Friday, May 24, 2013
America's got talent
Michael Clemens
American Economic Review, May 2013, Pages 198-202
Abstract:
Why do workers earn so much more in the United States than in India? This study compares the earnings of workers in the two countries in a unique setting. The product is perfectly tradable (software), technology differences are nil (they are members of the same work team), and the workers are identical in expectation (those who enter the United States are chosen by natural randomization). The results suggest that output tradability, technology, and human capital together explain much less than half of the earnings gap. Location itself may have large effects on individual workers' wages and productivity, for reasons poorly understood.
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Self-Selection and International Migration: New Evidence from Mexico
Robert Kaestner & Ofer Malamud
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the selection of Mexican migrants to the United States using novel data with rich pre-migration characteristics that include permanent migrants, return migrants, and migrating households. Results indicate that Mexican migrants are more likely to be young, male and from rural areas compared to non-migrants, but similar to non-migrants in cognitive ability and health. Migrants are selected from the middle of the education distribution. Male Mexican migrants are negatively selected on earnings, and this result is largely explained by differential returns to labor market skill between the U.S. and Mexico rather than proxies for differential costs of migration.
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Together in Good Times and Bad? How Economic Triggers Condition the Effects of Intergroup Threat
Alexandra Filindra & Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: Research has suggested that geosocial exposure to out-groups is associated with heightened threat perceptions on the part of the dominant white majority. However, findings are not consistent.
Methods: Drawing on realistic group conflict theory and research in political science that privileges the role of the economic context, we test if the effects of geosocial exposure are conditioned on individual expectations about the health of the macroeconomy using a unique data set from the New England states.
Results: We show that a perceived increase in the presence of immigrants in the community positively correlates with restrictionist immigration policy preferences (in this case support for Arizona's anti-immigration law), but only when people are pessimistic about the future of the state's economy.
Conclusion: The information provided by the social context becomes relevant for people's policy preference formation only when they experience or expect material loss.
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How Do Tougher Immigration Measures Affect Unauthorized Immigrants?
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Thitima Puttitanun & Ana Martinez-Donate
Demography, June 2013, Pages 1067-1091
Abstract:
The recent impetus of tougher immigration-related measures passed at the state level raises concerns about the impact of such measures on the migration experience, trajectory, and future plans of unauthorized immigrants. In a recent and unique survey of Mexican unauthorized immigrants interviewed upon their voluntary return or deportation to Mexico, almost a third reported experiencing difficulties in obtaining social or government services, finding legal assistance, or obtaining health care services. Additionally, half of these unauthorized immigrants reported fearing deportation. When we assess how the enactment of punitive measures against unauthorized immigrants, such as E-Verify mandates, has affected their migration experience, we find no evidence of a statistically significant association between these measures and the difficulties reported by unauthorized immigrants in accessing a variety of services. However, the enactment of these mandates infuses deportation fear, reduces interstate mobility among voluntary returnees during their last migration spell, and helps curb deportees' intent to return to the United States in the near future.
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Pathways to Adjustment: The Case of Information Technology Workers
John Bound et al.
American Economic Review, May 2013, Pages 203-207
Abstract:
One long-standing hypothesis about science and engineering labor markets is that the supply of highly skilled workers is likely to be inelastic in the short run. We consider the market for computer scientists and electrical engineers (IT workers) and the evolution of wages and employment through two periods of increased demand. Relative to the boom of the 1970s, the demand shock in the 1990s generated relatively greater changes in employment and smaller changes in wages. The growth in the pool of skilled workers abroad, combined with increased immigration in high-skill fields, is central to this story.
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Non-native speakers of English in the classroom: What are the effects on pupil performance?
Charlotte Geay, Sandra McNally & Shqiponja Telhaj
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
There has been an increase in the number of children going to school in England who do not speak English as a first language. We investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native English speakers at the end of primary school. We show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an artefact of selection: non-native speakers are more likely to attend school with disadvantaged native speakers. We attempt to identify a causal impact of changes in the percentage of non-native speakers. Our results suggest zero effect and rule out negative effects.
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Integration as a catalyst for assimilation
Oded Stark & Marcin Jakubeke
International Review of Economics & Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We draw a distinction between the social integration and economic assimilation of migrants, and study an interaction between the two. We define social integration as blending into the host country's society, and economic assimilation as acquisition of human capital that is specific to the host country's labor market. We show that a non-integrated migrant finds it optimal to acquire a relatively limited quantity of human capital; with fellow migrants constituting his only comparison group, a non-integrated migrant does not have a relative-deprivation-based incentive to close the income gap with the natives. However, when a migrant is made to integrate, his social proximity to the natives exposes him to relative deprivation, which in turn prompts him to form more destination-specific human capital in order to increase his earnings and narrow the income gap with the natives. In this way, social integration becomes a catalyst for economic assimilation.
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Legal Status and Educational Transitions for Mexican and Central American Immigrant Youth
Emily Greenman & Matthew Hall
Social Forces, June 2013, Pages 1475-1498
Abstract:
This study uses the Survey of Income and Program Participation to infer the legal status of Mexican and Central American immigrant youth and to investigate its relationship with educational attainment. We assess differences by legal status in high school graduation and college enrollment, decompose differences in college enrollment into the probability of high school graduation and the probability of high school graduates' enrollment in college and estimate the contributions of personal and family background characteristics to such differences. Results show that undocumented students are less likely than documented students to both graduate from high school and enroll in college, and differences in college enrollment cannot be explained by family background characteristics. We conclude that legal status is a critical axis of stratification for Latinos.
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Achieving the DREAM: The Effect of IRCA on Immigrant Youth Postsecondary Educational Access
Kalena Cortes
American Economic Review, May 2013, Pages 428-432
Abstract:
This paper contributes to the existing literature on the effect of legal status on educational access among immigrant youth in the United States. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants who entered the United States before 1982. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I analyze the effect of this large amnesty program on immigrant youth's postsecondary educational access. My main finding shows that immigrant youths who were granted amnesty under IRCA are more likely to enroll in postsecondary education.
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Does the Clustering of Immigrant Peers Affect the School Performance of Natives?
Inés Hardoy & Pål Schøne
Journal of Human Capital, Spring 2013, Pages 1-25
Abstract:
We analyze whether the proportion of immigrant students affects the school performance of natives in secondary school, measured by dropout. To derive causal statements, we construct a time-varying school quality indicator exploiting potential random variation in the number of immigrants within the same school. The results reveal a positive and significant relationship between the proportion of immigrants and the dropout rate of natives. It is only with larger proportions of immigrants that we find significant peer effects. Regarding the mechanisms of influence, our results point to the importance of peer quality.
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How immigrant children affect the academic achievement of native Dutch children
Asako Ohinata & Jan van Ours
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we analyse how the share of immigrant children in the classroom affects the educational attainment of native Dutch children. Our analysis uses data from various sources, which allow us to characterize educational attainment in terms of reading literacy, mathematical skills and science skills. Our results suggests that Dutch students face a worse learning environment when they are studying with more immigrant students in the classroom. However, we do not find strong evidence of negative spill-over effects from the presence of immigrant children on the academic performance of the native Dutch students.
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International Migration, Sex Ratios, and the Socioeconomic Outcomes of Nonmigrant Mexican Women
Steven Raphael
Demography, June 2013, Pages 971-991
Abstract:
This article assesses whether international migration from Mexico affects the marital, fertility, schooling, and employment outcomes of the Mexican women who remain behind by exploiting variation over time as well as across Mexican states in the demographic imbalance between men and women. I construct a gauge of the relative supply of men for women of different age groups based on state-level male and female population counts and the empirically observed propensity of men of specific ages to marry women of specific ages. Using Mexican census data from 1960 through 2000, I estimate a series of models in which the dependent variable is the intercensus change in an average outcome for Mexican women measured by state and for specific age groups, and the key explanatory variable is the change in the relative supply of men to women in that state/age group. I find that the declining relative supply of males positively and significantly affects the proportion of women who have never been married as well as the proportion of women who have never had a child. In addition, states experiencing the largest declines in the relative supply of men also experience relatively large increases in female educational attainment and female employment rates. However, I find little evidence that women who do marry match to men who are younger or less educated than themselves.
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Immigrant-native wage gaps in time series: Complementarities or composition effects?
Joakim Ruist
Economics Letters, May 2013, Pages 154-156
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that immigrants' wages decrease when the supply of immigrants increases. This negative correlation has been interpreted as evidence of immigrant-native complementarities in production. The present study finds that it is instead due to changing immigrant composition.
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The Scale and Selectivity of Foreign-Born PhD Recipients in the US
Jeffrey Grogger & Gordon Hanson
American Economic Review, May 2013, Pages 189-192
Abstract:
We study the scale and selectivity of foreign-born PhD students in science and engineering. We focus on students from China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, which together account for most roughly one-third of science and engineering PhD students in the United States. The selectivity of these students is high, as measured by their fathers' relative education levels. In China and India, fathers of students who receive US PhDs in these fields are roughly 15 times more likely to have a BA degree than their contemporaries are to have tertiary education. Over time, selectivity falls for China but the trend for other countries is ambiguous.
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Serge Guimond et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In contrast to authors of previous single-nation studies, we propose that supporting multiculturalism (MC) or assimilation (AS) is likely to have different effects in different countries, depending on the diversity policy in place in a particular country and the associated norms. A causal model of intergroup attitudes and behaviors, integrating both country-specific factors (attitudes and perceived norms related to a particular diversity policy) and general social-psychological determinants (social dominance orientation), was tested among participants from countries where the pro-diversity policy was independently classified as low, medium, or high (N = 1,232). Results showed that (a) anti-Muslim prejudice was significantly reduced when the pro-diversity policy was high; (b) countries differed strongly in perceived norms related to MC and AS, in ways consistent with the actual diversity policy in each country and regardless of participants' personal attitudes toward MC and AS; (c) as predicted, when these norms were salient, due to subtle priming, structural equation modeling with country included as a variable provided support for the proposed model, suggesting that the effect of country on prejudice can be successfully accounted by it; and (d) consistent with the claim that personal support for MC and AS played a different role in different countries, within-country mediation analyses provided evidence that personal attitudes toward AS mediated the effect of social dominance orientation on prejudice when pro-diversity policy was low, whereas personal attitudes toward MC was the mediator when pro-diversity policy was high. Thus, the critical variables shaping prejudice can vary across nations.
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Juan Manuel Falomir-Pichastor et al.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies examined the influence of an anti-discrimination norm on Swiss nationals' discrimination against foreigners as a function of initial attitude (pro-foreigner vs. anti-foreigner) and in-group threat (i.e., whether or not foreigners are perceived as taking nationals' jobs). Results showed that anti-foreigners decreased their level of discrimination (i.e., a conformity effect) when threat was low, but did not change (Study 1) or increased discrimination (i.e., a counter-conformity effect) when threat was high (Study 2). No significant effects were observed for pro-foreigners. It is argued that conformity to anti-discrimination norms increases as the individual-norm discrepancy increases, insofar as the social context provides legitimacy to this norm (i.e., low in-group threat conditions).
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Arjumand Siddiqi et al.
Journal of Public Health Policy, May 2013, Pages 330-344
Background: We compare disparities in health status between first-generation immigrants and others in the United States (US) and Canada.
Methods: We used data from the Joint Canada-US Survey of Health. The regression models adjusted for demographics, socioeconomic status, and health insurance (the US).
Results: In both countries, the health advantage belonged to immigrants. Fewer disparities between immigrants and those native-born were seen in Canada versus the US. Canadians of every immigrant/race group fared better than US native-born Whites.
Discussion: Fewer disparities in Canada and better overall health of all Canadians suggest that societal context may create differences in access to the resources, environments, and experiences that shape health and health behaviors.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Weighed down
Maternal Employment and Childhood Obesity - A European Perspective
Wencke Gwozdz et al.
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The substantial increase in female employment rates in Europe over the past two decades has often been linked in political and public rhetoric to negative effects on child development, including obesity. We analyse this association between maternal employment and childhood obesity using rich objective reports of various anthropometric and other measures of fatness from the IDEFICS study of children aged 2-9 in 16 regions of eight European countries. Based on such data as accelerometer measures and information from nutritional diaries, we also investigate the effects of maternal employment on obesity's main drivers: calorie intake and physical activity. Our analysis provides little evidence for an association between maternal employment and childhood obesity, diet or physical activity.
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Alison Hope Alkon et al.
Geoforum, August 2013, Pages 126-135
Abstract:
In the past decade, progressive public health advocates and food justice activists have increasingly argued that food deserts, which they define as neighborhoods lacking available healthy foods, are responsible for the diet-related health problems that disproportionately plague low-income communities of color. This well meaning approach is a marked improvement over the victim-blaming that often accompanies popular portrayals of health disparities in that it attempts to shift the emphasis from individual eaters to structural issues of equitable development and the supply of health-inducing opportunities. However, we argue that even these supply-side approaches fail to take into account the foodways - cultural, social and economic food practices, habits and desires - of those who reside in so-called food deserts. In this paper, we present five independently conducted studies from Oakland and Chicago that investigate how low-income people eat, where and how they shop, and what motivates their food choices. Our data reveals that cost, not lack of knowledge or physical distance, is the primary barrier to healthy food access, and that low-income people employ a wide variety of strategies to obtain the foods they prefer at prices they can afford. This paper speaks to academic debates on food systems, food movements and food cultures. We hope that progressive policy makers, planners and food justice activists will also draw on it to ensure that their interventions match the needs, skills and desires of those they seek to serve.
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Obesity in Men With Childhood ADHD: A 33-Year Controlled, Prospective, Follow-up Study
Samuele Cortese et al.
Pediatrics, forthcoming
Objective: To compare BMI and obesity rates in fully grown men with and without childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We predicted higher BMI and obesity rates in: (1) men with, versus men without, childhood ADHD; (2) men with persistent, versus men with remitted, ADHD; and (3) men with persistent or remitted ADHD versus those without childhood ADHD.
Methods: Men with childhood ADHD were from a cohort of 207 white boys (referred at a mean age of 8.3 years), interviewed blindly at mean ages 18 (FU18), 25 (FU25), and 41 years (FU41). At FU18, 178 boys without ADHD were recruited. At FU41, 111 men with childhood ADHD and 111 men without childhood ADHD self-reported their weight and height.
Results: Men with childhood ADHD had significantly higher BMI (30.1 ± 6.3 vs 27.6 ± 3.9; P = .001) and obesity rates (41.4% vs 21.6%; P = .001) than men without childhood ADHD. Group differences remained significant after adjustment for socioeconomic status and lifetime mental disorders. Men with persistent (n = 24) and remitted (n = 87) ADHD did not differ significantly in BMI or obesity rates. Even after adjustment, men with remitted (but not persistent) ADHD had significantly higher BMI (B: 2.86 [95% CI: 1.22 to 4.50]) and obesity rates (odds ratio: 2.99 [95% CI: 1.55 to 5.77]) than those without childhood ADHD.
Conclusions: Children with ADHD are at increased risk of obesity as adults. Findings of elevated BMI and obesity rates in men with remitted ADHD require replication.
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Physicians build less rapport with obese patients
Kimberly Gudzune et al.
Obesity, forthcoming
Objective: Physicians' negative attitudes towards patients with obesity are well documented. Whether or how these beliefs may affect patient-physician communication is unknown. We aimed to describe the relationship between patient BMI and physician communication behaviors (biomedical, psychosocial/lifestyle, and rapport building) during typical outpatient primary care visits.
Design and Methods: Using audio-recorded outpatient encounters from 39 urban PCPs and 208 of their patients, we examined the frequency of communication behaviors using the Roter Interaction Analysis System. The independent variable was measured patient BMI and dependent variables were communication behaviors by the PCP within the biomedical, psychosocial/lifestyle, and rapport building domains. We performed a cross-sectional analysis using multilevel Poisson regression models to evaluate the association between BMI and physician communication.
Results: PCPs demonstrated less emotional rapport with overweight and obese patients (IRR 0.65, 95%CI 0.48-0.88, p=0.01; IRR 0.69, 95%CI 0.58-0.82, p<0.01, respectively) than for normal weight patients. We found no differences in PCPs' biomedical or psychosocial/lifestyle communication by patient BMI.
Conclusions: Our findings raise the concern that low levels of emotional rapport in primary care visits with overweight and obese patients may weaken the patient-physician relationship, diminish patients' adherence to recommendations, and decrease the effectiveness of behavior change counseling.
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Angelina Sutin et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reciprocal relations between weight and psychological factors suggest that there are deep connections between mind and body. Personality traits are linked to weight gain; weight gain may likewise be associated with personality change. Using data from two diverse longitudinal samples (N = 1,919) collected at two time points an average of 10 years apart, we showed that significant weight gain is associated with increases in both impulsiveness and deliberation: In both samples, middle-aged adults who gained 10% or more of their baseline body weight by follow-up increased in their tendency to give in to temptation, yet were more thoughtful about the consequences of their actions. The present research moves beyond life events to implicate health status in adult personality development. The findings also suggest that interventions focusing on the emotional component of impulse control may be more effective because even people who become more thoughtful about the consequences of their actions may have limited success at inhibiting their behavior.
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The Impact of Physical Education on Obesity among Elementary School Children
John Cawley, David Frisvold & Chad Meyerhoefer
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In response to the dramatic rise in childhood obesity, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other organizations have advocated increasing the amount of time that elementary school children spend in physical education (PE) classes. However, little is known about the effect of PE on child weight. This paper measures that effect by instrumenting for child PE time with the state's mandated minimum number of minutes of PE, using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) for 1998-2004. Results from IV models indicate that PE lowers BMI z-score and reduces the probability of obesity among 5th graders. This effect is concentrated among boys; we find evidence that this gender difference is partly attributable to PE being a complement with other physical activity for boys, whereas they are substitutes for girls. This represents some of the first evidence of a causal effect of PE on youth obesity, and thus offers at least some support for the assumptions behind the CDC recommendations. We find no evidence that increased PE time crowds out time in academic courses or has spillovers to achievement test scores.
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Sonya Grier & Brennan Davis
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, May 2013, Pages 116-128
Abstract:
Prior research has demonstrated that the proximity of fast-food restaurants to schools is related to higher youth body weight and also suggests that this relationship may be stronger in urban areas. Research also suggests that some segments of youth may be more vulnerable to this relationship than others. The authors investigate the relationship of fast-food proximity to middle and high schools and adolescent weight outcomes, with a focus on understanding intra-urban differences across groups defined by ethnicity and school income. Their results suggest that body weight associations with proximity to a fast-food restaurant from school are not equal for all youth. Black and Hispanic students at low-income and urban schools have higher associations between school-fast food distance and youth body weight, up to four times greater than general distance associations. The authors discuss their findings in light of the complexity of understanding the relationship between retail marketing proximity and weight-related associations among youth, as well as obesity disparities.
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Obesity, School Obesity Prevalence, and Adolescent Childbearing among U.S. Young Women
Jennifer Kane & Michelle Frisco
Social Science & Medicine, July 2013, Pages 108-115
Abstract:
In the United States, adolescent obesity reduces young women's odds of forming romantic and sexual partnerships but increases the likelihood of risky sexual behavior when partnerships occur. This led us to conduct a study examining the relationship between adolescent obesity and adolescent childbearing. Our study has two aims. We draw from prior research to develop and test competing hypotheses about the association between adolescent obesity and young women's risk of an adolescent birth. Drawing from risk regulation theory, we also examine whether the association between obesity and young women's risk of an adolescent birth may vary across high schools with different proportions of obese adolescents. Multilevel logistic regression models are used to analyze data from 4,242 female students in 102 U.S. high schools who participated in Wave I (1994-5) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Results are the first to show that obesity reduces female adolescents' odds of childbearing, but that this association is not uniform across schools with different proportions of obese students. As the obesity prevalence in a school increases, so do obese young women's odds of childbearing. We conclude that understanding whether and how obesity is associated with young women's odds of having an adolescent birth requires attention to the weight context of high schools.
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Academic Performance and Childhood Misnourishment: A Quantile Approach
Kristen Capogrossi & Wen You
Journal of Family and Economic Issues, June 2013, Pages 141-156
Abstract:
This study assesses the impact of childhood BMI (underweight and overweight) on academic performance using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class. The modeling framework is innovative in that it focuses primarily on (i) controlling for potential endogeneity of BMI on academic performance (as both may be driven by other household characteristics), and (ii) examining marginal effects for the tails of the performance distribution (i.e., those lower performing students). We use Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression to address these two issues. We found that a child BMI had differential impacts across the performance distribution: it affected lower performing students more and may contribute to the achievement gap.
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Harvesting More Than Vegetables: The Potential Weight Control Benefits of Community Gardening
Cathleen Zick et al.
American Journal of Public Health, June 2013, Pages 1110-1115
Objectives: We examined the association of participation in community gardening with healthy body weight.
Methods: We examined body mass index (BMI) data from 198 community gardening participants in Salt Lake City, Utah, in relationship to BMI data for 3 comparison groups: neighbors, siblings, and spouses. In comparisons, we adjusted for gender, age, and the year of the BMI measurement.
Results: Both women and men community gardeners had significantly lower BMIs than did their neighbors who were not in the community gardening program. The estimated BMI reductions in the multivariate analyses were -1.84 for women and -2.36 for men. We also observed significantly lower BMIs for women community gardeners compared with their sisters (-1.88) and men community gardeners compared with their brothers (-1.33). Community gardeners also had lower odds of being overweight or obese than did their otherwise similar neighbors.
Conclusions: The health benefits of community gardening may go beyond enhancing the gardeners' intake of fruits and vegetables. Community gardens may be a valuable element of land use diversity that merits consideration by public health officials who want to identify neighborhood features that promote health.
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Do They Know What Is at Risk? Health Risk Perception among the Obese
Joachim Winter & Amelie Wuppermann
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The perception of health risks and risky health behaviors are closely associated. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy of health risk perceptions among obese individuals, aged 50-62 years. We compare subjective risk perceptions for various diseases elicited in the American Life Panel to individual's objective risks of the same diseases. We find that obese individuals significantly underestimate their 5-year risks of arthritis or rheumatism and hypertension, whereas they systematically overestimate their 5-year risks of a heart attack and a stroke. Obese individuals are thus aware of some but not all obesity-related health risks. For given diseases, we document substantial heterogeneities in the accuracy of expectations across individuals.
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Adolescent Purchasing Behavior at McDonald's and Subway
Lenard Lesser et al.
Journal of Adolescent Health, forthcoming
Purpose: To assess whether adolescents purchasing food at a restaurant marketed as "healthy" (Subway) purchase fewer calories than at a competing chain (McDonald's).
Methods: We studied 97 adolescents who purchased a meal at both restaurants on different days, using each participant as his or her control. We compared the difference in calories purchased by adolescents at McDonald's and Subway in a diverse area of Los Angeles, CA.
Results: Adolescents purchased an average of 1,038 calories (standard error of the mean [SEM]: 41) at McDonald's and 955 calories (SEM 39) at Subway. The difference of 83 calories (95% confidence interval [CI]: -20 to 186) was not statistically significant (p = .11). At McDonald's, participants purchased significantly more calories from drinks (151 vs. 61, p < .01) and from side dishes (i.e., French fries or potato chips; 201 at McDonald's vs. 35 at Subway, p < .01). In contrast, they purchased fewer cups of vegetables at McDonald's (.15 vs. .57 cups, p < .01).
Conclusions: We found that, despite being marketed as "healthy," adolescents purchasing a meal at Subway order just as many calories as at McDonald's. Although Subway meals had more vegetables, meals from both restaurants are likely to contribute to overeating.
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Do Environmental Interventions Impact Elementary School Students' Lunchtime Milk Selection?
Keiko Goto et al.
Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, June 2013, Pages 360-376
Abstract:
This paper examines whether environmental interventions increase elementary-school students' selection of white milk in the school cafeteria. At intervention school one, white milk was easily accessible, but students had to ask for chocolate milk. Here, intervention students significantly increased their selection of white milk. Further, there was no significant change in the ratio of white milk consumed to white milk selected during the examined period. At intervention school two, the visual cue of a threefold greater quantity of white compared to chocolate milk did not significantly alter selection patterns. These findings demonstrate that school-based practices that apply the theory of behavioral economics may offer useful policies and strategies for improving food selections.
