Latecomer political science communities have faced multiple challenges in the past decades, including the very establishment of their professional identities. Based on the case study of Hungary, this article argues that publication performance is a substantial component of the identity of the political science profession. Hungary is a notable example among Central and East European (CEE) political science academia in the sense that both the initial take-off of the profession and then its increasing challenges are typical to the CEE region. In an inclusive approach, which encompasses all authors published in the field between 1990 and 2018, as well as their publication record, the analysis demonstrates that political science has undergone major expansion, quality growth and internationalisation but these performance qualities are unevenly spread. These reflect important aspects of the profession’s identity. This agency and performance-based approach to identity formation might well be used to build up identity features elsewhere and also in a comparative manner.

The basic principle of any version of insurance is the paradigm that exchanging risk by sharing it in a pool is beneficial for the participants. In case of independent risks with a finite mean, this is the case for risk-averse decision-makers. The situation may be very different in case of infinite mean models. In that case it is known that risk sharing may have a negative effect, which is sometimes called the nondiversification trap. This phenomenon is well known for infinite mean stable distributions. In a series of recent papers, similar results for infinite mean Pareto and Fréchet distributions have been obtained. We further investigate this property by showing that many of these results can be obtained as special cases of a simple result demonstrating that this holds for any distribution that is more skewed than a Cauchy distribution. We also relate this to the situation of deadly catastrophic risks, where we assume a positive probability for an infinite value. That case gives a very simple intuition why this phenomenon can occur for such catastrophic risks. We also mention several open problems and conjectures in this context.

P-value functions are modern statistical tools that unify effect estimation and hypothesis testing and can provide alternative point and interval estimates compared to standard meta-analysis methods, using any of the many p-value combination procedures available (Xie et al., 2011, JASA). We provide a systematic comparison of different combination procedures, both from a theoretical perspective and through simulation. We show that many prominent p-value combination methods (e.g. Fisher’s method) are not invariant to the orientation of the underlying one-sided p-values. Only Edgington’s method, a lesser-known combination method based on the sum of p-values, is orientation-invariant and still provides confidence intervals not restricted to be symmetric around the point estimate. Adjustments for heterogeneity can also be made and results from a simulation study indicate that Edgington’s method can compete with more standard meta-analytic methods.

Many models of investor behavior predict that investors prefer assets that they believe to have positively skewed return distributions. We elicit detailed return expectations for a broad index fund and a single stock in a representative sample of the Dutch population. The data show substantial heterogeneity in individuals’ skewness expectations of which only very little is captured by sociodemographics. Across assets, most respondents expect a higher variance and skewness for the individual stock compared to the index fund. Portfolio allocations increase with the skewness of respondents’ return expectations for the respective asset, controlling for other moments of a respondent’s expectations.

This paper studies the asymptotic distributions of three reliability coefficient estimates: Sample coefficient alpha, the reliability estimate of a composite score following a factor analysis, and the estimate of the maximal reliability of a linear combination of item scores following a factor analysis. Results indicate that the asymptotic distribution for each of the coefficient estimates, obtained based on a normal sampling distribution, is still valid within a large class of nonnormal distributions. Therefore, a formula for calculating the standard error of the sample coefficient alpha, recently obtained by van Zyl, Neudecker and Nel, applies to other reliability coefficients and can still be used even with skewed and kurtotic data such as are typical in the social and behavioral sciences.

Compositional data for 464 clay minerals (2:1 type) were analyzed by statistical techniques. The objective was to understand the similarities and differences between the groups and subgroups and to evaluate statistically clay mineral classification in terms of chemical parameters. The statistical properties of the distributions of total layer charge (TLC), K, VIAl, VIMg, octahedral charge (OC) and tetrahedral charge (TC) were initially evaluated. Critical-difference (P = 1%) comparisons of individual characteristics show that all the clay micas (illite, glauconite and celadonite) differ significantly from all the smectites (montmorillonite, beidellite, nontronite and saponite) only in their TLC and K levels; they cannot be distinguished by their VIAl, VIMg, TC or OC values which reveal no significant differences between several minerals.

Linear discriminant analysis using equal prior was therefore performed to analyze the combined effect of all the chemical parameters. Using six parameters [TLC, K, VIAl, VIMg, TC and OC], eight minerals groups could be derived, corresponding to the three clay micas, four smectites (mentioned above) and vermiculite. The fit between predicted and experimental values was 88.1%. Discriminant analysis using two parameters (TLC and K) resulted in classification into three broad groups corresponding to the clay micas, smectites and vermiculites (87.7% fit). Further analysis using the remaining four parameters resulted in subgroup-level classification with an 85–95% fit between predicted and experimental results. The three analyses yielded D2 Mahalanobis distances, which quantify chemical similarities and differences between the broad groups, within members of a subgroup and also between the subgroups. Classification functions derived here can be used as an aid for classification of 2:1 minerals.

Knowledge on genetic architecture and inheritance of tomato shelf life contributing traits in different genetic backgrounds is a key issue for shelf life improvement. An investigation was undertaken to estimate the nature and magnitude of variability, traits inter-relationships, third and fourth degree statistics to unravel the genetics of 18 fruit quality and yield traits governing shelflife in F2 population of ‘Arka Vikas’ × ‘Red ball’ cross. The wider standardized range and higher estimates of phenotypic coefficient of variation indicated prevalence of adequate variability for fruit quality and yield traits. Fruit firmness and pericarp thickness ranged from 1.20–3.44 kg/cm2 and 2.44–5.31 mm respectively. Pulp content and shelflife ranged from 58.59–94.70% and 10.60–26.40 days respectively. Significant positive correlation with direct effect on fruit shelf life was exhibited by fruit firmness, pericarp thickness, TSS, titratable acidity, pulp content, fruit length and locule number. Positive skewness with platykurtic distribution recorded for TSS, lycopene, ascorbic acid, titratable acidity, fruit length, weight, pericarp thickness, plant height and number of branches. Negatively skewed with platykurtic distribution observed for pH, fruit diameter, firmness, pulp content, locule number, shelf life and number of clusters which signified duplicate epistasis of dominant genes in traits inheritance. The transgressive segregants for fruit quality traits indicated complementary effects of dispersed allele combinations between parents. Additive and dominance components could be exploited in the advanced segregating population by evaluating large number of families. In addition to additive effects, predominance of dominance effects of genes are important in inheritance of fruit quality traits governing shelflife.

This paper investigates the ordering properties of largest claim amounts in heterogeneous insurance portfolios in the sense of some transform orders, including the convex transform order and the star order. It is shown that the largest claim amount from a set of independent and heterogeneous exponential claims is more skewed than that from a set of independent and homogeneous exponential claims in the sense of the convex transform order. As a result, a lower bound for the coefficient of variation of the largest claim amount is established without any restrictions on the parameters of the distributions of claim severities. Furthermore, sufficient conditions are presented to compare the skewness of the largest claim amounts from two sets of independent multiple-outlier scaled claims according to the star order. Some comparison results are also developed for the multiple-outlier proportional hazard rates claims. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate these theoretical results.