Friday, May 3, 2013
Latest development
Economic Freedom of the World: An Accounting of the Literature
Joshua Hall & Robert Lawson
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index was first produced by Gwartney, Block, and Lawson (Economic Freedom of the World: 1975-1995; 1996) and has been updated annually since. During this period, the EFW index has been cited in hundreds of academic articles. Here, we provide an accounting and description of this literature. Of 402 articles citing the EFW index, 198 used the index as an independent variable in an empirical study. Over two-thirds of these studies found economic freedom to correspond to a "good" outcome such as faster growth, better living standards, more happiness, etc. Less than 4% of the sample found economic freedom to be associated with a "bad" outcome such as increased income inequality. The balance of evidence is overwhelming that economic freedom corresponds with a wide variety of positive outcomes with almost no negative tradeoffs.
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The Impact of Political Cycle: Evidence from Coalmine Accidents in China
Huihua Nie, Minjie Jiang & Xianghong Wang
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of political cycle on coalmine accidents in China. The political cycle is formed by the major local meetings of legislative bodies held every year in all provinces of China. This is because the government has a strong incentive to maintain social stability during the meetings and to focus on economic growth in other times. We test how such cycles affect coalmine fatality using monthly data at the provincial level between 2000 and 2010. We find that the number of accidents and casualties were significantly lowered during the local events of "two sessions" after controlling for other time fixed effects. The temporary reduction of accidents seemed to have been achieved by controlling production rather than by improving safety measures. The magnitude of the cycle for accidents is enlarged in provinces where media exposure is stronger and where the vice governor in charge of safety is faced with a possible extension to another term in the current post.
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Financial dependence and growth: Diminishing returns to improvement in financial development
Leilei Shen
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines how much financial development facilitates economic growth by nonparametrically estimating the effect of financial development on reducing the costs of external finance to firms. The data reveal substantial evidence of diminishing returns to improvement in financial development.
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The Time Trend of Life Satisfaction in China
Jiayuan Li & John Raine
Social Indicators Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The overtime changes of life satisfaction have been recognized as an important topic in happiness studies. Unfortunately, most of prior research is confined to Western industrialized countries. A few studies focused on the case of China yet fail to reach a general agreement. This research aims to synthesize multiple national representative samples implemented in China by standardizing the happiness scores. The transformation of datasets yields more observation points and grounds the analysis in much larger samples, which helps to represent a country as vast as China. The analysis shows that in the past two decades, Chinese people has been experiencing a marked decline of life satisfaction, in spite of tremendous economic and societal progress.
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Law, Stock Markets, and Innovation
James Brown, Gustav Martinsson & Bruce Petersen
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study a broad sample of firms across 32 countries and find that strong shareholder protections and better access to stock market financing lead to substantially higher long-run rates of R&D investment, particularly in small firms, but are unimportant for fixed capital investment. Credit market development has a modest impact on fixed investment but no impact on R&D. These findings connect law and stock markets with innovative activities key to economic growth, and show that legal rules and financial developments affecting the availability of external equity financing are particularly important for risky, intangible investments not easily financed with debt.
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Mass Media and Public Policy: Global Evidence from Agricultural Policies
Alessandro Olper & Johan Swinnen
World Bank Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Mass media play a crucial role in information distribution and in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that information provided by the mass media reflects the media's incentives to provide news to different groups in society and affects these groups' influence in policy making. We use data on agricultural policy from 69 countries spanning a wide range of development stages and media markets to test these predictions. Our empirical results are consistent with theoretical hypotheses that public support for agriculture is affected by the mass media. In particular, an increase in media (television) diffusion is associated with policies that benefit the majority to a greater extent and is correlated with a reduction in agriculture taxation in poor countries and a reduction in the subsidization of agriculture in rich countries, ceteris paribus. The empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that increased competition in commercial media reduces transfers to special interest groups and contributes to more efficient public policies.
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The Political Dynamics of Economic Growth
Kunal Sen
World Development, July 2013, Pages 71-86
Abstract:
We argue that an understanding of the political drivers of economic growth needs an explanation of the political dynamics around the transition from one growth phase to another, and that the political drivers of early stage growth accelerations are different from that of growth maintenance. Informal institutions are likely to play a role in growth acceleration, while formal institutions of credible commitment, the provisioning of public goods and the overcoming of co-ordination failures will be more important in growth maintenance. We present empirical evidence drawn from country case-studies and cross-country econometric analysis that provides support to our theoretical propositions.
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Evidence of traditional knowledge loss among a contemporary indigenous society
Victoria Reyes-García et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
As biological and linguistic diversity, the world's cultural diversity is on decline. However, to date there are no estimates of the rate at which the specific cultural traits of a group disappear, mainly because we lack empirical data to assess how the cultural traits of a given population change over time. Here we estimate changes in cultural traits associated to the traditional knowledge of wild plant uses among an Amazonian indigenous society. We collected data among 1151 Tsimane' Amerindians at two periods of time. Results show that between 2000 and 2009, Tsimane' adults experienced a net decrease in the report of plant uses ranging from 9% (for the female subsample) to 26% (for the subsample of people living close to towns), equivalent to 1% to 3% per year. Results from a Monte Carlo simulation show that the observed changes were not the result of randomness. Changes were more acute for men than for women and for informants living in villages close to market towns than for informants settled in remote villages. The Tsimane' could be abandoning their traditional knowledge as they perceive that this form of knowledge does not equip them well to deal with the new socio-economic and cultural conditions they face nowadays.
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Persistence of Politicians and Firms' Innovation
Giorgio Bellettini, Carlotta Berti Ceroni & Giovanni Prarolo
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
We empirically investigate whether the persistence of politicians in political institutions affects the innovation activity of firms. We use 12,000 firm-level observations from three waves of the Italian Observatory over Small and Medium Enterprises, and introduce a measure of political persistence defined as the average length of individual political careers in political institutions of Italian municipalities. Using death of politicians as an exogenous source of variation of political persistence, we find a robust negative relation between political persistence and the probability of process innovation. This finding is consistent with the view that political stability may hinder firms' incentive to innovate to maintain their competitiveness, as long as they can extract rents from long-term connections with politicians.
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Peter Boone et al.
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
We conducted a survey covering 20% of villages with 200-1000 population in rural Guinea-Bissau. We interviewed household heads, care-givers of children, and their teachers and schools. We analysed results from 9,947 children, aged 7-17, tested for literacy and numeracy competency. Only 27% of children were able to add two single digits, and just 19% were able to read and comprehend a simple word. Our unannounced school checks found 72% of enrolled children in grades 1-4 attending their schools, but the schools were poorly equipped. Teachers were present at 86% of schools visited. Despite surveying 351 schools, we found no examples of successful schools where children reached reasonable levels of literacy and numeracy for age. Our evidence suggests that interventions that raise school quality in these villages, rather than those which target enrollment, may be most important to generate very sharp improvements in children's educational outcomes.
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Oligarchic land ownership, entrepreneurship, and economic development
Josef Falkinger & Volker Grossmann
Journal of Development Economics, March 2013, Pages 206-215
Abstract:
This paper develops a theory in which oligarchic ownership of land or other natural resources may impede entrepreneurship in the manufacturing sector and may thereby retard structural change and economic development. We show that, due to oligopsony power of owners in the agricultural labor market, higher ownership concentration depresses entrepreneurial investments by landless, credit-constrained households, whose investment possibilities depend on the income earned in the primary sector. We discuss historical evidence from Latin America, India, Taiwan and South Korea which supports our theory.
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Taxes, Theft, and Firm Performance
Maxim Mironov
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the interaction between income diversion and firm performance. Using unique Russian banking transaction data, I identify 42,483 spacemen, fly‐by‐night firms created specifically for income diversion. Next, I build a direct measure of income diversion for 45,429 companies and show that it is negatively related to firm performance. I identify the main reason for the observed effect as managerial diversion rather than tax evasion per se. I further show that stricter tax enforcement can improve firm performance: a one standard deviation increase in tax enforcement corresponds to an increase in the annual revenue growth rate of 2.6%.
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The Evolution of Property Rights: State Law or Informal Norms?
Ryan Bubb
NYU Working Paper, January 2013
Abstract:
This paper investigates the factors that have shaped the evolution of property rights institutions. Using a regression discontinuity design, I show that the divergent state laws of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire have had little effect on de facto property rights institutions. In contrast, the data show that these states have had large impacts on other economic outcomes. Furthermore, I show that part of the substantial within-country variation in property rights institutions is explained by economic factors. Areas that are more suitable for growing cocoa have a greater prevalence of transfer rights. My findings highlight the importance of non-state sources of norms and show that these norms do, to some extent, evolve to accommodate the changing needs of society.
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Pandemics of the Poor and Banking Stability
Thomas Lagoarde-Segot & Patrick Leoni
Journal of Banking & Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We first develop a theoretical model that shows that the likelihood of a collapse of the banking industry of a developing country increases, as the joint prevalence of large pandemics such as AIDS and malaria increases. We also show that the optimal bank reserves increase as the prevalence increases. In the empirical part of the paper, we consider a large dataset of developing countries, and we exhibit a strong causality effect from combined prevalence to deposit turnover, as well as a strong causality effect from an increase of combined prevalence to an increase in bank reserves. This effect is strong for tuberculosis. Those empirical facts therefore strongly support our theoretical findings.
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The Rise and Fall of Worldwide Education Inequality from 1870 to 2010: Measurement and Trends
Shawn Dorius
Sociology of Education, April 2013, Pages 158-173
Abstract:
This research documents long-run trends in between-country education inequality and proposes a method for doing so that accounts for the ways in which most education variables differ from continuous variables such as income. Historical, national-level estimates of primary schooling enrollment rates and years of completed primary, secondary, and total schooling are used to identify several problems that arise when formal measures of inequality are used to estimate intercountry education convergence, including violation of the welfare, scale invariance, and anonymity principles. An alternate measurement strategy shows that the intercountry trend in the dispersion of education has followed an approximately normal curve over the past 140 years, but with considerable variation across measures of education. These results are in contradiction to previous education inequality studies, which have reported either monotonically rising or falling intercountry inequality.
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Property Rights, Land Liquidity, and Internal Migration
Eugenia Chernina, Paul Castañeda Dower & Andrei Markevich
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the early twentieth century, a large number of households resettled from the European to the Asian part of the Russian Empire. We propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 Stolypin land titling reform. One might expect better property rights to decrease the propensity to migrate by improving economic conditions in the reform area. However, this titling reform increased land liquidity and actually promoted migration by easing financial constraints and decreasing opportunity costs. Treating the reform as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ difference-in-differences analysis on a panel of province-level data that describe migration and economic conditions. We find that the reform had a sizeable effect on migration. To verify the land liquidity effect, we exploit variation in the number of households participating in the reform. This direct measure of the reform mechanism estimates that land liquidity explains approximately 18% of migration during this period.
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Samson Edo
OPEC Energy Review, March 2013, Pages 105-124
Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of crude oil boom on the economy of Nigeria particularly the manufacturing sector. In the study, a descriptive analysis of the three major sectors of the economy is undertaken followed by the formulation of a vector autoregression model depicting the relationship existing among the sectors - resource, manufacturing and service. The model was subsequently estimated using appropriate techniques such as unit root test, cointegration test, causality test, variance decomposition and parametric estimation. The unit root and cointegration tests reveal that the data series employed are reliable and the three sectors are most likely to converge in the long run, which augurs well for policy making. The causality test, variance decomposition and parametric estimation reveal that the oil boom led to significant stagnation in the manufacturing sector and a marginal decline in the service sector. The growth of manufacturing sector of Nigeria has thus been severely impaired by the oil boom. In light of this, adequate policy measures need to be taken to resuscitate the manufacturing sector. These measures may include attracting more foreign investment, reducing operating cost in the sector, developing local sources of raw materials, and allocation of more funds from the crude oil revenue to assist the sector. These policy measures may not only resuscitate the manufacturing sector, they would also accelerate growth of the economy as a whole.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Grades
Exposure to Classroom Poverty and Test Score Achievement: Contextual Effects or Selection?
Douglas Lee Lauen & Michael Gaddis
American Journal of Sociology, January 2013, Pages 943-979
Abstract:
It is widely believed that impoverished contexts harm children. Disentangling the effects of family background from the effects of other social contexts, however, is complex, making causal claims difficult to verify. This study examines the effect of exposure to classroom poverty on student test achievement using data on a cohort of children followed from third through eighth grade. Cross-sectional methods reveal a substantial negative association between exposure to high-poverty classrooms and test scores; this association grows with grade level, becoming especially large for middle school students. Growth models, however, produce much smaller effects of classroom poverty exposure on academic achievement. Even smaller effects emerge from student fixed-effects models that control for time-invariant unobservables and from marginal structural models that adjust for observable time-dependent confounding. These findings suggest that causal claims about the effects of classroom poverty exposure on achievement may be unwarranted.
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State Teacher Union Strength and Student Achievement
Johnathan Lott & Lawrence Kenny
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
A new and very small literature has provided evidence that students have lower test scores in larger school districts and in districts in which the district's teachers union has negotiated a contract that is more favorable to the district's teachers. The teachers' unions at the state and national levels contribute a great deal of money to candidates for state and federal offices. This gives the unions some influence in passing (defeating) bills that would help (harm) the state's teachers. We introduce two novel measures of the strength of the state-wide teachers union: union dues per teacher and union expenditures per student. These reflect the key role of political influence for state-wide unions. We provide remarkably strong evidence that students in states with strong teachers unions have lower proficiency rates than students in states with weak state-wide teacher unions.
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Deven Carlson, Joshua Cowen & David Fleming
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2013, Pages 179-199
Abstract:
Few school choice evaluations consider students who leave such programs, and fewer still consider the effects of leaving these programs as policy-relevant outcomes. Using a representative sample of students from the citywide voucher program in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we analyze more than 1,000 students who leave the program during a 4-year period. We show that low-performing voucher students tend to move from the voucher sector into lower performing and less effective public schools than the typical public school student attends, whereas high-performing students transfer to better public schools. In general, transferring students realize substantial achievement gains after moving to the public sector; these results are robust to multiple analytical approaches. This evidence has important implications for school choice policy and research.
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The surprising effect of larger class sizes: Evidence using two identification strategies
Kevin Denny & Veruska Oppedisano
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper estimates the marginal effect of class size on educational attainment of high school students. We control for the potential endogeneity of class size in two ways using a conventional instrumental variable approach, based on changes in cohort size, and an alternative method where identification is based on restrictions on higher moments. The data is drawn from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) collected in 2003 for the United States and the United Kingdom. Using either method or the two in conjunction leads to the conclusion that increases in class size lead to improvements in student's mathematics scores. Only the results for the United Kingdom are statistically significant.
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Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren
Robert Fairlie & Jonathan Robinson
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership and use increased substantially, we find no effects on any educational outcomes, including grades, test scores, credits earned, attendance and disciplinary actions. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts. The estimated null effect is consistent with survey evidence showing no change in homework time or other "intermediate" inputs in education.
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Reward or Punishment? Class Size and Teacher Quality
Nathan Barrett & Eugenia Toma
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The high stakes testing and school accountability components of our K-12 education system create an incentive for principals to behave strategically to maximize school performance. One possible approach is the adjustment of class sizes based on observed teacher effectiveness. Conceptually, this relationship may be positive or negative. On one hand, performance-maximizing principals may place more students in the classrooms of more effective teachers. But because administrators may have compensation constraints, it is also plausible that they may reward more effective teachers with fewer students in the classroom. This paper examines whether principals reward effective teachers by decreasing their class size or whether they increase the size of classes of more effective teachers as a means of enhancing the school outcome. Results overall indicate that more effective teachers do have larger classes. This result holds implications for prior policy studies of class size as well as for education policy more generally.
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"Academic Redshirting" in Kindergarten: Prevalence, Patterns, and Implications
Daphna Bassok & Sean Reardon
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use two nationally representative data sets to estimate the prevalence of kindergarten "redshirting" - the decision to delay a child's school entry. We find that between 4% and 5.5% of children delay kindergarten, a lower number than typically reported in popular and academic accounts. Male, White, and high-SES children are most likely to delay kindergarten, and schools serving larger proportions of White and high-income children have far higher rates of delayed entry. We find no evidence that children with lower cognitive or social abilities at age 4 are more likely to redshirt, suggesting parents' decisions to delay entry may be driven by concerns about children's relative position within a kindergarten cohort. Implications for policy are discussed.
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Do Small Schools Improve Performance in Large, Urban Districts? Causal Evidence from New York City
Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel & Matthew Wiswall
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We evaluate the effectiveness of small high school reform in the country's largest school district, New York City. Using a rich administrative dataset for multiple cohorts of students and distance between student residence and school to instrument for endogenous school selection, we find substantial heterogeneity in school effects: newly created small schools have positive effects on graduation and some other education outcomes while older small schools do not. Importantly, we show that ignoring this source of treatment effect heterogeneity by assuming a common small school effect yields a misleading zero effect of small school attendance.
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Sarah Butler Jessen
Educational Policy, May 2013, Pages 427-466
Abstract:
This article begins to unpack the complex effects of the policies of both the small schools and choice on students with special needs. Drawing on qualitative data collected throughout the 2008-2009 academic year and a range of quantitative data from New York City's public high schools, the author shows that while small schools and choice are intended to expand schooling options for all, students with special needs often find that when entering the public high school choice process, their selection set is narrowed. For families of students with special needs, the lack of adequate special needs resources can preclude schools from being considered as viable options. In addition, schools of choice engage in practices to deter higher need students from applying. The combined influences of parent decision and school choice processes result in between-school sorting, with larger institutions receiving the bulk of the higher need population of students, which is reflected in the city's enrollment data. The findings raise questions about not only the effects of the small school reforms, but also about the role of choice policies in the public educational system.
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The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics
Doug Chung
Harvard Working Paper, January 2013
Abstract:
I measure the spillover effect of intercollegiate athletics on the quantity and quality of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States, popularly known as the "Flutie Effect." I treat athletic success as a stock of goodwill that decays over time, similar to that of advertising. A major challenge is that privacy laws prevent us from observing information about the applicant pool. I overcome this challenge by using order statistic distribution to infer applicant quality from information on enrolled students. Using a flexible random coefficients aggregate discrete choice model - which accommodates heterogeneity in preferences for school quality and athletic success - and an extensive set of school fixed effects to control for unobserved quality in athletics and academics, I estimate the impact of athletic success on applicant quality and quantity. Overall, athletic success has a significant long-term goodwill effect on future applications and quality. However, students with lower than average SAT scores tend to have a stronger preference for athletic success, while students with higher SAT scores have a greater preference for academic quality. Furthermore, the decay rate of athletics goodwill is significant only for students with lower SAT scores, suggesting that the goodwill created by intercollegiate athletics resides more extensively with low-ability students than with their high-ability counterparts. But, surprisingly, athletic success impacts applications even among academically stronger students.