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When Value Trumps Health in a Supersized World
Kelly Haws & Karen Page Winterich
Journal of Marketing, May 2013, Pages 48-64
Abstract:
Marketers often offer consumers the option to "supersize" a food purchase intended for immediate consumption. Supersized products may be attractive to consumers from the standpoint of the unit pricing because ordering a larger size of the same product results in a per-unit savings and offers consumers the opportunity to meet their value-based financial goals. In this article, the authors show that such pricing strategies not only lead to greater purchase and consumption but do so by affecting important consumer goals in unrelated domains - namely, by decreasing the importance placed on health goals. Although supersized pricing can have a powerful effect on purchase behavior, providing health cues can prevent the decreased focus on health. In addition, supersized pricing can be used to increase size choice of healthy foods. The authors discuss the study's contributions to theory, particularly for understanding decisions regarding the pursuit of multiple goals and, more specifically, those that lie at the intersection of health and finance. In addition, the results suggest both marketing and public policy implications, including those for the obesity epidemic and frequent use of supersized pricing strategies for unhealthy foods.
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Density and Proximity of Fast Food Restaurants and Body Mass Index Among African Americans
Lorraine Reitzel et al.
American Journal of Public Health, forthcoming
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to address current gaps in the literature by examining the associations of fast food restaurant (FFR) density around the home and FFR proximity to the home, respectively, with body mass index (BMI) among a large sample of African American adults from Houston, Texas.
Methods: We used generalized linear models with generalized estimating equations to examine associations of FFR density at 0.5-, 1-, 2-, and 5-mile road network buffers around the home with BMI and associations of the closest FFR to the home with BMI. All models were adjusted for a range of individual-level covariates and neighborhood socioeconomic status. We additionally investigated the moderating effects of household income on these relations. Data were collected from December 2008 to July 2009.
Results: FFR density was not associated with BMI in the main analyses. However, FFR density at 0.5, 1, and 2 miles was positively associated with BMI among participants with lower incomes (P ≤ .025). Closer FFR proximity was associated with higher BMI among all participants (P < .001), with stronger associations emerging among those of lower income (P < .013) relative to higher income (P < .014).
Conclusions: Additional research with more diverse African American samples is needed, but results supported the potential for the fast food environment to affect BMI among African Americans, particularly among those of lower economic means.
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C.S. Srinivasan
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The facilitation of healthier dietary choices by consumers is a key element of government strategies to combat the rising incidence of obesity in developed and developing countries. Public health campaigns to promote healthier eating often target compliance with recommended dietary guidelines for consumption of individual nutrients such as fats and added sugars. This paper examines the association between improved compliance with dietary guidelines for individual nutrients and excess calorie intake, the most proximate determinant of obesity risk. We apply quantile regressions and counterfactual decompositions to cross-sectional data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (2000-01) to assess how excess calorie consumption patterns in the UK are likely to change with improved compliance with dietary guidelines. We find that the effects of compliance vary significantly across different quantiles of calorie consumption. Our results show that compliance with dietary guidelines for individual nutrients, even if successfully achieved, is likely to be associated with only modest shifts in excess calorie consumption patterns. Consequently, public health campaigns that target compliance with dietary guidelines for specific nutrients in isolation are unlikely to have a significant effect on the obesity risk faced by the population.
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Amy Carroll-Scott et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Obesity prevalence among US children and adolescents has tripled in the past three decades. Consequently, dramatic increases in chronic disease incidence are expected, particularly among populations already experiencing health disparities. Recent evidence identifies characteristics of "obesogenic" neighborhood environments that affect weight and weight-related behaviors. This study aimed to examine associations between built, socioeconomic, and social characteristics of a child's residential environment on body mass index (BMI), diet, and physical activity. We focused on pre-adolescent children living in New Haven, Connecticut to better understand neighborhood environments' contribution to persistent health disparities. Participants were 1048 fifth and sixth grade students who completed school-based health surveys and physical measures in fall 2009. Student data were linked to 2000 US Census, parks, retailer, and crime data. Analyses were conducted using multilevel modeling. Property crimes and living further from a grocery store were associated with higher BMI. Students living within a 5-minute walk of a fast food outlet had higher BMI, and those living in a tract with higher density of fast food outlets reported less frequent healthy eating and more frequent unhealthy eating. Students' reported perceptions of access to parks, playgrounds, and gyms were associated with more frequent healthy eating and exercise. Students living in more affluent neighborhoods reported more frequent healthy eating, less unhealthy eating, and less screen time. Neighborhood social ties were positively associated with frequency of exercise. In conclusion, distinct domains of neighborhood environment characteristics are independently related to children's BMI and health behaviors. Findings link healthy behaviors with built, social, and socioeconomic environment assets (access to parks, social ties, affluence), and unhealthy behaviors with built environment inhibitors (access to fast food outlets), suggesting neighborhood environments are an important level at which to intervene to prevent childhood obesity and its adverse consequences.
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Angelina Sutin et al.
Psychosomatic Medicine, forthcoming
Objective: Personality traits related to high neuroticism and low conscientiousness are consistently associated with obesity. Hormones implicated in appetite and metabolism, such as leptin, may also be related to personality and may contribute to the association between these traits and obesity. The present research examined the association between leptin and Five Factor Model personality traits.
Methods: A total of 5214 participants (58% women; mean [standard deviation] age = 44.42 [15.93] years; range, 18-94 years) from the SardiNIA project completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, a comprehensive measure of personality traits, and their blood samples were assayed for leptin.
Results: As expected, lower conscientiousness was associated with higher circulating levels of leptin (r = -0.05, p < .001), even after controlling for body mass index, waist circumference, or inflammatory markers (r = -0.05, p < .001). Neuroticism, in contrast, was unrelated to leptin (r = 0.01, p = .31).
Conclusions: Individuals who are impulsive and lack discipline (low conscientiousness) may develop leptin resistance, which could be one factor that contributes to obesity, whereas the relation between a proneness to anxiety and depression (high neuroticism) and obesity may be mediated through other physiological and/or behavioral pathways.
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Childhood maltreatment and obesity: Systematic review and meta-analysis
A. Danese & M. Tan
Molecular Psychiatry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Obesity is a prevalent global-health problem associated with substantial morbidity, impairment and economic burden. Because most readily available forms of treatment are ineffective in the long term, it is essential to advance knowledge of obesity prevention by identifying potentially modifiable risk factors. Findings from experimental studies in non-human primates suggest that adverse childhood experiences may influence obesity risk. However, observations from human studies showed heterogeneous results. To address these inconsistencies, we performed Medline, PsycInfo and Embase searches till 1 August 2012 for articles examining the association between childhood maltreatment and obesity. We then conducted a meta-analysis of the identified studies and explored the effects of various possible sources of bias. A meta-analysis of 41 studies (190 285 participants) revealed that childhood maltreatment was associated with elevated risk of developing obesity over the life-course (odds ratio=1.36; 95% confidence interval=1.26-1.47). Results were not explained by publication bias or undue influence of individual studies. Overall, results were not significantly affected by the measures or definitions used for maltreatment or obesity, nor by confounding by childhood or adult socioeconomic status, current smoking, alcohol intake or physical activity. However, the association was not statistically significant in studies of children and adolescents, focusing on emotional neglect, or adjusting for current depression. Furthermore, the association was stronger in samples including more women and whites, but was not influenced by study quality. Child maltreatment is a potentially modifiable risk factor for obesity. Future research should clarify the mechanisms through which child maltreatment affects obesity risk and explore methods to remediate this effect.
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TV Viewing and BMI by Race/Ethnicity and Socio-Economic Status
Kerem Shuval, Kelley Pettee Gabriel & Tammy Leonard
PLoS ONE, May 2013
Objective: To assess the association between TV viewing and obesity by race/ethnicity and socio-economic status.
Design: Cross-sectional analysis of 5,087 respondents to the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), a nationally representative sample of US adults. Multivariate regression models were computed to assess the association between quartiles of TV viewing and BMI, stratified by race/ethnicity, educational attainment, employment and health insurance status.
Results: Findings indicate that increased TV viewing was associated with higher odds for being overweight/obese in the entire sample, while adjusting for physical activity and other confounders. After stratification by race/ethnicity, increased odds for overweight/obesity in the 3rd and 4th quartiles of TV viewing (e.g., 3rd quartile- cumulative OR = 1.43, 95%CI 1.07-1.92) was observed in non-Hispanic whites, with statistical significance. In non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics, the odds were similar to whites, but did not reach statistical significance. Significant relations between greater TV viewing and increased BMI were observed in college graduates and non-graduates, those with health insurance and the employed.
Conclusions: This study extends previous research by examining potential inconsistencies in this association between various racial/ethnic groups and some socio-economic variables, which primarily were not found.
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News Coverage of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Taxes: Pro- and Antitax Arguments in Public Discourse
Jeff Niederdeppe et al.
American Journal of Public Health, June 2013, Pages e92-e98
Objectives: We examined news coverage of public debates about large taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) to illuminate how the news media frames the debate and to inform future efforts to promote obesity-related public policy.
Methods: We conducted a quantitative content analysis in which we assessed how frequently 30 arguments supporting or opposing SSB taxes appeared in national news media and in news outlets serving jurisdictions where SSB taxes were proposed between January 2009 and June 2011.
Results: News coverage included more discrete protax than antitax arguments on average. Supportive arguments about the health consequences and financial benefits of SSB taxes appeared most often. The most frequent opposing arguments focused on how SSB taxes would hurt the economy and how they constituted inappropriate governmental intrusion.
Conclusions: News outlets that covered the debate on SSB taxes in their jurisdictions framed the issue in largely favorable ways. However, because these proposals have not gained passage, it is critical for SSB tax advocates to reach audiences not yet persuaded about the merits of this obesity prevention policy.
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Effect of Skipping Breakfast on Subsequent Energy Intake
David Levitsky & Carly Paconowski
Physiology & Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The objective was to examine the effect of consuming breakfast on subsequent energy intake. Participants who habitually ate breakfast and those who skipped breakfast were recruited for two studies. Using a randomized crossover design , the first study, examined the effect of having participants consume either (a) no breakfast, (b) a high carbohydrate breakfast (335 kcals) or (c) a high fiber breakfast (360) kcals on three occasions and measured ad libitum intake at lunch. The second study again used a randomized crossover design but with a larger, normal carbohydrate, breakfast consumed ad libitum. Intake averaged 624 kcals and subsequent food intake was measured throughout the day. Participants ate only foods served from the Cornell Human Metabolic Research Unit where all foods were weighed before and after consumption. In the first study, neither eating breakfast nor the kind of breakfast consumed had an effect on the amount consumed at lunch despite a reduction in hunger ratings. In the second study, intake at lunch as well as hunger ratings was significantly increased after skipping breakfast, by 144 Kcal, leaving a net caloric deficit of 408 Kcal by the end of the day. These data are consistent with published literature demonstrating that skipping a meal does not result in accurate energy compensation at subsequent meals and suggests that skipping breakfast may be an effective means to reduce daily energy intake in some adults.
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Obesity as a status cue: Perceived social status and the stereotypes of obese individuals
Lenny Vartanian & Keri Silverstein
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies examined the relationship between social status and obesity stereotypes. In Study 1, obese individuals were seen as having lower status than non-obese individuals, and status ratings were positively correlated with common obesity stereotypes. In Study 2, targets were depicted as overweight or lean, and as having a high-status or low-status job. High-status heavy targets were rated as less lazy and more competent than were their low-status counterparts, but status did not impact ratings of sloppiness or warmth. The findings indicate that obesity can serve as a status cue. Furthermore, the findings provide preliminary evidence that status is related to the attribution of certain stereotypes to obese individuals, while also highlighting the multifaceted nature of obesity stereotypes.
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Sigridur Eidsdóttir et al.
Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, June 2013, Pages 384-391
Aims: To investigate whether the secular trend in the increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity among 16- to 20-year-old adolescents in Iceland varied by levels of parental education and family structure.
Methods: Odds ratios were calculated from repeated population-based, cross-sectional surveys comprising cohorts of 16- to 20-year-old Icelandic adolescents attending junior colleges in 1992 (n=4,922), 2004 (n=11,031), 2007 (n=11,229), and 2010 (n=11,388). Body mass index (BMI) was calculated from self-reported weight and height and categorised as normal weight or overweight and obese, and examined in relation to parental education level and family structure.
Results: The odds of being overweight increased by 2.62 and 1.71 for boys and girls respectively over each of the survey time points. The prevalence of overweight and obesity increased across all three subgroups (low, medium, and high) of parental education level. The probability of overweight across all years were consistently the highest for youths with parents in the low-education category followed by middle-educated and high-educated parental background (p<0.05). The gap in overweight and obesity trends between respondents' parental education backgrounds increased over time and was generally explained more by the fathers' education than by the mothers' education (p<0.05). Family structure was not associated with the prevalence of overweight and obesity in our data.
Conclusions: Differences in parental levels of education are associated with accelerating trends in prevalence of overweight and obesity among 16- to 20-year-old adolescents in Iceland.
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Marcel Bilger et al.
Medical Care, June 2013, Pages 471-477
Objectives: To test whether overweight or obese employees who achieve clinically significant weight loss of ≥5% have reduced medical expenditures, absenteeism, presenteeism, and/or improved Health-Related Quality Of Life (HRQOL).
Methods: The sample analyzed combines data from full-time overweight or obese employees who took part in one of the WAY to Health weight loss studies: 1 that took place in 17 community colleges (935 employees) and another in 12 universities (933), all in North Carolina. The estimations are performed using nonlinear difference-in-difference models where groups are identified by whether the employee achieved a ≥5% weight loss (treated) or not (control) and the treatment variable indicates preweight and postweight loss intervention. The outcomes analyzed are the average quarterly (90 d) amount of medical claims paid by the health insurer, number of days missed at work during the past month, Stanford Presenteeism Scale SPS-6, and the EQ-5D-3L measure of HRQOL.
Results: We find statistical evidence supporting that ≥5% weight loss prevents deterioration in EQ-5D-3L scores by 0.026 points (P-value=0.03) and reduces both absenteeism by 0.258 d/mo (P-value=0.093) and the likelihood of showing low presenteeism (Stanford SPS-6 score between 7 and 9) by 2.9 percentage points (P-value=0.083). No reduction in medical expenditures was observed.
Conclusions: Clinically significant weight loss among overweight or obese employees prevents short-term deterioration in HRQOL and there is some evidence that employee productivity is increased. We find no evidence of a quick return on investment from reduced medical expenditures, although this may occur over longer periods.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Air force
Projected Increases in North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Intensity from CMIP5 Models
Gabriele Villarini & Gabriel Vecchi
Journal of Climate, May 2013, Pages 3231-3240
Abstract:
Tropical cyclones - particularly intense ones - are a hazard to life and property, so an assessment of the changes in North Atlantic tropical cyclone intensity has important socioeconomic implications. In this study, the authors focus on the seasonally integrated power dissipation index (PDI) as a metric to project changes in tropical cyclone intensity. Based on a recently developed statistical model, this study examines projections in North Atlantic PDI using output from 17 state-of-the-art global climate models and three radiative forcing scenarios. Overall, the authors find that North Atlantic PDI is projected to increase with respect to the 1986-2005 period across all scenarios. The difference between the PDI projections and those of the number of North Atlantic tropical cyclones, which are not projected to increase significantly, indicates an intensification of North Atlantic tropical cyclones in response to both greenhouse gas (GHG) increases and aerosol changes over the current century. At the end of the twenty-first century, the magnitude of these increases shows a positive dependence on projected GHG forcing. The projected intensification is significantly enhanced by non-GHG (primarily aerosol) forcing in the first half of the twenty-first century.
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Projected increase in tropical cyclones near Hawaii
Hiroyuki Murakami et al.
Nature Climate Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
Projections of the potential impacts of global warming on regional tropical cyclone activity are challenging owing to multiple sources of uncertainty in model physical schemes and different assumptions for future sea surface temperatures. A key factor in projecting climate change is to derive robust signals of future changes in tropical cyclone activity across different model physical schemes and different future patterns in sea surface temperature. A suite of future warming experiments (2075-2099), using a state-of-the-art high-resolution global climate model, robustly predicts an increase in tropical cyclone frequency of occurrence around the Hawaiian Islands. A physically based empirical model analysis reveals that the substantial increase in the likelihood of tropical cyclone frequency is primarily associated with a northwestward shifting of the tropical cyclone track in the open ocean southeast of the islands. Moreover, significant and robust changes in large-scale environmental conditions strengthen in situ tropical cyclone activity in the subtropical central Pacific. These results highlight possible future increases in storm-related socio-economic and ecosystem damage for the Hawaiian Islands.
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Anatomy of Dissent: A Cultural Analysis of Climate Skepticism
Myanna Lahsen
American Behavioral Scientist, June 2013, Pages 732-753
Abstract:
Based on findings from ethnographic analysis of U.S. climate scientists, this article identifies largely unrecognized sociocultural dimensions underpinning differences in scientists' perceptions of anthropogenic climate change. It argues that culturally laden tensions among scientists have influenced some to engage with the antienvironmental movement and, as such, influence U.S. climate science politics. The tensions are rooted in broad-based and ongoing changes within U.S. science and society since the 1960s and propelled by specific scientific subgroups' negative experiences of the rise of environmentalism and of climate modeling, in particular. Attending to these and other experience-based cultural dynamics can help refine cultural theory and enhance understanding of the deeper battles of meaning that propel climate science politics.
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Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature
John Cook et al.
Environmental Research Letters, April-June 2013
Abstract:
We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.
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A global assessment of the effects of climate policy on the impacts of climate change
N.W. Arnell et al.
Nature Climate Change, May 2013, Pages 512-519
Abstract:
This study presents the first global-scale multi-sectoral regional assessment of the magnitude and uncertainty in the impacts of climate change avoided by emissions policies. The analysis suggests that the most stringent emissions policy considered here - which gives a 50% chance of remaining below a 2 °C temperature rise target - reduces impacts by 20-65% by 2100 relative to a ‘business-as-usual' pathway which reaches 4 °C, and can delay impacts by several decades. The effects of mitigation policies vary between sectors and regions, and only a few are noticeable by 2030. The impacts avoided by 2100 are more strongly influenced by the date and level at which emissions peak than the rate of decline of emissions, with an earlier and lower emissions peak avoiding more impacts. The estimated proportion of impacts avoided at the global scale is relatively robust despite uncertainty in the spatial pattern of climate change, but the absolute amount of avoided impacts is considerably more variable and therefore uncertain.
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Kevin Anchukaitis et al.
Journal of Climate, May 2013, Pages 3001-3012
Abstract:
Northwestern North America has one of the highest rates of recent temperature increase in the world, but the putative "divergence problem" in dendroclimatology potentially limits the ability of tree-ring proxy data at high latitudes to provide long-term context for current anthropogenic change. Here, summer temperatures are reconstructed from a Picea glauca maximum latewood density (MXD) chronology that shows a stable relationship to regional temperatures and spans most of the last millennium at the Firth River in northeastern Alaska. The warmest epoch in the last nine centuries is estimated to have occurred during the late twentieth century, with average temperatures over the last 30 yr of the reconstruction developed for this study [1973-2002 in the Common Era (CE)] approximately 1.3° ± 0.4°C warmer than the long-term preindustrial mean (1100-1850 CE), a change associated with rapid increases in greenhouse gases. Prior to the late twentieth century, multidecadal temperature fluctuations covary broadly with changes in natural radiative forcing. The findings presented here emphasize that tree-ring proxies can provide reliable indicators of temperature variability even in a rapidly warming climate.
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Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia
PAGES 2k Consortium
Nature Geoscience, May 2013, Pages 339-346
Abstract:
Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between AD 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971-2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.
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Martin Hoerling et al.
Journal of Climate, May 2013, Pages 2811-2832
Abstract:
The record-setting 2011 Texas drought/heat wave is examined to identify physical processes, underlying causes, and predictability. October 2010-September 2011 was Texas's driest 12-month period on record. While the summer 2011 heat wave magnitude (2.9°C above the 1981-2010 mean) was larger than the previous record, events of similar or larger magnitude appear in preindustrial control runs of climate models. The principal factor contributing to the heat wave magnitude was a severe rainfall deficit during antecedent and concurrent seasons related to anomalous sea surface temperatures (SSTs) that included a La Niña event. Virtually all the precipitation deficits appear to be due to natural variability. About 0.6°C warming relative to the 1981-2010 mean is estimated to be attributable to human-induced climate change, with warming observed mainly in the past decade. Quantitative attribution of the overall human-induced contribution since preindustrial times is complicated by the lack of a detected century-scale temperature trend over Texas. Multiple factors altered the probability of climate extremes over Texas in 2011. Observed SST conditions increased the frequency of severe rainfall deficit events from 9% to 34% relative to 1981-2010, while anthropogenic forcing did not appreciably alter their frequency. Human-induced climate change increased the probability of a new temperature record from 3% during the 1981-2010 reference period to 6% in 2011, while the 2011 SSTs increased the probability from 4% to 23%. Forecasts initialized in May 2011 demonstrate predictive skill in anticipating much of the SST-enhanced risk for an extreme summer drought/heat wave over Texas.
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Projections of declining surface-water availability for the southwestern United States
Richard Seager et al.
Nature Climate Change, May 2013, Pages 482-486
Abstract:
Global warming driven by rising greenhouse-gas concentrations is expected to cause wet regions of the tropics and mid to high latitudes to get wetter and subtropical dry regions to get drier and expand polewards. Over southwest North America, models project a steady drop in precipitation minus evapotranspiration, P-E, the net flux of water at the land surface, leading to, for example, a decline in Colorado River flow. This would cause widespread and important social and ecological consequences. Here, using new simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Five, to be assessed in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report Five, we extend previous work by examining changes in P, E, runoff and soil moisture by season and for three different water resource regions. Focusing on the near future, 2021-2040, the new simulations project declines in surface-water availability across the southwest that translate into reduced soil moisture and runoff in California and Nevada, the Colorado River headwaters and Texas.
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Seasonal Changes in Solar Radiation and Relative Humidity in Europe in Response to Global Warming
Kimmo Ruosteenoja & Petri Räisänen
Journal of Climate, April 2013, Pages 2467-2481
Abstract:
Future seasonal changes in surface incident solar radiation and relative humidity (RH) over Europe and adjacent ocean areas were assessed based on phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3) model ensemble. Under the A1B scenario, by 2070-99, summertime solar radiation is projected to increase by 5%-10% in central and southern Europe. In winter, radiation decreases in most of northern and eastern Europe by 5%-15%. RH drops in summer in the southern European inland by 8%-12%, whereas in winter a small increase of 2%-3% is projected for northeastern Europe. In spring, the change is an intermediate between those in the extreme seasons, while in autumn the patterns resemble summer. Over the northern Atlantic Ocean, RH increases in all seasons by 1%-2%. The intermodel agreement on the sign of all these shifts is good, and the patterns recur in the responses to the A2 and B1 scenarios. Substantial changes are already simulated to occur before the midcentury, for example, in summer RH decreases by more than 5% in the inner Balkan Peninsula. Projected changes in these two variables agree well and are also mainly consistent with precipitation responses both in the multimodel mean and in individual models. According to all indicators, southern European summers become more arid, while winters, in the north particularly, become moister and darker. The increasing radiation and declining RH exacerbate summertime drought in southern Europe, whereas excessive humidity in the north may, for example, inflict moisture damages in constructions.
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Assessment of groundwater inundation as a consequence of sea-level rise
Kolja Rotzoll & Charles Fletcher
Nature Climate Change, May 2013, Pages 477-481
Abstract:
Strong evidence on climate change underscores the need for actions to reduce the impacts of sea-level rise. Global mean sea level may rise 0.18-0.48 m by mid-century and 0.5-1.4 m by the end of the century. Besides marine inundation, it is largely unrecognized that low-lying coastal areas may also be vulnerable to groundwater inundation, which is localized coastal-plain flooding due to a rise of the groundwater table with sea level. Measurements of the coastal groundwater elevation and tidal influence in urban Honolulu, Hawaii, allow estimates of the mean water table, which was used to assess vulnerability to groundwater inundation from sea-level rise. We find that 0.6 m of potential sea-level rise causes substantial flooding, and 1 m sea-level rise inundates 10% of a 1-km wide heavily urbanized coastal zone. The flooded area including groundwater inundation is more than twice the area of marine inundation alone. This has consequences for decision-makers, resource managers and urban planners, and may be applicable to many low-lying coastal areas, especially where groundwater withdrawal is not substantial.
