighting prioritized areas and identifying the most important determinants of priority, facilitating location-specific interventions for climate-change adaptation and sustainable coastal management.
This chapter reconnects modes of futures-making with the requirements of democracy by focusing on the naturalization of nuclear weapons and their removal from the realm of democratic choice at a particular point in time.
National Bureau of Economic Research,
February 1, 2021
A burgeoning literature has documented the importance of elite colleges. Yet, little is known about access to elite education and its labor market implications in China, a country that produces one in every five college graduates in the world. College admission in China is governed by a single exam—the national college entrance exam, and the government sets admission cutoff scores for elite colleges. We examine the impacts of scoring above the elite-tier cutoff on a student's access to elite colleges and wage outcomes after graduation, using the discontinuity around the cutoff score. By employing hand-collected survey data, we find that scoring above the cutoff not only increases the chance of entering an elite college but also raises a young person's first-job wages after graduation. We also find that those just above the cutoff have peers with higher scores and better social networks than those below the cutoff, but it is less clear whether the two groups use their time differently in college.
Journal of Political Science Education,
January 26, 2021
The policy memo is particularly suited for introducing basic methodological concepts to upper-division undergraduate students of political science, argues Oriana Skylar Mastro.
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment,
January 19, 2021
The increasing availability of satellite data at higher spatial, temporal and spectral resolutions is enabling new applications in agriculture and economic development, including agricultural insurance. Yet, effectively using satellite data in this context requires blending technical knowledge about their capabilities and limitations with an understanding of their influence on the value of risk-reduction programmes. In this Review, we discuss how approaches to estimate agricultural losses for index insurance have evolved from costly field-sampling-based campaigns towards lower-cost techniques using weather and satellite data. We identify advances in remote sensing and crop modelling for assessing agricultural conditions, but reliably and cheaply assessing production losses remains challenging in complex landscapes. We illustrate how an economic framework can be used to gauge and enhance the value of insurance based on earth-observation data, emphasizing that even as yield-estimation techniques improve, the value of an index insurance contract for the insured depends largely on how well it captures the losses when people suffer most. Strategically improving the collection and accessibility of reliable ground-reference data on crop types and production would facilitate this task. Audits to account for inevitable misestimation complement efforts to detect and protect against large losses.
Rose Gottemoeller, the US chief negotiator of the New START treaty—and the first woman to lead a major nuclear arms negotiation—delivers in this book an invaluable insider’s account of the negotiations between the US and Russian delegations in Geneva in 2009 and 2010.