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Systematic Sorting: Teacher Characteristics and Class Assignments
Demetra Kalogrides, Susanna Loeb & Tara Béteille
Sociology of Education, April 2013, Pages 103-123
Abstract:
Although prior research has documented differences in the distribution of teacher characteristics across schools serving different student populations, few studies have examined the extent to which teacher sorting occurs within schools. This study uses data from one large urban school district and compares the class assignments of teachers who teach in the same grade and in the same school in a given year. The authors find that less experienced, minority, and female teachers are assigned classes with lower achieving students than are their more experienced, white, and male colleagues. Teachers who have held leadership positions and those who attended more competitive undergraduate institutions are also assigned higher achieving students. These patterns are found at both the elementary and middle/high school levels. The authors explore explanations for these patterns and discuss their implications for achievement gaps, teacher turnover, and the estimation of teacher value-added.
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The Spillover Effects of Grade-Retained Classmates: Evidence from Urban Elementary Schools
Michael Gottfried
American Journal of Education, May 2013, Pages 405-444
Abstract:
Numerous studies have examined how grade retention can impede the academic success of those retained students. One uncharted line of research is the spillover effect that retained students may exert on their classmates. The purpose of this study is to evaluate this relationship for students in urban elementary school classrooms. To do so, this study analyzes a longitudinal data set comprising entire populations of five elementary school cohorts within the School District of Philadelphia. Because individual student records can be linked to teacher and classroom data as well as to school, grade, and year identifiers, this study employs a series of multilevel fixed-effects models to address estimation issues regarding omitted variable bias. All results indicate that the effects of having a greater number of grade-retained peers are detrimental to the standardized achievement outcomes of nonretained classmates. Data-driven policy implications are discussed.
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The Effects of NCLB on School Resources and Practices
Thomas Dee, Brian Jacob & Nathaniel Schwartz
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2013, Pages 252-279
Abstract:
A number of studies have examined the impact of school accountability policies, including No Child Left Behind (NCLB), on student achievement. However, there is relatively little evidence on how school accountability reforms and NCLB, in particular, have influenced education policies and practices. This study examines the effects of NCLB on multiple district, school, and teacher traits using district-year financial data and pooled cross sections of teacher and principal surveys. Our results indicate that NCLB increased per-pupil spending by nearly $600, which was funded primarily through increased state and local revenue. We find that NCLB increased teacher compensation and the share of elementary school teachers with advanced degrees but had no effects on class size. We also find that NCLB did not influence overall instructional time in core academic subjects but did lead schools to reallocate time away from science and social studies and toward the tested subject of reading.
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Nicole Forry, Elizabeth Davis & Kate Welti
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has found disparities in young children's development across income groups. A positive association between high-quality early care and education and the school readiness of children in low-income families has also been demonstrated. This study uses linked administrative data from Maryland to examine the variations in school readiness associated with different types of subsidized child care, and with dual enrollment in subsidized child care and state pre-kindergarten or Head Start. Using multivariate methods, we analyze linked subsidy administrative data and portfolio-based kindergarten school readiness assessment data to estimate the probability of children's school readiness in three domains: personal and social development, language and literacy, and mathematical thinking. Compared to children in subsidized family child care or informal care, those in subsidized center care are more likely to be rated as fully ready to learn on the two pre-academic domains. Regardless of type of subsidized care used, enrollment in pre-kindergarten, but not Head Start, during the year prior to kindergarten is strongly associated with being academically ready for kindergarten. No statistically significant associations are found between type of subsidized care, pre-kindergarten enrollment, or Head Start and assessments of children's personal/social development.
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Test-Mex: Estimating the Effects of School Year Length on Student Performance in Mexico
Jorge Agüero & Trinidad Beleche
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Estimating the impact of changing school inputs on student performance is often difficult because these inputs are endogenously determined. We investigate a quasi-experiment that altered the number of instructional days prior to a nationwide test in Mexico. Our exogenous source of variation comes from across states and over time changes in the date when the school year started and the date when the test was administered. We find that having more days of instruction prior to examination slightly improves student performance but exhibits diminishing marginal returns. The effects vary along the distribution of resources as determined by a poverty index, with lower improvements in poorer schools. These findings imply a weaker net benefit of policies expanding the length of the school year as they could widen the achievement gap by socioeconomic status.
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Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures
Karl Szpunar, Novall Khan & Daniel Schacter
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 April 2013, Pages 6313-6317
Abstract:
The recent emergence and popularity of online educational resources brings with it challenges for educators to optimize the dissemination of online content. Here we provide evidence that points toward a solution for the difficulty that students frequently report in sustaining attention to online lectures over extended periods. In two experiments, we demonstrate that the simple act of interpolating online lectures with memory tests can help students sustain attention to lecture content in a manner that discourages task-irrelevant mind wandering activities, encourages task-relevant note-taking activities, and improves learning. Importantly, frequent testing was associated with reduced anxiety toward a final cumulative test and also with reductions in subjective estimates of cognitive demand. Our findings suggest a potentially key role for interpolated testing in the development and dissemination of online educational content.
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Steve Bradley, Giuseppe Migali & Jim Taylor
Journal of Human Capital, Spring 2013, Pages 76-106
Abstract:
We evaluate the causal association between the specialist schools policy, a UK reform that has increased funding and encouraged secondary school specialization in particular subjects, and pupils' test score outcomes. Using the National Pupil Database, we estimate difference-in-difference matching models. We find a small, positive, and statistically significant causal effect on test scores at age 16. Pupils from poorer social backgrounds benefited more than pupils from richer backgrounds; pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds benefited less. We disentangle the funding effect from a specialization effect, which yields a relatively large proportionate improvement in test scores in particular subjects.
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Dana Dunleavy et al.
Academic Medicine, May 2013, Pages 666-671
Purpose: Most research examining the predictive validity of the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) has focused on the relationship between MCAT scores and scores on the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step exams. This study examined whether MCAT scores predict students' unimpeded progress toward graduation (UP), which the authors defined as not withdrawing or being dismissed for academic reasons, graduating within five years of matriculation, and passing the Step 1, Step 2 Clinical Knowledge, and Step 2 Clinical Skills exams on the first attempt.
Method: Students who matriculated during 2001-2004 at 119 U.S. medical schools were included in the analyses. Logistic regression analyses were used to estimate the relationships between UP and MCAT total scores alone, undergraduate grade point averages (UGPAs) alone, and UGPAs and MCAT total scores together. All analyses were conducted at the school level and were considered together to evaluate relationships across schools.
Results: The majority of matriculants experienced UP. Together, UGPAs and MCAT total scores predicted UP well. MCAT total scores alone were a better predictor than UGPAs alone. Relationships were similar across schools; however, there was more variability across schools in the relationship between UP and UGPAs than between UP and MCAT total scores.
Conclusions: The combination of UGPAs and MCAT total scores performs well as a predictor of UP. Both UGPAs and MCAT total scores are strong predictors of academic performance in medical school through graduation, not just the first two years. Further, these relationships generalize across medical schools.
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High School and Financial Outcomes: The Impact of Mandated Personal Finance and Mathematics Courses
Shawn Cole, Anna Paulson & Gauri Kartini Shastry
Harvard Working Paper, January 2013
Abstract:
Financial literacy and cognitive capabilities are convincingly linked to the quality of financial decision-making, influencing savings, stock-picking, and avoidance of outright financial mistakes. Yet, there is little evidence that education intended to improve financial decision-making is successful. Using plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to state-mandated personal finance and mathematics training in high school, affecting millions of students, this paper answers the question "Can good financial behavior be taught in high school?" It can, though not via personal finance courses, which we find have no effect on financial outcomes. Instead, we find additional training in mathematics leads to greater financial market participation, more investment income, and better credit management, including less bankruptcy and fewer foreclosures.
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Life-cycle effects of age at school start
Peter Fredriksson & Björn Öckert
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In Sweden, children typically start school the year they turn 7. We combine this school entry cut-off with individuals' birthdates to estimate effects of school starting age on educational attainment and long-run labour market outcomes. We find that school entry age raises educational attainment and show that postponing tracking until age 16 reduces the effect of school starting age on educational attainment. On average, school starting age only affects the allocation of labour supply over the life-cycle and leaves prime-age earnings unaffected. But for individuals with low-educated parents we find that prime-age earnings increase in response to age at school start.
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Can High Schools Reduce College Enrollment Gaps With a New Counseling Model?
Jennifer Stephan & James Rosenbaum
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2013, Pages 200-219
Abstract:
Despite planning college, disadvantaged students are less likely to enroll in college, particularly 4-year colleges. Beyond cost and academic achievement, previous research finds that a lack of college-related social resources poses barriers. However, little research investigates whether schools can help. We examine whether, how, and for whom a new counseling model aimed at providing college-related social resources may improve college enrollment. Following nearly all seniors in Chicago Public Schools from senior year through the fall after high school, we find that coaches may improve the types of colleges that students attend by getting students to complete key actions. It is important that the most disadvantaged students appear to benefit. This research suggests that targeting social resources may improve the high-school-to-college transition for disadvantaged students.
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Ranking the Schools: How School-Quality Information Affects School Choice in the Netherlands
Pierre Koning & Karen van der Wiel
Journal of the European Economic Association, April 2013, Pages 466-493
Abstract:
This paper analyzes whether information about the quality of high schools published in a national newspaper affects school choice in the Netherlands. We find that negative (positive) school-quality scores decrease (increase) the number of first-year students who choose a school after the year of publication. These effects are only large for the college-preparatory track, such that a school receiving the most positive score for its most academic track sees 16-18 more first-year students enroll. We find that parents respond to the most recent and most prominently displayed information. The effects of information about school quality do not seem to be greater in regions with larger relevant newspaper circulation, suggesting that direct exposure to news about school quality does not explain the response to this information.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Who's in and who's out
Nurit Shnabel, Samer Halabi & Masi Noor
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that facilitating forgiveness among groups involved in intractable conflicts requires reducing competitive victimhood which stems from the conflicting parties' motivation to restore agency and a positive moral image. Examining novel and traditional re-categorization interventions, Study 1 found that inducing Israeli Jews and Palestinians with a common victim identity decreased competitive victimhood, which in turn increased forgiveness. Inducing a common regional identity failed to initiate a similar process. Study 2 further revealed that inducing either a common victim or a common perpetrator identity (but not a common regional identity) led to decreased competitive victimhood and increased forgiveness. The mechanisms involved were decreased moral defensiveness in the common victim intervention versus increased sense of agency in the common perpetrator intervention.
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Rebecca Neel, Samantha Neufeld & Steven Neuberg
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do targets of stigma manage social interactions? We built from a threat-specific model of prejudice to predict that targets select impression-management strategies that address the particular threats other people see them to pose. We recruited participants from two groups perceived to pose different threats: overweight people, who are heuristically associated with disease and targeted with disgust, and Black men, who are perceived to be dangerous and targeted with fear. When stereotypes and prejudices toward their groups were made salient, overweight people (Studies 1 and 2) and Black men (Study 2) selectively prioritized self-presentation strategies to minimize apparent disease threat (wearing clean clothes) or physical-violence threat (smiling), respectively. The specific threat a group is seen to pose plays an important but underexamined role in the psychology of being a target of prejudice.
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Nouns Cut Slices: Effects of Linguistic Forms on Intergroup Bias
Sylvie Graf et al.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, March 2013, Pages 62-83
Abstract:
Three studies examined the effect of nouns and adjectives for designations of nationality on intergroup bias. In Study 1, participants (N = 237) evaluated group artifacts whose authors' nationality was labeled with nouns or adjectives. Use of nouns enhanced in-group favoritism, manifested as a preference of the in-group artifact. Study 2 (N = 431) tested the effect of nouns and adjectives on attitudes toward the in-group and out-group focusing on the moderating role of in-group identification. Use of nouns led to a stronger relative preference of the in-group, pronounced especially in low identified group members. Study 3 (N = 979) examined the effect of nouns and adjectives in a more applied survey setting. Intergroup bias concerning material restitution for confiscated property was stronger when the ethnicity of the former owners was labeled with nouns. The article emphasizes that subtle variation in language use has a consistent impact on intergroup evaluation.
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Abdelatif Er-rafiy & Markus Brauer
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, April 2013, Pages 840-853
Abstract:
We examined whether increasing individuals' perceived variability of an out-group reduces prejudice and discrimination toward members of this group. In a series of four laboratory and field experiments, we attracted participants' attention to the heterogeneity of members of an out-group (or not), and then measured their attitudes or behaviors. Perceived variability was manipulated by portraying the out-group members as having diverse socio-demographic characteristics and different personality traits and preferences. Prejudice and discrimination were measured in terms of self-reported prejudice, stereotyping, in-group bias, social distance, and willingness to do something for the minority group under consideration. In all experiments, perceived variability decreased prejudice and discrimination.
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Act Your (Old) Age: Prescriptive, Ageist Biases Over Succession, Consumption, and Identity
Michael North & Susan Fiske
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perspectives on ageism have focused on descriptive stereotypes concerning what older people allegedly are. By contrast, we introduce prescriptive stereotypes that attempt to control how older people should be: encouraging active Succession of envied resources, preventing passive Consumption of shared resources, and avoidance of symbolic, ingroup identity resources. Six studies test these domains, utilizing vignette experiments and simulated behavioral interactions. Across studies, younger (compared with middle-aged and older) raters most resented elder violators of prescriptive stereotypes. Moreover, these younger participants were most polarized toward older targets (compared with middle-aged and younger analogues) - rewarding elders most for prescription adherences and punishing them most for violations. Taken together, these findings offer a novel approach to ageist prescriptions, which disproportionately target older people, are most endorsed by younger people, and suggest how elders shift from receiving the default prejudice of pity to either prescriptive resentment or reward.
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Two Signatures of Implicit Intergroup Attitudes: Developmental Invariance and Early Enculturation
Yarrow Dunham, Eva Chen & Mahzarin Banaji
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Long traditions in the social sciences have emphasized the gradual internalization of intergroup attitudes and the putatively more basic tendency to prefer the groups to which one belongs. In four experiments (N = 883) spanning two cultures and two status groups within one of those cultures, we obtained new evidence that implicit intergroup attitudes emerge in young children in a form indistinguishable from adult attitudes. Strikingly, this invariance from childhood to adulthood holds for members of socially dominant majorities, who consistently favor their in-group, as well as for members of a disadvantaged minority, who, from the early moments of race-based categorization, do not show a preference for their in-group. Far from requiring a protracted period of internalization, implicit intergroup attitudes are characterized by early enculturation and developmental invariance.
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Garriy Shteynberg & Evan Apfelbaum
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Across disciplines, social learning research has been unified by the principle that people learn new behaviors to the extent that they identify with the actor modeling them. We propose that this conceptualization may overlook the power of the interpersonal situation in which the modeled behavior is observed. Specifically, we predict that contexts characterized by shared in-group attention are particularly conducive to social learning. In two studies, participants were shown the same written exchange in either paragraph or chat form across multiple interpersonal contexts. We gauged social learning based on participants' tendency to imitate the form of the written exchange to which they were exposed. Across both studies, results reveal that imitation is especially likely among individuals placed in the specific context of simultaneous observation with a similar other. These findings suggest that shared in-group attention is uniquely adaptive for social learning.
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Rebels without a cause: Discrimination appraised as legitimate harms group commitment
Jolanda Jetten, Michael Schmitt & Nyla Branscombe
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, March 2013, Pages 159-172
Abstract:
Two experiments tested the hypothesis that perceptions of the legitimacy of discrimination moderate the extent to which targets respond to pervasive discrimination with commitment to their ingroup. Both the perceived pervasiveness and legitimacy of discrimination directed toward the ingroup were manipulated among group members of a stigmatized group: People with body piercings. Generalizing previous research findings to this non-typical stigmatized group, perceiving discrimination as pervasive and legitimate affected group commitment. On a number of group commitment indicators, we found that pervasive and legitimate discrimination lowered group identification (Experiment 1), outrage about the treatment received, and liking for a victimized ingroup member, but enhanced willingness to remove body-piercings in order to pass (Experiment 2) compared to legitimate and rare discrimination. Group commitment was relatively high when discrimination was appraised as illegitimate and was not affected by pervasiveness of discrimination. These results highlight that, for this non-typical stigmatized group, pervasive discrimination that is appraised as legitimate undermines group commitment.
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Peter Hatemi et al.
American Journal of Political Science, April 2013, Pages 279-293
Abstract:
Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out-groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out-group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti-immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out-group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes.
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Milica Vasiljevic & Richard Crisp
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Abstract:
Prejudices towards different groups are interrelated, but research has yet to find a way to promote tolerance towards multiple outgroups. We devise, develop and implement a new cognitive intervention for achieving generalized tolerance based on scientific studies of social categorization. In five laboratory experiments and one field study the intervention led to a reduction of prejudice towards multiple outgroups (elderly, disabled, asylum seekers, HIV patients, gay men), and fostered generalized tolerance and egalitarian beliefs. Importantly, these effects persisted outside the laboratory in a context marked by a history of violent ethnic conflict, increasing trust and reconciliatory tendencies towards multiple ethnic groups in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. We discuss the implications of these findings for intervention strategies focused on reducing conflict and promoting peaceful intergroup relations.
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(Re-)Shaping Hatred: Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Germany, 1890-2006
Nico Voigtländer & Hans-Joachim Voth
University of California Working Paper, March 2012
Abstract:
In this paper, we assess the determinants of long-run persistence of local culture, and examine the success of policy interventions designed to change beliefs. We analyze anti-Semitic attitudes drawing on individual-level survey results from Germany's social value survey in 1996 and 2006. On average, we find that historical voting patterns for anti-Semitic parties between 1890 and 1933 are powerful predictors of anti-Jewish attitudes today. There is evidence that transmission takes place both vertically (parent to child) and horizontally (among peers). Policy modified German views on Jews in important ways: The cohort that grew up under the Nazi regime shows significantly higher levels of anti-Semitism. After 1945, the victorious Allies implemented denazification programs in their zones of occupation. We use differences in these policies between the occupying powers as a source of identifying variation. The US and French zones today still show high anti-Semitism, reflecting an ambitious botched attempt at denazification. In contrast, the British and Soviet zones, register much lower levels of Jew-hatred.
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From the Persecuting to the Protective State? Jewish Expulsions and Weather Shocks from 1100 to 1800
Warren Anderson, Noel Johnson & Mark Koyama
George Mason University Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. We then use panel data consisting of 785 city-level expulsions of Jews from 933 European cities between 1100 and 1800 to test the implications of the model. We use the variation in city-level temperature to test whether expulsions were associated with colder growing seasons. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was associated with a one to two percentage point increase in the likelihood that a Jewish community would be expelled. Drawing on our model and on additional historical evidence we argue that the rise of state capacity was one reason why this relationship between negative income shocks and expulsions weakened after 1600.