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How do people update? The effects of local weather fluctuations on beliefs about global warming
Tatyana Deryugina
Climatic Change, May 2013, Pages 397-416
Abstract:
Global warming has become a controversial public policy issue in spite of broad scientific consensus that it is real and that human activity is a contributing factor. It is likely that public consensus is also needed to support policies that might counteract it. It is therefore important to understand how people form and update their beliefs about climate change. Using unique survey data on beliefs about the occurrence of the effects of global warming, I estimate how local temperature fluctuations influence what individuals believe about these effects. I find that some features of the updating process are consistent with rational updating. I also test explicitly for the presence of several heuristics known to affect belief formation and find strong evidence for representativeness, some evidence for availability, and no evidence for spreading activation. I find that very short-run temperature fluctuations (1 day-2 weeks) have no effect on beliefs about the occurrence of global warming, but that longer-run fluctuations (1 month-1 year) are significant predictors of beliefs. Only respondents with a conservative political ideology are affected by temperature abnormalities.
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Renewable energy and unemployment: A general equilibrium analysis
Nicholas Rivers
Resource and Energy Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a three-sector general equilibrium model, the impact of renewable electricity support policies on the rate of equilibrium unemployment is analyzed. In a simple two-factor version of the model, the paper shows analytically that renewable electricity support policies lead to an increase in the rate of unemployment. A numerical analysis is conducted with an expanded three-factor model. In this version, most scenarios analyzed also lead to an increase in equilibrium unemployment. However, the paper identifies conditions in which renewable energy support policies can decrease the rate of equilibrium unemployment. In particular, when the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is low, when capital is not mobile internationally, and when the labor intensity of renewable generation is high relative to conventional generation, renewable electricity support policies may reduce the rate of equilibrium unemployment. The model is parameterized to represent the US economy, such that the magnitudes of quantities can be observed. Although there is some variation in the results depending on parameters, the findings suggest in general that reducing electricity sector emissions by 10 percent through renewable electricity support policies is likely to increase the equilibrium unemployment rate by about 0.1 to 0.3 percentage points.
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Market Effects of Voluntary Climate Action by Firms: Evidence from the Chicago Climate Exchange
Will Gans & Beat Hintermann
Environmental and Resource Economics, June 2013, Pages 291-308
Abstract:
Are private voluntary environmental actions by firms a sign of mismanagement, or a profitable "win-win" replacement for regulation? Empirical evidence is decidedly mixed. In this study, we use 19 years of monthly stock price returns, from 1991 to 2009, to examine the profitability of participation in CCX, a large voluntary greenhouse gas mitigation program. After controlling for systemic market risk as well as industry-specific shocks, we find statistically significant and positive excess returns for firms that announce their decision to join CCX. In addition, the progress of proposed greenhouse gas legislation (the Waxman-Markey bill) had a positive and large impact on excess returns for CCX member firms, suggesting that a major incentive for firms to join CCX may be to prepare for future regulation. Marginal abatement costs (proxied by the carbon price), on the other hand, were unrelated to excess returns. Our results imply that voluntary approaches should play a role in combating climate change, but that relying on them alone is not enough.
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Regulatory Dealing: Technology Adoption versus Enforcement Stringency of Emission Taxes
Jessica Coria & Clara Villegas-Palacio
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the role of targeted enforcement of emissions taxes when the regulator wants to minimize aggregate emissions via the adoption of new more environmentally friendly technology. The regulator wants to speed up the path of technology adoption generated by a policy of uniform enforcement (that monitors adopters and nonadopters with the same probability) by engaging in a regulatory deal where a reduced monitoring probability is granted in "exchange" for adoption of the new technology. We set up a theoretical model, characterize the circumstances in which such dealing minimizes aggregate emissions, and test our hypothesis using economic laboratory experiments. Our analytical and experimental results suggest that even though such a deal might imply an increased level of violation by adopters, such tolerance is rather an integral part of an overall enforcement strategy that minimizes aggregate emissions when the rate of adoption is endogenous.
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Energy consumption and the unexplained winter warming over northern Asia and North America
Guang Zhang, Ming Cai & Aixue Hu
Nature Climate Change, May 2013, Pages 466-470
Abstract:
The worldwide energy consumption in 2006 was close to 498 exajoules. This is equivalent to an energy convergence of 15.8 TW into the populated regions, where energy is consumed and dissipated into the atmosphere as heat. Although energy consumption is sparsely distributed over the vast Earth surface and is only about 0.3% of the total energy transport to the extratropics by atmospheric and oceanic circulations, this anthropogenic heating could disrupt the normal atmospheric circulation pattern and produce a far-reaching effect on surface air temperature. We identify the plausible climate impacts of energy consumption using a global climate model. The results show that the inclusion of energy use at 86 model grid points where it exceeds 0.4 W m-2 can lead to remote surface temperature changes by as much as 1 K in mid- and high latitudes in winter and autumn over North America and Eurasia. These regions correspond well to areas with large differences in surface temperature trends between observations and global warming simulations forced by all natural and anthropogenic forcings. We conclude that energy consumption is probably a missing forcing for the additional winter warming trends in observations.
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The Reversibility of Sea Level Rise
N. Bouttes, J.M. Gregory & J.A. Lowe
Journal of Climate, April 2013, Pages 2502-2513
Abstract:
During the last century, global climate has been warming, and projections indicate that such a warming is likely to continue over coming decades. Most of the extra heat is stored in the ocean, resulting in thermal expansion of seawater and global mean sea level rise. Previous studies have shown that after CO2 emissions cease or CO2 concentration is stabilized, global mean surface air temperature stabilizes or decreases slowly, but sea level continues to rise. Using idealized CO2 scenario simulations with a hierarchy of models including an AOGCM and a step-response model, the authors show how the evolution of thermal expansion can be interpreted in terms of the climate energy balance and the vertical profile of ocean warming. Whereas surface temperature depends on cumulative CO2 emissions, sea level rise due to thermal expansion depends on the time profile of emissions. Sea level rise is smaller for later emissions, implying that targets to limit sea level rise would need to refer to the rate of emissions, not only to the time integral. Thermal expansion is in principle reversible, but to halt or reverse it quickly requires the radiative forcing to be reduced substantially, which is possible on centennial time scales only by geoengineering. If it could be done, the results indicate that heat would leave the ocean more readily than it entered, but even if thermal expansion were returned to zero, the geographical pattern of sea level would be altered. Therefore, despite any aggressive CO2 mitigation, regional sea level change is inevitable.
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Ecological limits to terrestrial biological carbon dioxide removal
Lydia Smith & Margaret Torn
Climatic Change, May 2013, Pages 89-103
Abstract:
Terrestrial biological atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (BCDR) through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECS), afforestation/reforestation, and forest and soil management is a family of proposed climate change mitigation strategies. Very high sequestration potentials for these strategies have been reported, but there has been no systematic analysis of the potential ecological limits to and environmental impacts of implementation at the scale relevant to climate change mitigation. In this analysis, we identified site-specific aspects of land, water, nutrients, and habitat that will affect local project-scale carbon sequestration and ecological impacts. Using this framework, we estimated global-scale land and resource requirements for BCDR, implemented at a rate of 1 Pg C y-1. We estimate that removing 1 Pg C y-1 via tropical afforestation would require at least 7 × 106 ha y-1 of land, 0.09 Tg y-1 of nitrogen, and 0.2 Tg y-1 of phosphorous, and would increase evapotranspiration from those lands by almost 50 %. Switchgrass BECS would require at least 2 × 108 ha of land (20 times U.S. area currently under bioethanol production) and 20 Tg y-1 of nitrogen (20 % of global fertilizer nitrogen production), consuming 4 × 1012 m3 y-1 of water. While BCDR promises some direct (climate) and ancillary (restoration, habitat protection) benefits, Pg C-scale implementation may be constrained by ecological factors, and may compromise the ultimate goals of climate change mitigation.
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Mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants slows sea-level rise
Aixue Hu et al.
Nature Climate Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
Under present growth rates of greenhouse gas and black carbon aerosol emissions, global mean temperatures can warm by as much as 2 °C from pre-industrial temperatures by about 2050. Mitigation of the four short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs), methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons and black carbon, has been shown to reduce the warming trend by about 50% by 2050. Here we focus on the potential impact of this SLCP mitigation on global sea-level rise (SLR). The temperature projections under various SLCP scenarios simulated by an energy-balance climate model are integrated with a semi-empirical SLR model, derived from past trends in temperatures and SLR, to simulate future trends in SLR. A coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model is also used to estimate SLR trends due to just the ocean thermal expansion. Our results show that SLCP mitigation can have significant effects on SLR. It can decrease the SLR rate by 24-50% and reduce the cumulative SLR by 22-42% by 2100. If the SLCP mitigation is delayed by 25 years, the warming from pre-industrial temperature exceeds 2 °C by 2050 and the impact of mitigation actions on SLR is reduced by about a third.
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A Reconciled Estimate of Glacier Contributions to Sea Level Rise: 2003 to 2009
Alex Gardner et al.
Science, 17 May 2013, Pages 852-857
Abstract:
Glaciers distinct from the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets are losing large amounts of water to the world's oceans. However, estimates of their contribution to sea level rise disagree. We provide a consensus estimate by standardizing existing, and creating new, mass-budget estimates from satellite gravimetry and altimetry and from local glaciological records. In many regions, local measurements are more negative than satellite-based estimates. All regions lost mass during 2003-2009, with the largest losses from Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes, and high-mountain Asia, but there was little loss from glaciers in Antarctica. Over this period, the global mass budget was -259 ± 28 gigatons per year, equivalent to the combined loss from both ice sheets and accounting for 29 ± 13% of the observed sea level rise.
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Marco Mazzotti et al.
Climatic Change, May 2013, Pages 119-135
Abstract:
Direct Air Capture (DAC) of CO2 with chemicals, recently assessed in a dedicated study by the American Physical Society (APS), is further investigated with the aim of optimizing the design of the front-end section of its benchmark two-loop hydroxide-carbonate system. Two new correlations are developed that relate mass transfer and pressure drop to the air and liquid flow velocities in the countercurrent packed absorption column. These relationships enable an optimization to be performed over the parameters of the air contactor, specifically the velocities of air and liquid sorbent and the fraction of CO2 captured. Three structured Sulzer packings are considered: Mellapak-250Y, Mellapak-500Y, and Mellapak-CC. These differ in cost and pressure drop per unit length; Mellapak-CC is new and specifically designed for CO2 capture. Scaling laws are developed to estimate the costs of the alternative DAC systems relative to the APS benchmark, for plants capturing 1 Mt of CO2 per year from ambient air at 500 ppm CO2 concentration. The optimized avoided cost hardly differs across the three packing materials, ranging from $518/tCO2 for M-CC to $568/tCO2 for M-250Y. The $610/tCO2 avoided cost for the APS-DAC design used M-250 Y but was not optimized; thus, optimization with the same packing lowered the avoided cost of the APS system by 7 % and improved packing lowered the avoided cost by a further 9 % The overall optimization exercise confirms that capture from air with the APS benchmark system or systems with comparable avoided costs is not a competitive mitigation strategy as long as the energy system contains high-carbon power, since implementation of Carbon Capture and Storage, substitution with low-carbon power and end-use efficiency will offer lower avoided-cost strategies.
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Quantifying the benefit of early climate change mitigation in avoiding biodiversity loss
R. Warren et al.
Nature Climate Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
Climate change is expected to have significant influences on terrestrial biodiversity at all system levels, including species-level reductions in range size and abundance, especially amongst endemic species. However, little is known about how mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions could reduce biodiversity impacts, particularly amongst common and widespread species. Our global analysis of future climatic range change of common and widespread species shows that without mitigation, 57±6% of plants and 34±7% of animals are likely to lose ≥50% of their present climatic range by the 2080s. With mitigation, however, losses are reduced by 60% if emissions peak in 2016 or 40% if emissions peak in 2030. Thus, our analyses indicate that without mitigation, large range contractions can be expected even amongst common and widespread species, amounting to a substantial global reduction in biodiversity and ecosystem services by the end of this century. Prompt and stringent mitigation, on the other hand, could substantially reduce range losses and buy up to four decades for climate change adaptation.
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Recent climate and ice-sheet changes in West Antarctica compared with the past 2,000 years
Eric Steig et al.
Nature Geoscience, May 2013, Pages 372-375
Abstract:
Changes in atmospheric circulation over the past five decades have enhanced the wind-driven inflow of warm ocean water onto the Antarctic continental shelf, where it melts ice shelves from below. Atmospheric circulation changes have also caused rapid warming over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and contributed to declining sea-ice cover in the adjacent Amundsen-Bellingshausen seas. It is unknown whether these changes are part of a longer-term trend. Here, we use water-isotope (δ18O) data from an array of ice-core records to place recent West Antarctic climate changes in the context of the past two millennia. We find that the δ18O of West Antarctic precipitation has increased significantly in the past 50 years, in parallel with the trend in temperature, and was probably more elevated during the 1990s than at any other time during the past 200 years. However, δ18O anomalies comparable to those of recent decades occur about 1% of the time over the past 2,000 years. General circulation model simulations suggest that recent trends in δ18O and climate in West Antarctica cannot be distinguished from decadal variability that originates in the tropics. We conclude that the uncertain trajectory of tropical climate variability represents a significant source of uncertainty in projections of West Antarctic climate and ice-sheet change.
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Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century
Nerilie Abram et al.
Nature Geoscience, May 2013, Pages 404-411
Abstract:
Over the past 50 years, warming of the Antarctic Peninsula has been accompanied by accelerating glacier mass loss and the retreat and collapse of ice shelves. A key driver of ice loss is summer melting; however, it is not usually possible to specifically reconstruct the summer conditions that are critical for determining ice melt in Antarctic. Here we reconstruct changes in ice-melt intensity and mean temperature on the northern Antarctic Peninsula since AD 1000 based on the identification of visible melt layers in the James Ross Island ice core and local mean annual temperature estimates from the deuterium content of the ice. During the past millennium, the coolest conditions and lowest melt occurred from about AD 1410 to 1460, when mean temperature was 1.6 °C lower than that of 1981-2000. Since the late 1400s, there has been a nearly tenfold increase in melt intensity from 0.5 to 4.9%. The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century. Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. We conclude that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is now particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melting and loss in response to relatively small increases in mean temperature.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Significant other
Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households
Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan & Emir Kamenica
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We establish that gender identity - in particular, an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband - impacts marriage formation, the wife's labor force participation, the wife's income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. Within couples, if the wife's potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband's, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.
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David Matthew Doyle & Lisa Molix
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
National data on romantic relationships reveal a prominent gap between members of devalued and dominant groups in the United States, with devalued group members experiencing less positive relationship outcomes. However, little research examines how social stigma affects relationship quality for members of devalued groups and moderating factors have generally not been explored in the literature. In the current studies, we experimentally examined the effects of social stigma on relationship quality among women (Study 1) and African Americans (Study 2) as well as whether these effects differed based upon relationship length (Studies 1 and 2). Results showed that individuals involved in shorter relationships reported lesser relationship quality after social stigma was made salient, while those involved in longer relationships reported somewhat greater relationship quality after social stigma was made salient. Implications for future research on social stigma and relationship quality as well as moderating factors are discussed.
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The long run consequences of unilateral divorce laws on children - evidence from SHARELIFE
Steffen Reinhold, Thorsten Kneip & Gerrit Bauer
Journal of Population Economics, July 2013, Pages 1035-1056
Abstract:
Previous research has shown adverse effects of growing up under unilateral divorce laws on long-term outcomes of children. It remains an open question of whether these effects of early childhood conditions arise due to divorce laws raising the likelihood of parental marital disruption or whether unilateral divorce laws also affect children in intact marriages by changing intra-household bargaining. Using recently available data from SHARELIFE for 11 Western European countries, we address this question employing a difference-in-differences approach and controlling for childhood family structure and socioeconomic status. Like previous research, we find adverse effects of growing up under unilateral divorce laws on the well-being of children. This effect remains even when controlling for childhood variables. We conclude that unilateral divorce laws affect children by changing family bargaining in intact marriages.
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Women's Emancipation Through Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis
Fatih Guvenen & Michelle Rendall
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women.
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The Effect Of Joint Custody On Family Outcomes
Martin Halla
Journal of the European Economic Association, April 2013, Pages 278-315
Abstract:
Since the 1970s almost all US states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. I analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on different family outcomes. My identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across the US states. Estimations based on state panel data suggest that the introduction of joint custody led to an increase in marriage rates, an increase in overall fertility (including a shift from nonmarital to marital fertility), and an increase in divorce rates for older couples. Accordingly, female labor market participation decreased. Further, male suicide rates and domestic violence fell in treated states. The empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that joint custody increased the relative bargaining power of men within marriage.
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Male Wage Inequality and Marital Dissolution: Is There a Link?
Andriana Bellou
Université de Montréal Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
After almost a century-long pattern of rising marital instability, divorce rates leveled off in 1980 and have been declining ever since. The timing of deceleration and decline in the rates of marital disruption interestingly coincides with a period of substantial growth in wage inequality. This paper establishes a connection between the two phenomena and explores potential explanations for the underlying link. Using individual data on female marital histories in a duration analysis framework combined with regional and temporal variation in the pattern of male wage dispersion, I show that inequality has a significant stabilizing effect on the marital relationship. Quantitatively, increases in male wage dispersion can roughly explain up to 30% of the fall in the mean separation probability between 1979 and 1990. Several plausible explanations for this relationship are assessed: changes in spousal labor supplies, female wage inequality, income uncertainty, social capital as well as a hypothesis of "on-the-marriage" search. The results are most supportive of the search interpretation. No strong quantitative support was found for the remaining mechanisms.
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Social Insurance and the Marriage Market
Petra Persson
Columbia University Working Paper, January 2013
Abstract:
When social insurance eligibility depends on marital status, this is a government intervention into the marriage market. I formally show that such intervention influences three behavioral margins in the marriage market, and test the theory exploiting a Swedish reform of survivors insurance - an annuity paid to widows, but not divorcees, upon the husband's death. First, I analyze bunching in the distribution of marriages and show that, by affecting the wedge between marriage and cohabitation, survivors insurance alters the composition of married couples up to 45 years before the annuity's expected payout. This distortion is larger in couples with higher ex post male mortality, holding constant the policy's value at realization and all demographics that I observe, suggesting "adverse selection" into government-provided insurance. Second, I use a regression discontinuity design to show that removal of survivors insurance from existing marriage contracts caused divorces and, in surviving unions, a renegotiation of marital surplus. Third, because survivors insurance subsidized couples with highly unequal earnings (capacities), its elimination raised the long-run assortativeness of matching. I argue that such marriage market responses to social insurance design have important implications for when it is optimal to separate social insurance from marriage in modern societies.
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For richer, if not for poorer? Marriage and divorce over the business cycle
Jessamyn Schaller
Journal of Population Economics, July 2013, Pages 1007-1033
Abstract:
Despite anecdotal evidence that recessions affect marriage and divorce rates, researchers do not agree about the direction and magnitude of the relationship. This paper reexamines the effect of business cycles on flows into and out of marriage, finding that increased unemployment rates are associated with reductions in both outcomes. The results are robust to the use of alternative measures of economic conditions, hold for both blacks and whites, and are concentrated among working-age individuals. Lag specifications and impulse response functions suggest that the effect of an unemployment shock on marriage is permanent, while the effect on divorce is temporary.
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Tracy Kwang et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do men base their self-worth on relationships less than do women? In an assessment of lay beliefs, men and women alike indicated that men are less reliant on relationships as a source of self-worth than are women (Study 1). Yet relationships may make a different important contribution to the self-esteem of men. Men reported basing their self-esteem on their own relationship status (whether or not they were in a relationship) more than did women, and this link was statistically mediated by the perceived importance of relationships as a source of social standing (Studies 1 and 2). Finally, when relationship status was threatened, men displayed increased social-standing concerns, whereas women displayed increased interdependence concerns (Study 3). Together, these findings demonstrate that both men and women rely on relationships for self-worth, but that they derive self-esteem from relationships in different ways.
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The Impact of Internet Diffusion on Marriage Rates: Evidence from the Broadband Market
Andriana Bellou
Université de Montréal Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
The Internet has the potential to reduce search frictions by allowing individuals to identify faster a larger set of available options that conform to their preferences. One market that stands to benefit from this process is that of marriage. This paper empirically examines the implications of Internet diffusion in the United States since the 1990s on one aspect of this market: marriage rates. Exploring sharp temporal and geographic variation in the pattern of consumer broadband adoption, I find that the latter has significantly contributed to increased marriages rates among 21-30 year olds. A number of tests suggest that this relationship is causal and that it varies across demographic groups potentially facing thinner marriage markets. I also provide some suggestive evidence that Internet has likely crowded out other traditional meeting venues, such as through family and friends.
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Women's Education, Marital Violence, and Divorce: A Social Exchange Perspective
Derek Kreager et al.
Journal of Marriage and Family, June 2013, Pages 565-581
Abstract:
Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education-divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The evidence suggests that the negative relationship between women's education and divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse than when they do not. The authors observed a similar pattern when they examined the association of women's proportional earnings and divorce, controlling for education. Supplementary analyses suggested that marital satisfaction explains some of the association among women's resources, victimization, and divorce but that marital violence continues to be a significant moderator of the education-divorce association. In sum, education appears to benefit women by both maintaining stable marriages and dissolving violent ones.
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Women's oral sex behaviors and risk of partner infidelity
Michael Pham, Todd Shackelford & Yael Sela
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Pham and Shackelford documented that men at greater risk of their partner's infidelity reported greater interest in and spent more time performing oral sex on their partner. The current study is an extension of their study to a female sample. We recruited 200 women to investigate whether women's oral sex behaviors are related to the risk of their partner's infidelity. The results indicate that women at greater risk of partner infidelity did not report more interest in, or spend more time performing, oral sex on their partner. Additionally, the relationships between partner infidelity risk and interest in, and time spent, performing oral sex were greater for men than women. We discuss limitations of this research and discuss explanations for the results.
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Kristie Thomas, Manisha Joshi & Susan Sorenson
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Strangulation is a unique and particularly gendered form of nonfatal intimate partner violence, affecting 10 times as many women as men. Medical research documents multiple negative health outcomes of such victimization, and in the past decade nearly 30 U.S. states have enacted laws making nonfatal strangulation a felony. We extended prior work by using grounded theory in a qualitative study to explore women's experiences of, thoughts about, and reactions to being strangled. Each of the 17 mostly well-educated and African American domestic violence shelter residents had been strangled at least once by an intimate partner; most had survived multiple strangulations. Despite other severe abuse and a high level of fear, all were shocked that their partner strangled them. Participants reported an intense sense of vulnerability when they recognized during the assault how easily they could be killed by their partner. Nonetheless, they seemed to think of strangulation, not as a failed murder attempt, but as a way to exert power. Efforts to extricate themselves from a "choking" largely failed and resistance resulted in an escalation of the violence. Moreover, strangulation is difficult to detect which, as participants observed, makes it especially useful to the abuser. The aftereffects permeated the relationship such that strangulation need not be repeated in order for her to be compliant and submissive, thus creating a context of coercive control.
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Dylan Selterman et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the extent to which dreams of close others would predict subsequent waking experiences with those partners, suggesting a process for the effects of dreams parallel to findings on "priming" as observed in other contexts. Participants in committed relationships completed measures of attachment and relationship health (interdependence), followed by a 2-week diary of dream reports and interactions with their partners. Multilevel modeling results indicated (among other effects) that certain types of content (e.g., infidelity) and emotions (e.g., jealousy) in participants' dream reports were associated with less intimate feelings and more conflict with their partners on subsequent days. These associations were unidirectional and they remained significant while controlling for trait attachment styles, overall relationship heath, and the previous day's activity, thus identifying for the first time a unique and important role for dreams in affecting relationship behaviors.
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Does Specialization Explain Marriage Penalties and Premiums?
Alexandra Killewald & Margaret Gough
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Married men's wage premium is often attributed to within-household specialization: men can devote more effort to wage-earning when their wives assume responsibility for household labor. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the specialization hypothesis, arguing that, if specialization causes the male marriage premium, married women should experience wage losses. Furthermore, specialization by married parents should augment the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood premium for married as compared to unmarried parents. Using fixed-effects models and data from the NLSY79, we estimate within-gender differences in wages according to marital status and between-gender differences in the associations between marital status and wages. We then test whether specialization on time use, job traits, and tenure accounts for the observed associations. Results for women do not support the specialization hypothesis. Childless men and women both receive a marriage premium. Marriage augments the fatherhood premium but not the motherhood penalty. Changes in own and spousal employment hours, job traits, and tenure appear to benefit both married men and women, although men benefit more. Marriage changes men's labor market behavior in ways that augment wages, but these changes do not appear to occur at the expense of women's wages.
