This article proposes and studies two Huber-type estimation approaches, namely, the Huber instrumental variable (IV) estimation and the Huber generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, for a spatial autoregressive model. We establish the consistency, asymptotic distributions, finite sample breakdown points, and influence functions of these estimators. Simulation studies show that compared to the corresponding traditional estimators (the two-stage least squares estimator, the best IV estimator, and the GMM estimator), our estimators are more robust when the unknown disturbances are long-tailed, and our estimators only lose a little efficiency when the disturbances are short-tailed. Moreover, the Huber GMM estimator also outperforms several robust estimators in the literature. Finally, we apply our estimation method to investigate the impact of the urban heat island effect on housing prices. A package is published on GitHub for practitioners to use in their empirical studies.

This paper uses China’s 2016 Pollutant Discharge Permits System (PDPS) to evaluate its impact on innovation in the food processing industry. We begin by exploring the entry and exit decisions of food processing firms. The findings suggest that stricter environmental enforcement following the PDPS leads to decreased local firm entry but increased neighboring firm entry, indicating that new firms tend to locate in neighboring regions with less stringent regulations. Building upon this pattern, we argue that the PDPS’s positive impact on firm innovation is primarily driven by increased industry agglomeration – a dynamic directly stimulated by heterogeneous regulatory pressures.

The environmental effects of state ownership are still controversial. The ‘reverse privatization’ phenomenon of injecting state capital into non-state-owned enterprises offers a novel perspective to study the environmental impact of state ownership. Using data on Chinese listed companies from 2011 to 2021, this study empirically analyses the impact of state capital injections (SCAI) on firms’ green innovation. Our results reveal that SCAI has a positive effect on the quantity and quality of green innovation, reflecting the net outcome of opposing forces. SCAI promotes green innovation by enhancing firms’ innovative capabilities and willingness, increasing environmental regulatory pressure and reducing managerial myopia, though it may hinder such innovation by exacerbating agency problems and policy burdens. Moreover, SCAI’s positive effects on green innovation quantity and quality are more pronounced for firms with relatively high state capital control, in heavily polluting industries and in less marketized regions.

In a ruling delivered on 1 August 2025, the Court of Justice upheld a General Court judgment annulling the classification as a suspected carcinogen of titanium dioxide in powder form containing at least 1% of particles of a diameter equal to or below 10 μm. Both EU Courts criticise the scientific assessment underlying that classification, but the Court of Justice relies on conceptual distinctions that reveal its reluctance to perform a genuine “manifest error of assessment” review. While these issues are not addressed by the Court of Justice, the case also raises thorny questions regarding the meaning of “intrinsic properties” of a substance.

The lower Cambrian Cranbrook Burgess Shale-type Lagerstätte (Series 2, Stage 4) occurs within the Eager Formation of southeastern British Columbia, Canada. This deposit consists of claystone intercalated with normally graded mudstone, which has medium silt to very fine-grained sand and disarticulated skeletal debris near the bed bases, recording mostly accumulation from turbidity currents. Well known for its olenelloid trilobites in particular, the site also contains rare soft-bodied fossils, including Tuzoia carapaces and Anomalocaris claws, and low-diversity and low-density suites of ichnofossils. A 2015 systematic field investigation of a 2.65 m interval recovered 12 ichnotaxa and three types of trace fossils left in open nomenclature. The most abundant are Helminthoidichnites tenuis Fitch, 1850, Palaeophycus tubularis Hall, 1847, Diplocraterion isp., and finger-like structures (FLS). These trace fossils form two ichnocoenoses recurring through the studied interval: (1) the Helminthoidichnites tenuis ichnocoenosis, consisting of small trails and shallow burrows, and (2) the Diplocraterion isp. ichnocoenosis, consisting of paucispecific suites of U-shaped burrows, commonly associated with FLS. The FLS contain a diverse range of disarticulated or broken trilobite sclerites and grains coarser than the host sediment and are interpreted as passively infilled burrows, suggesting significant sediment bypass and trapping of transported grains. Overall, the Cranbrook ichnocoenoses do not display a well-defined tiering structure. The trace fossils overall record the activities of a surficial epifauna and a shallow-tier infauna that colonized the sea bottoms during short windows between episodic flows and inhabited dysoxic (Helminthodichnites tenuis ichnocoenosis) to relatively well-oxygenated (Diplocraterion isp. ichnocoenosis) outer shelf environments.