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Michal Bilewicz & Manana Jaworska
Journal of Social Issues, March 2013, Pages 162-179
Abstract:
Postwar Polish-Jewish relations are heavily affected by divergent narratives about the Holocaust. Debates about the role of Poles as passive bystanders or perpetrators during the Holocaust have deeply influenced mutual perceptions of Poles and Jews. Previous research has shown that historical issues raised during Polish-Jewish encounters inhibit positive consequences of intergroup contact, mostly due to frustrated emotional needs related to past genocide. The aim of the present intervention was to reconcile young Poles and Israelis by presenting narratives that could change stereotypical thinking about the past. Our results indicate that the narratives of historical rescuers of Jews during WWII allowed overcoming the negative impact of the past on intergroup contact by fulfilling frustrated needs for acceptance among Polish participants. The article discusses the potential role of the heroic helpers' narrative for reconciliation after mass violence, as it may prevent entitative categorizations of groups as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders.
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Manuel Schubert & Johann Graf Lambsdorff
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
How is negative reciprocity cultivated in an environment of violent conflict? This study investigates how students in the West Bank react to unfair proposals in an ultimatum game. Proposals submitted with Hebrew as compared to Arab handwriting are rejected more often. Israelis must offer 15 percent more of a given stake than Palestinians in order to achieve the same probability of acceptance. This willingness to lose money by rejecting proposals reveals a preference for discrimination against Israelis, cultivated in the conflict-ridden environment. Students who voice a militant attitude, surprisingly, do not reveal a higher tendency to discriminate, exercising a high degree of negative reciprocity toward all unfair proposals. But those who favor a political role for Islam have a higher inclination to discriminate. This implies that ethnic and religious cleavages do not consistently generate in-group solidarity.
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Intergroup Boundaries and Attitudes: The Power of a Single Potent Link
Jill Gulker & Margo Monteith
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many prejudice reduction strategies involve linking the self to outgroup members. We tested the novel question of whether establishing a potent link with a single outgroup member can reduce explicit and implicit prejudice toward the outgroup as a whole. White participants completed a mock adoption procedure where they "adopted" a baby from another country. Three experiments showed that this single link fostered perceived overlap between the self and the ethnic outgroup. This overlap mediated the effect of the adoption manipulation on explicit prejudice, which was significantly reduced. Whereas the single link was insufficient to reduce implicit prejudice significantly when the self-outgroup member link was not practiced, repeatedly practicing this connection reduced prejudice significantly in comparison with a control group that had no connection to the outgroup member. Furthermore, unlike explicit attitudes, this effect was direct.
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Ivar Kolstad & Arne Wiig
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
A number of studies document an in-group bias in social dilemma situations. While group structure and dynamics are important in shaping in-group favouritism, less attention has been paid to individual characteristics affecting favouritism. Using data from dictator games conducted among 523 microcredit clients in Angola, this paper analyzes the effect of education on in-group favouritism. When addressing the endogeneity of education, we find that education increases in-group bias. This goes against the conventional view that education broadens the perspectives of an individual. In addition, our results suggest that in-group favouritism is related to gender, family background and access to particular forms of networks.
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The development of tag-based cooperation via a socially acquired trait
Emma Cohen & Daniel Haun
Evolution and Human Behavior, May 2013, Pages 230-235
Abstract:
Recent theoretical models have demonstrated that phenotypic traits can support the non-random assortment of cooperators in a population, thereby permitting the evolution of cooperation. In these "tag-based models", cooperators modulate cooperation according to an observable and hard-to-fake trait displayed by potential interaction partners. Socially acquired vocalizations in general, and speech accent among humans in particular, are frequently proposed as hard to fake and hard to hide traits that display sufficient cross-populational variability to reliably guide such social assortment in fission-fusion societies. Adults' sensitivity to accent variation in social evaluation and decisions about cooperation is well-established in sociolinguistic research. The evolutionary and developmental origins of these biases are largely unknown, however. Here, we investigate the influence of speech accent on 5-10-year-old children's developing social and cooperative preferences across four Brazilian Amazonian towns. Two sites have a single dominant accent, and two sites have multiple co-existing accent varieties. We found that children's friendship and resource allocation preferences were guided by accent only in sites characterized by accent heterogeneity. Results further suggest that this may be due to a more sensitively tuned ear for accent variation. The demonstrated local-accent preference did not hold in the face of personal cost. Results suggest that mechanisms guiding tag-based assortment are likely tuned according to locally relevant tag-variation.
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Marco Brambilla et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has shown that information on group morality (rather than competence or sociability) is the primary determinant of group pride, identification, and impression formation. Extending this work, three studies investigated how the morality of ingroup and outgroup targets affects perceived threat and behavioural intentions. In Study 1 (N = 83) we manipulated the moral characteristics ascribed to an ingroup (vs. outgroup) member. In Study 2 (N = 165) we manipulated morality and competence information, while in Study 3 (N = 108) morality was crossed with sociability information. Results showed that behavioural intentions were influenced only by moral information. Specifically, people reported less desire to interact with targets depicted as lacking moral qualities than those depicted as highly moral. This effect was mediated by perceived group image threat for ingroup targets and safety threat for outgroup targets. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for social judgment and future research directions are outlined.
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Wealthier Jews, taller Gentiles: Inequality of income and physical stature in fin-de-siècle Hungary
Dániel Bolgár
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The stereotype of rich Jews versus poor Gentiles does not apply to fin-de-siècle Hungary. Although the average income of Jews was higher than that of Gentiles, the distribution of income among Jews was extremely unequal, far more so than among Christians. Jews were over-represented at the poor end as well as at the rich end of the income spectrum. In four high schools studied the average height of Jewish students was approximately 1 cm below that of Gentiles. This height-income discrepancy goes far to explain the divergence in income distribution between the members of the two faiths.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Who's up and who's down
Only 15 Minutes? The Social Stratification of Fame in Printed Media
Arnout van de Rijt et al.
American Sociological Review, April 2013, Pages 266-289
Abstract:
Contemporary scholarship has conceptualized modern fame as an open system in which people continually move in and out of celebrity status. This model stands in stark contrast to the traditional notion in the sociology of stratification that depicts stable hierarchies sustained through classic forces such as social structure and cumulative advantage. We investigate the mobility of fame using a unique data source containing daily records of references to person names in a large corpus of English-language media sources. These data reveal that only at the bottom of the public attention hierarchy do names exhibit fast turnover; at upper tiers, stable coverage persists around a fixed level and rank for decades. Fame exhibits strong continuity even in entertainment, on television, and on blogs, where it has been thought to be most ephemeral. We conclude that once a person's name is decoupled from the initial event that lent it momentary attention, self-reinforcing processes, career structures, and commemorative practices perpetuate fame.
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Relative Status and Well-Being: Evidence from U.S. Suicide Deaths
Mary Daly, Daniel Wilson & Norman Johnson
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We assess the importance of interpersonal income comparisons using data on suicide deaths. We examine whether suicide risk is related to others' income, holding own income and other individual and environmental factors fixed. We estimate models of the suicide hazard using two independent data sets: (1) the National Longitudinal Mortality Study and (2) the National Center for Health Statistics' Multiple Cause of Death Files combined with the 5 percent Public Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that, controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with others' income.
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Jennifer Marr & Stefan Thau
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate how initial status position influences the quality of task performance in the aftermath of status loss. We argue that despite the benefits of having status, high-status individuals experience more self-threat and, consequently, have more difficulty performing well after status loss than do low-status individuals who experience a comparable loss of status. In a field study of professional baseball players (Study 1), we found that while low-status players' performance quality was unaffected by status loss, the quality of high-status players' performance declined significantly after losing status. In a high-involvement group experiment (Study 2) we found that high-status individuals who lost status were less proficient than both high-status individuals who did not lose status, and low-status individuals who lost a comparable amount of status. However, supporting the proposed self-threat mediation, self-affirmation restored the quality of high-status individuals' performance (Study 3). We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these findings.
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Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket: Life-History Strategies, Bet Hedging, and Diversification
Andrew Edward White et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Diversification of resources is a strategy found everywhere from the level of microorganisms to that of giant Wall Street investment firms. We examine the functional nature of diversification using life-history theory - a framework for understanding how organisms navigate resource-allocation trade-offs. This framework suggests that diversification may be adaptive or maladaptive depending on one's life-history strategy and that these differences should be observed under conditions of threat. In three studies, we found that cues of mortality threat interact with one index of life-history strategy, childhood socioeconomic status (SES), to affect diversification. Among those from low-SES backgrounds, mortality threat increased preferences for diversification. However, among those from high-SES backgrounds, mortality threat had the opposite effect, inclining people to put all their eggs in one basket. The same interaction pattern emerged with a potential biomarker of life-history strategy, oxidative stress. These findings highlight when, and for whom, different diversification strategies can be advantageous.
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It's Good to Be the King: Neurobiological Benefits of Higher Social Standing
Modupe Akinola & Wendy Berry Mendes
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Epidemiological and animal studies often find that higher social status is associated with better physical health outcomes, but these findings are by design correlational and lack mediational explanations. In two studies, we examine neurobiological reactivity to test the hypothesis that higher social status leads to salutary short-term psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses. In Study 1, we measured police officers' subjective social status and had them engage in a stressful task during which we measured cardiovascular and neuroendocrine reactivity. In Study 2, we manipulated social status and examined physiological reactivity and performance outcomes to explore links among status, performance, and physiological reactivity. Results indicated that higher social status (whether measured or manipulated) was associated with approach-oriented physiology (Studies 1 and 2) and better performance (Study 2) relative to lower status. These findings point to acute reactivity as one possible causal mechanism to better physical health among those higher in social status.
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Rebecca Diamond
Harvard Working Paper, December 2012
Abstract:
From 1980 to 2000, the substantial rise in the U.S. college-high school graduate wage gap coincided with an increase in geographic sorting as college graduates increasingly concentrated in high wage, high rent metropolitan areas, relative to lower skill workers. The increase in wage inequality may not reflect a similar increase in well-being inequality because high and low skill workers increasingly paid different housing costs and consumed different local amenities. This paper examines the determinants and welfare implications of the increased geographic skill sorting. I estimate a structural spatial equilibrium model of local labor demand, housing supply, labor supply, and amenity levels. The model allows local amenity and productivity levels to endogenously respond to a city's skill-mix. I identify the model parameters using local labor demand changes driven by variation in cities' industry mixes and interactions of these labor demand shocks with determinants of housing supply (land use regulations and land availability). The GMM estimates indicate that cross-city changes in firms' demands for high and low skill labor were the underlying forces of the increase in geographic skill sorting. An increase in labor demand for college relative to non-college workers increases a city's college employment share, which then endogenously raises the local productivity of all workers and improves local amenities. Local wage and amenity growth generates in-migration, driving up rents. My estimates show that low skill workers are less willing to pay high housing costs to live in high-amenity cities, leading them to elect more affordable, low-amenity cities. I find that the combined effects of changes in cities' wages, rents, and endogenous amenities increased well-being inequality between high school and college graduates by a significantly larger amount than would be suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone.
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Just Luck: An Experimental Study of Risk Taking and Fairness
Alexander Cappelen et al.
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Choices involving risk significantly affect the distribution of income and wealth in society. This paper reports the results of the first experiment, to our knowledge, to study fairness views about risk-taking, specifically whether such views are based chiefly on ex ante opportunities or on ex post outcomes. We find that, even though many participants focus exclusively on ex ante opportunities, most favor some redistribution ex post. Many participants also make a distinction between ex post inequalities that reflect differences in luck and ex post inequalities that reflect differences in choices. These findings apply to both stakeholders and impartial spectators.
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Rising Top Incomes Do Not Raise the Tide
Dierk Herzer & Sebastian Vollmer
Journal of Policy Modeling, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the long-run relationship between top income shares and economic growth for a panel of nine high-income countries over the period from 1961 to 1996. We use panel cointegration and causality techniquesthat are robust to omitted variables, slope heterogeneity, and endogenous variables. Our main findings are that an increase in the top decile of income share reduces growth, and that long-run causality also runs in the opposite direction - from economic growth to top income shares.
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Exporting, Skills and Wage Inequality
Michael Klein, Christoph Moser & Dieter Urban
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
International trade has been cited as a source of widening wage inequality in industrial nations. Most previous empirical evidence supports this claim by showing an effect in which increasing exports tilt demand towards firms which export and employ a relatively large proportion of higher-skilled workers from the group of firms which do not export. We find that, in addition to this, there is also an effect whereby, among exporting firms, there is a significant wage premium for high-skilled workers and a wage discount for low-skilled workers. These estimates are based on a matched employer-employee data set of western German manufacturing firms over the period 1993 - 2007. Our estimates suggest that export activity can be associated with up to 30 percent of within and between skill group wage inequality.
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Jeff Larrimore
Review of Income and Wealth, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a shift-share analysis on March CPS data, this paper estimates the degree to which changes in labor earnings, employment, and marriage patterns account for household income inequality growth in the United States since 1979. The factors contributing to the rapid rise in income inequality in the 1980s differ substantially from those contributing to its slower increase since that time. Unlike findings for the 1980s when changes in the correlation of spouses' earnings accounted for income inequality growth, this factor is no longer a major contributor toward its continued increase. Additionally, the 2000s business cycle is the first full business cycle in at least 30 years where changes in earnings of male household heads accounted for declines in income inequality. Instead, the continued growth in income inequality in the 2000s was accounted for primarily by increases in female earnings inequality and declines in both male and female employment.
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A New Model of Social Class: Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey Experiment
Mike Savage et al.
Sociology, April 2013, Pages 219-250
Abstract:
The social scientific analysis of social class is attracting renewed interest given the accentuation of economic and social inequalities throughout the world. The most widely validated measure of social class, the Nuffield class schema, developed in the 1970s, was codified in the UK's National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) and places people in one of seven main classes according to their occupation and employment status. This principally distinguishes between people working in routine or semi-routine occupations employed on a ‘labour contract' on the one hand, and those working in professional or managerial occupations employed on a ‘service contract' on the other. However, this occupationally based class schema does not effectively capture the role of social and cultural processes in generating class divisions. We analyse the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the UK, the BBC's 2011 Great British Class Survey, with 161,400 web respondents, as well as a nationally representative sample survey, which includes unusually detailed questions asked on social, cultural and economic capital. Using latent class analysis on these variables, we derive seven classes. We demonstrate the existence of an ‘elite', whose wealth separates them from an established middle class, as well as a class of technical experts and a class of ‘new affluent' workers. We also show that at the lower levels of the class structure, alongside an ageing traditional working class, there is a ‘precariat' characterised by very low levels of capital, and a group of emergent service workers. We think that this new seven class model recognises both social polarisation in British society and class fragmentation in its middle layers, and will attract enormous interest from a wide social scientific community in offering an up-to-date multi-dimensional model of social class.
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Bruno Frey et al.
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: Do employees care about their relative (economic) position in comparison to their co-workers in an organization? And if so, does it raise or lower their performance? While the topic is widely discussed in the literature, behavioral evidence on these important questions is relatively rare.
Methods: This article explores the pay-performance relationship using a sports data set. The strength of analyzing such data is that sports tournaments take place in a very controlled environment that helps to isolate a relative income effect.
Results: Using two large unique data sets that cover 26 seasons in basketball and eight seasons in soccer (Bundesliga), we find considerable support for the idea that a relative income disadvantage is correlated with a decrease in individual performance. In addition, there does not seem to be any tolerance for income disparity based on the hope that such differences may signal that better times are ahead.
Conclusions: This suggests the need to consider the impact of the relative income position when designing pay-for-performance mechanisms within firms and teams.
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Are egalitarian preferences based on envy?
Simon Kemp & AndFriedel Bolle
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated whether preferences for living in a society with equal (or unequal) incomes were related to individual differences in how envious people were. Four studies measured dispositional envy with a scale developed by Smith et al. (1999). The first study showed that dispositional envy correlated quite strongly with individual's ratings of how much they would envy another's success for a number of different objects of envy. Studies 2, 3 and 4 found little correlation between dispositional envy and rated preferences for living in a society with more equal incomes for five scenarios which were predicted to be productive of envy for samples of New Zealand students, East German students, and New Zealand general public respectively. Study 3 also found a similar result for an experiment in which distribution decisions implied corresponding money transfers to the participants. Overall, the four studies indicate that individual differences in envy are only weak predictors of preferences for egalitarian income distributions.
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Daniel Potter & Josipa Roksa
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Children from different family backgrounds enter schooling with different levels of academic skills, and those differences grow over time. What explains this growing inequality? While the social reproduction tradition has argued that family contexts are central to producing class gaps in academic achievement, recent quantitative studies have found that family experiences explain only a small portion of those inequalities. We propose that resolving this inconsistency requires developing a new measure of family experiences that captures the continuity of exposure over time and thus more closely reflects the logic of the social reproduction tradition. Results from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K) show that, consistent with previous quantitative research, time-specific measures of family experiences have little explanatory power. However, cumulative family experiences account for most of the growing inequality in academic achievement between children from different social class backgrounds over time. These findings support claims from the social reproduction tradition, and inform more broadly the understanding of how family experiences contribute to social inequality.
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Jo Blanden et al.
Review of Income and Wealth, forthcoming
Abstract:
We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the child's characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence.
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Philipp Bauer & Regina Riphahn
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use census data on 26 Swiss cantons to determine the association of educational institutions with the intergenerational transmission of education. We test whether education transmission is higher when children enter kindergarten and school earlier and when tracking occurs at a later age. In contrast to the literature we consider the three institutions jointly. Our results generally confirm the expected correlation patterns. Among second generation immigrants, the age at enrollment in kindergarten is most closely associated with educational mobility. Among natives, late tracking is most strongly and positively associated with educational mobility. Our results are robust to various alternative specifications.
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Educational expectation trajectories and attainment in the transition to adulthood
Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson & John Reynolds
Social Science Research, May 2013, Pages 818-835
Abstract:
How consequential is family socioeconomic status for maintaining plans to get a bachelor's degree during the transition to adulthood? This article examines persistence and change in educational expectations, focusing on the extent to which family socioeconomic status shapes overtime trajectories of bachelor's degree expectations, how the influence involves the timing of family formation and full-time work vs. college attendance, and how persistence in expectations is consequential for getting a 4-year degree. The findings, based on the high school senior classes of 1987-1990, demonstrate that adolescents from higher socioeconomic status families are much more likely to hold onto their expectations to earn 4-year degrees, both in the early years after high school and, for those who do not earn degrees within that period, on through their 20s. These more persistent expectations in young adulthood, more so than adolescent expectations, help explain the greater success of young people from higher socioeconomic status backgrounds in earning a 4-year degree. Persistence of expectations to earn a bachelor's degree in the years after high school is shaped by stratified pathways of school, work, and family roles in the transition to adulthood.