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Matthew Hammond & Nickola Overall
European Journal of Social Psychology, April 2013, Pages 212-223
Abstract:
Benevolent sexism promises women a revered place within intimate relationships, which should lead to greater dissatisfaction when they face relationship difficulties. We collected self-reports of relationship problems and relationship satisfaction (Study 1; N = 91 heterosexual couples), relationship problems and relationship evaluations daily over 3 weeks (Study 1), and hurtful partner behaviour and relationship evaluations over 10 days (Study 2; N = 86 women). Women's endorsement of benevolent sexism predicted sharper declines in relationship satisfaction when they faced greater relationship problems (Study 1) and hurtful partner behaviour (Study 2). These effects were magnified in longer relationships (Studies 1 and 2), indicating that the sensitivity to relationship problems associated with women's endorsement of benevolent sexism is particularly pronounced when women have more invested in their relationship role being revered and cherished. The results suggest that women who endorse benevolent sexism are vulnerable within their relationships because their satisfaction is contingent upon the fulfilment of the promises of benevolent sexism.
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Does Culture Affect Divorce? Evidence From European Immigrants in the United States
Delia Furtado, Miriam Marcén & Almudena Sevilla
Demography, June 2013, Pages 1013-1038
Abstract:
This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.
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Liat Raz-Yurovich
European Sociological Review, April 2013, Pages 373-385
Abstract:
Men's and women's employment trajectories following divorce is an important issue for analysis because of the possible implications of the changes in employment characteristics on the economic well-being of divorced men and women and their children, and on their levels of dependency on the welfare state. In order to analyse the long-term effects of divorce on an individual's salary, employment stability, and the number of jobs held, we employ a unique register-based panel data from Israel. Using longitudinal multi-level analyses and linear growth models, as well as fixed-effects models, we find that men's monthly salary and employment stability levels suffer more than those of women following divorce. Nonetheless, our results are in line with previous research on the negative effect of divorce on women's economic status. This is because our fixed-effects models show that, although women increase their employment stability and the number of jobs held following divorce, their earnings do not rise following marital disruption. Moreover, women usually experience a reduction in their salary growth rates. For men, our fixed-effects models suggest that their employment stability levels suffer following divorce, but that there are no substantial differences in men's earnings or in their salary growth rates following marital disruption. These results are discussed within the theoretical frameworks of the marriage premium and the divorce penalty.
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Marital Quality and Health Over 20 Years: A Growth Curve Analysis
Richard Miller et al.
Journal of Marriage and Family, June 2013, Pages 667-680
Abstract:
Although there is substantial evidence linking marital quality to physical health, few studies have been longitudinal. This study examined data from the Marital Instability Over the Life Course Study; 1,681 married individuals followed for 20 years were included in these analyses. In order to control for life course effects, participants were divided into 2 cohorts: early life and midlife. On the basis of latent growth curve analysis, the results indicated that initial values of marital happiness and marital problems were significantly associated with the initial value of physical health among both cohorts. In addition, the slope of marital happiness was significantly associated with the slope of physical health among the younger cohort, and the slope of marital problems was significantly associated with the slope of physical health among the midlife cohort. These results provide evidence of the significant association between positive and negative dimensions of marital quality and physical health over the life course.
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Crystal Jiang & Jeffrey Hancock
Journal of Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many people assume that it is challenging to maintain the intimacy of a long-distance (LD) relationship. However, recent research suggests that LD romantic relationships are of equal or even more trust and satisfaction than their geographically close (GC) counterparts. The present diary study tested an intimacy-enhancing process, in which LD couples (a) engage in more adaptive self-disclosures and (b) form more idealized relationship perceptions than do GC couples in the pursuit of intimacy across various interpersonal media. The results demonstrate the effects of behavioral adaptation and idealization on intimacy, and suggest that the two effects vary depending on the cue multiplicity, synchronicity, and mobility of the communication medium employed. Implications for understanding LD relating and mix-mode relating are discussed.
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The Role of Sleep in Interpersonal Conflict: Do Sleepless Nights Mean Worse Fights?
Amie Gordon & Serena Chen
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examined the impact of a basic biological process - namely, sleep - on relationship conflict, specifically testing whether poor sleep influences the degree, nature, and resolution of conflict. In Study 1, a 14-day daily experience study, participants reported more conflict in their romantic relationships following poor nights of sleep. In Study 2, we brought couples into the laboratory to assess the dyadic effects of sleep on the nature and resolution of conflict. One partner's poor sleep was associated with a lower ratio of positive to negative affect (self-reported and observed), as well as decreased empathic accuracy for both partners during a conflict conversation. Conflict resolution occurred most when both partners were well rested. Effects were not explained by stress, anxiety, depression, lack of relationship satisfaction, or by partners being the source of poor sleep. Overall, these findings highlight a key factor that may breed conflict, thereby putting relationships at risk.
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Gender and Socioeconomic Status Differences in First and Second Marriage Formation
Kevin Shafer & Spencer James
Journal of Marriage and Family, June 2013, Pages 544-564
Abstract:
In this article, we address how first and second marriages are formed by asking whether SES has similar effects on first and second marriage entry. Like many studies of first marriage, we focus on gender, socioeconomic characteristics (education, income, and employment status), and gender differences in the effect of SES. To examine this question, we use the NLSY79 (n = 12,231 never-married and 3,695 divorced persons), discrete-time logistic regression, and heterogeneous choice models to test for statistically significant differences by gender and between first and second marriages. Our models show gender differences in first and second marriage entry, that the effect of SES on marriage entry differs between first and second marriage, and that the interaction between gender and SES has a unique association with marital entry for never- and previously married individuals. Our results have implications for understanding marriage formation, stratification across the life course, and the well-being of divorced persons who remarry.
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Michelle Russell, Levi Baker & James McNulty
Journal of Family Psychology, April 2013, Pages 242-251
Abstract:
Attachment theory provides a useful framework for predicting marital infidelity. However, most research has examined the association between attachment and infidelity in unmarried individuals, and we are aware of no research that has examined the role of partner attachment in predicting infidelity. In contrast to research showing that attachment anxiety is unrelated to infidelity among dating couples, 2 longitudinal studies of 207 newlywed marriages demonstrated that own and partner attachment anxiety interacted to predict marital infidelity, such that spouses were more likely to perpetrate infidelity when either they or their partner was high (vs. low) in attachment anxiety. Further, and also in contrast to research on dating couples, own attachment avoidance was unrelated to infidelity, whereas partner attachment avoidance was negatively associated with infidelity, indicating that spouses were less likely to perpetrate infidelity when their partner was high (vs. low) in attachment avoidance. These effects emerged controlling for marital satisfaction, sexual frequency, and personality; did not differ across husbands and wives; and did not differ across the two studies, with the exception that the negative association between partner attachment avoidance and own infidelity only emerged in 1 of the 2 studies. These findings offer a more complete understanding of the implications of attachment insecurity for marital infidelity and suggest that studies of unmarried individuals may not provide complete insights into the implications of various psychological traits and processes for marriage.
Monday, May 20, 2013
The powers that be
Daniel Stone
Journal of Public Economics, May 2013, Pages 94-104
Abstract:
I develop a model of the relation between the media environment and political obstructionism. I show that when voters are less informed by media, obstructionism becomes a more effective political signal for the minority party. The model thus implies that media change can cause gridlock via signaling; by contrast, the previous literature on causes of gridlock focuses on polarization and other factors. The model also makes several auxiliary predictions consistent with recent trends in U.S. politics.
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Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from US States
Filipe Campante & Quoc-Anh Do
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability, and in contrast with the alternative hypothesis that it might forestall political capture. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different accountability mechanisms over state politics: newspaper coverage, voter knowledge and information, and turnout. We also find evidence against the capture hypothesis: isolated capitals are associated with more money in state-level campaigns. Finally, we show that isolation is linked with worse public good provision.
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David Broockman
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why are politicians more likely to advance the interests of those of their race? I present a field experiment demonstrating that black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests than are their counterparts. Guided by elite interviews, I emailed 6,928 U.S. state legislators from a putatively black alias asking for help signing up for state unemployment benefits. Crucially, I varied the legislators' political incentive to respond by randomizing whether the sender purported to live within or far from each legislator's district. While nonblack legislators were markedly less likely to respond when their political incentives to do so were diminished, black legislators typically continued to respond even when doing so promised little political reward. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests. As political decision making is often difficult for voters to observe, intrinsically motivated descriptive representatives play a crucial role in advancing minorities' political interests.
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Men, women, and the ballot: Gender imbalances and suffrage extensions in the United States
Sebastian Braun & Michael Kvasnicka
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women's suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Voting rights, however, were not won by force or threats thereof, a fact leading political economy theories find hard to explain. Studying the timing of suffrage extensions in US states between 1869 and 1919, we find that a scarcity of women strongly promoted early transitions to women's suffrage. Such scarcity significantly reduced the political costs and risks for male grantors of the suffrage. It might also have made women's suffrage attractive as a means to attract more women.
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War and the political zeitgeist: Evidence from the history of female suffrage
Daniel Hicks
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the upheaval associated with warfare, empirical evidence linking conflict with institutional development is limited. This paper examines the hypothesis that international wars accelerated democratization by fostering political inclusion. Employing survival analysis, I find that during the 20th century, nations engaging in external conflict were more than twice as likely to extend the franchise to women in the post-conflict period, even after controlling for other commonly cited determinants of suffrage adoption. I explore several potential mechanisms for this association and find evidence consistent with stories which connect war with increased national unity, ideological fervor, and international posturing. Finally, examining conflict-induced changes in sex ratios and female labor force participation suggests that the underlying determinants of suffrage expansion at the national and sub-national level differ.
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Unilateral Presidential Policy Making and the Impact of Crises
Laura Young
Presidential Studies Quarterly, June 2013, Pages 328-352
Abstract:
Scholars interested in the power of the presidency often overlook the importance of a crisis. The right kind of event, however, has characteristics that create a window of opportunity for a president to exert or expand his unilateral power. Failure to explore this relationship leaves a gap in our knowledge regarding presidential power, which this article addresses. The results show foreign policy crises provide the largest window for a president to increase his authority. Economic crises and most natural disasters have little to no impact on unilateral power. Epidemic outbreaks are the exception, though compared to a foreign policy crisis, the impact is relatively small. Finally, the findings suggest a president suffering from institutional constraints or lacking in skill and will has the ability to increase his power whenever a foreign policy crisis occurs.
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David Broockman & Christopher Skovron
University of California Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
We reexamine prospects for constituency control in American politics with original data describing nearly 2,000 state legislative candidates' perceptions of mass opinion in their districts and recent advances in public opinion estimation that allow us to determine actual district-level opinion with precision. Actual district opinion explains only a modest share of the variation in politicians' perceptions of their districts' views. Moreover, there is a striking conservative bias in politicians' perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by over 20 percentage points, while liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents' conservatism by several percentage points. A follow-up survey demonstrates that politicians appear to learn nothing from democratic campaigns or elections that leads them to correct these shortcomings. Electoral selection has a limited impact on whether the chosen representative is congruent with the majority of her constituents. These findings suggest a substantial conservative bias in American political representation and bleak prospects for constituency control of politicians when voters' collective preferences are less than unambiguous.
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Candidates, Credibility, and Re-election Incentives
Richard Van Weelden
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
I study elections between citizen-candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office, but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re-election. In each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences. The elected candidate chooses the policy to implement, and how much rent-seeking to engage in, when in office. As the voter decides both which candidate to elect and, subsequently, whether the candidate is retained, this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability. I show that, in the best stationary equilibrium, when utility functions are concave over policy, non-median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter. In this equilibrium, there are two candidates who are elected at some history, and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge. This divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent-seeking, increasing voter welfare.
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Presidential and Media Leadership of Public Opinion on Iraq
Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha & Christopher Linebarger
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Much research disputes the president's ability to lead public opinion and shows media to have influenced public opinion concerning the war in Iraq. We argue that although news tone is likely to have affected public support for the war, presidential rhetoric could be influential for two reasons. First, heightened presidential attention to the war increases the public's accessibility to the president's perspective on the war. Second, a survey question that cues the respondent to consider the president explicitly in their evaluation of the Iraq war is likely to encourage responsiveness to presidential rhetoric. To assess these arguments, we simultaneously examine the impact that presidential tone and media tone have on public support for the war in Iraq by analyzing an original dataset of presidential speeches, news coverage, and public support for the war and the president's handling of it from 2002 to 2008. Our findings reveal that although media tone drives public support for the war in Iraq, presidential tone influences the public's view of President Bush's handling of it.
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Uncertainty, Electoral Incentives and Political Myopia
Alessandra Bonfiglioli & Gino Gancia
Economic Journal, May 2013, Pages 373-400
Abstract:
We study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability with informational frictions and uncertainty. When politicians' ability is ex ante unknown and policy choices are unobservable, elections improve political accountability and selection. However, incumbents underinvest in costly policies with future returns to signal high ability and increase re-election probability. Surprisingly, uncertainty reduces political myopia and may increase social welfare. We also address the socially optimal political rewards and the desirability of a one-term limit. Our predictions are consistent with several stylised facts and with a new empirical observation: aggregate uncertainty is positively correlated with fiscal discipline.
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Amel Ahmed
Studies in Comparative International Development, June 2013, Pages 141-171
Abstract:
The origins of electoral systems in early democracies have received a great deal of attention in recent years, as scholars seek to explain why at the time of suffrage expansion some countries adopted proportional representation (PR) while others chose single-member plurality (SMP). This paper offers a systematic explanation of the choice of electoral systems based on the "existential threat" posed by rising workers' parties after suffrage expansion, that is, the extent to which these parties threatened the institutions of capitalism and liberal democracy. Original historical research offers important correctives to the dominant scholarly narrative, revealing that PR and SMP were both novel systems at the time, devised to replace the "mixed" systems that prevailed in the predemocratic period. Both, moreover, were seen as elite safeguards that, through different mechanisms, would protect right parties from the impact of suffrage expansion. Mid-range analysis of 18 historical cases reveals that the choice ultimately turned on the different strategic advantages and time horizons associated with the two systems as well as the existential threat presented by new workers' parties.
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Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics
Zoltan Hajnal & Jessica Trounstine
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although there is widespread concern about bias in American democracy, convincing tests of differential responsiveness are rare. We use a unique data set that surveys the views of a large cross-section of urban residents to provide greater insight into this question. We demonstrate clear differences in perceived responsiveness across demographic and political groups with racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, and liberals expressing less satisfaction with local outcomes. Our analysis suggests that these differences are unlikely to be due to underlying differences in individual attitudes but instead appear to stem from real differences in local conditions and perceived governmental responsiveness.
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Term Limits and Legislative-Executive Conflict in the American States
Travis Baker & David Hedge
Legislative Studies Quarterly, May 2013, Pages 237-258
Abstract:
State governments have experienced considerable institutional change in the last several decades. None appeared at first glance to be as far-reaching as the legislative term limits that were adopted by over 20 states in the 1990s. The evidence to date suggests that term limits have indeed changed the character of many of the states' legislatures, if not always as predicted by their advocates. We report data on veto dynamics over the period 1989-2008 to determine how term limits have impacted legislative-executive relations. Our data both challenge and support what has become the conventional wisdom, i.e., that term limits will weaken legislatures relative to their governors. States with more stringent term limits experienced fewer gubernatorial vetoes but proved more likely to override those vetoes when they were issued. Taken together the evidence suggests that the relationship between governors and legislatures in the wake of term limits is more complex and variable than scholars and others had previously thought.
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Optimal Districting with Endogenous Party Platforms
Emanuele Bracco
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Representation is one of the most important criteria by which to judge electoral systems. In this paper, I focus on one aspect of representative democracy: the formation of electoral district boundaries. It is well known that majoritarian systems give rise to highly biased seat-vote curves, causing representation to be less than ideal. What should, therefore, be the optimal constituency design when the objective is to maximize voters' welfare? I show that when parties take account of districting while setting platforms, then the district design problem reduces to a very simple rule: do nothing when voters are risk neutral, and - when voters are risk averse - choose a bias that is against the largest partisan group. Calibrating the model on data of U.S. State legislative elections during the 1990s, I show that the welfare gain due to optimal districting is very small.
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Erik Engstrom, Jesse Hammond & John Scott
American Political Science Review, May 2013, Pages 225-240
Abstract:
The location of a government's capital can profoundly influence the nature and quality of political representation. Yet scholars know very little about what drives the siting of political capitals. In this article, we examine the location and relocation of political capitals in the United States, including the choice of Washington, DC, as the nation's capital and the location and relocation of capitals in the 48 contiguous American states. We argue that the location of capitals in the United States followed a systematic pattern in accord with the theory of representative government developed in the new nation, especially as articulated by Madison. Based on an empirical analysis of historical census and political boundaries data from 1790 to the present, we find that decision makers consistently tended to locate - and especially relocate - the seat of government as near as possible to the population centroid of the relevant political jurisdiction, consistent with the principle of equal representation of citizens. Our analysis contributes to the study of institutional design and change, especially in the area of American political development, as well as to a burgeoning literature on the effects of geographical factors on political outcomes.
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Theodore Rave
Harvard Law Review, January 2013, Pages 671-739
Abstract:
When incumbent legislators draw the districts from which they are elected, the conflicts of interest are glaring: incumbents can and do gerrymander district lines to entrench themselves. Despite recognizing that such incumbent self-dealing works a democratic harm, the Supreme Court has not figured out what to do with political gerrymandering claims, which inherently require first-order decisions about the allocation of raw political power - decisions that courts are institutionally ill suited to make. But the same type of agency problem arises all the time in corporate law. And though we do not think courts are any better at making business decisions than political ones, or trust elections alone to align the interests of corporate directors with their shareholders, courts nevertheless play an important role in checking self-dealing by corporate agents. They do so through an enforceable fiduciary duty of loyalty. Courts apply a strict standard of review when corporate agents act under a conflict of interest, typically invalidating the transactions unless the taint of self-dealing is cleansed by approval through a neutral process (such as ratification by disinterested directors or shareholders), in which case courts apply the much more deferential "business judgment rule." Drawing from constitutional history and political theory, this Article argues that political representatives should be treated as fiduciaries, subject to a duty of loyalty, which they breach when they manipulate election laws to their own advantage. Courts can thus check incumbent self-dealing in gerrymandering by taking a cue from corporate law strategies for getting around their institutional incompetence. As in corporate law, courts should strictly scrutinize incumbent decisions that are tainted by conflicts of interest (such as when a legislature draws its own districts). But when the taint is cleansed by a neutral process (such as an independent districting commission), courts should apply a much more deferential standard of review. The threat of searching review would likely create as a powerful incentive for legislators to adopt neutral processes for redistricting, allowing a reviewing court to focus not on the substantive political outcomes, but on ensuring that the processes are free from incumbent influence - a role for which courts are institutionally well suited.
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Can the President Appoint Principal Executive Officers Without a Senate Confirmation Vote?
Matthew Stephenson
Yale Law Journal, January 2013, Pages 940-979
Abstract:
It is generally assumed that the Constitution requires the Senate to vote to confirm the President's nominees to principal federal offices. This Essay argues, to the contrary, that when the President nominates an individual to a principal executive branch position, the Senate's failure to act on the nomination within a reasonable period of time can and should be construed as providing the Senate's tacit or implied advice and consent to the appointment. On this understanding, although the Senate can always withhold its constitutionally required consent by voting against a nominee, the Senate cannot withhold its consent indefinitely through the expedient of failing to vote on the nominee one way or the other. Although this proposal seems radical, and certainly would upset longstanding assumptions, the Essay argues that this reading of the Appointments Clause would not contravene the constitutional text, structure, or history. The Essay further argues that, at least under some circumstances, reading the Constitution to construe Senate inaction as implied consent to an appointment would have desirable consequences in light of deteriorating norms of Senate collegiality and of prompt action on presidential nominations.
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Entelechy and Irony in Political Time: The Preemptive Rhetoric of Nixon and Obama
Michael Steudeman
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Spring 2013, Pages 59-96
Abstract:
This essay makes two key arguments. The first is that preemptive politics often rely on strategies of rhetorical irony to cultivate perceptions of reasonableness, humility, and dialectical transcendence. As such, I expand the rhetorical conception of Stephen Skowronek's "political time" thesis to reveal its dimensions as a Burkean "ironic development." The second argument is that Barack Obama's rhetorical strategy more directly fits the typology of preemptive presidents than that of reconstructive presidents, making him far more comparable in "political time" with Richard Nixon than with Ronald Reagan. I proceed to analyze the two presidential candidates' rhetoric in their first winning campaigns for the presidency to discern the extent of these parallels and reveal the applicability of an ironist political style in preemptive electoral situations. The essay concludes by examining the trajectory of liberalism in political time and the implications of this analysis for preemptive "wild cards" in presidential rhetoric.
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What's at Stake? A Veto-Player Theory of Voter Turnout
Ryan Carlin & Gregory Love
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Turnout is theorized to reflect elections' policy stakes. All else equal, a highly constrained policymaking context is expected to lower the potential policy stakes of a given election. This study tests if such contexts, which are characterized by multiple veto players, reduce electoral participation. According to time-series cross-sectional autoregressive dynamic lag models of turnout in 311 elections in 21 advanced industrialized democracies, additional veto players decrease turnout in both the short and long run. Moreover, the results suggest veto players conceptually fine-tune and empirically contribute to existing models of cross-national turnout. Hence this study has crucial implications for the students of electoral participation and scholars interested in the democratic outcomes of institutional design.
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Do Better Paid Politicians Perform Better? Disentangling Incentives from Selection
Stefano Gagliarducci & Tommaso Nannicini
Journal of the European Economic Association, April 2013, Pages 369-398
Abstract:
The wage paid to politicians affects both the choice of citizens to run for office and the performance of those who are appointed. First, if skilled individuals shy away from politics because of higher opportunities in the private sector, an increase in politicians' pay may change their mind. Second, if the re-election prospects of incumbents depend on their in-office deeds, a higher wage may foster performance. We use data on all Italian municipal governments from 1993 to 2001 and test these hypotheses in a quasi-experimental setup. In Italy, the wage of mayors depends on population size and sharply rises at different thresholds. We apply a regression discontinuity design to the only threshold that uniquely identifies a wage increase: 5,000 inhabitants. Exploiting the existence of a two-term limit, we further disentangle the composition from the incentive component of the effect of the wage on performance. Our results show that a higher wage attracts more-educated candidates, and that better-paid politicians size down the government machinery by improving efficiency. Importantly, most of this effect is driven by the selection of competent politicians, rather than by the incentive to be re-elected.
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Political Homophily and Collaboration in Regional Planning Networks
Elisabeth Gerber, Adam Douglas Henry & Mark Lubell
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the extent of political homophily - the tendency to form connections with others who are politically similar - in local governments' decisions to participate in an important form of intergovernmental collaboration: regional planning networks. Using data from a recent survey of California planners and government officials, we develop and test hypotheses about the factors that lead local governments to collaborate within regional planning networks. We find that local governments whose constituents are similar politically, in terms of partisanship and voting behavior, are more likely to collaborate with one another in regional planning efforts than those whose constituents are politically diverse. We conclude that political homophily reduces the transaction costs associated with institutional collective action, even in settings where we expect political considerations to be minimal.
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Eliciting Information from a Large Population
Kohei Kawamura
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies information transmission in social surveys where a welfare maximizing decision maker communicates with a random sample of individuals from a large population who have heterogeneous preferences. The population distribution of preferences is unknown and has to be estimated, based on answers from the respondents. The decision maker cannot identify the true distribution of preferences even if the sample size becomes arbitrarily large, since the respondents have incentive to "exaggerate" their preferences especially as the sample size becomes larger and each respondent has weaker influence on the decision. The quality of communication with each respondent may improve as the sample size becomes smaller, and thus we identify the trade-off between the quality and quantity of communication. We show that the decision maker may prefer to sample a smaller number of individuals when the prior is weaker.
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Precontextualization and the rhetoric of futurity: Foretelling Colin Powell's UN address on NBC News
John Oddo
Discourse & Communication, February 2013, Pages 25-53
Abstract:
This article examines precontextualization: the rhetorical act of previewing and contextualizing a future discursive event. I examine how an NBC News broadcast selected verbal-visual representations of the past in order to enact a context for an upcoming discourse moment: Colin Powell's 2003 United Nations (UN) address. The article draws on appraisal analysis (Martin and White, 2005), multimodal video analysis (Baldry and Thibault, 2005) and scholarship on the rhetoric of futurity (e.g. Dunmire, 2011). I show that the NBC journalists who precontextualized Powell's address on the night before its delivery presented viewers with a supportive context for understanding Powell's argument. By representing Saddam Hussein as deceptive and even deserving of future violence, the journalists essentially pre-confirmed arguments that Powell employed the next day. More importantly, because the news representations were presented as factual, they allowed viewers little space to consider alternative viewpoints - and little reason to question or resist the seemingly inexorable push for war.
