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The European Emission Trading System (EU ETS) is commonly regarded as the key pillar of the European climate policy and as the main unifying tool to create a unique carbon price all over Europe. The UK has always played a crucial role in the EU ETS, being one of the most active national registry and a crucial hub for the exchange of allowances in the market. Brexit, therefore, could deeply modify the number and directions of such exchanges as well as the centrality of the other countries in this system. To investigate these issues, the present paper exploits network analysis tools to compare the structure of the EU ETS market in its first two phases with and without the UK, investigating a few different scenarios that might emerge from a possible reallocation of the transactions that have involved UK partners. We find that without the UK the EU ETS network would become in general much more homogeneous, though results may change focusing on the type of accounts involved in the transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many disciplines of scholarship are interested in the Relative Age Effect (RAE), whereby age-banding confers advantages on older members of the cohort over younger ones. Most research does not test this relationship in a manner consistent with theory (which requires a decline in frequency across the cohort year), instead resorting to non-parametric, non-directional approaches. In this article, the authors address this disconnect, provide an overview of the benefits associated with Poisson regression modelling, and two managerially useful measures for quantifying RAE bias, namely the Indices of Discrimination and Wastage. In a tutorial-like exposition, applications and extensions of this approach are illustrated using data on professional soccer players competing in the top two tiers of the “Big Five” European football leagues in the search to identify paragon clubs, leagues, and countries from which others may learn to mitigate this form of age-discrimination in the talent identification process. As with OLS regression, Poisson regression may include more than one independent variable. In this way we test competing explanations of RAE; control for unwanted sources of covariation; model interaction effects (that different clubs and countries may not all be subject to RAE to the same degree); and test for non-monotonic versions of RAE suggested in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UK Biobank includes 502,649 middle- and older-aged adults from the general population who have undergone detailed phenotypic assessment. The majority of participants completed tests of cognitive functioning, and on average four years later a sub-group of N = 20,346 participants repeated most of the assessment. These measures will be used in a range of future studies of health outcomes in this cohort. The format and content of the cognitive tasks were partly novel. The aim of the present study was to validate and characterize the cognitive data: to describe the inter-correlational structure of the cognitive variables at baseline assessment, and the degree of stability in scores across longitudinal assessment. Baseline cognitive data were used to examine the inter-correlational/factor-structure, using principal components analysis (PCA). We also assessed the degree of stability in cognitive scores in the subsample of participants with repeat data. The different tests of cognitive ability showed significant raw inter-correlations in the expected directions. PCA suggested a one-factor solution (eigenvalue = 1.60), which accounted for around 40% of the variance. Scores showed varying levels of stability across time-points (intraclass correlation range = 0.16 to 0.65). UK Biobank cognitive data has the potential to be a significant resource for researchers looking to investigate predictors and modifiers of cognitive abilities and associated health outcomes in the general population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]