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Choices Chance and Change: Luck Egalitarianism Over Time
Patrick Tomlin
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, April 2013, Pages 393-407
Abstract:
The family of theories dubbed ‘luck egalitarianism' represent an attempt to infuse egalitarian thinking with a concern for personal responsibility, arguing that inequalities are just when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, choice, but are unjust when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, luck. In this essay I argue that luck egalitarians should sometimes seek to limit inequalities, even when they have a fully choice-based pedigree (i.e., result only from the choices of agents). I grant that the broad approach is correct but argue that the temporal standpoint from which we judge whether the person can be held responsible, or the extent to which they can be held responsible, should be radically altered. Instead of asking, as Standard (or Static) Luck Egalitarianism seems to, whether or not, or to what extent, a person was responsible for the choice at the time of choosing, and asking the question of responsibility only once, we should ask whether, or to what extent, they are responsible for the choice at the point at which we are seeking to discover whether, or to what extent, the inequality is just, and so the question of responsibility is not settled but constantly under review. Such an approach will differ from Standard Luck Egalitarianism only if responsibility for a choice is not set in stone - if responsibility can weaken then we should not see the boundary between luck and responsibility within a particular action as static. Drawing on Derek Parfit's illuminating discussions of personal identity, and contemporary literature on moral responsibility, I suggest there are good reasons to think that responsibility can weaken - that we are not necessarily fully responsible for a choice for ever, even if we were fully responsible at the time of choosing. I call the variant of luck egalitarianism that recognises this shift in temporal standpoint and that responsibility can weaken Dynamic Luck Egalitarianism (DLE). In conclusion I offer a preliminary discussion of what kind of policies DLE would support.
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The effect of spatial elevation on respect depends on merit and medium
Lisa Schubert, Thomas Schubert & Sascha Topolinski
Social Psychology, Spring 2013, Pages 147-159
Abstract:
Five experiments investigated the effects of spatial elevation on person perception in both a computer setup and actual encounters, determining the moderating role of additional verbal information about the target. In accordance with prior findings, spatial elevation increased respect in a computer setting, especially when the target was described as nonachieving. Liking toward the target was not affected. In an actual encounter the results were reversed: When actually facing the target, spatial elevation decreased respect when it was not legitimized by achievements of the target. We discuss the implications of our findings for the elicitation of respect and experimental approaches to investigate it.
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How Growing Asset Inequality Affects Developing Economies
Hamid Beladi, Chi-Chur Chao & Daniel Hollas
Journal of Economics and Business, July-August 2013, Pages 43-51
Abstract:
Using a dual structure depicting a developing economy, this paper shows that an increase in asset inequality can lead to wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor. In addition, increasing asset inequality raises the luxury goods price and hence the unemployment ratio. These effects lower the social welfare of the economy. To mitigate the adverse effect on wage inequality by asset inequality, a policy option to increase the urban minimum wage rate can be considered. However, this wage policy worsens social welfare by generating higher urban unemployment in the economy.
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Intersecting Cultural Beliefs in Social Relations: Gender, Race, and Class Binds and Freedoms
Cecilia Ridgeway & Tamar Kricheli-Katz
Gender & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop an evidence-based theoretical account of how widely shared cultural beliefs about gender, race, and class intersect in interpersonal and other social relational contexts in the United States to create characteristic cultural "binds" and freedoms for actors in those contexts. We treat gender, race, and class as systems of inequality that are culturally constructed as distinct but implicitly overlap through their defining beliefs, which reflect the perspectives of dominant groups in society. We cite evidence for the contextually contingent interactional "binds" and freedoms this creates for people such as Asian men, Black women, and poor whites who are not prototypical of images embedded in cultural gender, race, and class beliefs. All forms of unprototypicality create "binds," but freedoms result from being unprototypical of disadvantaging rather than advantaging statuses.
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Mario Lucchini, Sara Della Bella & Maurizio Pisati
European Sociological Review, April 2013, Pages 289-301
Abstract:
The standard sociological approach to the study of social stratification and mobility fails to take due account of the role played by the genetic confounders which, as emerges from other fields of research, condition the processes by which inequalities are transmitted and structured. For over a century, behavioural genetics has shown that a significant proportion of cognitive abilities and personality characteristics that play important roles in the status attainment process are traits largely structured on genetic bases. We shall therefore argue that theories and methods deriving from behavioural genetics can enhance our understanding of the processes by which inequalities are shaped and transmitted, and that more sophisticated models should be developed to measure social gradients controlling for distal non-observable causal antecedents, like genes and every environmental characteristic that we are not able to observe. In this article, using Italian family data taken from the sample survey Multiscopo Istat ‘Aspetti della Vita Quotidiana', we decompose the variance of educational attainment into a genetic and an environmental component. We obtain a heritability estimate of 0.50 for females and 0.52 for males, meaning that about 50 per cent of the differences observed in educational attainment are statistically ‘explained' by differences in genotypes. This result induces us to state that the traditional sociological theories used to explain individual differences in educational achievement may not be the best ones, and that it is crucial to consider both genetic and environmental influences when studying social behaviours.
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Inequality and happiness: When perceived social mobility and economic reality do not match
Christian Bjørnskov et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that perceived fairness of the income generation process affects the association between income inequality and subjective well-being, and that there are systematic differences in this regard between countries that are characterized by a high or, respectively, low level of actual fairness. Using a simple model of individual labor market participation under uncertainty, we predict that high levels of perceived fairness cause higher levels of individual welfare, and lower support for income redistribution. Income inequality is predicted to have a more favorable impact on subjective well-being for individuals with high fairness perceptions. This relationship is predicted to be stronger in societies that are characterized by low actual fairness. Using data on subjective well-being and a broad set of fairness measures from a pseudo micro-panel from the WVS over the 1990-2008 period, we find strong support for the negative (positive) association between fairness perceptions and the demand for more equal incomes (subjective well-being). We also find strong empirical support for the predicted differences in individual tolerance for income inequality, and the predicted influence of actual fairness.
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The Interaction between Human and Physical Capital Accumulation and the Growth-Inequality Trade-off
Stephen Turnovsky & Aditi Mitra
Journal of Human Capital, Spring 2013, Pages 26-75
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the effects of technological change on growth and inequality in a two-sector economy. The key mechanism is the evolution of the differential rates of return to human relative to physical capital as they respond to the changing technology. Productivity enhancement in the human capital sector increases the growth rate permanently, but in the final output sector, it has only a temporary effect. The effects on inequality depend on (i) the underlying source of inequality and (ii) the time horizon over which the productivity increase occurs. The model can generate growth-inequality relationships consistent with the empirical evidence.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Faith at work
Does a Protestant work ethic exist? Evidence from the well-being effect of unemployment
André van Hoorn & Robbert Maseland
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, July 2013, Pages 1-12
Abstract:
Evidence on Weber's original thesis on a Protestant work ethic is ambiguous and relies on questionable measures of work attitudes. We test the relation between Protestantism and work attitudes using a novel method, operationalizing work ethic as the effect of unemployment on individuals' subjective well-being. Analyzing a sample of 150,000 individuals from 82 societies, we find strong support for a Protestant work ethic: unemployment hurts Protestants more and hurts more in Protestant societies. Whilst the results shed new light on the Protestant work ethic debate, the method has wider applicability in the analysis of attitudinal differences.
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Changes in Americans' Strength of Religious Affiliation, 1974-2010
Philip Schwadel
Sociology of Religion, Spring 2013, Pages 107-128
Abstract:
I use data from the 1974-2010 General Social Survey to analyze changes in Americans' strength of religious affiliation. Results show little change in the percent of Americans who report a strong affiliation, though the percent with a somewhat/not very strong affiliation declined from 1990 to 2010, as the number of unaffiliated respondents increased. Tradition-specific, age-period-cohort analyses show that the probability of reporting a strong religious affiliation declined considerably among Catholics, predominantly due to period-based effects in the 1980s, and increased among evangelical Protestants, also due to period-based changes. These trends have produced a large gap in the likelihood of having a strong religious affiliation between evangelical Protestants/black Protestants and mainline Protestants/Catholics. Additional analyses show considerable across-cohort changes in the association between religious service attendance and strength of religious affiliation, particularly among Catholics, suggesting that religious identity and religious practice are more loosely connected among younger generations.
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An exploration of the functions of religious monumental architecture from a Darwinian perspective
Yannick Joye & Jan Verpooten
Review of General Psychology, March 2013, Pages 53-68
Abstract:
In recent years, the cognitive science of religion has displayed a keen interest in religions' social function, bolstering research on religious prosociality and cooperativeness. The main objective of this article is to explore, from a Darwinian perspective, the biological and psychological mechanisms through which religious monumental architecture (RMA) might support that specific function. A frequently held view is that monumental architecture is a costly signal that served vertical social stratification in complex large-scale societies. In this paper we extend that view. We hypothesize that the function(s) of RMA cannot be fully appreciated from a costly signaling perspective alone, and invoke a complementary mechanism, namely sensory exploitation. We propose that, in addition to being a costly signal, RMA also often taps into an adaptive "sensitivity for bigness." The central hypothesis of this paper is that when cases of RMA strongly stimulate that sensitivity, and when commoners become aware of the costly investments that are necessary to build RMA, then this may give rise to a particular emotional response, namely awe. We will try to demonstrate that, by exploiting awe, RMA promotes and regulates prosocial behavior among religious followers and creates in them an openness to adopt supernatural beliefs.
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Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation
Jared Rubin
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper attempts to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis which instruments for omitted variable bias with a city's distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were at minimum 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600.
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On the Road to Heaven: Self-Selection, Religion, and Socioeconomic Outcomes
Mohamed Saleh
Toulouse School of Economics Working Paper, December 2012
Abstract:
Correlation between religion and socioeconomic outcomes is observed in various contexts. In the Middle East, local non-Muslims are, on average, better off than the Muslim majority. I trace the origins of the phenomenon in Egypt to a historical process of self-selection across religions (based on socioeconomic status) that was motivated by an economic incentive: the imposition of the poll tax on non-Muslims upon the Islamic Conquest of the then-Coptic Christian Egypt in 640. The tax, which remained until 1855, led to the conversion of poor Copts to Islam to avoid paying the tax, and to the shrinking of Copts to a better off minority. Using new data sources that I digitized, including the 1848 and 1868 census manuscripts, I provide econometric evidence to support the hypothesis. I find that the spatial variation in poll tax enforcement in 640-900 and pre-Islamic attachment to Coptic Christianity, as measured by four historical proxies, predicts the Coptic population share in 1897. Consistent with the hypothesis predictions, the instrumented Coptic population share has a negative impact on the socioeconomic status for both Copts and Muslims, and on the Coptic-Muslim socioeconomic difference, particularly in rural Egypt, in 1848-68. I draw on a range of quantitative and qualitative evidence to support the underlying assumptions of the hypothesis and to examine the persistence of spatial and socioeconomic outcomes of Copts and Muslims.
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Peter Leeson
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do the members of societies that can't use government or simple ostracism produce social order? To investigate this question I use economics to analyze Gypsy law. Gypsy law leverages superstition to enforce desirable conduct in Gypsy societies where government is unavailable and simple ostracism is ineffective. According to Gypsy law, unguarded contact with the lower half of the human body is ritually polluting, ritual defilement is physically contagious, and non-Gypsies are in an extreme state of such defilement. These superstitions repair holes in simple ostracism among Gypsies, enabling them to secure social cooperation without government. Gypsies' belief system is an efficient institutional response to the constraints they face on their choice of mechanisms of social control.
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Religion as a Commitment Device: The Economics of Political Islam
Dalibor Roháč
Kyklos, May 2013, Pages 256-274
Abstract:
Why are religious parties so popular in the new and emerging democracies of the Middle East and North Africa? This paper offers an alternative to the traditional accounts that stress religiosity, the repressive nature of the previous regimes, poverty and underdevelopment, or Arab grievances against Israel. Instead, it outlines a rational choice-based explanation, in which religious political parties are able to address the problem of credible commitment, ubiquitous in new democracies. Instead of having to rely on patronage as the only mechanism of making pre-electoral commitments, Islamic parties are able to directly make credible promises about the supply of public goods. This is because they already have a history and a reputation, which both serve as channels of communication with the voters. Their reputation relies most importantly on a track record of providing social services in environments where governments have failed to do so. Furthermore, we argue that their religious nature makes them well equipped to overcome collective action problems.
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Religion as Reassurance? Testing the Insecurity Theory in 26 European Countries
Tim Immerzeel & Frank van Tubergen
European Sociological Review, April 2013, Pages 359-372
Abstract:
In this article, we extend insecurity theory by examining the influence of various kinds of insecurities on religiosity. Religiosity is operationalized in terms of a public dimension (church attendance) and a private dimension (subjective religiosity). Using data from four rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2002-2008) on 26 European countries, we find strong support for the main hypothesis of insecurity theory that higher levels of insecurity are associated with increasing religiosity. Furthermore, it appears that all kinds of insecurities play a role. Specifically, we find, among others, that religiosity is higher among people who have an insecure job position, whose parents were unemployed, whose parents had a lower status job, who have experienced a war in their own country, who have lost their partner, and who reside in a country with lower social welfare spending and a higher unemployment rate. On a more general level, it is concluded that both (i) economic and existential; (ii) past and present; and (iii) individual and contextual insecurities are important in explaining (cross-national) variation in religiosity.
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Becka Alper & Daniel Olson
Sociology of Religion, Spring 2013, Pages 82-106
Abstract:
Survey data from Jews find that Jewish population density is positively related to rates of synagogue attendance and most other behavioral measures of religious commitment. We ask whether, after controlling for higher rates of religious practice in more Jewish areas, Jewish population concentration has its own separate independent negative effect on Jewish identity salience. Using the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey, we present three main findings. First, the simple correlation between population share and identity salience is positive. Second, after statistically controlling several key control variables, including level of Jewish practice, the overall direct effect of population share is negative. Third, we find that respondents who were raised Jewish but no longer consider themselves Jewish are more likely to reside in low Jewish population share areas. Taken together, our second and third main findings suggest that different kinds of "assimilation" are occurring in high versus low Jewish population share areas.
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Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences
Timur Kuran & Anantdeep Singh
Economic Development and Cultural Change, April 2013, Pages 503-538
Abstract:
In South Asia, Muslims made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were less likely to use large-scale and perpetual commercial organizations and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this article also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families; they were also ill suited to profit-seeking business. Another key difference is that while Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint-family enterprises, Muslims tended to use transitory Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.
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"Trial by the Press": An Examination of Journalism, Ethics, and Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia
Janet Steele
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the United States, when journalists or legal scholars use the term "trial by the press," it is usually in the context of pretrial publicity, and the First Amendment right to freedom of expression versus the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. Although this understanding of the term exists in Indonesia and Malaysia, there it is also used in a variety of other ways that are related to the teachings of Islam and the legacy of authoritarianism. Islam contains strict prohibitions against gossip, libel, and other forms of defamation. For those who are uncomfortable with what they see as the excesses of press freedom, "trial by the press," or the idea that the press should not "judge" someone until the facts have been proven in a court of law strongly resembles the Islamic injunctions against fitnah (slander) and gossip. The question of when a Muslim journalist can properly divulge something negative about someone else has implications not only for the popular understanding of libel and defamation but also for investigative reporting. Because the accusation of "trial by the press" resonates with deeply held Islamic principles, it can be an exceptionally powerful political tool.
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Daniel McShea & Wim Hordijk
Evolutionary Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The eye and brain: standard thinking is that these devices are both complex and functional. They are complex in the sense of having many different types of parts, and functional in the sense of having capacities that promote survival and reproduction. Standard thinking says that the evolution of complex functionality proceeds by the addition of new parts, and that this build-up of complexity is driven by selection, by the functional advantages of complex design. The standard thinking could be right, even in general. But alternatives have not been much discussed or investigated, and the possibility remains open that other routes may not only exist but may be the norm. Our purpose here is to introduce a new route to functional complexity, a route in which complexity starts high, rising perhaps on account of the spontaneous tendency for parts to differentiate. Then, driven by selection for effective and efficient function, complexity decreases over time. Eventually, the result is a system that is highly functional and retains considerable residual complexity, enough to impress us. We try to raise this alternative route to the level of plausibility as a general mechanism in evolution by describing two cases, one from a computational model and one from the history of life.
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Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt
Joel Lehman & Kenneth Stanley
PLoS ONE, April 2013
Abstract:
Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt. The insight is that if evolvability is heritable, then an unbiased drifting process across genotypes can still create a distribution of phenotypes biased towards evolvability, because evolvable organisms diffuse more quickly through the space of possible phenotypes. Furthermore, because phenotypic divergence often correlates with founding niches, niche founders may on average be more evolvable, which through population growth provides a genotypic bias towards evolvability. Interestingly, the combination of these two mechanisms can lead to increasing evolvability without any pressure to out-compete other organisms, as demonstrated through experiments with a series of simulated models. Thus rather than from pressure to adapt, evolvability may inevitably result from any drift through genotypic space combined with evolution's passive tendency to accumulate niches.
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Common genetic influences underpin religiosity, community integration, and existential uncertainty
Gary Lewis & Timothy Bates
Journal of Research in Personality, August 2013, Pages 398-405
Abstract:
Although genetic factors underpin individual differences in religiosity, the psychological mechanisms through which such influences are manifested are presently unknown. Religiosity is associated with concerns for community integration and existential certainty, suggesting that heritable influences underlying such sentiments may overlap with heritable influences underpinning religiosity. Here we tested this hypothesis within a genetically informative design, using a large, nationally-representative twin sample. As predicted, heritable effects underlying community integration and existential uncertainty were strongly overlapping with the heritable influences on religiosity. These findings are consistent with the position that individual differences in religiosity are mediated through biological systems involved in meeting both social and existential needs, although further work is required to determine directions of causal action.
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Samuel Perry
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: This study examines how religious affiliations, salience, beliefs, and practices influence engagement in interracial dating or romance.
Methods: Bivariate and multivariate analyses are employed using data from the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey (N = 1,268). Logistic regression models are estimated in order to determine how certain dimensions of religious life predict whether one has engaged in interracial dating or romance, net of sociodemographic and ideological controls.
Results: Relative to evangelicals, mainline Protestants are less likely to have engaged in interracial romance. Those who frequently attend church and affirm biblical literalism are less likely to have dated across race, but those who engage in devotional practices such as prayer and sacred text reading are more likely to have interracialy dated.
Conclusion: The relationship between religion and interracial romance is more complex than previously thought. Future studies should both acknowledge and account for this complexity in their analyses.
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Unexpected enchantment in unexpected places: Mormonism in Battlestar Galactica
Iver Neumann
European Journal of Cultural Studies, April 2013, Pages 226-243
Abstract:
The study of religion leads a curiously secluded life within intellectual circles. This article argues that this is to our loss, particularly on the part of students of popular culture, since a number of the most widely discussed artefacts depend on religious themes for their effect. Taking note of the largely non-religious reception of one TV show, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the article offers a detailed reading of its constitutive religious narrative, aiming to demonstrate how this narrative owes very much indeed to Mormon theology. In conclusion, the article argues that intellectuals need to regain the skills needed to identify and analyse religious thinking, lest we miss the hermeneutic level on which religiously based artefacts are actually consumed by many viewers.