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To Whom Do People Think Representatives Should Respond: Their District or the Country?
David Doherty
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2013, Pages 237-255
Abstract:
Representatives face clear incentives to respond to district preferences. I report findings from a series of experiments that examine whether the public understands these incentives and rewards representatives who respond to them. The findings show that although many people say they want legislators to prioritize national preferences, when evaluating instances of legislators' behavior they recognize the institutionally prescribed incentives representatives face and reward legislators who prioritize their districts. I also find that, to the extent that people hold their own legislators to unique standards, these differences are not the product of an expectation that one's own representative prioritize the district while others prioritize the country. Instead, the differences suggest that people understand that their own legislator is accountable to them, personally, whereas other representatives are not. The findings offer novel insight into the standards people hold representatives to and challenge the notion that people want legislators to reject institutional incentives.
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Majority Party Power and Procedural Motions in the U.S. Senate
Steven Smith, Ian Ostrander & Christopher Pope
Legislative Studies Quarterly, May 2013, Pages 205-236
Abstract:
While the metaphor of House parties as cartels is widely accepted, its application to the Senate is difficult as the majority party lacks the power to unilaterally manipulate rules and pass legislation. Nevertheless, several scholars have argued that the Senate majority party is able to employ nondebatable motions to table to exclude unwanted amendments with procedural rather than substantive votes. Does the motion to table yield negative agenda control or special party influence? Using an analysis of individual Senators' behavior on thousands of votes and an assessment of interest group scores, we find that motions to table do not elicit higher party influence or provide much political cover. A desire to speed up the legislative process, rather than to insulate members from electoral scrutiny, seems to motivate the use of motions to table.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Dumb and dumber
Michael Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis & Raegan Murphy
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently. The presence of dysgenic fertility for IQ amongst Western nations, starting in the 19th century, suggests that these trends might be related to declining IQ. This is because high-IQ people are more productive and more creative. We tested the hypothesis that the Victorians were cleverer than modern populations, using high-quality instruments, namely measures of simple visual reaction time in a meta-analytic study. Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition. In this study we used the data on the secular slowing of simple reaction time described in a meta-analysis of 14 age-matched studies from Western countries conducted between 1884 and 2004 to estimate the decline in g that may have resulted from the presence of dysgenic fertility. Using psychometric meta-analysis we computed the true correlation between simple reaction time and g, yielding a decline of - 1.23 IQ points per decade or fourteen IQ points since Victorian times. These findings strongly indicate that with respect to g the Victorians were substantially cleverer than modern Western populations.
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Long-Term Enhancement of Brain Function and Cognition Using Cognitive Training and Brain Stimulation
Albert Snowball et al.
Current Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Noninvasive brain stimulation has shown considerable promise for enhancing cognitive functions by the long-term manipulation of neuroplasticity. However, the observation of such improvements has been focused at the behavioral level, and enhancements largely restricted to the performance of basic tasks. Here, we investigate whether transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) can improve learning and subsequent performance on complex arithmetic tasks. TRNS of the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a key area in arithmetic, was uniquely coupled with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to measure online hemodynamic responses within the prefrontal cortex. Five consecutive days of TRNS-accompanied cognitive training enhanced the speed of both calculation- and memory-recall-based arithmetic learning. These behavioral improvements were associated with defined hemodynamic responses consistent with more efficient neurovascular coupling within the left DLPFC. Testing 6 months after training revealed long-lasting behavioral and physiological modifications in the stimulated group relative to sham controls for trained and nontrained calculation material. These results demonstrate that, depending on the learning regime, TRNS can induce long-term enhancement of cognitive and brain functions. Such findings have significant implications for basic and translational neuroscience, highlighting TRNS as a viable approach to enhancing learning and high-level cognition by the long-term modulation of neuroplasticity.
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Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns and national ability
Thomas Coyle & Heiner Rindermann
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examined Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR) using national ability as the unit of analysis. National ability was estimated using international standardized tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Factor analysis estimated the national G loadings of tests for high and low ability nations. Consistent with SLODR, the G loadings of tests were lower for higher ability nations. The pattern was confirmed after correcting for school attendance and age biases. Because a test's g loading is directly related to its predictive validity (correlation with outcomes), our results imply that the predictive validity of tests may be lower for higher ability nations.
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Are cognitive differences between countries diminishing? Evidence from TIMSS and PISA
Gerhard Meisenberg & Michael Woodley
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cognitive ability differences between countries can be large, with average IQs ranging from approximately 70 in sub-Saharan Africa to 105 in the countries of north-east Asia. A likely reason for the great magnitude of these differences is the Flynn effect, which massively raised average IQs in economically advanced countries during the 20th century. The present study tests the prediction that international IQ differences are diminishing again because substantial Flynn effects are now under way in the less developed "low-IQ countries" while intelligence is stagnating in the economically advanced "high-IQ countries." The hypothesis is examined with two periodically administered scholastic assessment programs. TIMSS has tested 8th-grade students periodically between 1995 and 2011 in mathematics and science, and PISA has administered tests of mathematics, science and reading between 2000 and 2009. In both TIMSS and PISA, low-scoring countries tend to show a rising trend relative to higher-scoring countries. Despite the short time series of only 9 and 16 years, the results indicate that differences between high-scoring and low-scoring countries are diminishing on these scholastic achievement tests. The results support the prediction that through a combination of substantial Flynn effects in low-scoring countries and diminished (or even negative) Flynn effects in high-scoring countries, cognitive differences between countries are getting smaller on a worldwide scale.
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Shana Carpenter et al.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study explored the effects of lecture fluency on students' metacognitive awareness and regulation. Participants watched one of two short videos of an instructor explaining a scientific concept. In the fluent video, the instructor stood upright, maintained eye contact, and spoke fluidly without notes. In the disfluent video, the instructor slumped, looked away, and spoke haltingly with notes. After watching the video, participants in Experiment 1 were asked to predict how much of the content they would later be able to recall, and participants in Experiment 2 were given a text-based script of the video to study. Perceived learning was significantly higher for the fluent instructor than for the disfluent instructor (Experiment 1), although study time was not significantly affected by lecture fluency (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the fluent instructor was rated significantly higher than the disfluent instructor on traditional instructor evaluation questions, such as preparedness and effectiveness. However, in both experiments, lecture fluency did not significantly affect the amount of information learned. Thus, students' perceptions of their own learning and an instructor's effectiveness appear to be based on lecture fluency and not on actual learning.
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Nicolas Déry et al.
Frontiers in Neuroscience, April 2013
Abstract:
Since the remarkable discovery of adult neurogenesis in the mammalian hippocampus, considerable effort has been devoted to unraveling the functional significance of these new neurons. Our group has proposed that a continual turnover of neurons in the DG could contribute to the development of event-unique memory traces that act to reduce interference between highly similar inputs. To test this theory, we implemented a recognition task containing some objects that were repeated across trials as well as some objects that were highly similar, but not identical, to ones previously observed. The similar objects, termed lures, overlap substantially with previously viewed stimuli, and thus, may require hippocampal neurogenesis in order to avoid catastrophic interference. Lifestyle factors such as aerobic exercise and stress have been shown to impact the local neurogenic microenvironment, leading to enhanced and reduced levels of DG neurogenesis, respectively. Accordingly, we hypothesized that healthy young adults who take part in a long-term aerobic exercise regime would demonstrate enhanced performance on the visual pattern separation task, specifically at correctly categorizing lures as "similar." Indeed, those who experienced a proportionally large change in fitness demonstrated a significantly greater improvement in their ability to correctly identify lure stimuli as "similar." Conversely, we expected that those who score high on depression scales, an indicator of chronic stress, would exhibit selective deficits at appropriately categorizing lures. As expected, those who scored high on the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were significantly worse than those with relatively lower BDI scores at correctly identifying lures as "similar," while performance on novel and repeated stimuli was identical. Taken together, our results support the hypothesis that adult-born neurons in the DG contribute to the orthogonalization of incoming information.
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Increased morphological asymmetry, evolvability and plasticity in human brain evolution
Aida Gómez-Robles, William Hopkins & Chet Sherwood
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 June 2013
Abstract:
The study of hominin brain evolution relies mostly on evaluation of the endocranial morphology of fossil skulls. However, only some general features of external brain morphology are evident from endocasts, and many anatomical details can be difficult or impossible to examine. In this study, we use geometric morphometric techniques to evaluate inter- and intraspecific differences in cerebral morphology in a sample of in vivo magnetic resonance imaging scans of chimpanzees and humans, with special emphasis on the study of asymmetric variation. Our study reveals that chimpanzee-human differences in cerebral morphology are mainly symmetric; by contrast, there is continuity in asymmetric variation between species, with humans showing an increased range of variation. Moreover, asymmetric variation does not appear to be the result of allometric scaling at intraspecific levels, whereas symmetric changes exhibit very slight allometric effects within each species. Our results emphasize two key properties of brain evolution in the hominine clade: first, evolution of chimpanzee and human brains (and probably their last common ancestor and related species) is not strongly morphologically constrained, thus making their brains highly evolvable and responsive to selective pressures; second, chimpanzee and, especially, human brains show high levels of fluctuating asymmetry indicative of pronounced developmental plasticity. We infer that these two characteristics can have a role in human cognitive evolution.
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Changes in test-taking patterns over time
Olev Must & Aasa Must
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study aims to investigate the relationship between right, wrong and missing answers to cognitive test items (test-taking patterns) in the context of the Flynn Effect (FE). We compare two cohorts of Estonian students (1933/36, n = 890; 2006, n = 913) using an Estonian adaptation of the National Intelligence Tests and document three simultaneous trends: fewer missing answers (- 1 Cohen's d averaged over subtests), and a rise in the number of right and wrong answers to the subtests (average ds of .86 and .30, respectively). In the Arithmetical Reasoning and Vocabulary subtests, adjustments for false-positive answers (the number of right minus the number of wrong answers) reduced the size of the Flynn Effect by half. These subtests were supposed to be high g-loading subtests. Our conclusion is that rapid guessing has risen over time and influenced tests scores more strongly over the years. The FE is partly explained by changes in test-taking behavior over time.
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Human frontal lobes are not relatively large
Robert Barton & Chris Venditti
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
One of the most pervasive assumptions about human brain evolution is that it involved relative enlargement of the frontal lobes. We show that this assumption is without foundation. Analysis of five independent data sets using correctly scaled measures and phylogenetic methods reveals that the size of human frontal lobes, and of specific frontal regions, is as expected relative to the size of other brain structures. Recent claims for relative enlargement of human frontal white matter volume, and for relative enlargement shared by all great apes, seem to be mistaken. Furthermore, using a recently developed method for detecting shifts in evolutionary rates, we find that the rate of change in relative frontal cortex volume along the phylogenetic branch leading to humans was unremarkable and that other branches showed significantly faster rates of change. Although absolute and proportional frontal region size increased rapidly in humans, this change was tightly correlated with corresponding size increases in other areas and whole brain size, and with decreases in frontal neuron densities. The search for the neural basis of human cognitive uniqueness should therefore focus less on the frontal lobes in isolation and more on distributed neural networks.
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Krista Macpherson & William Roberts
Learning and Motivation, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numerical competencies have been thoroughly examined in several species, yet relatively few studies have examined such processes in the domestic dog. In an initial experiment, procedures from numerical studies of chimpanzees (0010 and 0015) were adapted for use with 27 domestic dogs. Subjects in these experiments watched as different quantities of food were sequentially dropped into each of two bowls. The subjects were then allowed to select and consume the contents of one of the bowls. Although dogs excelled in a 1 vs 0 condition, their performance failed to significantly surpass chance across all other ratios. In a second experiment with a single subject (a rough collie named Sedona), the procedure was revised so that non-food stimuli were presented simultaneously to the dog on two magnet boards. If Sedona chose the board with the majority of the items, she was rewarded with a piece of food hidden underneath the board. If she made an incorrect choice, she received no reinforcement. Interestingly, Sedona's performance far exceeded that of the dogs in Experiment 1. Implications of these findings for the study of domestic dogs are discussed.
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Deliberate practice: Is that all it takes to become an expert?
David Hambrick et al.
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Twenty years ago, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) proposed that expert performance reflects a long period of deliberate practice rather than innate ability, or "talent". Ericsson et al. found that elite musicians had accumulated thousands of hours more deliberate practice than less accomplished musicians, and concluded that their theoretical framework could provide "a sufficient account of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance" (p. 392). The deliberate practice view has since gained popularity as a theoretical account of expert performance, but here we show that deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance in the two most widely studied domains in expertise research - chess and music. For researchers interested in advancing the science of expert performance, the task now is to develop and rigorously test theories that take into account as many potentially relevant explanatory constructs as possible.
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R.C. Veasey et al.
Appetite, 1 September 2013, Pages 38-44
Abstract:
The current study assessed the interactive effect of breakfast and exercise on cognition and mood. Twelve active males completed four trials; no breakfast-rest, breakfast-rest, no breakfast-exercise or breakfast-exercise in a randomized, cross-over design. The trials consisted of; breakfast or fast, a 2h rest, exercise (treadmill run) or equivalent rest, a chocolate milk drink, a 90min rest and an ad libitum lunch. Cognitive performance and mood were recorded frequently throughout each trial. Data was analysed as pre-exercise/rest, during and immediately post exercise/rest and post-drink. No effects were found prior to consumption of the drink. Post-drink, fasting before exercise increased mental fatigue compared to consuming breakfast before exercise and fasting before rest. Tension increased when breakfast was consumed at rest and when exercise was undertaken fasted compared to omitting breakfast before rest. Breakfast before rest decreased Rapid Visual Information Processing task speed and impaired Stroop performance. Breakfast omission improved Four Choice Reaction Time performance. To conclude, breakfast before exercise appeared beneficial for post-exercise mood even when a post-exercise snack was consumed. Exercise reversed post-breakfast cognitive impairment in active males.
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Music training, cognition, and personality
Kathleen Corrigall, Glenn Schellenberg & Nicole Misura
Frontiers in Psychology, April 2013
Abstract:
Although most studies that examined associations between music training and cognitive abilities had correlational designs, the prevailing bias is that music training causes improvements in cognition. It is also possible, however, that high-functioning children are more likely than other children to take music lessons, and that they also differ in personality. We asked whether individual differences in cognition and personality predict who takes music lessons and for how long. The participants were 118 adults (Study 1) and 167 10- to 12-year-old children (Study 2). We collected demographic information and measured cognitive ability and the Big Five personality dimensions. As in previous research, cognitive ability was associated with musical involvement even when demographic variables were controlled statistically. Novel findings indicated that personality was associated with musical involvement when demographics and cognitive ability were held constant, and that openness-to-experience was the personality dimension with the best predictive power. These findings reveal that: (1) individual differences influence who takes music lessons and for how long, (2) personality variables are at least as good as cognitive variables at predicting music training, and (3) future correlational studies of links between music training and non-musical ability should account for individual differences in personality.
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Emergence of Individuality in Genetically Identical Mice
Julia Freund et al.
Science, 10 May 2013, Pages 756-759
Abstract:
Brain plasticity as a neurobiological reflection of individuality is difficult to capture in animal models. Inspired by behavioral-genetic investigations of human monozygotic twins reared together, we obtained dense longitudinal activity data on 40 inbred mice living in one large enriched environment. The exploratory activity of the mice diverged over time, resulting in increasing individual differences with advancing age. Individual differences in cumulative roaming entropy, indicating the active coverage of territory, correlated positively with individual differences in adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Our results show that factors unfolding or emerging during development contribute to individual differences in structural brain plasticity and behavior. The paradigm introduced here serves as an animal model for identifying mechanisms of plasticity underlying nonshared environmental contributions to individual differences in behavior.
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Developmental constraints on behavioural flexibility
Kay Holekamp, Eli Swanson & Page Van Meter
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 19 May 2013
Abstract:
We suggest that variation in mammalian behavioural flexibility not accounted for by current socioecological models may be explained in part by developmental constraints. From our own work, we provide examples of constraints affecting variation in behavioural flexibility, not only among individuals, but also among species and higher taxonomic units. We first implicate organizational maternal effects of androgens in shaping individual differences in aggressive behaviour emitted by female spotted hyaenas throughout the lifespan. We then compare carnivores and primates with respect to their locomotor and craniofacial adaptations. We inquire whether antagonistic selection pressures on the skull might impose differential functional constraints on evolvability of skulls and brains in these two orders, thus ultimately affecting behavioural flexibility in each group. We suggest that, even when carnivores and primates would theoretically benefit from the same adaptations with respect to behavioural flexibility, carnivores may nevertheless exhibit less behavioural flexibility than primates because of constraints imposed by past adaptations in the morphology of the limbs and skull. Phylogenetic analysis consistent with this idea suggests greater evolutionary lability in relative brain size within families of primates than carnivores. Thus, consideration of developmental constraints may help elucidate variation in mammalian behavioural flexibility.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Outrageous
The Biological Bases for Aggressiveness and Nonaggressiveness in Presidents
Rose McDermott
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Leaders remain subject to the same biological determinants and pressures that affect other humans. Yet, they also differ in their ability to regulate and marshal their emotions just as they diverge in their other skills, talents, limitations, and abilities. In particular, some are better at channeling their emotions to help shape foreign policy more efficiently than others. One of the most potent and powerful emotions with which leaders have to contend, particularly under conditions of provocation, is anger. Anger can influence judgment and decision making in systematic and predictable ways. Individual heritable differences can influence the conditions under which anger leads to aggressive action. Such differences can influence not only the environments into which leaders select, but also the ways they process and interpret information; these determinations can decisively influence the outcome of significant public policies, including decisions on conflict and war. As a result, emotion regulation can play a strategic role in leadership. Examples from several recent presidencies illustrate how such individual differences play out on the world stage.
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Silvia Bergmüller
Aggressive Behavior, May-June 2013, Pages 182-200
Abstract:
This study examined the relationship between countries' dominant cultural values (i.e., individualism and collectivism) and (a) school principals' perceptions of aggressive student behavior and (b) students' self-reports of being aggressively victimized in school. Data on student aggression and victimization were collected across 62 countries in nationally representative samples of fourth and eighth graders (N = 428,566) and their principals (N = 15,043) by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007. Students were asked about three forms of aggressive victimization: physical, verbal, and relational; principals about two forms of aggressive student behavior: physical and verbal. Country-level regression analyses revealed that the level of cultural individualism, according to the individualism index (IDV) by Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov (2010), was not significantly related to either form of student-reported victimization. However, school principals reported aggressive student behavior more often the more individualist, and hence less collectivist, their country's culture. This relation was evident in the principals' reports on 4th and 8th grade students' aggressive behavior for both physical and verbal aggression. Multilevel analyses revealed that cultural individualism was still a powerful predictor of principal-reported aggressive student behavior after controlling for school and country characteristics. The discussion outlines reasons why principals' reports of aggressive student behavior are probably more valid indicators of student aggression than student self-reports of victimization, thereby supporting the hypothesis of culture-dependency of aggression.
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Exposure to violence reduces empathetic responses to other's pain
Xiuyan Guo et al.
Brain and Cognition, July 2013, Pages 187-191
Abstract:
Past researches showed that empathy for pain not only triggers a resonance mechanism between other and self, but also is modulated by contextual factors. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study demonstrated that short-term media violence exposure reduced both pain ratings and also the activation of anterior insula and anterior mid-cingulate cortex to other's pain. Thus, violence exposure modulated empathic responses to other's pain based on a physiological desensitization.
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Low Skin Conductance Activity in Infancy Predicts Aggression in Toddlers 2 Years Later
Erika Baker et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Low autonomic nervous system activity is claimed to be a biomarker for aggressive and antisocial behavior. Although there is evidence that low skin conductance activity (SCA) accounts for variation in the severity of antisocial behavior and predicts the onset of aggression in children and adults, it is unknown whether SCA measured in infancy can predict the development of aggression. We measured SCA in 70 typically developing 1-year-old infants at baseline, during an orienting habituation paradigm, and during a fear challenge. We also observed the infants' fear behavior, and each mother rated her infant's temperament and her attachment to her child. At follow-up, mothers rated the children at 3 years old for aggressive and nonaggressive behavior problems. Low infant SCA predicted aggressive behavior, but there was no association between SCA and nonaggressive behavior problems. Mothers' ratings of the infants' temperament and their maternal attachment and the infants' observed fearlessness did not predict later aggression. These results suggest that SCA is a specific biomarker for aggression in low-risk samples of infants.
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Changes in testosterone mediate the effect of winning on subsequent aggressive behavior
Justin Carré et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Testosterone concentrations rise rapidly in the context of competitive interactions and remain elevated in winners relative to losers. Theoretical models suggest that this divergent neuroendocrine response serves to mediate future dominance behaviours. Although research in animal models provides compelling support for this model, evidence for its applicability to human social behaviour is limited. In the current study, men and women were randomly assigned to experience a series of victories or defeats, after which aggressive behaviour was assessed using a well-validated behavioural measure. Winning produced elevated testosterone concentrations relative to losing in men, but not women. More importantly, testosterone reactivity to competition mediated the effect of winning on subsequent aggressive behaviour in men, but not women. We discuss limitations of the current study (e.g., the status manipulation may have affected other variables not measured in the study including competitiveness and physical activity expended), as well as discuss a potential neural mechanism underlying the effect of testosterone reactivity on aggressive behaviour.
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MAOA and Male Antisocial Behavior: A Review
Robert Eme
Aggression and Violent Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Of all the risk factors for the development of antisocial behavior, "maleness" is by far the most robust predictor. Among the numerous biological factors that have been identified as increasing risk for antisocial behavior, one of the most well-supported has inexplicably received very little attention with regard to implications for explaining why maleness is such a robust predictor. That factor is the low activity form of the monoamine oxidase-A gene. A major reason for this inattention to the MAOA-L gene appears to be the failure to appreciate that its location on the X chromosome reflects the enormous biological disadvantage of the male compared to the female. This article, after presenting a brief overview of the research which establishes that MAOA-L is one of the most well-supported biological risk factors for antisocial behaviors, explained how the enormous male biological disadvantage related to the sex difference in the prevalence of MAOA-L and thus helped explain why maleness is the most robust predictor of antisocial behavior.
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The Association Between Peer and Own Aggression is Moderated by the BDNF Val-Met Polymorphism
Tina Kretschmer, Frank Vitaro & Edward Barker
Journal of Research on Adolescence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Peer antisocial behavior robustly predicts adolescents' own behavior, but not all adolescents are equally vulnerable to their peers' influence and genetic factors may confer vulnerability. This study used data of n = 3,081 adolescents from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to examine whether brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a polymorphism that affects psychological functioning, moderates the association between affiliation with aggressive peers at age 10 and own aggression at age 15. A significant gene-environment interaction was found, where those who affiliated with aggressive peers in childhood showed increased risk of being aggressive in adolescence if they carried the BDNF met-met variant compared with val-val carriers. Our findings underline the importance of both biological and social factors for adolescent development.
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Malena Ivarsson et al.
Psychosomatic Medicine, May 2013, Pages 390-396
Objective: To study cardiac, sleep-related, and emotional reactions to playing violent (VG) versus nonviolent video games (NVG) in adolescents with different gaming habits.
Methods: Thirty boys (aged 13-16 years, standard deviation = 0.9), half of them low-exposed (≤1 h/d) and half high-exposed (≥3 h/d) to violent games, played a VG/NVG for 2 hours during two different evenings in their homes. Heart rate (HR) and HR variability were registered from before start until next morning. A questionnaire about emotional reactions was administered after gaming sessions and a sleep diary on the following mornings.
Results: During sleep, there were significant interaction effects between group and gaming condition for HR (means [standard errors] for low-exposed: NVG 63.8 [2.2] and VG 67.7 [2.4]; for high-exposed: NVG 65.5 [1.9] and VG 62.7 [1.9]; F(1,28) = 9.22, p = .005). There was also a significant interaction for sleep quality (low-exposed: NVG 4.3 [0.2] and VG 3.7 [0.3]); high-exposed: NVG 4.4 [0.2] and VG 4.4 [0.2]; F(1,28) = 3.51, p = .036, one sided), and sadness after playing (low-exposed: NVG 1.0 [0.0] and VG 1.4 [0.2]; high-exposed: NVG 1.2 [0.1] and VG 1.1 [0.1]; (F(1,27) = 6.29, p = .009, one sided).
