Around 50 years ago, the Netherlands decriminalized cannabis for recreational use. This paper uses retrospective data on the ages at which individuals began and ceased cannabis use to reconstruct its prevalence in Amsterdam during the period surrounding the policy change. This approach enables a...

Background: Predicting student performance in online learning is difficult due to class imbalance and limited model interpretability. At-risk students are fewer than high performers, biasing predictions, and methods like SMOTE fail to preserve temporal patterns. Although black-box models are...

The first Global Stocktake (GST1) underscored current gaps in climate ambition and implementation, and issued calls to align efforts with 1.5°C pathways, in particular for the energy sector in paragraph 28 of the GST1 decision. This paper analyses new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)...

European labour markets are facing major challenges due to the green, demographic, and digital transitions, with developments in technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) likely to reshape jobs. Accordingly, public employment services (PES) are increasingly providing preventive services...

The current study employs a longitudinal sample 2822 of Shenzhen and Shanghai A-share-listed firms between 2003 and 2017 to examine how directors' famine experiences influence dividend payout decisions. The findings suggest that directors with famine experience are positively associated with...

The U.S. nuclear industry has overcome a challenging period during which low wholesale market prices threatened the survival of nuclear power plants (NPPs). From 2017 to 2019, several U.S. states initiated out-of-market support schemes to bolster the financial conditions of NPPs. This paper...