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Humble Self-Enhancement: Religiosity and the Better-Than-Average Effect
Kimmo Eriksson & Alexander Funcke
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research has linked religiosity to certain forms of self-enhancement. We extend this literature by three studies linking religiosity to the well-established better-than-average effect (BAE). First, a reanalysis of self-judgments of desirable characteristics in 15 nations showed that the BAE was stronger in more religious countries, even taking into account gross domestic product, interdependence, and economic inequality. Second, in two online surveys totaling 1,000 Americans, the BAE was stronger among more religious individuals. Several observations indicated that this relation was due to individuals self-stereotyping with respect to their religious in-groups. In particular, the relation was restricted to characteristics on the warmth dimension, consistent with the religious stereotype, and the average religious in-group member tended to be judged even more favorably than self. The latter phenomenon, which we term humble self-enhancement, is consistent with other studies linking stronger religiosity to greater favoritism of the religious in-group and greater derogation of religious out-groups.
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Teleological reasoning about nature: Intentional design or relational perspectives?
Bethany Ojalehto, Sandra Waxman & Douglas Medin
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, April 2013, Pages 166-171
Abstract:
According to the theory of ‘promiscuous teleology', humans are naturally biased to (mistakenly) construe natural kinds as if they (like artifacts) were intentionally designed ‘for a purpose'. However, this theory introduces two paradoxes. First, if infants readily distinguish natural kinds from artifacts, as evidence suggests, why do school-aged children erroneously conflate this distinction? Second, if Western scientific education is required to overcome promiscuous teleological reasoning, how can one account for the ecological expertise of non-Western educated, indigenous people? Here, we develop an alternative ‘relational-deictic' interpretation, proposing that the teleological stance may not index a deep-rooted belief that nature was designed for a purpose, but instead may reflect an appreciation of the perspectival relations among living things and their environments.
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Catholics versus Protestants: On the Benefit Incidence of Faith-Based Foreign Aid
Niklas Bengtsson
Economic Development and Cultural Change, April 2013, Pages 479-502
Abstract:
We estimate the impact of a village-level assistance program run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania on schooling and literacy. These programs are partly funded by foreign aid from US and Scandinavian donors. Difference-in-difference estimates suggest that the program increased literacy by 15-20 percentage points and educational attainment by 10-15 percentage points, but only among Protestant children. Catholic children living in the same targeted villages were unaffected. Supplementary evidence implies that these results cannot be explained by observable differences at baseline, nor are Catholic households less inclined to accept development assistance in general. The combined results support the concern that faith organizations might overstate their ability to aid households of different faith.
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Critical Stress: Police Officer Religiosity and Coping with Critical Stress Incidents
Jason Clark-Miller & Hallie Brady
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, April 2013, Pages 26-34
Abstract:
As a result of exposure to critical stress inducing incidents, police officers experience high rates of family disruption, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and physical and psychological problems. This paper evaluates the ability of religion to mitigate the harmful consequences of critical stress using data obtained from a survey of metropolitan police officers (n = 811). Contrary to our expectations, we found less religious officers used more adaptive coping strategies when confronted by critical stress incidents than their more religious counterparts. Furthermore, we found Protestants employed more adaptive strategies than Catholics. Potential explanations for the unexpected findings are discussed.
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Nicole Stephens et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2013, Pages 606-619
Abstract:
Two studies utilized firsthand accounts from survivors of two major natural disasters - Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Chilean earthquake in 2010 - to investigate (1) how people make sense of their disaster experiences and (2) who understands these events in religious terms. We found that describing the disasters as an act of God was among the most common explanations. Moreover, the degree to which survivors encountered extreme hardship - unpredictable, disruptive, and uncontrollable experiences - predicted explanations of the events as an act of God. These findings held even after controlling for demographic factors (educational attainment and race/ethnicity) known to be associated with religiosity. Notably, objective experiences (e.g., seeing dead bodies) were better predictors of religious meaning-making than relatively subjective psychological reactions to those experiences (e.g., fear). These studies extend the literature by examining how experiences of hardship in real-world contexts underlie religious meaning-making and suggest that religiosity emerges, in part, from variation in individual experience.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Drug problem
Shantanu Bagchi & James Feigenbaum
Review of Economic Dynamics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Even though smokers incur higher health expenditures than nonsmokers of the same age, smokers have significantly higher mortality rates, so the expected lifetime health expenditure for a smoker is actually lower than for a nonsmoker. Because of this fact, some politicians and policy-makers have argued that society might actually be better off promoting smoking rather than discouraging it. We consider this argument in a general-equilibrium model where health expenditures are paid for by a single-payer health-care system financed by taxes. Because the percentage increase in the tax base is larger than the percentage increase in health-care expenditures, the elimination of smoking actually decreases the budget-balancing health-care tax rate.
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Do time restrictions on alcohol advertising reduce youth exposure?
Craig Ross, Avalon de Bruijn & David Jernigan
Journal of Public Affairs, February 2013, Pages 123-129
Abstract:
Regulators may attempt to reduce youth exposure to alcohol advertising by restricting times during which alcohol ads may be aired on television or radio. The Netherlands introduced such a policy and found that teenage advertising exposure increased following the time restrictions. This study uses simulation analysis and a comprehensive database of television alcohol advertising to demonstrate that time restrictions are likely to reduce advertising exposure to the youngest viewers while increasing exposure for the high-risk teenage population.
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Cannabis use and suicidal ideation
Jan van Ours et al.
Journal of Health Economics, May 2013, Pages 524-537
Abstract:
Globally, suicide has emerged as the second leading cause of death among youth aged 10-24 years old. In order to better understand the causes of this phenomenon, we investigate the relationship between suicidal ideation and cannabis use. Our empirical analysis is based on a 30 year longitudinal study of a birth cohort. We find that intensive cannabis use - at least several times per week - leads to a higher transition rate into suicidal ideation for males. We find no evidence that suicidal ideation leads to cannabis use for either males or females.
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Cannabidiol reduces cigarette consumption in tobacco smokers: Preliminary findings
Celia Morgan et al.
Addictive Behaviors, forthcoming
Abstract:
The role of the endocannabinoid system in nicotine addiction is being increasingly acknowledged. We conducted a pilot, randomized double blind placebo controlled study set out to assess the impact of the ad-hoc use of cannabidiol (CBD) in smokers who wished to stop smoking. 24 smokers were randomized to receive an inhaler of CBD (n=12) or placebo (n=12) for one week, they were instructed to use the inhaler when they felt the urge to smoke. Over the treatment week, placebo treated smokers showed no differences in number of cigarettes smoked. In contrast, those treated with CBD significantly reduced the number of cigarettes smoked by ~ 40% during treatment. Results also indicated some maintenance of this effect at follow up. These preliminary data, combined with the strong preclinical rationale for use of this compound, suggest CBD to be a potential treatment for nicotine addiction that warrants further exploration.
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The price of a drink - too exactly? Flawed evidence for minimum unit pricing
John Duffy
Significance, April 2013, Pages 23-27
Abstract:
The UK government has been considering whether to introduce minimum unit pricing for alcohol. Extraordinarily precise benefits have been claimed for the measure, down to exactly how many lives a year will be saved. But are the statistics real or illusory? John Duffy says they are flawed to the point of uselessness.
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Christine Griffin et al.
Feminism & Psychology, May 2013, Pages 184-206
Abstract:
This paper contributes to debates on post-feminism and the constitution of contemporary femininity via an exploration of young women's alcohol consumption and their involvement in normative drinking cultures. We view femininity as a profoundly contradictory and dilemmatic space which appears almost impossible for girls or young women to inhabit. The juxtaposition of hyper-sexual femininity and the culture of intoxication produces a particularly difficult set of dilemmas for young women. They are exhorted to be sassy and independent - but not feminist; to be ‘up for it' and to drink and get drunk alongside young men - but not to ‘drink like men'. They are also called on to look and act as agentically sexy within a pornified night-time economy, but to distance themselves from the troubling figure of the ‘drunken slut'. Referring to recent research on young women's alcohol consumption and our own study on young adults' involvement in the culture of intoxication in the UK, we consider the ways in which young women manage to inhabit this terrain, and the implications for contemporary feminism and safer drinking initiatives.
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Lisa Berger, Michael Fendrich & Daniel Fuhrmann
Addictive Behaviors, forthcoming
Objective: The consumption of alcohol mixed with energy drinks (AmED) is prevalent among college students as is hazardous drinking, a drinking pattern that places one at risk for alcohol-related harm. The present study, therefore, examined associations between AmED use, hazardous drinking, and alcohol-related consequences in college students.
Methods: Based on a probability sample conducted in 2010, participants were 606 undergraduate students aged 18-25. AmED consumption included lifetime and past year use. Hazardous drinking and alcohol-related consequences were measured during the past year. Point prevalence was used to estimate rates of AmED use, and chi-square, ANOVA, and logistic regression were used to examine associations between AmED use, hazardous drinking, and alcohol-related consequences.
Results: Lifetime and past year AmED use prevalence rates were 75.2% and 64.7%, respectively. Hazardous drinkers who engaged in AmED use were significantly more likely than past year hazardous drinkers who did not engage in AmED use to have had unprotected sex (OR = 2.35, CI 1.27-4.32).
Conclusions: AmED use appears to be highly prevalent among college students, and AmED use may confer additional risk for unprotected sex beyond hazardous drinking. Unprotected sex has implications for public health, and students who drink hazardously and consume AmED may be at greater risk.
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Shanta Dube et al.
Journal of Adolescent Health, May 2013, Pages S45-S51
Purpose: Smoking is a leading cause of cancer, and most smokers begin during adolescence. We examined the proportion of adolescents exposed to pro-tobacco advertising and assessed the association between this exposure and susceptibility to smoking.
Methods: Data from the 2011 National Youth Tobacco Survey were used to calculate the proportion of susceptible middle school (MS) and high school (HS) students exposed to pro-tobacco advertisements through stores, magazines, and the Internet. Following previous work, susceptibility to smoking cigarettes was defined as "never smoked but open to trying cigarettes."
Results: In 2011, 81.5% of MS students and 86.9% of HS students were exposed to tobacco advertisements in stores; 48.2% of MS students and 54.0% of HS students were exposed to such advertising in magazines. Exposure to tobacco advertisements on the Internet was similar for MS (40.8%) and HS students (40.2%). Of those surveyed, 22.5% of MS students and 24.2% of HS students were susceptible to trying cigarettes. Exposure to magazine advertising declined from 71.8% in 2000 to 46.1% in 2009 among susceptible MS students; however, exposure increased to 55.4% in 2011. Tobacco advertising seen through the Internet among susceptible HS students increased from 25.9% in 2000 to 44.7% in 2011.
Conclusions: Adolescents continue to be exposed to pro-tobacco advertisements. Adolescents susceptible to smoking are more likely to report exposure to pro-tobacco advertisements. In addition to continued monitoring, more effective interventions to eliminate youth exposure to pro-tobacco marketing are needed.
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Health Consequences of Easier Access to Alcohol: New Zealand Evidence
Emily Conover & Dean Scrimgeour
Journal of Health Economics, May 2013, Pages 570-585
Abstract:
We evaluate the health effects of a reduction in New Zealand's minimum legal purchase age for alcohol. Difference-in-differences (DD) estimates show a substantial increase in alcohol-related hospitalizations among those newly eligible to purchase liquor, around 24.6% (s.e.=5.5%) for males and 22% (s.e.=8.1%) for females. There is less evidence of an effect among ineligible younger cohorts. There is little evidence of alcohol either complementing or substituting for drugs. We do not find evidence that earlier access to alcohol is associated with learning from experience. We also present regression discontinuity estimates, but emphasize DD estimates since in a simulation of a rational addiction model DD estimates are closer than regression discontinuity estimates to the policy's true effect.
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Pierre Maurage et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Background: Emotional and interpersonal impairments associated with alcohol-dependence have been recently explored, but the distorted cognitive representations underlying these deficits remain poorly understood. The present study aims at exploring the presence of maladaptive social self-beliefs among alcohol-dependent individuals, as these biased self-beliefs have been recently shown to play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of other psychopathological states (social anxiety and depression).
Methodology/Principal findings: Twenty-five recently detoxified alcohol-dependent participants and 25 matched controls filled in self-report questionnaires evaluating maladaptive social self-beliefs, interpersonal problems and several comorbid states (anxiety, social anxiety, depression). As compared to controls, alcohol-dependent individuals showed higher scores than controls for the three subcategories of maladaptive social self-beliefs (high standards, conditional beliefs and unconditional beliefs). Our key finding was that when comorbidities were controlled for, alcohol-dependence was associated with a specific bias towards exaggerated high standards in social contexts. Moreover, these high standards beliefs were strongly correlated with interpersonal problems.
Conclusions/Significance: These results provide the first insights into the influence of cognitive biases on interpersonal problems in addictive states, and suggest that maladaptive self-beliefs could have a central influence on the development and maintenance of alcohol-dependence.
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Trenette Clark, Otima Doyle & Amanda Clincy
Addictive Behaviors, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines age of first cigarette, alcohol, and marijuana use among self-identified biracial youth, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). We found an intermediate biracial phenomenon in which some biracial youth initiate substance use at ages that fall between the initiation ages of their 2 corresponding monoracial groups. When controlling for the covariates, our findings show White-Asian biracial youth begin smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol at earlier ages than Whites and engaging in all forms of substance use at earlier ages than Asian youth. Results indicate White-American Indian youth start smoking cigarettes at earlier ages than all biracial and monoracial groups. Our findings underscore the need for future research to examine substance-use initiation and progression among biracial/ethnic youth.
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Stephen Magura, Charles Cleland & Scott Tonigan
Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, May 2013, Pages 378-385
Objective: The objective of the study is to determine whether Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) participation leads to reduced drinking and problems related to drinking within Project MATCH (Matching Alcoholism Treatments to Client Heterogeneity), an existing national alcoholism treatment data set.
Method: The method used is structural equation modeling of panel data with cross-lagged partial regression coefficients. The main advantage of this technique for the analysis of AA outcomes is that potential reciprocal causation between AA participation and drinking behavior can be explicitly modeled through the specification of finite causal lags.
Results: For the outpatient subsample (n = 952), the results strongly support the hypothesis that AA attendance leads to increases in alcohol abstinence and reduces drinking/ problems, whereas a causal effect in the reverse direction is unsupported. For the aftercare subsample (n = 774), the results are not as clear but also suggest that AA attendance leads to better outcomes.
Conclusions: Although randomized controlled trials are the surest means of establishing causal relations between interventions and outcomes, such trials are rare in AA research for practical reasons. The current study successfully exploited the multiple data waves in Project MATCH to examine evidence of causality between AA participation and drinking outcomes. The study obtained unique statistical results supporting the effectiveness of AA primarily in the context of primary outpatient treatment for alcoholism
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Spatial Panel Analyses of Alcohol Outlets and Motor Vehicle Crashes in California: 1999-2008
William Ponicki, Paul Gruenewald & Lillian Remer
Accident Analysis & Prevention, June 2013, Pages 135-143
Abstract:
Although past research has linked alcohol outlet density to higher rates of drinking and many related social problems, there is conflicting evidence of density's association with traffic crashes. An abundance of local alcohol outlets simultaneously encourages drinking and reduces driving distances required to obtain alcohol, leading to an indeterminate expected impact on alcohol-involved crash risk. This study separately investigates the effects of outlet density on (1) the risk of injury crashes relative to population and (2) the likelihood that any given crash is alcohol-involved, as indicated by police reports and single-vehicle nighttime status of crashes. Alcohol outlet density effects are estimated using Bayesian misalignment Poisson analyses of all California ZIP codes over the years 1999 to 2008. These misalignment models allow panel analysis of ZIP-code data despite frequent redefinition of postal-code boundaries, while also controlling for overdispersion and the effects of spatial autocorrelation. Because models control for overall retail density, estimated alcohol-outlet associations represent the extra effect of retail establishments selling alcohol. The results indicate a number of statistically well-supported associations between retail density and crash behavior, but the implied effects on crash risks are relatively small. Alcohol-serving restaurants have a greater impact on overall crash risks than on the likelihood that those crashes involve alcohol, whereas bars primarily affect the odds that crashes are alcohol-involved. Off-premise outlet density is negatively associated with risks of both crashes and alcohol involvement, while the presence of a tribal casino in a ZIP code is linked to higher odds of police-reported drinking involvement. Alcohol outlets in a given area are found to influence crash risks both locally and in adjacent ZIP codes, and significant spatial autocorrelation also suggests important relationships across geographical units. These results suggest that each type of alcohol outlet can have differing impacts on risks of crashing as well as the alcohol involvement of those crashes.
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Enforcement following 0.08% BAC law change: Sex-specific consequences of changing arrest practices?
Jennifer Schwartz & Ardavan Davaran
Addictive Behaviors, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research evaluated effects of stricter 0.08% BAC drunken driving law on changes in sex-specific DUI arrest rates, controlling for increased law enforcement resources and shifts in DUI-related behaviors. Another main purpose, the study assessed female/male differences in arrest increases due to broader enforcement standards and efforts. Panel data was assembled for 24 states over 1990-2007 on DUI arrests, alcohol policy, law enforcement resources, drinking and drunken driving prevalence. Two-way fixed-effects seemingly unrelated regression models predicted female versus male changes in DUI arrests following implementation of lower legal limits of intoxication, net controls. Findings suggest, first, a broader legal definition of drunken driving intending to officially sanction less serious offenders (0.08% vs. 0.10% BAC) was associated with increased DUI arrests for both sexes. Second, growth in specialized DUI-enforcement units also was related to increased arrests. Whereas male and female arrest trends were equally affected by the direct net-widening effects of 0.08% BAC alcohol-policy, specialized DUI-enforcement efforts to dig deeper into the offender-pool had stronger arrest-producing effects on females, particularly prior to law change. Specifying how changes in law and enforcement resources affect arrest outcomes is an important pre-cursor to alcohol-policy analyses of effectiveness. A potential unintended consequence, effects of law and enforcement may differ across population segments.
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Demand for Smokeless Tobacco: Role of Advertising
Dhaval Dave & Henry Saffer
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
While the prevalence of smokeless tobacco (ST) is low relative to smoking, the distribution of ST use is highly skewed with consumption concentrated among certain segments of the population (rural residents, males, whites, low-educated individuals). Furthermore, there is suggestive evidence that use has trended upwards recently for groups that have traditionally been at low risk of using ST, and thus started to diffuse across demographics. This study provides the first estimates, at the national level, of the effects of magazine advertising on ST use. The focus on magazine advertising is significant given that ST manufacturers have been banned from using other conventional media since the 1986 Comprehensive ST Act and the 1998 ST Master Settlement Agreement. This study is based on the 2003-2009 waves of the National Consumer Survey (NCS), a unique data source that contains extensive information on the reading habits of individuals, matched with magazine-specific advertising information over the sample period. This allows detailed and salient measures of advertising exposure at the individual level and addresses potential bias due to endogeneity and selective targeting. We find consistent and robust evidence that exposure to ST ads in magazines raises ST use, especially among males, with an estimated elasticity of 0.06. There is suggestive evidence that both ST taxes and cigarette taxes reduce ST use, indicating contemporaneous complementarity between these tobacco products. Sub-analyses point to some differences in the advertising and tax response across segments of the population. The effects from this study inform the debate on the cost and benefits of ST use and its potential to be a tool in overall tobacco harm reduction.