Conclusions: Different combinations of the extent of (low versus high) previous VG and experimental exposure to a VG or an NVG are associated with different reaction patterns - physiologically, emotionally, and sleep related. Desensitizing effects or selection bias stand out as possible explanations.
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From Fistfights to Firefights: Trait Aggression and Support for State Violence
Nathan Kalmoe
Political Behavior, June 2013, Pages 311-330
Abstract:
Aggression is a fundamental component of human behavior, yet is mostly absent from scholarship on mass political behavior. This study proposes and tests a theory of state violence attitudes in which citizens develop preferences from aggressive personality traits. In an original nationally-representative survey, trait aggression strongly predicts support for violent state policies, as does its subcomponent trait anger, rivaling the power of partisanship. More provocatively, the well-documented gender gap in state violence attitudes replicated here is not attributable to sex differences in aggressive personality. This work builds on recent advances in political personality research and highlights the important role of aggression in political behavior.
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Seth Gitter et al.
Aggressive Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous work has shown that playing violent video games can stimulate aggression toward others. The current research has identified a potential exception. Participants who played a violent game in which the violence had an explicitly prosocial motive (i.e., protecting a friend and furthering his nonviolent goals) were found to show lower short-term aggression (Study 1) and show higher levels of prosocial cognition (Study 2) than individuals who played a violent game in which the violence was motivated by more morally ambiguous motives. Thus, violent video games that are framed in an explicitly prosocial context may evoke more prosocial sentiments and thereby mitigate some of the short-term effects on aggression observed in previous research. While these findings are promising regarding the potential aggression-reducing effects of prosocial context, caution is still warranted as a small effect size difference (d = .2-.3), although nonsignificant, was still observed between those who played the explicitly prosocial violent game and those who played a nonviolent game; indicating that aggressive behavior was not completely eliminated by the inclusion of a prosocial context for the violence.
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Jean-Baptiste Pingault et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2013
Background: Research shows that children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder are at elevated risk of criminality. However, several issues still need to be addressed in order to verify whether hyperactivity in itself plays a role in the prediction of criminality. In particular, co-occurrence with other behaviors as well as the internal heterogeneity in ADHD symptoms (hyperactivity and inattention) should be taken into account. The aim of this study was to assess the unique and interactive contributions of hyperactivity to the development of criminality, whilst considering inattention, physical aggression and family adversity.
Methodology/Principal Findings: We monitored the development of a population-based sample of kindergarten children (N = 2,741). Hyperactivity, inattention, and physical aggression were assessed annually between the ages of 6 and 12 years by mothers and teachers. Information on the presence, the age at first charge and the type of criminal charge was obtained from official records when the participants were aged 25 years. We used survival analysis models to predict the development of criminality in adolescence and adulthood: high childhood hyperactivity was highly predictive when bivariate analyses were used; however, with multivariate analyses, high hyperactivity was only marginally significant (Hazard Ratio: 1.38; 95% CI: 0.94-2.02). Sensitivity analyses revealed that hyperactivity was not a consistent predictor. High physical aggression was strongly predictive (Hazard Ratio: 3.44; 95% CI: 2.43-4.87) and its role was consistent in sensitivity analyses and for different types of crime. Inattention was not predictive of later criminality.
Conclusions/Significance: Although the contribution of childhood hyperactivity to criminality may be detected in large samples using multi-informant longitudinal designs, our results show that it is not a strong predictor of later criminality. Crime prevention should instead target children with the highest levels of childhood physical aggression and family adversity.
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John Light et al.
Journal of Research on Adolescence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Antisocial behavior typically increases during early adolescence, but the possibility of seasonal variation has not been examined. In this study, trajectories of antisocial behavior were estimated for early adolescent boys and girls. Data were obtained from a 3-year longitudinal study of 11 middle schools in the western United States (n = 5,742), with assessments completed four times per academic year. Antisocial behavior increased steadily throughout 6th grade, but beginning in 7th grade for boys and 8th grade for girls it declined during the school year. Significant increases between Grades 6-7 and 7-8 were found for both genders. Trajectories varied by contextual and individual-level social victimization and gender. Implications for theoretical development and future studies are discussed.
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Kendra Lewis et al.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, June 2013, Pages 622-630
Background: Youth problem behaviors remain a public health issue. Youth in low-income, urban areas are particularly at risk for engaging in aggressive, violent, and disruptive behaviors.
Purpose: To evaluate the effects of a school-based social-emotional learning and health promotion program on problem behaviors and related attitudes among low-income, urban youth.
Design: A matched-pair, cluster RCT.
Setting/participants: Participants were drawn from 14 Chicago Public Schools over a 6-year period of program delivery with outcomes assessed for a cohort of youth followed from Grades 3 to 8. Data were collected from Fall 2004 to Spring 2010, and analyzed in Spring 2012.
Intervention: The Positive Action program includes a scoped and sequenced K-12 classroom curriculum with six components: self-concept, social and emotional positive actions for managing oneself responsibly, and positive actions directed toward physical and mental health, honesty, getting along with others, and continually improving oneself. The program also includes teacher, counselor, family, and community training as well as activities directed toward schoolwide climate development.
Main outcome measures: Youth reported on their normative beliefs in support of aggression and on their bullying, disruptive, and violent behaviors; parents rated youths' bullying behaviors and conduct problems; schoolwide data on disciplinary referrals and suspensions were obtained from school records.
Results: Multilevel growth-curve modeling analyses conducted on completion of the trial indicated that Positive Action mitigated increases over time in (1) youth reports of normative beliefs supporting aggressive behaviors and of engaging in disruptive behavior and bullying (girls only) and (2) parent reports of youth bullying behaviors (boys only). At study end-point, students in Positive Action schools also reported a lower rate of violence-related behavior than students in control schools. Schoolwide findings indicated positive program effects on both disciplinary referrals and suspensions. Program effect sizes ranged from -0.26 to -0.68.
Conclusions: These results extend evidence of the effectiveness of the Positive Action program to low-income, minority, urban school settings, and to middle school-aged youth.
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Lorena Estrada-Martínez et al.
Youth & Society, June 2013, Pages 221-242
Abstract:
Youth violence is a major cause of morbidity and mortality among Blacks and Latinos. Violent behaviors within Latino subgroups and the reasons for subgroup differences are not well understood. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 16,615), this study examined the risk for violent behaviors among an ethnically diverse sample of youth, with special attention to different Latino subgroups. Family dynamics were examined as moderators between neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) and violent behaviors who lived in neighborhoods with different racial/ethnic compositions. Results indicated that neighborhood SES was positively associated with risk for violent behaviors among youth living in predominately Black and Latino neighborhoods, but negatively in predominately White neighborhoods. Additionally, family cohesion, parental engagement, and adolescent autonomy differentially impacted the relationship between neighborhood SES and youth violent behaviors for youth living in predominately Latino neighborhoods.
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Effects of Oxytocin on Women's Aggression Depend on State Anxiety
Anne Campbell & Markus Hausmann
Aggressive Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on oxytocin (OT) indicates that it has stress reducing effects. This leads to opposing predictions of decreased and increased aggression which we examine in this study. Following completion of a state anxiety measure and administration of OT or a placebo, female participants took part in a competitive aggression game (PSAP) for a monetary prize which, if won, would be paid to a loved one. In the game, three options were available: participants could earn points; attack their opponent by deducting points; and defend themselves against point deduction by their opponent. There was no main effect of OT on these responses, however there was an interaction with state anxiety. In the placebo condition, women higher in state anxiety showed a significantly higher ratio of Attack-to-Earn responses than low anxiety women. Under oxytocin, there was a significant reduction in their Attack:Earn ratio resulting in no significant difference between high and low state anxiety groups. There was a similar trend for the Defend:Earn ratio. The reduction of reactive aggression in state anxious women supports the view that OT may decrease negative behavior and increase constructive behavior even under conditions of provocation.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Sleeper cell
Higher-Status Occupations and Breast Cancer: A Life-Course Stress Approach
Tetyana Pudrovska et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using the 1957-2011 data from 3,682 White non-Hispanic women (297 incident breast cancer cases) in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, United States, we explore the effect of occupation in 1975 (at age 36) on breast cancer incidence up to age 72. Our study is motivated by the paradoxical association between higher-status occupations and elevated breast cancer risk, which presents a challenge to the consistent health advantage of higher social class. We found that women in professional occupations had 72%-122% and women in managerial occupations had 57%-89% higher risk of a breast cancer diagnosis than housewives and women in lower-status occupations. We explored an estrogen-related pathway (reproductive history, health behaviors, and life-course estrogen cycle) as well as a social stress pathway (occupational experiences) as potential explanations for the effect of higher-status occupations. The elevated risk of breast cancer among professional women was partly explained by estrogen-related variables but remained large and statistically significant. The association between managerial occupations and breast cancer incidence was fully explained by job authority defined as control over others' work. Exercising job authority was related to higher breast cancer risk (HR = 1.57, 95% CI: 1.12, 2.18), especially with longer duration of holding the professional/managerial job. We suggest that the assertion of job authority by women in the 1970s involved stressful interpersonal experiences that may have promoted breast cancer development via prolonged dysregulation of the glucocorticoid system and exposure of the breast tissue to adverse effects of chronically elevated cortisol. Our study emphasizes complex biosocial pathways through which women's gendered occupational experiences become embodied and drive forward physiological repercussions.
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Sleeping at the Limits: The Changing Prevalence of Short and Long Sleep Durations in 10 Countries
Yu Sun Bin, Nathaniel Marshall & Nick Glozier
American Journal of Epidemiology, 15 April 2013, Pages 826-833
Abstract:
Short (≤6 hours) and long (>9 hours) sleep durations are risk factors for mortality and morbidity. To investigate whether the prevalences of short and long sleep durations have increased from the 1970s to the 2000s, we analyzed data from repeated cross-sectional surveys of 10 industrialized countries (38 nationally representative time-use surveys; n = 328,018 adults). Logistic regression models for each country were used to determine changes in the prevalence of short and long sleep durations over time, controlling for sampling differences in gender, age, number of weekend days included, and season of data collection. Over the periods covered by data, the prevalence of short sleep duration increased in Italy (adjusted odds ratio = 2.64, 95% confidence interval (CI): 2.41, 2.89) and Norway (adjusted odds ratio = 2.33, 95% CI: 1.77, 3.08) but decreased in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The prevalence of long sleep duration increased in Australia (adjusted odds ratio = 1.14, 95% CI: 1.05, 1.25), Finland (adjusted odds ratio = 1.30, 95% CI: 1.14, 1.48), Sweden (adjusted odds ratio = 1.51, 95% CI: 1.35, 1.69), the United Kingdom (adjusted odds ratio = 2.03, 95% CI: 1.68, 2.46), and the United States (adjusted odds ratio = 1.50, 95% CI: 1.36, 1.65) but decreased in Canada and Italy. No changes were observed in Germany or the Netherlands. Limited increases in short sleep duration challenge the claim of increasingly sleep-deprived societies. Long sleep duration is more widespread than is short sleep duration. It has become more prevalent and thus should not be overlooked as a potential contributor to ill health.
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Richard Shaw & Kate Pickett
American Journal of Public Health, June 2013, Pages 1052-1057
Objectives: In the United States, Hispanic mothers have birth outcomes comparable to those of White mothers despite lower socioeconomic status. The contextual effects of Hispanic neighborhoods may partially explain this "Hispanic paradox." We investigated whether this benefit extends to other ethnic groups.
Methods: We used multilevel logistic regression to investigate whether the county-level percentage of Hispanic residents is associated with infant mortality, low birth weight, preterm delivery, and smoking during pregnancy in 581 151 Black and 2 274 247 White non-Hispanic mothers from the US Linked Birth and Infant Death Data Set, 2000.
Results: For White and Black mothers, relative to living in counties with 0.00%-0.99% of Hispanic residents, living in counties with 50.00% or more of Hispanic residents was associated with an 80.00% reduction in the odds of smoking, an infant mortality reduction of approximately one third, and a modest reduction in the risks of preterm delivery and low birth weight.
Conclusions: The health benefits of living in Hispanic areas appear to bridge ethnic divides, resulting in better birth outcomes even for those of non-Hispanic origin.
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Texting While Driving and Other Risky Motor Vehicle Behaviors Among US High School Students
Emily O'Malley Olsen, Ruth Shults & Danice Eaton
Pediatrics, forthcoming
Objective: To assess the prevalence of texting/e-mailing while driving (TWD) and association of TWD with other risky motor vehicle (MV) behaviors among US high school students.
Methods: Data were used from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2011 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which assessed TWD during the 30 days before the survey among 8505 students aged ≥16 years from a nationally representative sample of US high school students. TWD frequency was coded into dichotomous and polychotomous variables. Logistic regression assessed the relationship between TWD and other risky driving behaviors, controlling for age, race/ethnicity, and sex.
Results: The prevalence of TWD on ≥1 days during the 30 days before the survey was 44.5% (95% confidence interval: 40.8%-48.2%). Students who engaged in TWD were more likely than their non-TWD counterparts to not always wear their seatbelt (prevalence ratio; 95% confidence interval: 1.16; 1.07-1.26), ride with a driver who had been drinking alcohol (1.74; 1.57-1.93), and drink alcohol and drive (5.33; 4.32-6.59). These other risky MV behaviors were most likely to occur among students who frequently engaged in TWD.
Conclusions: Nearly half of US high school students aged ≥16 years report TWD during the past 30 days; these students are more likely to engage in additional risky MV behaviors. This suggests there is a subgroup of students who may place themselves, their passengers, and others on the road at elevated risk for a crash-related injury or fatality by engaging in multiple risky MV behaviors.
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Cellphone bans and fatal motor vehicle crash rates in the United States
Siew Hoon Lim & Junwook Chi
Journal of Public Health Policy, May 2013, Pages 197-212
Abstract:
A number of states in the United States have laws restricting drivers from using cellphones. Using state-level panel data, we examined the effect of cellphone laws on fatal crashes in the United States between 2000 and 2010. Our results show that there is insufficient power to detect a reduction in overall fatal crash rates scaled by vehicle miles and population estimates. Cellphone bans, however, have significantly reduced the fatal crash rates of drivers in certain age cohorts. The effect was most pronounced among drivers between 18 and 34 years of age. We did not find any significant effect among drivers in the 55 and older age cohorts.
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Car Ratings Take a Back Seat to Vehicle Type: Outcomes of SUV vs. Passenger Car Crashes
Dietrich Jehle et al.
University at Buffalo Working Paper, May 2013
Background: Car safety ratings are routinely utilized in making automobile purchase decisions. These one to five star ratings are based on crash test data comparing vehicles of similar type, size and weight.
Objectives: In this study, we hypothesized that car safety ratings are less important than other vehicle factors in predicting outcomes of head-on crashes between SUVs and standard passenger vehicles.
Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on the drivers in severe head-on motor vehicle crashes entered into the FARS (Fatality Analysis Reporting System) database between 1995 and 2010. This database includes all motor vehicle crashes in United States that resulted in a death within 30 days. Only two car head-on crashes between a highly (safety) rated passenger car and a more poorly rated SUV were included in the initial analysis. Outcomes of all SUV vs. passenger car and passenger car vs. passenger car head-on crashes were then compared by safety rating. In all analyses, crashes were excluded if either vehicle was older than model year 1995, incomplete information was available on specific vehicle types, or vehicle crash ratings were not available for both vehicles. These paired crash results were entered into a univariate logistic regression model with driver death as the outcome of interest.
Results: There were 83,251 vehicles of any type involved in head-on crashes in the database. In head-on crashes where the front driver passenger car crash rating was superior to the SUV's front driver crash rating, the odds of death was 4.03 times higher for the driver of the passenger car (95% CI: 3.04 - 5.35). Ignoring crash ratings, the odds of death was 7.59 times higher for the car driver than the SUV driver in all head-on crashes (95% CI: 6.75 - 8.52). In passenger vs. passenger car head-on crashes, a lower car safety rating was associated with a 1.47 times higher odds of death (95% CI: 1.26-1.71).
Conclusion: Vehicle type (passenger vehicle vs. SUV) is a much more important predictor of death than crash safety ratings in SUV vs. passenger vehicle head-on crashes. The increased safety of SUVs in head-on crashes with passenger vehicles should be taken into consideration when purchasing a car.
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Sepideh Modrek & Mark Cullen
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
While the negative effects of unemployment have been well studied, the consequences of layoffs and downsizing for those who remain employed are less well understood. This study used human resources and health claimsdata from a large multi-site fully insured aluminum company to explore the health consequences of downsizing on the remaining workforce. We exploit the variation in the timing and intensity of layoff to categorize 30 plants as high or low layoff plants. Next, we select a stably employed cohort of workers with history of health insurance going back to 2006 to 1) describe the selection process into layoff and 2) explore the association between the severity of plant level layoffs and the incidence of four chronic conditions in the remaining workforce. We examined four health outcomes: incident hypertension, diabetes, asthma/COPD and depression for a cohort of approximately 13,000 employees. Results suggest that there was an increased risk of developing hypertension for workers that remain at the plants with the highest level of layoffs, and increased risk of developing diabetes for salaried workers that remain at the plants with the highest level of layoffs. The hypertension results were robust to a several specification tests. In addition, the study design selected only healthy workers, therefore our results are likely to be a lower bound and suggest that adverse health consequences of the current recession may affect a broader proportion of the population than previously expected.
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Richard Steckel
American Journal of Human Biology, forthcoming
Objectives: The paper tests the thrifty phenotype hypothesis, according to which nonharmonious growth trajectories are costly for adult health.
Methods: The American surge in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes is concentrated in the South, a region characterized by a long history of poverty followed by rapid economic growth beginning in the 1960s. Civil rights legislation further accelerated income growth for African-Americans in the region. The paper investigates the hypothesis by using per capita income at the state level as a proxy for net nutritional conditions.
Results: Regressions at the state level explain 56% of the variation in the prevalence rate of type 2 diabetes in 2009 using two explanatory variables: the ratio of per capita income in 1980 to that in 1950 and the share of the population that was African-American. The paper discusses ways that rapid economic growth may have translated into weight gain and type 2 diabetes.
Conclusions: If the thrifty phenotype hypothesis is correct, future rates in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes are predictable based on income history. The forecast for rapidly developing countries such as India and China are ominous.
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For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic
Gil Eyal
American Journal of Sociology, January 2013, Pages 863-907
Abstract:
This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and power were analyzed in the sociology of professions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by using it to explain the recent precipitous rise in autism diagnoses. This article shows that autism remained a rare disorder until the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation created a new institutional matrix within which a new set of actors - the parents of children with autism in alliance with psychologists and therapists - were able to forge an alternative network of expertise.
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Aggregation and The Estimated Effects of Local Economic Conditions on Health
Jason Lindo
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
This paper considers the relationship between local economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation. After reviewing the tradeoffs associated with more- and less-disaggregated analyses - including an investigation of the migratory response to changing economic conditions - I update earlier state-level analyses of mortality and infant health and then consider how the estimated effects vary when the analysis is conducted at differing levels of geographic aggregation. This analysis reveals that more-disaggregated analyses severely understate the extent to which downturns are associated with improved health. Further investigation reveals that county economic conditions have an independent effect on mortality but that state and regional economic conditions are stronger predictors. I also leverage county-level data to explore heterogeneity in the link between county economic conditions and health across states, demonstrating that local downturns lead to the greatest improvements in health in low-income states.
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Childhood Infections and Adult Height in Monozygotic Twin Pairs
Amie Hwang et al.
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Adult height is determined by genetics and childhood nutrition, but childhood infections may also play a role. Monozygotic twins are genetically matched and offer an advantage when identifying environmental determinants. In 2005-2007, we examined the association of childhood infections with adult height in 140 height-discordant monozygotic twin pairs from the California Twin Program. To obtain information on childhood infections and growth, we interviewed the mothers of monozygotic twins who differed in self-reported adult height by at least 1-inch (2.5 cm). Within-pair differences in the relative frequency of childhood infections were highly correlated, especially within age groups. A conditional logistic regression analysis demonstrated that more reported episodes of febrile illness occurred in the twin with shorter stature (odds ratio = 2.00, 95% confidence interval: 1.18, 3.40). The association was strongest for differences in the relative frequency of infection during the toddler years (ages 1-5: odds ratio = 3.34, 95% confidence interval: 1.47, 7.59) and was similar when restricted to twin pairs of equal birth length. The association was not explained by differential nutritional status. Measures of childhood infection were associated with height difference in monozygotic twin pairs, independent of genome, birth length, and available measures of diet.
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Blood Cholesterol Trends 2001-2011 in the United States: Analysis of 105 Million Patient Records
Harvey Kaufman et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2013
Objectives: We report annual trends in low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) from an in-care patient population of nearly 105 million adults across the United States (U.S.), from 2001 through 2011.
Background: Average blood cholesterol values have declined in the U.S. since at least 1960. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) reported declining blood cholesterol values from 1999 through 2010. In the absence of more recent published data, we examined LDL-C values from a single clinical laboratory database to determine whether these values continued to decline through 2011.
Methods and Results: We extracted almost 247 million LDL-C results from nearly 105 million adults who received diagnostic testing from a single national clinical laboratory. Annual age-adjusted mean LDL-C values were calculated, and analyzed by gender. Piecewise regression analysis of the total study population indicates a breakpoint, or change in slope, in the years following 2008 (F = 163.13; p<0.05). Between 2001 and 2008, the average rate of annual decline was -2.05 mg/dL (95% CI [-2.35, -1.75]). After 2008, mean LDL-C levels flattened out, with a slope not statistically different from zero (slope = -0.10 mg/dL/year; 95% CI [-1.46, 1.26]). This stabilization was observed in both genders and all age ranges, and was also reflected in the percentage of results in low- and high-risk categories.
Conclusions: The trends reported suggest historical progress in decreasing LDL-C levels, observed from 2001-2008, may have stalled in recent years. Further research is needed to determine the cause of the observed trends and develop new strategies to reduce lipid-based cardiovascular risk further.
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Amar Hamoudi & Jennifer Beam Dowd
American Journal of Public Health, June 2013, Pages 1039-1045
Objectives: We examined the impact of the dramatic increases in housing prices in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s on physical health outcomes among a representative sample of middle-aged and older Americans.
Methods: Using a quasi-experimental design, we exploited geographic and time variation in housing prices using third-party valuation estimates of median single-family detached houses from 1988 to 2007 in each of 2400 zip codes combined with Health and Retirement Study data from 1992 to 2006 to test the impact of housing appreciation on physical health outcomes.
Results: Respondents living in communities in which home values appreciated more rapidly had fewer functional limitations, performed better on interviewer-administered physical tasks, and had smaller waist circumference.
Conclusions: Our results indicate that increases in housing wealth were associated with better health outcomes for homeowners in late middle age and older. The recent sharp decline in housing values for this group may likewise be expected to have important implications for health and should be examined as data become available.
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Disability, Earnings, Income and Consumption
Bruce Meyer & Wallace Mok
NBER Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
Using longitudinal data for 1968-2009 for male household heads, we determine the prevalence of pre-retirement age disability and its association with a wide range of outcomes, including earnings, income, and consumption. We then employ some of these quantities in the optimal social insurance framework of Chetty (2006) to study current compensation for the disabled. Six of our findings stand out. First, disability rates are high. We divide the disabled along two dimensions based on the persistence and severity of their work-limiting condition. We estimate that a person reaching age 50 has a 36 percent chance of having been disabled at least temporarily once during his working years, and a 9 percent chance that he has begun a chronic and severe disability. Second, the economic consequences of disability are frequently profound. Ten years after disability onset, a person with a chronic and severe disability on average experiences a 79 percent decline in earnings, a 35 percent decline in after-tax income, a 24 percent decline in food and housing consumption and a 22 percent decline in food consumption. Third, economic circumstances differ sharply across disability groups. The outcome decline for the chronically and severely disabled is often more than twice as large as that for the average disabled head. Fourth, our findings show the partial and incomplete roles that individual savings, family support and social insurance play in reducing the consumption drop that follows disability. Fifth, time use and detailed consumption data further indicate that disability is associated with a decline in well-being. Sixth, using the quantities we have estimated, we provide the range of behavioral elasticities and preference parameters consistent with current disability compensation being optimal within the Chetty framework.