Social media often follow a visual logic found to increase engagement, as images are more likely to attract attention, presenting information on a holistic-associative basis. For a political entity like the EU, social media are a promising route to overcome the remoteness to its citizens, identified as one of the crucial challenges to its public legitimacy. Against this broader background, our study analyses the influence of 10 years of EU visual social media communication on user engagement as an indicator of successfully creating visibility in a crucial communication space. For this purpose, we conducted an image-type analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative features of visual analysis: First, a subsample of posts was inductively analysed to identify recurring image types and subsequently used to implement a manual quantitative visual content analysis. Building on the results, we drew on a machine learning approach, allowing us to analyse over 40,000 posts, including more than 20,000 pictures. Our results emphasise the crucial influence of social media affordances in explaining user engagement with EU visual social media communication. Implications are discussed with reference to the ongoing discussion about the EU’s democratic deficit.

In the 1970s, activists in the Youth International Party transformed new technologies and techniques in the American telephone system into tools for advancing the political aims of the New Left. The Yippies adopted new practices of telephone “hacking” or “phone phreaking” and developed these practices to manipulate, defraud, and protest the AT&T Bell System. Appeals to and protests of “the system” invoked the image of a broader American state. The practice of phone phreaking bridged the technical exploitation of AT&T with critiques of monopoly capitalism, state surveillance, postwar conformity, and American empire. By the late 1970s, as the New Left faded in prominence and the Bell System was itself broken up, the vernacular of system changed. Within an emerging “computer underground” of phreaks, hackers, and users connected through electronic bulletin board systems, the Yippie vernacular of system was reinterpreted as a critique of the state in the language of ascendant conservative and libertarian politics.

It is crucial to properly evaluate the traits that directly impact agricultural productivity. Some of these traits, such as soil erosion or crop diseases, are quantified with scoring systems. The resulting data are strictly ordinal and often have an underlying percentage scale. Deciding which model to use for this type of data is not straightforward. Ordinal scores do not meet the assumptions required for analysis of variance. Although multinomial ordinal models, particularly the threshold model, can be applied, they do not account for the underlying percentage scale of the data. To address this limitation, a hurdle model tailored for interval-censored percentage data is proposed. It is a two-part model that models the data according to its nature: In its first part, it models presence or absence of a disease (incidence), and in the second part it models severity or abundance. Individually modelling presence and absence in the first part allows to account for zero inflation. The second part implements theory from the threshold model and the Johnson SB system of distributions that involves a transformation of the percentage scale to a normal distribution. The model result also reflects the two components. They individually describe the degree of disease infestation, and the degree of disease spread. This improves interpretability and enables concrete, insightful conclusions. To illustrate the model, mildew scorings from an on-farm trial in grapevines were used. The model was found highly suitable for this dataset and superior to the threshold model.

Even though the incidence of conflicts between Fulani nomadic pastoralists and sedentary communities in Nigeria has risen significantly in the last decade, there is a notable lack of research examining how these conflicts influence distrust towards members of the Fulani ethnic group and Muslims. Using novel survey data from Kaduna, the state with the third-highest incidence of pastoral conflict in Nigeria, this study addresses that gap. Regression analyses show that exposure to pastoral conflict increases distrust towards the Fulani and Muslims. This suggests a contagion effect whereby the Fulani are conflated with the broader Muslim population, due to the Muslim identity of nomadic Fulani pastoralists. Disaggregating the data by religious affiliation reveals a pattern: conflict exposure raises distrust only among Muslim respondents, while effects are statistically insignificant among Christians. Among Muslims, the positive effect suggests that pastoral conflict erodes in-group cohesion. The null effect among Christians may reflect the way in which pastoral conflicts align with pre-existing religious fault lines.

Despite improvement over the past few decades, particularly for white, cisgender women, intersectional gender-based inequality remains prominent within anthropological archaeology and beyond. Building on critiques of the leaky pipeline metaphor laid out in the introduction to this themed issue, and drawing on Black, Indigenous, and Posthumanist Feminisms, we advocate for a metaphorical shift focused on care, inclusivity, and diversity—that of a garden. The garden metaphor provides a way to express and explore the complex and intertwined ways disciplinary norms, institutions, and individuals structure and shape experiences in archaeology. After reviewing the garden metaphor and summarizing previous suggestions for improving equity in archaeology, we present recommendations for actionable steps at disciplinary, institutional, supervisory, and individual levels. Drawing on insights from the articles in the issue, as well as existing literature within and beyond archaeology, we argue that a greater emphasis on care, and its integration into the value structure of archaeology, would create a more inclusive discipline.