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Daniel Belsky et al.
JAMA Psychiatry, forthcoming
Objective: To test how genetic risks discovered in genome-wide association studies of adult smoking influence the developmental progression of smoking behavior from initiation through conversion to daily smoking, progression to heavy smoking, nicotine dependence, and struggles with cessation.
Design: A 38-year, prospective, longitudinal study of a representative birth cohort.
Setting: The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study of New Zealand.
Participants: The study included 1037 male and female participants.
Exposure: We assessed genetic risk with a multilocus genetic risk score. The genetic risk score was composed of single-nucleotide polymorphisms identified in 3 meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies of smoking quantity phenotypes.
Main Outcomes and Measures: Smoking initiation, conversion to daily smoking, progression to heavy smoking, nicotine dependence (Fagerström Test of Nicotine Dependence), and cessation difficulties were evaluated at 8 assessments spanning the ages of 11 to 38 years.
Results: Genetic risk score was unrelated to smoking initiation. However, individuals at higher genetic risk were more likely to convert to daily smoking as teenagers, progressed more rapidly from smoking initiation to heavy smoking, persisted longer in smoking heavily, developed nicotine dependence more frequently, were more reliant on smoking to cope with stress, and were more likely to fail in their cessation attempts. Further analysis revealed that 2 adolescent developmental phenotypes-early conversion to daily smoking and rapid progression to heavy smoking-mediated associations between the genetic risk score and mature phenotypes of persistent heavy smoking, nicotine dependence, and cessation failure. The genetic risk score predicted smoking risk over and above family history.
Conclusions and Relevance: Initiatives that disrupt the developmental progression of smoking behavior among adolescents may mitigate genetic risks for developing adult smoking problems. Future genetic research may maximize discovery potential by focusing on smoking behavior soon after smoking initiation and by studying young smokers.
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Brandon Oberlin et al.
Neuropsychopharmacology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Striatal dopamine (DA) is increased by virtually all drugs of abuse, including alcohol. However, drug-associated cues are also known to provoke striatal DA transmission- a phenomenon linked to the motivated behaviors associated with addiction. To our knowledge, no one has tested if alcohol's classically-conditioned flavor cues, in the absence of a significant pharmacologic effect, are capable of eliciting striatal dopamine release in humans. Employing positron emission tomography (PET), we hypothesized that beer's flavor alone can reduce the binding potential of [11C]raclopride (a reflection of striatal DA release) in the ventral striatum, relative to an appetitive flavor control. Forty-nine men, ranging from social to heavy drinking, mean age 25, with a varied family history of alcoholism underwent two [11C]raclopride PET scans: one while tasting beer, and one while tasting Gatorade®. Relative to the control flavor of Gatorade, beer flavor significantly increased self-reported desire to drink, and reduced [11C]raclopride binding potential, indicating that the alcohol-associated flavor cues induced dopamine release. Binding potential reductions were strongest in subjects with first-degree alcoholic relatives. These results demonstrate that alcohol-conditioned flavor cues can provoke ventral striatal dopamine release absent significant pharmacologic effects, and that the response is strongest in subjects with a greater genetic risk for alcoholism. Striatal DA responses to salient alcohol cues may thus be an inherited risk factor for alcoholism.
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Association of PER2 Genotype and Stressful Life Events with Alcohol Drinking in Young Adults
Dorothea Blomeyer et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Background: Clock genes govern circadian rhythms and shape the effect of alcohol use on the physiological system. Exposure to severe negative life events is related to both heavy drinking and disturbed circadian rhythmicity. The aim of this study was 1) to extend previous findings suggesting an association of a haplotype tagging single nucleotide polymorphism of PER2 gene with drinking patterns, and 2) to examine a possible role for an interaction of this gene with life stress in hazardous drinking.
Methods: Data were collected as part of an epidemiological cohort study on the outcome of early risk factors followed since birth. At age 19 years, 268 young adults (126 males, 142 females) were genotyped for PER2 rs56013859 and were administered a 45-day alcohol timeline follow-back interview and the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT). Life stress was assessed as the number of severe negative life events during the past four years reported in a questionnaire and validated by interview.
Results: Individuals with the minor G allele of rs56013859 were found to be less engaged in alcohol use, drinking at only 72% of the days compared to homozygotes for the major A allele. Moreover, among regular drinkers, a gene x environment interaction emerged (p = .020). While no effects of genotype appeared under conditions of low stress, carriers of the G allele exhibited less hazardous drinking than those homozygous for the A allele when exposed to high stress.
Conclusions: These findings may suggest a role of the circadian rhythm gene PER2 in both the drinking patterns of young adults and in moderating the impact of severe life stress on hazardous drinking in experienced alcohol users. However, in light of the likely burden of multiple tests, the nature of the measures used and the nominal evidence of interaction, replication is needed before drawing firm conclusions.
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Adolescents' Attitudes Toward Antimarijuana Ads, Usage Intentions, and Actual Marijuana Usage
Eusebio Alvaro et al.
Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, forthcoming
Abstract:
The association of adolescents' appraisals of the antimarijuana TV ads used in the National Youth Antidrug Media Campaign with future marijuana use was investigated. The 12- to 18-year-old respondents (N = 2,993) were first classified as users, resolute nonusers, or vulnerable nonusers (Crano, Siegel, Alvaro, Lac, & Hemovich, 2008). Usage status and the covariates of gender, age, and attitudes toward marijuana were used to predict attitudes toward the ads (Aad) in the first phase of a multilevel linear analysis. All covariates were significantly associated with Aad, as was usage status: Resolute nonusers evaluated the ads significantly more positively than vulnerable nonusers and users (all ps < .001), who did not differ. In the second phase, the covariates along with Aad and respondents' usage status predicted intentions and actual usage 1 year after initial measurement. The lagged analysis disclosed negative associations between Aad and usage intentions and between Aad and actual marijuana use (both ps < .05); however, this association held only for users (p < .01), not vulnerable or resolute nonusers. Users who reported more positive attitudes toward the ads were less likely to report intention to use marijuana and to continue marijuana use at 1-year follow-up. These findings may inform designers of persuasion-based prevention campaigns, guiding preimplementation efforts in the design of ads that targeted groups find appealing and thus, influential.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Wide perceiver
Exploring the Impact of Various Shaped Seating Arrangements on Persuasion
Rui (Juliet) Zhu & Jennifer Argo
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the common belief that seating arrangements matter, little research has examined how the geometrical shape of a chair arrangement can impact persuasion. Across three studies, this research demonstrates that the shape of seating arrangements can prime two fundamental human needs which in turn influence persuasion. When seated in a circular shaped layout, individuals evaluate persuasive material more favorably when it contains family-oriented cues or majority endorsement information. In contrast, when seated in an angular shaped seating arrangement, individuals evaluate persuasive material more favorably when it contains self-oriented cues or minority endorsement. Further, results reveal that these responses to persuasive material arise because circular (angular) shaped seating arrangements prime a need to belong (need to be unique). Thus, this research shows that a subtle environmental cue - the shape of a seating arrangement - can activate fundamental human needs and consequently affect persuasion.
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The insurance effect: How the possession of gas masks reduces the likelihood of a missile attack
Orit Tykocinski
Judgment and Decision Making, March 2013, Pages 174-178
Abstract:
When a threat looms large in people's minds, they may seek protective measures that could mitigate the negative outcomes associated with this threat. Paradoxically, the possession of such protective measures may, in turn, inspire a sense of safety and reduce the perceived probability of the very threat that had originally triggered their acquisition. Thus, reminding people that they possess a medical insurance policy attenuated their perceived risk of suffering from health related misfortunes (Tykocinski, 2008). The current study conceptually replicates these findings and extends them to a different form of insurance. Reminding citizens in Israel of the fact that they possess gas masks significantly reduced their subjective estimates of the probability that Israel will be attacked by Iran.
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Getting a Grip on Memory: Unilateral Hand Clenching Alters Episodic Recall
Ruth Propper et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2013
Abstract:
Unilateral hand clenching increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe of the contralateral hemisphere. Such hand clenching is also associated with increased experiencing of a given hemisphere's "mode of processing." Together, these findings suggest that unilateral hand clenching can be used to test hypotheses concerning the specializations of the cerebral hemispheres during memory encoding and retrieval. We investigated this possibility by testing effects of unilateral hand clenching on episodic memory. The hemispheric Encoding/Retrieval Asymmetry (HERA) model proposes left prefrontal regions are associated with encoding, and right prefrontal regions with retrieval, of episodic memories. It was hypothesized that right hand clenching (left hemisphere activation) pre-encoding, and left hand clenching (right hemisphere activation) pre-recall, would result in superior memory. Results supported the HERA model. Also supported was that simple unilateral hand clenching can be used as a means by which the functional specializations of the cerebral hemispheres can be investigated in intact humans.
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Why Are People Bad at Detecting Randomness? A Statistical Argument
Joseph Williams & Thomas Griffiths
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Errors in detecting randomness are often explained in terms of biases and misconceptions. We propose and provide evidence for an account that characterizes the contribution of the inherent statistical difficulty of the task. Our account is based on a Bayesian statistical analysis, focusing on the fact that a random process is a special case of systematic processes, meaning that the hypothesis of randomness is nested within the hypothesis of systematicity. This analysis shows that randomly generated outcomes are still reasonably likely to have come from a systematic process and are thus only weakly diagnostic of a random process. We tested this account through 3 experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the low accuracy in judging whether a sequence of coin flips is random (or biased toward heads or tails) is due to the weak evidence provided by random sequences. While randomness judgments were less accurate than judgments involving non-nested hypotheses in the same task domain, this difference disappeared once the strength of the available evidence was equated. Experiment 3 extended this finding to assessing whether a sequence was random or exhibited sequential dependence, showing that the distribution of statistical evidence has an effect that complements known misconceptions.
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Does Green Mean Healthy? Nutrition Label Color Affects Perceptions of Healthfulness
Jonathon Schuldt
Health Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
The food industry has recently implemented numerous front-of-package nutrition labels to readily convey key aspects a food product's nutritional profile to consumers (e.g., calories and fat content). Although seemingly well-intentioned, such labels might lead consumers to perceive relatively poor nutrition foods in a healthier light. The present research explores whether one underresearched aspect of nutrition labels - namely, their color - might influence perceptions of a product's healthfulness. In Study 1, participants perceived a candy bar as healthier when it bore a green rather than a red calorie label, despite the fact that the labels conveyed the same calorie content. Study 2 examined the perceived healthfulness of a candy bar bearing a green versus white calorie label and assessed individual differences in the importance of healthy eating. Overall, results suggest that green labels increase perceived healthfulness, especially among consumers who place high importance on healthy eating. Discussion focuses on implications for health-related judgment and nutrition labeling.
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You taste what you see: Do organic labels bias taste perceptions?
Wan-chen Jenny Lee et al.
Food Quality and Preference, July 2013, Pages 33-39
Abstract:
Does simply believing that a processed food is organic improve how enjoyable it tastes, influence caloric estimations, or increase how much people are willing to pay for the item? In the present study, 115 participants recruited from a local shopping mall were asked to taste and evaluate three paired food samples (i.e., cookies, potato chips, and yogurt). Each of those food samples was labeled, specifying one of the items in the pair as ‘organic' and the other label specifying its counterpart as ‘regular', although they were identical and organically produced. Results found that participants estimated those foods with organic labels to be lower in calories than those without the organic label. Furthermore, foods with the organic label elicited a higher willingness-to-pay and yielded better nutritional evaluations (e.g., tastes lower in fat, higher in fiber) than foods without the organic label. Finally, results found that the effects of the organic label on caloric estimations were less pronounced among people who typically read nutritional labels, who often buy organic foods, and who often engage in pro-environmental activities. This underscores the idea that the health halo effect is primarily driven by automatic processing based on heuristics. Understanding how consumers use nutritional information on product labels has important implications for both public policy as well as processed food manufacturers who use such claims as tools to market their products.
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Edith Shalev & Vicki Morwitz
Journal of Consumer Psychology, April 2013, Pages 220-227
Abstract:
We show that counting downward while performing a task shortens the perceived duration of the task compared to counting upward. People perceive that less time has elapsed when they were counting downward versus upward while using a product (Studies 1 and 3) or watching geometrical shapes (Study 2). The counting direction effect is obtained using both prospective and retrospective time judgments (Study 3), but only when the count range begins with the number "1" (Study 2). Furthermore, the counting direction affects peoples' attitude toward the product, their likelihood of using it again, and their purchase intentions. We test several plausible accounts for the counting direction effect, including task difficulty, numerical anchoring, and arousal. We find preliminary evidence that downward counting feels shorter because it is more arousing than upward counting.
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Seeing or smelling? Assessing personality on the basis of different stimuli
Agnieszka Sorokowska
Personality and Individual Differences, July 2013, Pages 175-179
Abstract:
This study examines whether people can accurately assess personality on the basis of facial images and body odor and whether attractiveness influences these relationships. Three personality dimensions of target individuals - neuroticism, extraversion and dominance - were measured with the NEO Five-Factor Inventory, a one-item measure of dominance and the reports of close acquaintances. Naive observers assessed neuroticism and dominance at above-chance levels based on body odor, and they assessed extraversion (and in some cases, neuroticism) at above-chance levels based on either facial images alone or body odor and facial images presented together. The accuracy differed depending on the sex of the targets and the raters. In addition, facial and body odor attractiveness predicted the targets' personalities and the assessments of their personalities. These results show that the accuracy of personality assessment changes when judges assess different types of stimuli.
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Sarah Garfinkel et al.
Psychophysiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Mental functions are influenced by states of physiological arousal. Afferent neural activity from arterial baroreceptors at systole conveys the strength and timing of individual heartbeats to the brain. We presented words under limited attentional resources time-locked to different phases of the cardiac cycle, to test a hypothesis that natural baroreceptor stimulation influences detection and subsequent memory of words. We show memory for words presented around systole was decreased relative to words at diastole. The deleterious memory effect of systole was greater for words detected with low confidence and amplified in individuals with low interoceptive sensitivity, as indexed using a heartbeat counting task. Our observations highlight an important cardiovascular channel through which autonomic arousal impacts a cognitive function, an effect mitigated by metacognition (perceptual confidence) and interoceptive sensitivity.
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Debora Thompson & Elise Chandon Ince
Journal of Marketing Research, April 2013, Pages 228-240
Abstract:
This research examines the effect of processing fluency on judgments of agent competence. In the context of service relationships, four studies reveal that the experience of processing difficulty, or disfluency, enhances expectations of agent-exerted effort and competence, which in turn increase expected service value. When reading information about a target service, consumers interpret the difficulty of processing information as a signal of the level of skill required to execute the task, which highlights the agent's expected utility. The authors explore several moderators of this positive effect of disfluency, showing that it is attenuated under conditions that decrease the relevance of consumers' subjective experiences and it may be reversed on measures of experienced (vs. expected) service value.
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Raffaella Misuraca & Ursina Teuscher
Acta Psychologica, June 2013, Pages 176-180
Abstract:
Three experiments assessed whether maximizing and satisficing decision-making types were associated with differences in perception of time, as a consequence of their different cognitive workloads. Findings showed that maximizers and satisficers perceived time differently during decision-making, but not during other tasks. In particular, compared to satisficers, maximizers tended to underestimate time while choosing, independently of the number of options and the specific task requirements. Satisficers instead tended to underestimate time only when the number of options or the task requirements were more challenging. Our findings suggest that the perception of time may serve as a measure of the cognitive workload associated with decision-making types. The findings furthermore suggest that satisficers adopt a more malleable decision-making process than maximizers.
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The neural correlates of beauty comparison
Gayannée Kedia et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. How attractive someone is perceived to be depends on the individual or cultural standards to which this person is compared. But although comparisons play a central role in the way people judge the appearance of others, the brain processes underlying attractiveness comparisons remain unknown. In the present experiment, we tested the hypothesis that attractiveness comparisons rely on the same cognitive and neural mechanisms as comparisons of simple nonsocial magnitudes such as size. We recorded brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants compared the beauty or height of two women or two dogs. Our data support the hypothesis of a common process underlying these different types of comparisons. First, we demonstrate that the distance effect characteristic of nonsocial comparisons also holds for attractiveness comparisons. Behavioral results indicated, for all our comparisons, longer response times for near than far distances. Second, the neural correlates of these distance effects overlapped in a frontoparietal network known for its involvement in processing simple nonsocial quantities. These results provide evidence for overlapping processes in the comparison of physical attractiveness and nonsocial magnitudes.
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The association between the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and hypnotizability
Richard Bryant et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hypnosis has puzzled scientists for centuries, and particularly the reason why some people are prone to engaging in suggested experiences discordant with external reality. Absorption in internal experience is one key component of the hypnotic response. The neuropeptide oxytocin has been posited to heighten sensitivity to external cues, and it is possible that individual differences in oxytocin-related capacity to engage in external or internal experiences influences hypnotic response. To test this proposal, 185 Caucasian individuals provided saliva samples for analysis of polymorphisms in the oxytocin receptor gene, COMT, and independently completed standardized measures of hypnotizability and absorption. Participants with the GG genotype at rs53576 were characterized by lower hypnotizability and absorption scores than those with the A allele; there was no association between hyponotizability and COMT. These findings provide initial evidence that the capacity to respond to suggestions for altered internal experience is influenced by the oxytocin receptor gene, and is consistent with evidence that oxytocin plays an important role in modulating the extent to which people engage with external versus internal experiences.
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Playing nice: A multi-methodological study on the effects of social conformity on memory
Lorena Deuker et al.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, March 2013
Abstract:
Conformity is an important aspect of social behavior. Two main motives have been identified: people may adapt their behavior to "play nice" despite knowing better (normative conformity) or they may accept the others' opinion as a valid source of information (informative conformity). Neuroimaging studies can help to distinguish between these two possibilities. Here, we present a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study on memory conformity in a real group situation. We investigated the effects of group pressure on activity in hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) which likely support informative and normative memory conformity, respectively. Furthermore, we related the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs4680 [called Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val158Met] on the gene coding for COMT to both behavior and fMRI activation. Homozygous Met-allele carriers (Val-) behaved more conformist than carriers of at least one Val-allele (Val+). In the neuroimaging data, we compared trials in which subjects were confronted with a majority of incorrect group responses to trials in which they were confronted with a majority of correct group responses. We found increased hippocampal activity when the majority of the group was correct, possibly indicating retrieval processes. Moreover, we observed enhanced activity in the ACC when the majority of the group was incorrect, suggesting that conformity was mostly normative. Most interestingly, this latter effect was more pronounced for Val- as compared to Val+ participants. This offers a speculative explanation for the higher behavioral levels of social conformity in Val- allele carriers, because their subjectively perceived conflict in the presence of an incorrect group majority may have been higher. Overall, this study demonstrates how the mechanisms leading to complex social behavior such as conformity can be studied by combining genetic analyses and fMRI in social neuroscience paradigms.