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Predictors of health behaviors after the economic downturn: A longitudinal study
Jonathan Macy, Laurie Chassin & Clark Presson
Social Science & Medicine, July 2013, Pages 8-15
Abstract:
Economic declines and their associated stress, shortage of financial resources, and changes in available time can impair health behaviors. This study tested the association between change in working hours, change in employment status, and financial strain and health behaviors measured after the 2008 recession after controlling for pre-recession levels of the health behaviors. The moderating influences of demographic factors and pre-recession levels of the health behaviors on the association between change in working hours and employment status and financial strain and the health behaviors were also tested. Participants (N = 3984) were from a longitudinal study of a U.S. Midwestern community-based sample. Regression analyses tested the unique relations between change in hours worked per week, change in employment status, and financial strain and five health behaviors over and above demographic factors and pre-recession levels of the same behavior. Models included predictor by covariate interactions. Participants who reported higher levels of financial strain engaged in lower levels of all but one of the five health behaviors, but there were no significant main effects of a change in the number of hours worked per week or change in employment status. Significant interactions revealed moderation of these relations by demographic characteristics, but findings differed across health behaviors. Financial strain negatively affected engagement in multiple healthy behaviors. Promoting the maintenance of healthy behaviors for disease prevention is an important public health goal during times of economic decline.
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The Effect of Health on Earnings: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Commuting Accidents
Martin Hallaa & Martina Zweimüller
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper interprets accidents occurring on the way to and from work as negative health shocks to identify the causal effect of health on labor market outcomes. We argue that in our sample of exactly matched injured and non-injured workers, these health shocks (predominantly impairments in the musculoskeletal system) are quasi-randomly assigned. A fixed-effects difference-in-differences approach estimates a negative and persistent effect on subsequent employment and earnings. After initial periods with ahigher incidence of sick leave, injured workers are more likely to be unemployed, and a growing share of them leave the labor market via disability retirement. Injured workers who manage to stay in employment incur persistent earnings losses. The effectsare somewhat stronger for sub-groups of workers who are typically less attached to the labor market.
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An Investigation into the Effect of Type I and Type II Diabetes Duration on Employment and Wages
Travis Minor
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the current study examines the effect of type I and type II diabetes on employment status and wages. The results suggest that both the probability of employment and wages are negatively related to the number of years since the initial diagnosis of diabetes. Moreover, the effect of diabetes duration on the probability of employment appears to be nonlinear, peaking around 16 years for females and 10 years for males. A similar negative effect on wages is found only in male diabetics. Finally, the results suggest that failure to distinguish between type I and type II diabetics may lead to some counterintuitive results.
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Family income and child health in the UK
Bénédicte Apouey & Pierre-Yves Geoffard
Journal of Health Economics, July 2013, Pages 715-727
Abstract:
Recent studies examining the relationship between family income and child health in the UK have produced mixed findings. We re-examine the income gradient in child general health and its evolution with child age in this country, using a very large sample of British children. We find that there is no correlation between income and child general health at ages 0-1, that the gradient emerges around age 2 and is constant from age 2 to age 17. In addition, we show that the gradient remains large and significant when we reduce the endogeneity of income. Furthermore, our results indicate that the gradient in general health reflects a greater prevalence of chronic conditions among low-income children and a greater severity of these conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that income does matter for child health in the UK and may play a role in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status.
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Martin Binder & Alex Coad
Social Science & Medicine, June 2013, Pages 155-167
Abstract:
Bad health decreases individuals' happiness, but few studies measure the impact of specific illnesses. We apply matching estimators to examine how changes in different (objective) conditions of bad health affect subjective well-being for a sample of 100,278 observations from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) database (1996-2006). The strongest effect is for alcohol and drug abuse, followed by anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses, stroke and cancer. Adaptation to health impairments varies across health impairments. There is also a puzzling asymmetry: strong adverse reactions to deteriorations in health appear alongside weak increases in well-being after health improvements. In conclusion, our analysis offers a more detailed account of how bad health influences happiness than accounts focusing on how bad self-assessed health affects individual well-being.
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Does More Schooling Improve Health Outcomes and Health Related Behaviors? Evidence from U.K. Twins
Vikesh Amin, Jere Behrman & Tim Spector
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Several recent studies using instrumental variables based on changes in compulsory school leaving age laws have estimated the causal effect of schooling on health outcomes and health-related behaviors in the U.K. Despite using the same identification strategy and similar datasets, no consensus has been reached. We contribute to the literature by providing results for the U.K. using a different research design and a different dataset. Specifically, we estimate the effect of schooling on health outcomes (obesity and physical health) and health-related behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption and exercise) for women through within-MZ twins estimates using the TwinsUK database. For physical health, alcohol consumption and exercise, the within-MZ twins estimates are uninformative about whether there is a causal effect. However, we find (1) that the significant association between schooling and smoking status is due to unobserved endowments that are correlated with schooling and smoking (2) there is some indication that more schooling reduces the body mass index for women, even once these unobserved endowments have been controlled for.
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Income Inequalities in Unhealthy Life Styles in England and Spain
Joan Costa-Font, Cristina Hernández-Quevedo & Dolores Jiménez Rubio
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Health inequalities in developed societies are persistent. Arguably, the rising inequalities in unhealthy lifestyles might underpin these inequality patterns, yet supportive empirical evidence is scarce. We examine the patterns of inequality in unhealthy lifestyles in England and Spain, two countries that exhibit rising obesity levels with a high prevalence of smoking and alcohol use. This study is unique in that it draws from health survey data spanning over a period in which major contextual and policy changes have taken place. We document persistent income-related inequalities in obesity and smoking; both unhealthy lifestyles appear to be disproportionately concentrated among the relatively poor in recent decades. In contrast, alcohol use appears to be concentrated among richer individuals in both periods and countries examined.
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Peter Muennig et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Abstract:
We set out to examine the material, psychological, and sociological pathways mediating the income gradient in health and mortality. We used the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index dataset (N = 26,870), which contains three decades of social survey data in the US linked to thirty years of mortality follow-up. We grouped a large number of variables into 3 domains: material, psychological, and sociological using factor analysis. We then employed discrete-time hazard models to examine the extent to which these three domains mediated the income-mortality association among men and women. Overall, the gradient was weaker for females than for males. While psychological and material factors explained mortality hazards among females, hazards among males were explained only by social capital. Poor health significantly predicted both income and mortality, particularly among females, suggesting a strong role for reverse causation. We also find that many traditional associations between income and mortality are absent in this dataset, such as perceived social status.
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Markus Schafer
Social Science & Medicine, June 2013, Pages 176-184
Abstract:
Building from the premise that network ties influence why and how people seek health care, this study examines whether different types of close relations predict two distinct, but overlapping forms of care utilization. To that end, I examine the use of conventional care and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Analyses are conducted with a national sample of older American adults aged 57-85 in 2005/2006 (n = 3005). I find that partnered men who are very likely to discuss health with a partner had a greater number of physician visits in the past year, net of their health status and other relevant factors. Having children with whom health is likely to be discussed was also associated with more visits, as was the presence of non-kin ties. On the other hand, the use of complementary and alternative medicine was predicted not by spousal or other kin-based relationships, but only by having non-kin ties with whom a respondent could discuss health. Results suggest that understanding the relational undercurrents of care utilization requires attention to diverse forms of social relations and to diverse expressions of care participation.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Race through time
The Political Foundations of the Black-White Education Achievement Gap
Michael Hartney & Patrick Flavin
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
More than 50 years after Brown v. Board, African American students continue to trail their White peers on a variety of important educational indicators. In this article, we investigate the political foundations of the racial "achievement gap" in American education. Using variation in high school graduation rates across the states, we first assess whether state policymakers are attentive to the educational needs of struggling African American students. We find evidence that state policymaking attention to teacher quality - an issue education research shows is essential to improving schooling outcomes for racial minority students - is highly responsive to low graduation rates among White students, but bears no relationship to low graduation rates among African American students. We then probe a possible mechanism behind this unequal responsiveness by examining the factors that motivate White public opinion about education reform and find racial influences there as well. Taken together, we uncover evidence that the persisting achievement gap between White and African American students has distinctively political foundations.
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Distinctively Black Names in the American Past
Lisa Cook, Trevon Logan & John Parman
NBER Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
We document the existence of a distinctive national naming pattern for African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use census records to identify a set of high-frequency names among African Americans that were unlikely to be held by whites. We confirm the distinctiveness of the names using over five million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois and North Carolina from the early twentieth century. The names we identify in the census records are similarly distinctive in these three independent data sources. Surprisingly, approximately the same percentage of African Americans had "black names" historically as they do today. No name that we identify as a historical black name, however, is a contemporary black name. The literature has assumed that black names are a product of the Civil Rights Movement, yet our results suggest that they are a long-standing cultural norm among African Americans. This is the first evidence that distinctively racialized names existed long before the Civil Rights Era, establishing a new fact in the historical literature.
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Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress
Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers
Journal of Legal Studies, June 2012, Pages 459-493
Abstract:
Progress in closing differences in many objective outcomes for blacks relative to whites has slowed, and even worsened, over the past 3 decades. However, over this period the racial gap in happiness has shrunk. In the early 1970s data revealed much lower levels of subjective well-being among blacks relative to whites. Investigating various measures of well-being, we find that the well-being of blacks has increased both absolutely and relative to that of whites. While a racial gap in well-being remains, two-fifths of the gap has closed, and these gains have occurred despite little progress in closing other racial gaps such as those in income, employment, and education. Much of the current racial gap in happiness can be explained by differences in the objective conditions of the lives of black and white Americans. Thus, making further progress will likely require progress in closing racial gaps in objective circumstances.
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Örn Bodvarsson & Brad Humphreys
Contemporary Economic Policy, July 2013, Pages 604-617
Abstract:
We investigate the possibility that labor market discrimination affects capital. Previous research indicates that discrimination affects wages and employment in labor markets. However, the effects of discrimination on other inputs to production are not known. We develop a model of the optimal capital stock in the presence of customer discrimination and test this model using data on sports facility construction. The empirical evidence suggests that teams in cities with a larger white population and more racial segregation put less capital in place, confirming the predictions of the model about the effect of customer discrimination on capital inputs.
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The Residential Segregation Patterns of Whites by Socioeconomic Status, 2000-2011
Gregory Sharp & John Iceland
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In light of increasing racial and ethnic diversity, a recent housing crisis, and deep economic recession, arguments pertaining to the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in shaping patterns of racial/ethnic segregation remain salient. Using data from the 2000 decennial census and the 2007-2011 American Community Survey, we provide new evidence on the residential segregation patterns of whites from minorities by SES (income, education, and poverty). Results from our comprehensive analyses indicate that SES matters for the segregation patterns of whites from minorities. In particular, we find that whites as a whole are less segregated from higher-SES minority group members than lower-SES ones. Among whites, those of higher SES are more segregated from blacks and Hispanics as a whole and less segregated from Asians, indicating the importance of SES differentials across racial/ethnic groups in shaping residential patterns. We also find that during the 2000s, white-black segregation remained stable or declined, while whites became more segregated from Hispanics and Asians by all SES indicators. Fixed-effects models indicate that increasing white-minority SES segregation was fueled in part by increases in a metropolitan area's immigrant and elderly populations, minority poverty rate, and home values, while declining segregation was associated with rising education levels and new housing construction.
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Race-Specific Agglomeration Economies: Social Distance and the Black-White Wage Gap
Elizabeth Ananat, Shihe Fu & Stephen Ross
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
We demonstrate a striking but previously unnoticed relationship between city size and the black-white wage gap, with the gap increasing by 2.5% for every million-person increase in urban population. We then look within cities and document that wages of blacks rise less with agglomeration in the workplace location, measured as employment density per square kilometer, than do white wages. This pattern holds even though our method allows for non-parametric controls for the effects of age, education, and other demographics on wages, for unobserved worker skill as proxied by residential location, and for the return to agglomeration to vary across those demographics, industry, occupation and metropolitan areas. We find that an individual's wage return to employment density rises with the share of workers in their work location who are of their own race. We observe similar patterns for human capital externalities as measured by share workers with a college education. We also find parallel results for firm productivity by employment density and share college-educated using firm racial composition in a sample of manufacturing firms. These findings are consistent with the possibility that blacks, and black-majority firms, receive lower returns to agglomeration because such returns operate within race, and blacks have fewer same-race peers and fewer highly-educated same-race peers at work from whom to enjoy spillovers than do whites. Data on self-reported social networks in the General Social Survey provide further evidence consistent with this mechanism, showing that blacks feel less close to whites than do whites, even when they work exclusively with whites. We conclude that social distance between blacks and whites preventing shared benefits from agglomeration is a significant contributor to overall black-white wage disparities.
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A theory of perceived discrimination
Tilman Klumpp & Xuejuan Su
Economic Theory, May 2013, Pages 153-180
Abstract:
We develop a model in which individuals compete for a fixed pool of prizes by investing effort in a contest. Individuals belong to two separate and identifiable groups. We say that the contest is discriminatory if a lower share of prizes is reserved for one group than for the other. We show that it can be difficult for an observer to detect the presence or absence of discrimination in the contest, as both regimes can be observationally equivalent. In particular, one group's belief that it is allocated a lower share of prizes than the other group can be consistent with observed data even if no such group quotas actually exist. Conversely, the belief that the contest does not discriminate can be consistent with data when, in fact, discrimination exists. Incorrect beliefs will therefore not be revised, as the contest generates no evidence to the contrary.
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Housing Tenure and Residential Segregation in Metropolitan America
Samantha Friedman, Hui-shien Tsao & Cheng Chen
Demography, forthcoming
Abstract:
Homeownership, a symbol of the American dream, is one of the primary ways through which families accumulate wealth, particularly for blacks and Hispanics. Surprisingly, no study has explicitly documented the segregation of minority owners and renters from whites. Using data from Census 2000, this study aims to fill this gap. Analyses here reveal that the segregation of black renters relative to whites is significantly lower than the segregation of black owners from whites, controlling for relevant socioeconomic and demographic factors, contrary to the notion that homeownership represents an endpoint in the residential assimilation process. The patterns for Hispanics and Asians conform more to expectations under the spatial assimilation model. The findings here suggest that race and ethnicity continue to be as important in shaping residential segregation as socioeconomic status, and raise concerns about the benefits of homeownership, particularly for blacks.
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The Vulnerability of Minority Homeowners in the Housing Boom and Bust
Patrick Bayer, Fernando Ferreira & Stephen Ross
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
This paper examines mortgage outcomes for a large, representative sample of individual home purchases and refinances linked to credit scores in seven major US markets in the recent housing boom and bust. Among those with similar credit scores, black and Hispanic homeowners had much higher rates of delinquency and default in the downturn. These differences are not readily explained by the likelihood of receiving a subprime loan or by differential exposure to local shocks in the housing and labor market and are especially pronounced for loans originated near the peak of the boom. Our findings suggest that those black and Hispanic homeowners drawn into the market near the peak were especially vulnerable to adverse economic shocks and raise serious concerns about homeownership as a mechanism for reducing racial disparities in wealth.
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Kori Stroub & Meredith Richards
American Educational Research Journal, June 2013, Pages 497-531
Abstract:
Considerable attention has been devoted to the resegregation of public schools over the 1990s. No research to date, however, has examined change in school segregation since 2000. Using the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD), we examine longitudinal trends in racial/ethnic segregation in 350 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1993 to 2009. We find that worsening segregation over the 1990s has given way to a period of modest integration among all racial/ethnic groups since 1998. However, decreases in segregation were smaller in the formerly de jure segregated South and in metropolitan areas with large increases in racial/ethnic diversity. In addition, since 1998, the relative importance of segregation among non-Whites has increased, while the proportion of segregation that lies across district boundaries has stabilized.
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The Price of Opportunity: Race, Student Loan Debt, and College Achievement
Brandon Jackson & John Reynolds
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines racial differences in student loan debt and concurrently assesses the potential payoffs and countervailing risks inherent in reliance on loans in a cohort of black and white first-year college students. Using the 1996-2001 Beginning Postsecondary Student study we find that the use of loans results in greater enrollment persistence and higher odds of college completion, especially for black students. However, black students acquire larger amounts of student loan debt and face a higher risk of default than white students. This is in part due to associated racial differences in family socioeconomic status and type of institution attended. We suggest these findings illuminate the dual-sided nature of college loans that makes them an imperfect, but overall positive, tool for reducing educational inequality. On the one hand, student loans reduce educational inequality that otherwise results from disadvantaged students' struggles to pay for college and complete college in a timely fashion. At the same time, the degree to which loans reduce racial inequality is diminished by black students' higher loan amounts, the large number of black students who borrow but do not finish college, and the large racial difference in the odds of defaulting on a loan.
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Poverty at a Racial Crossroads: Poverty Among Multiracial Children of Single Mothers
Jenifer Bratter & Sarah Damaske
Journal of Marriage and Family, April 2013, Pages 486-502
Abstract:
Although multiracial youth represent a growing segment of children in all American families, we have little information on their well-being within single-mother households. This article examines multiracial children's level of poverty within single-mother families to identify the degree to which they may stand out from their monoracial peers. Using data from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey (3-year estimates), we explore the level of racial disparities in child poverty between monoracial White children and monoracial and multiracial children of color. Fully adjusted multivariate logistic regression analyses (n = 359,588) reveal that nearly all children of color are more likely to be poor than White children. Yet many multiracial children appear to hold an in-between status in which they experience lower rates of poverty than monoracial children of color. The high level of variation across groups suggests that the relationship between race and childhood poverty is more complicated than generally presumed.
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Racial Heterogeneity and Medicaid Expenditure in the U.S. States: A Longitudinal Analysis
Soomi Lee
Journal of Socio-Economics, August 2013, Pages 28-37
Abstract:
This study investigates the relationship between racial heterogeneity and Medicaid expenditures as a share of state public expenditures in the U.S. states from 1999 to 2010. Extant studies predict that increasing racial heterogeneity reduces the share of expenditure on "productive public goods" such as health and education spending. The relationship, however, has been inadequately examined in the previous research because (1) the use of a cross-section dataset in previous research makes it difficult to draw a causal inference, (2) previous research does not sufficiently discuss the magnitude of the effect, (3) it uses aggregate expenditure data which do not distinguish between programs that benefit targeted groups vs. the general public, and (4) previous research does not take political representation bias into consideration. My paper offers the first longitudinal analysis to examine a causal effect of racial heterogeneity on Medicaid expenditure at the U.S. state level. Using state panel data from 2000 to 2010, I find that racial heterogeneity has a negative and statistically significant effect on Medicaid's share within a state's budget. The fiscal impact is also economically significant.
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The Origins and Persistence of Black-White Differences in Women's Labor Force Participation
Leah Platt Boustan & William Collins
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
Black women were more likely than white women to participate in the labor force from 1870 until at least 1980 and to hold jobs in agriculture or manufacturing. Differences in observables cannot account for most of this racial gap in labor force participation for the 100 years after Emancipation. The unexplained racial gap may be due to racial differences in stigma associated with women's work, which Goldin (1977) suggested could be traced to cultural norms rooted in slavery. In both nineteenth and twentieth century data, we find evidence of inter-generation transmission of labor force participation from mother to daughter, which is consistent with the role of cultural norms.
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Chronic physical health conditions among children of different racial/ethnic backgrounds
P. Kitsantas et al.
Public Health, forthcoming
Objectives: It is estimated that 20% of children in the USA are affected by at least one chronic disease. Although the burden of chronic conditions is greater for minority populations of children, research that has explored the prevalence and risk factors of chronic disease across different racial/ethnic groups is scarce. The aim of this study was to examine racial/ethnic disparities in the prevalence rates of common physical, chronic diseases in White, Black and Hispanic children; and assess the effect of several factors on the risk of having a chronic disease.
Methods: Using the 2007 National Survey of Childrens Health, prevalence estimates were calculated for asthma, hearing impairment, visual impairment, joint/bone/muscle problems, brain injury and other illnesses for each racial/ethnic group. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the effects of several risk factors on the risk of each of these health conditions.
Results: The findings show that the prevalence for all health conditions was significantly higher (25.3%) among Black children than White (19.8%) and Hispanic (18.6%) children. Furthermore, 19.5% of Black children have had or currently have asthma compared with 12.2% of White and Hispanic children. More Black and Hispanic children were covered by public health insurance, while 19% of Hispanic children were currently uninsured. White children whose mothers had a health problem were associated with asthma, hearing impairment, visual impairment and joint/bone/muscle problems, while Black children were more likely to report asthma and Hispanics reported visual impairment and joint/bone muscle problems. Hispanic children who were living in poverty or were uninsured were at lower risk for any chronic disease. Regardless of race/ethnicity, children living in a single-parent household were more likely to be associated with any health condition.
Conclusions: This study provides evidence that racial/ethnic disparities in chronic physical conditions and health care among US children are extensive. It underscores that uninsured children who do not have access to the healthcare system are not being screened for chronic diseases, or are not obtaining medical care for such health problems. Healthcare providers should educate families about prevention measures and community services that might be able to assist them in improving the health of their children.
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Julia Goodman et al.
Social Science & Medicine, July 2013, Pages 83-89
Abstract:
Natural selection conserves mechanisms allowing women to spontaneously abort gestations least likely to yield fit offspring. Small gestational size has been proposed as an indicator of fitness observable by maternal biology. Previous research suggests that exposure to ambient stress in utero results in more "culling" of small fetuses and therefore lower rates of small-for-gestational-age (SGA). However, African American women persistently have higher rates of SGA than non-Hispanic white women, despite experiencing more ambient stress. This paper tests whether attenuation of the stress response among highly stressed African American women, as suggested by the weathering hypothesis, may help to explain this apparent inconsistency. We apply time-series modeling to over 2 million African American and non-Hispanic white male term births in California over the period of January 1989 through December 2010. We test for the parabolic (i.e., "U" shaped) relationship, implied by an attenuated stress response, between unusually strong labor market contraction and the rate of SGA among African American term male infants, and a linear relationship among non-Hispanic whites. We find the hypothesized parabolic relationship among term male African American infants. As expected, we find a linear relationship between unexpected layoffs and the rate of SGA among term male non-Hispanic whites. These results are robust to sensitivity analyses. These results may help to explain the high rates of SGA among term male African American infants, despite greater maternal exposure to ambient stress during pregnancy.
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The Evolution of Gender Employment Rate Differentials within Racial Groups in the United States
Candace Hamilton Hester, Chris Meyer & Steven Raphael
Journal of Legal Studies, June 2012, Pages 385-418
Abstract:
This paper analyzes changes in gender employment rate (GER) differentials for whites and blacks in the United States from 1950 to 2008. We document the evolution of the GER gap, which narrows considerably within both racial groups and turns slightly negative for blacks. We document the changing employment levels that drive these patterns as well as compositional shifts in each gender-race population. Among whites, nearly all of the narrowing is attributable to increasing employment rates among women. For blacks, a large component of the narrowing is explained by declining employment rates among men. Black employment rates decline precipitously for the least educated and post-1980 are reduced further by increased institutionalization and declining marriage rates. In an analysis of state-level interdecade changes in female outcomes, we find that a worsening of black male employment prospects is associated with an increase in female education and a decline in marriage and fertility rates.
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Interrogating Claims of Progress for Black Women Since 1970
Enobong Hannah Branch & Caroline Hanley
Journal of Black Studies, March 2013, Pages 203-226
Abstract:
Utilizing a comparative and historical perspective, we interrogate claims of progress focusing on low-wage Black and White women workers from 1970 to 2000. We begin by offering a historical perspective on occupational segregation by race and gender, which informs the evaluation of low-wage Black women's occupational progress. We then situate Black women's occupational attainment since 1970 within the larger context of labor market restructuring, which fundamentally changed the occupational landscape. We find no evidence that industrial and occupational upgrading among low-wage Black women, particularly in the South, from 1970 to 2000 narrowed the racial wage gap among low-wage women. The wage gap between low-wage Black and White women declined because of larger changes in the American economy, which reduced the quality of those jobs, eroding the wage advantage that White women in the white-collar service sector once enjoyed.