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In search of a surrogate for touch: The effect of haptic imagery on perceived ownership
Joann Peck, Victor Barger & Andrea Webb
Journal of Consumer Psychology, April 2013, Pages 189-196
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that individuals value objects more highly if they own them, a finding commonly known as the endowment effect. In fact, simply touching an object can create a perception of ownership that produces the endowment effect. In this paper, we extend this line of research in several ways. First, we show that haptic imagery, or imagining touching an object, can have the same effect on perceived ownership as physical touch. We then demonstrate that haptic imagery can lead to perceptions of physical control, which in turn increase feelings of ownership. Moreover, the more vivid the haptic imagery, the greater the perception of control and the feeling of ownership. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
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Warmer hearts, warmer rooms: How positive communal traits increase estimates of ambient temperature
Aleksandra Szymkow et al.
Social Psychology, Spring 2013, Pages 167-176
Abstract:
Conceptual representations of warmth have been shown to be related to people's perceptions of ambient temperature. Based on this premise, we hypothesized that merely thinking about personality traits related to communion (but not agency) influences physical experience of warmth. Specifically, the three studies revealed that (a) perceptions of temperature are influenced by both positive and negative attributes within the communion but not agency dimension, (b) the effect is stronger when traits indicate sociability rather than morality subdimension of communion, and (c) communion activation affects temperature perceptions independently of target's or self-perceptions.
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Affective judgement about information relating to competence and warmth: An embodied perspective
Sébastien Freddi et al.
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Several studies have shown that social judgement may be defined by two dimensions, competence and warmth. From a functional perspective, embodied theories have proposed that warmth may be associated with physical distance, whereas competence may be connected to a vertical motion (UPWARD/DOWNWARD). Two main studies were conducted to examine if approach-avoidance and vertical motion could influence affective judgements about traits representing these two social dimensions. Valence judgements about warmth traits that were moving towards the subject resulted in more positive judgement than when they were moving away (approach/avoidance). Furthermore, competence traits were judged more positively when they moved in an UPWARD direction, compared with when they moved DOWNWARD. A metacognitive account of confidence is offered to explain how cognitions about warmth and competence are connected to the physical world.
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Processing fluency, positive affect, and judgments of meaning in life
Jason Trent, Caroline Lavelock & Laura King
Journal of Positive Psychology, March/April 2013, Pages 135-139
Abstract:
This study examined the effects of processing ease on judgments of meaning in life (MIL), employing a common manipulation of fluency, font styles. One hundred and three adults completed a questionnaire assessing MIL with items printed in one of four fonts that differed in readability. We predicted that those who rated MIL items printed in easy-to-read fonts would report higher MIL than those who rated items presented in difficult-to-read fonts. Participants also completed a measure of the proposed mechanism for these effects, positive affect (PA). Results showed that, as predicted, easy reading led to higher MIL than difficult reading and these effects were explained by PA. Results not only extend the influence of processing fluency to such profound judgments as life's meaningfulness, but also lend further support to the very strong role of PA in judgments of MIL.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Oversight
Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior
Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell & Thore Graepel
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 9 April 2013, Pages 5802-5805
Abstract:
We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic/linear regression to predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95% of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85% of cases. For the personality trait "Openness," prediction accuracy is close to the test-retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attributes and Likes and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy.
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Advertising Expensive Mortgages
Umit Gurun, Gregor Matvos & Amit Seru
NBER Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
We use a unique dataset that combines information on advertising by subprime lenders and mortgages originated by them from 2002 to 2007 to study the relationship between advertising and the nature of mortgages obtained by consumers. We exploit the richness of our data and measure the relative expensiveness of a given mortgage as the excess rate of a mortgage after accounting for a broad set of borrower, contract, and regional characteristics associated with a given mortgage--less expensive mortgages, all else equal, are better products from the perspective of the consumer. We find a strong positive relationship between the intensity of local advertising and the expensiveness of mortgages extended by lenders within a given region, with the relationship strongest for advertising through newspapers, the most heavily used channel for local advertising of mortgages. This pattern survives even after conditioning for a rich set of borrower, loan and region characteristics and exploiting differences in advertising within a given lender. Advertisers lend to consumers who, all else equal, default less, making it unlikely that our results are driven by unobservable borrower quality. We also exploit variation in mortgage advertising induced by the entry of Craigslist across different regions to demonstrate that the relation between advertising and expensiveness of mortgages is not likely to be spurious. We corroborate that advertising is most effective when targeted at groups that might be less informed about mortgages, such as the poor, the less educated and minorities. These findings are inconsistent with the "informative view" under which advertising allows consumers to find cheaper products, and instead support the "persuasive view" that advertising in the subprime mortgage market was used to steer consumers into expensive choices.
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Fudging the Nudge: Information Disclosure and Restaurant Grading
Daniel Ho
Yale Law Journal, December 2012, Pages 574-688
Abstract:
One of the most promising regulatory currents consists of "targeted" disclosure: mandating simplified information disclosure at the time of decisionmaking to "nudge" parties along. Its poster child is restaurant sanitation grading. In principle, a simple posted letter grade (‘A,' ‘B,' or ‘C') empowers consumers and properly incentivizes restaurateurs to reduce risks for foodborne illness. Yet empirical evidence of the efficacy of restaurant grading is sparse. This Article fills the void by studying over 700,000 health inspections of restaurants across ten jurisdictions, focusing on San Diego and New York. Despite grading's great promise, we show that the regulatory design, implementation, and practice suffer from serious flaws: jurisdictions fudge more than nudge. In San Diego, grade inflation reigns. Nearly all restaurants receive ‘A's. In New York, inspections exhibit little substantive consistency. A good score does not meaningfully predict cleanliness down the road. Unsurprisingly, New York's implementation of letter grading in 2010 has not discernably reduced manifestations of foodborne illness. Perhaps worse, the system perversely shifts inspection resources away from higher health hazards to resolve grade disputes. These results have considerable implications, not only for food safety, but also for the institutional design of information disclosure.
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The Rise of Carrots and the Decline of Sticks
Gerrit De Geest & Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci
University of Chicago Law Review, Winter 2013, Pages 341-392
Abstract:
There is a remarkable tendency in modern legal systems to increasingly use carrots. This trend is not limited to legal systems but can also be observed in, for instance, parenting styles, social control mechanisms, and even law schools' teaching methods. Yet, at first glance, sticks appear to be a more efficient means of inducing people to comply with legal rules or social norms because they are not meant to be applied (thus minimizing transaction costs and risks) and may cause fewer unintended distributional distortions. So how can we justify the widespread use of carrots? This Article shows that carrots can be superior in two cases. The first is when the lawmaker faces specification problems, which means that she does not know what to expect from each individual citizen (for instance, she may not know which citizen should spend time composing songs or which part of the cargo of a sinking ship should be rescued). In those cases, sticks are likely to punish citizens who are unable to comply with the norm and likely to cause wasteful transaction costs, risks, and undesirable wealth changes. The second is when the lawmaker needs to require significantly higher efforts from some citizens than from others. We use the term singling-out danger to refer to this problem. This is the case, for instance, when the lawmaker wants only some families to send a family member to the army, or only some families to sacrifice land for a highway project. In such cases, sticks would cause significant unintended distributional distortions (artificially impoverishing those from whom much is required), making carrots superior. Overall, our results predict that in societies with more specialization and division of labor, carrots will be used more often. But they also predict that within each society, carrots will be used more often in situations that involve a higher degree of complexity. Applications include patents, regulatory takings, contract bonuses, the duty to rescue, finders, information disclosure to contract parties, the Endangered Species Act, incentives in the military, slavery, health policy, and parenting.
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Congressional Influence as a Determinant of Subprime Lending
Stuart Gabriel, Matthew Kahn & Ryan Vaughn
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
We apply unique loan level data from New Century Financial Corporation, a major subprime lender, to assess whether attributes of Congressional Representatives were associated with access to and pricing of subprime mortgage credit. Research findings indicate higher likelihoods of subprime loan origination and lower mortgage pricing among borrowers represented by the Republican and Democratic leadership of Congress. Black borrowers also benefitted from significantly larger loan amounts in those same districts. Also, borrowers received mortgage interest rate discounts in districts where New Century donated to the Congressional Representative. Findings provide new insights into the political geography of the subprime crisis and suggest gains to trade between New Century Financial Corporation and targeted Congressional Representatives in the extension, pricing and sizing of subprime mortgage credit.
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Paging Inspector Sands: The Costs of Public Information
Sacha Kapoor & Arvind Magesan
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most empirical studies on the role of information in markets analyze policies that reduce asymmetries in the information that market participants possess, often suggesting that the policies improve welfare. We exploit the introduction of pedestrian countdown signals - timers that indicate when traffic lights will change - to evaluate a policy that increases the information that all market participants possess. We find that although countdown signals reduce the number of pedestrians struck by automobiles, they increase the number of collisions between automobiles. We also find that countdown signals caused more collisions overall. The findings imply welfare gains can be attained by revealing the information to pedestrians and hiding it from drivers. We conclude that policies which increase asymmetries in information can improve welfare.
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Evidence on the Benefits of Alternative Mortgage Products
João Cocco
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Alternative mortgage products have been identified by many as culprits in the financial crisis. However, because of their lower initial mortgage payments relative to loan amount, they may be a valuable tool for households who expect higher and more certain future labor income, and who wish to smooth consumption over the life‐cycle. Using U.K. household‐level panel data, this paper provides evidence in support of this hypothesis and highlights other important benefits of alternative mortgages, including portfolio diversification, tax benefits, and a reduction in the transaction costs incurred in housing transactions.
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Inspection Technology, Detection and Compliance: Evidence from Florida Restaurant Inspections
Ginger Zhe Jin & Jungmin Lee
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
Many regulations mandate government employees to inspect economic entities on a regular basis. In this paper we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a hand-held electronic device, a portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors of about 1,000 potential violations. Using administrative data on inspections from July 2003 to June 2009, we find that the adoption of PDAs led to 16% more detected violations. Subsequently, restaurants increased their compliance effort, but the response was neither immediate nor large enough to offset the initial PDA impact. Nevertheless, the heightened compliance induced by use of PDAs has contributed to reducing the risk of restaurant-related foodborne disease outbreaks.
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Banking Deregulation and Innovation
Sudheer Chava et al.
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We document empirical support for a key micro-level channel - innovation by young, private firms - through which financial sector deregulation affects economic growth. We find that intrastate banking deregulation, which increased the local market power of banks, decreased the level and risk of innovation by young, private firms. In contrast, interstate banking deregulation, which decreased the local market power of banks, increased the level and risk of innovation by young, private firms. These contrasting effects on innovation also translated into contrasting effects on economic growth. Our study suggests that the nature of financial sector deregulation crucially affects its potential benefits to the real economy.
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Do Bank Regulations Affect Board Independence? A Cross-Country Analysis
Li Li & Frank Song
Journal of Banking & Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on the hand-collected board structure data of 277 listed banks across 55 countries, and the bank regulation and supervision database compiled by the World Bank, this paper provides the first cross-country assessment of the impacts of bank regulations on board independence of banks. In line with Beck, Demirguc-Kunt and Levine (2006), we examine the effects of two types of regulation policies, the first involving the empowerment of supervisory agencies to monitor and discipline banks directly, and the second focusing on encouraging private monitoring of banks through requiring disclosure of more accurate and complete information. We find that empowering official supervisory agencies to discipline banks directly reduces board independence, but encouraging private sector monitoring of banks increases it. The findings suggest that the first type of regulations tends to crowd out the internal governance of banks, while the second crowds in it. We also find that the legal system with better investor rights protection and better contracts enforcement not only increases board independence but also enhances the crowding in effect of promoting private monitoring and decreases the crowding out effect of direct official supervision on board independence.
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Financial Literacy and High-Cost Borrowing in the United States
Annamaria Lusardi & Carlo de Bassa Scheresberg
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
In this paper, we examine high-cost methods of borrowing in the United States, such as payday loans, pawn shops, auto title loans, refund anticipation loans, and rent-to-own shops, and offer a portrait of borrowers who use these methods. Considering a representative sample of more than 26,000 respondents, we find that about one in four Americans has used one of these methods in the past five years. Moreover, many young adults engage in high-cost borrowing: 34 percent of young respondents (aged 18-34) and 43 percent of young respondents with a high school degree have used one of these methods. Using well-tested questions to measure financial literacy, we document that most high-cost borrowers display very low levels of financial literacy, i.e., they lack numeracy and do not possess knowledge of basic financial concepts. Most importantly, we find that those who are more financially literate are much less likely to have engaged in high-cost borrowing. Our empirical work shows that it is not only the shocks inflicted by the financial crisis or the structure of the financial system but that the level of financial literacy also plays a role in explaining why so many individuals have made use of high-cost borrowing methods.
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Credit Supply and Corporate Innovation
Mario Daniele Amore, Cédric Schneider & Alminas Žaldokas
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present evidence that banking development plays a key role in technological progress. We focus on manufacturing firms' innovative performance, measured by patent-based metrics, and employ exogenous variations in banking development arising from the staggered deregulation of banking activities across US states during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that interstate banking deregulation had significant beneficial effects on the quantity and quality of innovation activities, especially for firms highly dependent on external capital and located closer to entering banks. Furthermore, we find that these results are strongly driven by a greater ability of deregulated banks to geographically diversify credit risk.
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Strong Financial Laws Without Strong Enforcement: Is Good Law Always Better than No Law?
Mark Humphery-Jenner
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, June 2013, Pages 288-324
Abstract:
This article examines whether strong laws are effective when regulatory institutions are weak. This has become especially relevant due to criticisms of financial market regulation in the United States. I test the impact of imposing strong laws on a weak regulatory environment by using China's principled reforms to market manipulation law as a natural experiment. The results from difference-in-difference tests suggest that China's principled law reforms did not improve the market's information environment, as proxied by the level of informed trade and information asymmetry. This implies that principled law reform is ineffective if the regulatory environment is weak.
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Who Should Pay for Credit Ratings and How?
Anil Kashyap & Natalia Kovrijnykh
NBER Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
This paper analyzes a model where investors use a credit rating to decide whether to finance a firm. The rating quality depends on the unobservable effort exerted by a credit rating agency (CRA). We analyze optimal compensation schemes for the CRA that differ depending on whether a social planner, the firm, or investors order the rating. We find that rating errors are larger when the firm orders it than when investors do. However, investors ask for ratings inefficiently often. Which arrangement leads to a higher social surplus depends on the agents' prior beliefs about the project quality. We also show that competition among CRAs causes them to reduce their fees, put in less effort, and thus leads to less accurate ratings. Rating quality also tends to be lower for new securities. Finally, we find that optimal contracts that provide incentives for both initial ratings and their subsequent revisions can lead the CRA to be slow to acknowledge mistakes.
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Feedback Effects of Credit Ratings
Gustavo Manso
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rating agencies are often criticized for being biased in favor of borrowers, for being too slow to downgrade following credit quality deterioration, and for being oligopolists. Based on a model that takes into account the feedback effects of credit ratings, I show that: (i) rating agencies should focus not only on the accuracy of their ratings but also on the effects of their ratings on the probability of survival of the borrower; (ii) even when rating agencies pursue an accurate rating policy, multi-notch downgrades or immediate default may occur in response to small shocks to fundamentals; (iii) increased competition between rating agencies can lead to rating downgrades, increasing default frequency and reducing welfare.
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Dividend payouts: Evidence from U.S. bank holding companies in the context of the financial crisis
José Filipe Abreu & Mohamed Azzim Gulamhussen
Journal of Corporate Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study dividend payouts of 462 U.S. bank holding companies before and during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Fama and French (2001) characteristics (size, profitability and growth opportunities) explain dividend payouts before and during the financial crisis. The agency cost hypothesis explains dividend payouts before and during (more pronouncedly) the financial crisis. The signaling hypothesis explains dividend payouts during the financial crisis. Regulatory pressure was ineffective in limiting dividend payouts by undercapitalized banks before the financial crisis. Our findings have implications for corporate finance and governance theories, and also for the regulatory reforms that are being discussed among policymakers.
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Exclusive Handset Arrangements in the Wireless Industry: A Competitive Analysis
Upender Subramanian, Jagmohan Raju & John Zhang
Marketing Science, March/April 2013, Pages 246-270
Abstract:
In many markets, a handset vendor and a service provider may enter into a tie-in for a handset to be available exclusively through the service provider. We examine when and why a service provider and a handset vendor may find this arrangement mutually profitable. We find that an exclusive handset arrangement (EHA) may serve a dual strategic purpose. By restricting its handsets to one service provider, a handset vendor may be able to induce a rival handset vendor to compete less aggressively. At the same time, the service provider may be able to essentially raise a rival service provider's handset costs by limiting the handsets available to the rival. Interestingly, the handset vendor's market share may be higher when its handset is sold exclusively than when it is not. Our results might explain why EHAs seem more attractive in some markets than in others, why some service providers have exclusive arrangements even for handset models that do not seem popular, and how some handset vendors enjoy high market shares despite having many exclusive models. Furthermore, an EHA may lower the handset vendor's incentives to improve handset quality, supporting concerns raised by proponents of wireless network neutrality.
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Do Local Energy Prices and Regulation Affect the Geographic Concentration of Employment?
Matthew Kahn & Erin Mansur
Journal of Public Economics, May 2013, Pages 105-114
Abstract:
Manufacturing industries differ with respect to their energy intensity, labor-to-capital ratio and their pollution intensity. Across the United States, there is significant variation in electricity prices and labor and environmental regulation. This paper examines whether the basic logic of comparative advantage can explain the geographical clustering of U.S. manufacturing. We document that energy-intensive industries concentrate in low electricity price counties and labor-intensive industries avoid pro-union counties. We find mixed evidence that pollution-intensive industries locate in counties featuring relatively lax Clean Air Act regulation.
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Edward Van Wesep & Christopher Parsons
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
There exists large and persistent variation in not only how, but when employees are paid, a fact unexplained by existing theory. This paper develops a simple model of optimal pay timing for firms. When workers have self-control problems, they under-save and experience volatile consumption between paychecks. Thus, pay whose delivery matches the timing of workers' consumption needs will reduce wage costs. The model also explains why pay timing should be regulated (as it is in practice): although the worker benefits from a timing profile that smoothes her consumption, her lack of self-control induces her to attempt to undo the arrangement, either by renegotiating with her employer or by taking out payday loans. Regulation of pay timing and consumer borrowing is required to counter these efforts, helping the worker help herself.
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Protecting Minority Homeowners: Race, Foreclosure Counseling and Mortgage Modifications
Michael Collins, Maximilian Schmeiser & Carly Urban
Journal of Consumer Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
Millions of minority homeowners are at risk of losing their homes as a result of the housing crisis due to mortgage foreclosure and home repossession. One consumer-oriented policy response to this crisis is mortgage default counseling for borrowers. This study examines the rate at which minority borrowers seek default counseling and the resulting correlation between counseling and the probability that a borrower obtains a modification of his/her original mortgage contract terms. The results suggest that African Americans are more likely to be counseled, relative to Whites. However, Latinos or other non-White groups are no more or less likely to be counseled. The probability of loan modifications among counseled African Americans is also higher than other counseled borrowers. These results suggest that counseling policies and the public subsidy of default counseling may be one approach for promoting consumer financial well-being of these households, but also suggest counseling efforts might be better designed for other minority groups. These results also have implications for the application of counseling to other mortgage decisions, such as refinance.