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Embracing Isolation: Chinese American Geographic Redistribution during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
Susan Carter
University of California Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first race-based immigration restriction in American history. It prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers and legitimated a host of new discriminatory policies and practices that circumscribed the activities of Chinese Americans residing in the country. This paper explores the geographic responses of Chinese Americans to the harsh new reality ushered in by the law. Using data from the IPUMS and ICPSR digitized census files, hand-coded entries from published census volumes, and Exclusion-era Chinese case files, this paper describes and analyzes for the first time the forces that shaped the geographic redistribution of the Chinese American population in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I reject the standard view that Chinese Americans were "confined to Chinatowns" during Exclusion and document instead their wide geographic dispersion. Chinatowns in the West shrank. This was true of those in big cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Oakland but also of those in smaller places such as Stockton, Sacramento, and Butte. Many Chinese returned home. Others left for cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South. While new Chinatowns outside the West were established, I show that much of the migratory flow out of the West was directed toward smaller cities without Chinatowns. I model Chinese American locational choices in terms of three motivations: a desire to live in their own ethnic communities, the need for remunerative employment, and the contrasting preferences of solitary male sojourners and co-habiting families raising children. Multivariate regression analysis suggests that the community motive played a strong positive role throughout the Exclusion Era, with larger Chinatowns especially attractive, but, during the period of Chinese population decline, its influence on geographic distribution was outweighed by the employment motive. Discrimination coupled with good access to capital and labor led the Chinese to embrace laundry and restaurant service. Chinese Americans dispersed throughout the country in an effort to locate near potential customers, often becoming the only person of their race living in their community. Success on Gold Mountain came at the price of an unparalleled degree of social isolation. Beginning in the 1920s, the recovery of the Chinese American population improved the economic viability of Chinatowns and offset the centrifugal effect of laundry and restaurant employment.
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Celeste Carruthers & Marianne Wanamaker
Journal of Public Economics, May 2013, Pages 53-67
Abstract:
Long-run labor market inequities are frequently attributed to disparities in primary and secondary school quality, and philanthropists often resort to targeted and tightly conditioned gifts to address these quality disparities. We match data on the Rosenwald Schools Program, an early 20th century initiative aimed at the Southern black-white school quality gap, to newly assembled data on local school districts and measure the impact of Rosenwald gifts on African-American public school resources. Although these gifts increased contemporaneous expenditures on African-American schools, results show that they yielded no lasting change in multiple school quality proxies. Further, because Rosenwald funds were diverted or implicitly matched to favor white schools, we find no evidence that the Fund reduced the black-white gap in superficial school quality. We demonstrate, however, that overall black public education expenditures in this era had a steeper marginal effect on black attendance and literacy measures than white public expenditures had on white outcome measures, which helps to explain why the Rosenwald program led to meaningful human capital gains for black, but not white, individuals despite its failure to impact relative school quality.
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Citizen Control: Race at the Welfare Office
Rose Ernst, Linda Nguyen & Kamilah Taylor
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: Individual relationships to the state are shaped through encounters with a variety of institutions. Little scholarly attention has been devoted to how citizenship is shaped through everyday interactions with the social service arm of the state through local "welfare" offices. In Washington State, one-third of all residents are served by the state's primary social service agency. Does this state agency send different messages about citizenship to individuals according to race? We examine this question through encounters of individuals with front-line welfare office staff.
Methods: Using a systematic audit method, we collected data from 54 Community Service Offices in Washington State to explore messages sent to individuals.
Results: We find consistent relationships between race and the quantity of information received and the quality of the interaction with the representatives of the state.
Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence that the state reinforces notions of both belonging and marginalization through patterns of racialized encounters with the state.
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Racial disparities in travel time to radiotherapy facilities in the Atlanta metropolitan area
Lucy Peipins et al.
Social Science & Medicine, July 2013, Pages 32-38
Abstract:
Low-income women with breast cancer who rely on public transportation may have difficulty in completing recommended radiation therapy due to inadequate access to radiation facilities. Using a geographic information system (GIS) and network analysis we quantified spatial accessibility to radiation treatment facilities in the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area. We built a transportation network model that included all bus and rail routes and stops, system transfers and walk and wait times experienced by public transportation system travelers. We also built a private transportation network to model travel times by automobile. We calculated travel times to radiation therapy facilities via public and private transportation from a population-weighted center of each census tract located within the study area. We broadly grouped the tracts by low, medium and high household access to a private vehicle and by race. Facility service areas were created using the network model to map the extent of areal coverage at specified travel times (30, 45 and 60 minutes) for both public and private modes of transportation. The median public transportation travel time to the nearest radiotherapy facility was 56 minutes vs. approximately 8 minutes by private vehicle. We found that majority black census tracts had longer public transportation travel times than white tracts across all categories of vehicle access and that 39% of women in the study area had longer than one hour of public transportation travel time to the nearest facility. In addition, service area analyses identified locations where the travel time barriers are the greatest. Spatial inaccessibility, especially for women who must use public transportation, is one of the barriers they face in receiving optimal treatment.
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Chenoa Flippen
American Journal of Sociology, March 2013, Pages 1161-1198
Abstract:
While the link between geographic and social mobility has long been a cornerstone of sociological approaches to migration, recent research has cast doubt on the economic returns to internal U.S. migration. Moreover, important racial disparities in migration patterns remain poorly understood. Drawing on data from the 2000 census, the author reappraises the link between migration and social mobility by taking relative deprivation into consideration. She examines the association between migration, disaggregated by region of origin and destination, and absolute and relative earnings and occupational prestige, separately by race. Findings lend new insight into the theoretical and stratification implications of growing racial disparities in migration patterns; while both blacks and whites who move north-south generally average lower absolute incomes than their stationary northern peers, they enjoy significantly higher relative social positions. Moreover, the relative "gains" to migration are substantially larger for blacks than for whites. The opposite patterns obtain for south-north migration.
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Matthew Hunt, Larry Hunt & William Falk
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: We examine (1) whether black migration trends from the final few decades of the 20th century continued during the first decade of the 21st century, (2) whether the black southern migration stream continues to be demographically distinctive, and (3) whether incorporating subjective/motivational factors into our models advances our understanding of race and interregional migration.
Methods: Using data from the 2000 to 2010 Current Population Surveys, we employ descriptive and inferential statistics to (1) map recent patterns of interregional migration in the United States by race and (2) estimate the effects of race, other sociodemographics, and subjective/motivational factors on people's propensity to migrate to the United States South.
Results: We find that the rate of black migration to the South continues to exceed that of whites, and that black migrants differ from their white counterparts both demographically and motivationally. We also observe selected gender differences within the black southern migration stream.
Conclusions: Our results underscore the need for more research on race, gender, and interregional migration in the United States. We suggest directions for such work, with particular focus on possibilities for further inquiry when 2010 census materials become more widely available.
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Apology and Redress: Escaping the Dustbin of History in the Postsegregationist South
Gary Alan Fine
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
How at moments of dramatic change and a shifting social context do political actors alter their public identities? Put differently, how do political figures respond when positions with which they have been closely identified are no longer morally and electorally defensible and must be altered? Responses to identity challenge within institutional spheres require an expansion of the theory of accounts to an approach that examines shifts in cultural fields. Those challenged must signal adherence to newly claimed values. The standard view of accounts examines interpersonal justifications outside of institutional pressures, downplaying social location. Extending a theory of accounts to political actors requires recognizing appeals to audiences and distribution of resources. In the political arena the presentation of accounts carries reputational dangers. Presenting excuses, politicians deny agency, placing themselves at jeopardy as incompetent. Justifications require a credulous audience that overlooks possible insincerity. As a result, other strategies are necessary. Political actors rely on apologies or redress to demonstrate a revised self to stakeholders, strategies based on position, resources and audience. To analyze the realignment of reputation in unsettled times, I examine the postsegregation careers of Governor George Wallace of Alabama and Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Both moved from being icons of segregation to (claimed) devotees of racial equality, but because of their political location they moved in different ways. Given their context, Wallace apologized, while Thurmond provided redress to offended communities.
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April Copes
Journal of Communication Inquiry, January 2013, Pages 26-44
Abstract:
This study assessed the inclusiveness of New York Times coverage prior to the 2012 presidential election as it relates to the lived experiences of African American voters. The study specifically asked, does the newspaper include substantive information about African American voters, the most pressing social justice concerns facing Black communities, and African American voices? The sampled news discourse is compared to the defining issues for the 21st century identified by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): racial disparity, economic disparity, health care disparity, education disparity, voter empowerment, and criminal justice. Findings reveal a paucity of coverage about African American voters in 2011. Although most of the articles discussed at least one social justice issue, when the scant coverage is considered, it becomes clear that the attention these issues received was severely lacking. African American voice was also seriously underrepresented.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Slumming
Does International Child Sponsorship Work? A Six-Country Study of Impacts on Adult Life Outcomes
Bruce Wydick, Paul Glewwe & Laine Rutledge
Journal of Political Economy, April 2013, Pages 393-436
Abstract:
Child sponsorship is a leading form of direct aid from wealthy country households to children in developing countries. Over 9 million children are supported through international sponsorship organizations. Using data from six countries, we estimate impacts on several outcomes from sponsorship through Compassion International, a leading child sponsorship organization. To identify program effects, we utilize an age-eligibility rule implemented when programs began in new villages. We find large, statistically significant impacts on years of schooling; primary, secondary, and tertiary school completion; and the probability and quality of employment. Early evidence suggests that these impacts are due, in part, to increases in children's aspirations.
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How Long Will It Take to Lift One Billion People Out of Poverty?
Martin Ravallion
World Bank Research Observer, forthcoming
Abstract:
Alternative scenarios are considered for reducing by one billion the number of people surviving on less than $1.25 a day. The low-case, "pessimistic" path to that goal envisages the developing world outside China returning to the slower pace of economic growth and poverty reduction of the 1980s and 1990s, but with China maintaining its progress. This path would take 50 years or more to lift one billion people out of poverty. A more optimistic path is identified that would maintain the developing world's (impressive) progress against absolute poverty since the turn of the century. This path would lift one billion people out of poverty by 2025-30. The optimistic path is consistent with both linear projections of the time-series data and nonlinear simulations of inequality-neutral growth for the developing world as a whole.
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The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
Esther Duflo et al.
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
This paper reports on the first randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing the standard microcredit group-based lending product in a new market. In 2005, half of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of a branch of a particular microfinance institution (Spandana) while the remainder were not, although other MFIs were free to enter those slums. Fifteen to 18 months after Spandana began lending in treated areas, households were 8.8 percentage points more likely to have a microcredit loan. They were no more likely to start any new business, although they were more likely to start several at once, and they invested more in their existing businesses. There was no effect on average monthly expenditure per capita. Expenditure on durable goods increased in treated areas, while expenditures on "temptation goods" declined. Three to four years after the initial expansion (after many of the control slums had started getting credit from Spandana and other MFIs ), the probability of borrowing from an MFI in treatment and comparison slums was the same, but on average households in treatment slums had been borrowing for longer and in larger amounts. Consumption was still no different in treatment areas, and the average business was still no more profitable, although we find an increase in profits at the top end. We found no changes in any of the development outcomes that are often believed to be affected by microfinance, including health, education, and women's empowerment. The results of this study are largely consistent with those of four other evaluations of similar programs in different contexts.
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Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment
Clemens Hetschko, Andreas Knabe & Ronnie Schöb
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using German panel data, we show that unemployed people are, on average, less satisfied with their life than employed people, but they report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction upon retirement. We interpret this finding using identity theory. Retirement raises the identity utility of the unemployed because it changes the social norms they are supposed to adhere to. While the social norm for people of working age prescribes that able-bodied people should be employed, the social norm for the retired does not contain such expectations. Findings for various subgroups are consistent with that interpretation.
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Poverty in Global Perspective: Is Shame a Common Denominator?
Robert Walker et al.
Journal of Social Policy, April 2013, Pages 215-233
Abstract:
Focussing on the psychosocial dimensions of poverty, the contention that shame lies at the ‘irreducible absolutist core' of the idea of poverty is examined through qualitative research with adults and children experiencing poverty in diverse settings in seven countries: rural Uganda and India; urban China; Pakistan; South Korea and United Kingdom; and small town and urban Norway. Accounts of the lived experience of poverty were found to be very similar, despite massive disparities in material circumstances associated with locally defined poverty lines, suggesting that relative notions of poverty are an appropriate basis for international comparisons. Though socially and culturally nuanced, shame was found to be associated with poverty in each location, variably leading to pretence, withdrawal, self-loathing, ‘othering', despair, depression, thoughts of suicide and generally to reductions in personal efficacy. While internally felt, poverty-related shame was equally imposed by the attitudes and behaviour of those not in poverty, framed by public discourse and influenced by the objectives and implementation of anti-poverty policy. The evidence appears to confirm the negative consequences of shame, implicates it as a factor in increasing the persistence of poverty and suggests important implications for the framing, design and delivery of anti-poverty policies.
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Childhood Neighborhood Conditions and the Persistence of Adult Income
Tonmoy Islam
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economists have long been interested on the role of childhood neighborhood and family characteristics in explaining adult income, with some emphasizing the importance of family over neighborhood characteristics in determining income. However, they seldom include persistence as a factor that can influence income, and the few that do always treat it as homogeneous across individuals. In spite of this, the importance of persistence should not be undermined because it is vital to understanding long term effect of variables on income, in addition to explaining the likelihood of a person to be trapped in a low income trap and the time taken to recover from a negative shock. As an extension to this literature, I add individual-level heterogeneity in income persistence and show it can be affected by childhood neighborhood variables. By applying a two-step correlated random effects GMM on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Dataset, I find that persistence is a significant factor in determining adult income, with average being about 0.38. However, I find that the poor have a higher persistence of income than the rich, implying that the poor are affected more when the macroeconomy changes. The poor also take a longer time to recover from a negative shock. Furthermore, I find that improving childhood neighborhood, especially neighborhood idleness rate, can help to increase adult income by lowering its persistence. My simulation exercise also shows that reducing idleness rate in childhood neighborhood by 1 percentage point of those earning in the bottom quartile of the income distribution can help to increase overall social welfare the most.
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Saving Response to Unemployment of a Sibling
Kiichi Tokuoka
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, May 2013, Pages 58-75
Abstract:
Standard theoretical models of household saving behavior do not typically assume that household perceptions of the world change in response to observed events. In light of the potential importance of such perception changes (e.g., after a financial crisis), this paper considers the hypothesis that a household's saving rate rises through informal learning after a sibling (direct or in-law) has been unemployed. The empirical results in this paper are consistent with the learning hypothesis, with coefficients estimated by the instrumental variable (IV) method implying that a household's saving rate increases by 2 - 3 percentage points if a sibling has been unemployed.
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Alessio Vieno, Michele Roccato & Silvia Russo
Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using the 2006 Eurobarometer data (representative sample of the European population, N = 16 306, 27 countries), we performed a multilevel analysis aimed at predicting fear of crime. A significant proportion of the variation in fear of crime was at country level. Of the individual predictors included, being a woman, being poorly educated, being unemployed, and being an urban dweller showed positive relations with fear of crime. Fear was highest among people who considered themselves to be socially marginal, among people with negative expectations regarding themselves and their country's future, and among people who considered their nation's welfare system to be unsatisfactory. Among the ecological predictors we took into consideration, nations' degree of economic inequality and low expenditure on education and on social protection showed a positive association with fear of crime, whereas the crime, immigration, and employment rates did not. Implications and limitations of this research are discussed.
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Paula Gilligan
Television & New Media, May 2013, Pages 244-260
Abstract:
In the aftermath of the 2011 UK riots, two main themes emerged in public discourse: (a) that the riots were criminal and materialistic in intent and linked to the reality television driven "miswanting" of poor youth and (b) that the riots were a manifestation of a national crisis generated by the absence of public and civic responsibility among (female) denizens of public housing estates. The author argues that, far from telling us about the cultures of poor youth, reality television programs, notably those produced by the BBC, elucidate the agenda of political elites driving "Austerity Britain" to "harden" the views of British citizens against the poor and marginalized. She explores the new harsh realism of Neighbourhood Watched identifying a shift from the earlier left-wing concerns of the British social-realist movement, toward a right-wing sensibility, which has coincided with significant changes to state policy toward the most vulnerable segments of Britain's population.
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Benefit Duration, Unemployment Duration and Job Match Quality: A Regression-Discontinuity Approach
Marco Caliendo, Konstantinos Tatsiramos & Arne Uhlendorff
Journal of Applied Econometrics, June/July 2013, Pages 604-627
Abstract:
We use a sharp discontinuity in the maximum duration of benefit entitlement to identify the effect of extended benefit duration on unemployment duration and post-unemployment outcomes (employment stability and re-employment wages). We address dynamic selection, which may arise even under an initially random assignment to treatment, estimating a bivariate discrete-time hazard model jointly with a wage equation and correlated unobservables. Owing to the non-stationarity of job search behavior, we find heterogeneous effects of extended benefit duration on the re-employment hazard and on job match quality. Our results suggest that the unemployed who find a job close to and after benefit exhaustion experience less stable employment patterns and receive lower re-employment wages compared to their counterparts who receive extended benefits and exit unemployment in the same period. These results are found to be significant for men but not for women.
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Bounding the Effects of Social Experiments: Accounting for Attrition in Administrative Data
Jeffrey Grogger
NBER Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
Social experiments frequently exploit data from administrative records. However, most administrative data systems are state-specific, designed to track earnings or benefit payments among residents within a single state. Once an experimental participant moves out of state, his earnings and benefits in his state of origin consist entirely of zeros, giving rise to a form of attrition. In the presence of such attrition, the average treatment effect of the experiment is no longer point-identified, despite random assignment. I propose a method to estimate such attrition and, for binary outcomes such as employment, to construct bounds on the average treatment effect. Results from a welfare-reform experiment considered to have sizeable effects appear quite ambiguous after accounting for attrition. The results have important implications for planning social experiments.
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Christina Robinson
Journal of Family and Economic Issues, June 2013, Pages 172-184
Abstract:
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a food assistance program designed to help pregnant (or postpartum) women and young children consume a nutritious diet. With WIC's emphasis on providing healthy foods, and food being (generally) a communal commodity, age-ineligible children may benefit from living with a WIC participant. This paper used data from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to examine whether age-ineligible children who lived in WIC households were in better health than similar children who lived in households that did not participate in the program. Results suggested that older males received a health benefit as a result of living in a WIC household; however, no similar effect was found for younger males or for female children.
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Income Shocks and Adolescent Mental Health
Sarah Baird, Jacobus de Hoop & Berk Özler
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2013, Pages 370-403
Abstract:
We investigate the effects of a positive income shock on mental health among adolescent girls using evidence from a cash transfer experiment in Malawi. Offers of cash transfers strongly reduced psychological distress among baseline schoolgirls. However, these large beneficial effects declined with increases in the transfer amount offered to the parents conditional on regular school attendance by the adolescent girls. Improved physical health, increased school attendance, personal consumption, and leisure contributed to the effects. There was also strong evidence of increased psychological distress among untreated baseline schoolgirls in treatment areas. All of these effects dissipated soon after the program ended.
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Shawn Kneipp, John Kairalla & Amanda Sheely
Social Science & Medicine, March 2013, Pages 130-140
Abstract:
The high prevalence of health conditions among U.S. women receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, or ‘welfare') impedes the ability of many in this group to move from ‘welfare-to-work', and the economic recession has likely exacerbated this problem. Despite this, few interventions have been developed to improve employment outcomes by addressing the health needs of women receiving TANF, and little is known about the impact of economic downturns on the employment trajectory of this group. Using data from a recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) that tested the efficacy of a public health nursing (PHN) intervention to address the chronic health condition needs of 432 American women receiving TANF, we examine the effect of the intervention and of recession exposure on employment. We further explore whether intervention effects were modified by select sociodemographic and health characteristics. Both marginal and more robust intervention effects were noted for employment-entry outcomes (any employment, p = 0.05 and time-to-employment, p = 0.01). There were significant effects for recession exposure on employment-entry (any employment, p = 0.002 and time-to-employment, p < 0.001). Neither the intervention nor recession exposure influenced longer-term employment outcomes (employment rate or maximum continuous employment). Intervention effects were not modified by age, education, prior TANF receipt, functional status, or recession exposure, suggesting the intervention was equally effective in improving employment-entry across a fairly heterogeneous group both before and after the recession onset. These findings advance our understanding of the health and employment dynamics among this group of disadvantaged women under variable macroeconomic conditions, and have implications for guiding health and TANF-related policy.
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How Financial Incentives Induce Disability Insurance Recipients to Return to Work
Andreas Ravndal Kostøl & Magne Mogstad
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
Disability Insurance (DI) programs have long been criticized by economists for apparent work disincentives. Some countries have recently modified their programs such that DI recipients are allowed to keep some of their benefits if they return to work, and other countries are considering similar return-to-work policies. However, there is little empirical evidence of the effectiveness of programs that incentivize the return to work by DI recipients. Using a local randomized experiment that arises from a sharp discontinuity in DI policy in Norway, we provide transparent and credible identification of how financial incentives induce DI recipients to return to work. We find that many DI recipients have considerable capacity to work that can be effectively induced by providing financial work incentives. We further show that providing work incentives to DI recipients may both increase their disposable income and reduce program costs. Our findings also suggest that targeted policies may be the most effective in encouraging DI recipients to return to work.
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WIC in Your Neighborhood: New Evidence on the Impacts of Geographic Access to Clinics
Maya Rossin-Slater
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
A large body of evidence indicates that conditions in-utero and health at birth matter for individuals' long-run outcomes, suggesting potential value in programs aimed at pregnant women and young children. This paper uses a novel identification strategy and data from birth and administrative records over 2005-2009 to provide causal estimates of the effects of geographic access to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). My empirical approach uses within-ZIP-code variation in WIC clinic presence together with maternal fixed effects, and accounts for the potential endogeneity of mobility, gestational-age bias, and measurement error in gestation. I find that access to WIC increases food benefit take-up, pregnancy weight gain, birth weight, and the probability of breastfeeding initiation at the time of hospital discharge. The estimated effects are strongest for mothers with a high school education or less, who are most likely eligible for WIC services.
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Redistributional consequences of early childhood intervention
Tim Lohse, Peter Lutz & Christian Thomann
European Journal of Health Economics, June 2013, Pages 373-381
Abstract:
Recently, early investment in the human capital of children from socially disadvantaged environments has attracted a great deal of attention. Programs of such early intervention, aimed at children's health and well-being, are spreading considerably in the US and are currently being tested in several European countries. In a discrete version of the Mirrlees model with a parents' and a children's generation, we model the intra-generational and the inter-generational redistributional consequences of such intervention programs. It turns out that the parents' generation loses whenever such intervention programs are implemented. Furthermore, the rich part of the children's generation always benefits. Despite the expectation that early intervention puts the poor descendants in a better position, our analysis reveals that the poor among the children's generation may even be worse off, if the effect of early intervention on their productivity is not large enough.
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Are poor people credit-constrained or myopic? Evidence from a South African panel
Erlend Berg
Journal of Development Economics, March 2013, Pages 195-205
Abstract:
Credit constraints are an almost ubiquitous assumption in development economics. Yet direct evidence for credit constraints is limited, and many observations consistent with credit constraints are equally compatible with myopic (non-forward-looking) consumption or precautionary saving. Using household panel data and a source of widely anticipated income in South Africa, this paper tests and rejects the standard consumption model with perfect capital markets. Then, myopic consumption and precautionary saving are tested as alternative explanations for the observed jumps in expenditure. The standard model with credit constraints cannot be rejected in favour of myopic consumption or precautionary saving.
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Workfare for the old and long-term unemployed
Helge Bennmarker, Oskar Nordström Skans & Ulrika Vikman
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate the effects of conditioning benefits on program participation among older long-term unemployed workers. We exploit a Swedish reform which reduced UI duration from 90 to 60 weeks for a group of older unemployed workers in a setting where workers who exhausted their benefits received unchanged transfers if they agreed to participate in a work practice program. Our results show that job finding increased as a result of the shorter duration of passive benefits. The time profile of the job-finding effects suggests that the results are due to deterrence during the program-entry phase. We find no impact on ensuing job durations or wages, suggesting that the increased job-finding rate was driven by increased search intensity rather than lower reservation wages. A crude cost benefit analysis suggests that the reform reduced the combined cost of programs and transfers.
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Does unemployment insurance crowd out home production?
Bulent Gul & Temel Taskin
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the interaction between self insurance and public insurance. In particular, we provide evidence on a negative correlation between unemployment insurance benefits and home production using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the state-level unemployment insurance data of the U.S. The empirical results suggest that moving to a two times more generous state would decrease time spent on home production about 22% for the unemployed. Then, we pursue a quantitative assessment of this empirical finding using a dynamic competitive equilibrium model in which households do home production as well as market production. The model is able to generate the empirical facts regarding the unemployment benefits and home production. The fact that unemployment insurance benefits crowd out home production is interpreted as a substitution between the two insurance mechanisms against loss of earnings during unemployment spells.