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Appropriate mechanism design, regulations, and wages
Sumit Majumdar
Industrial and Corporate Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although economic regulation is ubiquitous, little is known about the impact of different regulatory schemes, and changes in these schemes, on wages. The article evaluates the impact of changes in price regulation on average employee wages among the United States local exchange telecommunications companies using contemporary historical data between 1988 and 2001. Two primary approaches in price regulation have been the rate of return and price cap regulation schemes, with the latter assumed to possess important incentive properties. The results establish that firms regulated via rate of return or other hybrid regulatory approaches have paid significantly lower wages. These wages have been, on average, 5-10% lower than what firms regulated via price cap regulation have paid their employees. These results signify the importance of regulations possessing requisite incentive properties and of appropriate regulatory mechanism design in enhancing employees' real wages in regulated firms.
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Canada-US productivity gap: The role of competition intensity differential
Malick Souare
International Review of Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The lower degree of competition in product markets and lower investment in both fundamental and applied innovation are among the potential factors that have been put forward to explain Canada's weak productivity performance with respect to the US. Since competition is generally seen as the single leading catalyst for innovation, this paper analyzes the role of product market competition in the Canada-US productivity level gap. We develop an empirical framework in which competition exerts both direct and indirect effects on productivity, with the indirect impact coming through fundamental and applied innovation. Using industry-level panel data, we find evidence that the competition intensity differential has contributed to the Canada-US productivity level gap directly, as well as indirectly through lower investment in both R&D activities and M&E (including ICT) capital. We also find evidence that Canada's relative poor performance in both M&E (including ICT) investment and productivity have acted as a self-reinforcing mechanism, which further causes detriment to the country's productivity.
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Kartik Kalaignanam, Tarun Kushwaha & Meike Eilert
Journal of Marketing, March 2013, Pages 41-57
Abstract:
Although the goal of a product recall program is to enhance safety, little is known about whether firms learn from product recalls. This study tests the direct effect of product recalls on future accidents and future recall frequency and their indirect effect through future product reliability in the automobile industry. The authors test the hypotheses on 459 make/year observations involving 27 automobile makers between 1995 and 2011. The findings suggest that increases in recall magnitude lead to decreases in future number of injuries and recalls. This effect, in turn, is partially mediated by future changes in product reliability. The results also suggest that the positive relationship between recall magnitude and future product reliability is (1) stronger for firms with higher shared product assets and (2) weaker for brands of higher prior quality. The findings are robust across alternate measures and alternate model specifications and offer valuable insights for managerial practice and public policy.
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Giovanni Federico & Paul Sharp
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates the costs of transport regulation using the example of agricultural markets in the US. Using a large database of prices by state of agricultural commodities, we find that dispersion fell for many commodities until the First World War. We demonstrate that this reflected changes in transport costs which in turn in the long run depended on productivity growth in railroads. The year 1920 marked a change in this relationship, however, and between the First and Second World Wars we find considerable disintegration of agricultural markets, ultimately as a consequence of the 1920 Transportation Act. We argue that this benefited railroad companies in the 1920s and workers in the 1930s, and we put forward an estimate of the welfare losses for the consumers of railroad services (that is, agricultural producers and final consumers).
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Boy or girl
Ming-Te Wang, Jacquelynne Eccles & Sarah Kenny
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The pattern of gender differences in math and verbal ability may result in females having a wider choice of careers, in both science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM fields, compared with males. The current study tested whether individuals with high math and high verbal ability in 12th grade were more or less likely to choose STEM occupations than those with high math and moderate verbal ability. The 1,490 subjects participated in two waves of a national longitudinal study; one wave was when the subjects were in 12th grade, and the other was when they were 33 years old. Results revealed that mathematically capable individuals who also had high verbal skills were less likely to pursue STEM careers than were individuals who had high math skills but moderate verbal skills. One notable finding was that the group with high math and high verbal ability included more females than males.
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Human Capital Accumulation and the Expansion of Women's Economic Rights
Rick Geddes, Dean Lueck & Sharon Tennyson
Journal of Law and Economics, November 2012, Pages 839-867
Abstract:
Between 1850 and 1920, most U.S. states enacted laws expanding the rights of married women to own and control their separate property and to own their market earnings. The economic approach to property rights implies that as married women gain economic rights, the incentive to invest in girls' human capital will rise. This prediction is tested by examining the impact of these legal changes on girls' school attendance rates relative to boys'. State-level census data are used to examine the effects of these changes on school attendance among all school-aged children. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series data are used to examine their effect on school attendance among children ages 15-19, who are just beyond compulsory schooling ages. Consistent with hypothesized effects, the empirical analysis shows that expanding women's economic rights resulted in higher relative rates of school attendance by girls and had the largest effect on the 15-19 age group.
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Distance Running as an Ideal Domain for Showing a Sex Difference in Competitiveness
Robert Deaner
Archives of Sexual Behavior, April 2013, Pages 413-428
Abstract:
Men are over-represented in the arts, sciences, and sports. This has been hypothesized to reflect an evolved male predisposition for enduring competitiveness or long-term motivation to improve one's performance and "show-off." Evidence for this hypothesis is equivocal, however, because there are viable alternative explanations for men's dominance in most cultural display domains. Here, I argue that distance running is an ideal domain for addressing this issue. Distance running is ideal because it indicates enduring competitiveness, allows objective comparisons, and is accessible, acceptable, and popular for both men and women. I review recent studies and present new data showing that substantially more men than women run relatively fast in the U.S., that this sex difference in relative performance can be attributed, at least in part, to men's greater training motivation, and that this pattern has been stable for several decades. Distance running thus provides compelling evidence for an evolved male predisposition for enduring competitiveness. I conclude with suggestions regarding how variation in achievement motivation can be informed by considering how evolved predispositions interact with environmental and social conditions.
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Boy-Girl Differences in Parental Time Investments: Evidence from Three Countries
Michael Baker & Kevin Milligan
NBER Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
We study differences in the time parents spend with boys and girls at preschool ages in Canada, the UK and the US. We refine previous evidence that fathers commit more time to boys, showing this greater commitment emerges with age and is not present for very young children. We next examine differences in specific parental teaching activities such as reading and the use of number and letters. We find the parents commit more of this time to girls, starting at ages as young as 9 months. We explore possible explanations of this greater commitment to girls including explicit parental preference and boy-girl differences in costs of these time inputs. Finally, we offer evidence that these differences in time inputs are important: in each country the boy-girl difference in inputs can account for a non-trivial proportion of the boy-girl difference in preschool reading and math scores.
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Annique Smeding et al.
Journal of Educational Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 2 field experiments, we relied on the very features of real testing situations-where both math and verbal tests are administered-to examine whether order of test administration can, by itself, create vs. alleviate stereotype threat (ST) effects on girls' math performance. We predicted that taking the math test before the verbal test would be deleterious for girls' math performance (ST effect), whereas taking the verbal test before the math test would benefit their math performance. We also explored whether ST (if any) may spill over from the math test to the verbal test in a real-world testing situation. The studies were conducted among French middle-school students (Ns = 1,127 and 498) during a regular class hour. In both studies, whereas girls underperformed on the math test relative to boys in the math-verbal order condition (ST effect), they performed as well as boys in the verbal-math order condition. Moreover, girls' math performance was higher in the verbal-math order condition than in the math-verbal order condition. Test order affected neither girls' verbal performance (no ST spillover) nor boys' verbal or math performance. In Study 2, additional measures pertaining to students' self-evaluations in and perceptions of the math and verbal domains provided complementary evidence that only girls who took the math test first experienced ST. Implications of order of test administration for women's experience in math, for ST effect and ST spillover research, and for educational practices are discussed.
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Beyond Gender Differences: Using Tests of Equivalence to Evaluate Gender Similarities
Laura Ball, Robert Cribbie & Jennifer Steele
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Proponents of what has been termed the Gender Similarities Hypothesis (GSH) have typically relied on meta-analyses as well as the generation of nonsignificant tests of mean differences to support their argument that the genders are more similar than they are different. In the present article, we argue that alternative statistical methodologies, such as tests of equivalence, can provide more accurate (yet equally rigorous) tests of these hypotheses and therefore might serve to complement, challenge, and/or extend findings from meta-analyses. To demonstrate and test the usefulness of such procedures, we examined Scholastic Aptitude Test-Math (SAT-M) data to determine the degree of similarity between genders in the historically gender-stereotyped field of mathematics. Consistent with previous findings, our results suggest that men and women performed similarly on the SAT-M for every year that we examined (1996-2009). Importantly, our statistical approach provides a greater opportunity to open a dialogue on theoretical issues surrounding what does and what should constitute a meaningful difference in intelligence and achievement. As we note in the discussion, it remains important to consider whether even very small but consistent gender differences in mean test performance could reflect stereotype threat in the testing environment and/or gender biases in the test itself that would be important to address.
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Something Old, Something New: Evidence of Self-Accommodation to Gendered Social Change
Amanda Diekman, Amanda Johnston & Allison Loescher
Sex Roles, May 2013, Pages 550-561
Abstract:
Two studies examined how individuals adapt the self to social trends-in particular, when the social roles of the gender ingroup change, do people readily leave behind traditional roles in favor of nontraditional roles? We hypothesized that self-relevant cognitions and behaviors would accommodate to societal change, and we found that this accommodation took the shape of greater acceptance of nontraditional roles alongside continued acceptance of traditional roles. Experiment 1 included 112 undergraduates from the Midwestern U.S. who learned about social change or social stability by reading articles ostensibly published in a newspaper. Individuals who learned about social change for their gender ingroup, relative to those learning about social stability, projected greater personal success in careers, particularly for gender-nontraditional careers. Experiment 2 examined behavioral responses to social change in a sample of 198 female undergraduates from the Midwestern U.S. Participants learned about social change or social stability and then chose to view either a website focused on physical appearance (i.e., traditional choice) or leadership (i.e., nontraditional choice). Behavioral responses to social change reflected accommodation to the anticipated social structure: Individuals who learned about social change chose to view information about nontraditional rather than traditional roles. These studies provide initial experimental evidence investigating how individuals adapt the self to the social structure.
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Do psychosocial traits help explain gender segregation in young people's occupations?
Heather Antecol & Deborah Cobb-Clark
Labour Economics, April 2013, Pages 59-73
Abstract:
This paper investigates the role of psychosocial traits in the occupational segregation of young workers entering the U.S. labor market. We find entry into male-dominated fields of study and male-dominated occupations are both related to the extent to which individuals have "masculine" traits and believe they are intelligent, while entry into male-dominated occupations is also related to the willingness to work hard, impulsivity, and the tendency to avoid problems. The nature of these relationships differs for men and women, however. Psychosocial traits (self-assessed intelligence and impulsivity) also influence movement into higher-paid occupations, but in ways that are similar for men and women. On balance, psychosocial traits provide an important, though incomplete, explanation for segregation in the fields that young men and women study as well as in the occupations in which they are employed.
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Boris Schiffer et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2013
Abstract:
Men are traditionally thought to have more problems in understanding women compared to understanding other men, though evidence supporting this assumption remains sparse. Recently, it has been shown, however, that men's problems in recognizing women's emotions could be linked to difficulties in extracting the relevant information from the eye region, which remain one of the richest sources of social information for the attribution of mental states to others. To determine possible differences in the neural correlates underlying emotion recognition from female, as compared to male eyes, a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was applied to a sample of 22 participants. We found that men actually had twice as many problems in recognizing emotions from female as compared to male eyes, and that these problems were particularly associated with a lack of activation in limbic regions of the brain (including the hippocampus and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex). Moreover, men revealed heightened activation of the right amygdala to male stimuli regardless of condition (sex vs. emotion recognition). Thus, our findings highlight the function of the amygdala in the affective component of theory of mind (ToM) and in empathy, and provide further evidence that men are substantially less able to infer mental states expressed by women, which may be accompanied by sex-specific differences in amygdala activity.
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Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis
Robb Willer et al.
American Journal of Sociology, January 2013, Pages 980-1022
Abstract:
The masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that men react to masculinity threats with extreme demonstrations of masculinity, a proposition tested here across four studies. In study 1, men and women were randomly given feedback suggesting they were either masculine or feminine. Women showed no effects when told they were masculine; however, men given feedback suggesting they were feminine expressed more support for war, homophobic attitudes, and interest in purchasing an SUV. Study 2 found that threatened men expressed greater support for, and desire to advance in, dominance hierarchies. Study 3 showed in a large-scale survey on a diverse sample that men who reported that social changes threatened the status of men also reported more homophopic and prodominance attitudes, support for war, and belief in male superiority. Finally, study 4 found that higher testosterone men showed stronger reactions to masculinity threats than those lower in testosterone. Together, these results support the masculine overcompensation thesis, show how it can shape political and cultural attitudes, and identify a hormonal factor influencing the effect.
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Gender-Role Differences in Spatial Ability: A Meta-Analytic Review
David Reilly & David Neumann
Sex Roles, May 2013, Pages 521-535
Abstract:
Although gender-related differences in highly gender typed cognitive abilities are of considerable interest to educators and cognitive researchers alike, relatively little progress has been made in understanding the psychological processes that lead to them. Nash (1979) proposed a gender-role mediation hypothesis for such differences, with particular emphasis on spatial ability. However, changes in gender equality and gender stereotypes in the decades since merit a re-examination of whether a gender-role association still holds (Feingold 1988). A meta-analysis of 12 studies that examined gender-role identity and mental rotation performance was conducted. These included studies from the United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, Croatia, and the United States of America. The mean effect size for masculinity was r = .30 for men and r = .23 for women; no association was found between femininity and mental rotation. This effect size was slightly larger than that found previously by Signorella and Jamison (1986), and exceeds many other factors known to influence spatial ability. The implications of gender-role mediation of gender differences are discussed and future research directions are identified.
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Feeding the Pipeline: Gender, Occupational Plans, and College Major Selection
Stephen Morgan, Dafna Gelbgiser & Kim Weeden
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we analyze gender differences in college major selection for respondents to the Education Longitudinal Study (2002-2006), focusing on educational pathways through college that lead to science, engineering, or doctoral-track medicine occupations and to non-doctoral track clinical and health sciences occupations. We show that gender differences in college major selection remain substantial, even for a cohort in which rates of enrollment in postsecondary education are more than ten percent higher for young women than for young men. Consistent with other recent research, we demonstrate that neither gender differences in work-family goals nor in academic preparation explain a substantial portion of these differences. However, the occupational plans of high school seniors are strong predictors of initial college major selection, a finding that is revealed only when occupational plans are measured with sufficient detail, here by using the verbatim responses of students. We also find that the association between occupational plans and college major selection is not attributable to work-family orientation or academic preparation. Finally, we find gender differences in the associations between occupational plans and college major selection that are consistent with prior research on STEM attrition, as well as with the claim that attrition also affects the selection of majors that are gateways into doctoral-track medicine. We discuss the implications of the predictive power of occupational plans formed in adolescence for understanding sex segregation and for policies intended to create a gender-balanced STEM and doctoral-level medical workforce.
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The Influence of Female Role Models on Women's Implicit Science Cognitions
Danielle Young et al.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can female science professors benefit women? Women's negative implicit cognitions about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines impact performance in these fields, marking implicit associations as a space for potential change to improve women's participation in STEM. Examining college student science majors (N = 320, 63% women) enrolled in chemistry and engineering courses, our study investigates how meaningful contact with female role models impacts women's implicit cognitions about STEM. We used the Implicit Association Test to measure attitudes toward science, identification with science, and gendered stereotypes about science, and we compared students with female versus male professors. Our study first demonstrates both direct and indirect paths between implicit cognitions and women's career aspirations in STEM. Next, when female professors were seen as positive role models, women automatically identified with science and stereotyped science as more feminine than masculine. Moreover, viewing professors as positive role models was associated with pro-science career aspirations and attitudes (both implicit and explicit), for men and women alike. The findings suggest that female science professors benefit women provided students identify with them as role models. We conclude that female STEM professors not only provide positive role models for women, but they also help to reduce the implicit stereotype that science is masculine in the culture-at-large. We further discuss how shifting implicit gendered stereotypes about science can impact women's investment in a science career.
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Do College Students' Gender-typed Attitudes About Occupations Predict Their Real-World Decisions?
Lisa DiDonato & JoNell Strough
Sex Roles, May 2013, Pages 536-549
Abstract:
We investigated US college students' gender-typed attitudes about occupations for themselves as a predictor of their real-world decisions regarding an academic major and intended future career. We also investigated US college students' attitudes about the appropriateness of gender-typed occupations for other men and women. The sample (N = 264) was mostly Caucasian and was drawn from a large state university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. An established self-report measure (see Liben and Bigler 2002) was used to assess attitudes about occupations for the self and other people. Gender-typed majors and intended careers were categorized using a coding scheme that was developed for the study. College students preferred gender-stereotypical occupations for themselves. Women's, but not men's, preferences for gender-typed occupations predicted their decisions about their academic major and the career they intended to pursue. Both men and women reported that men should only hold masculine occupations, but that women should hold both masculine and feminine occupations. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding the gender gap in occupations in the US, such as the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers and barriers for men in stereotypically female occupations.
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The Gender Gap in High School Physics: Considering the Context of Local Communities
Catherine Riegle-Crumb & Chelsea Moore
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: We focus on variation in gender inequality in physics course-taking, questioning the notion of a ubiquitous male advantage. We consider how inequality in high school physics is related to the context of students' local communities, specifically the representation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations in the labor force.
Methods: This study uses nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and its education component, the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Transcript Study.
Results: Approximately half of schools are characterized by either gender equality or even a small female advantage in enrollment in this traditionally male subject. Furthermore, variation in the gender gap in physics is related to the percent of women who are employed in STEM occupations within the community.
Conclusion: Our study suggests that communities differ in the extent to which traditionally gendered status expectations shape beliefs and behaviors.
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Stephanie Ann Kovalchik & Ray Stefani
Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, March 2013, Pages 15-24
Abstract:
Gender gaps in absolute performance at the Olympics are well-established, while gender differences in relative performance have not been considered. We analyzed time trends in male and female performance improvement for medal results in all individual athletics and swimming events in Olympic years with male and female competition. Performance improvement was defined as the percentage change in performance over the gold-medal result of the previous Olympic year. In mixed effects models that accounted for the effects of the order of finish, event, and year, we found a non-significant average difference in performance improvement of <0.5% for events in running, jumping, throwing, and swimming. Since the mid-twentieth century, the record at the Summer Games shows that gains in the performance of female Olympic medalists have kept pace with men.
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Emily Shaffer, David Marx & Radmila Prislin
Sex Roles, April 2013, Pages 454-463
Abstract:
Interventions designed to combat the negative effects of stereotype threat have primarily taken an individual-based approach. The current study sought to expand upon these strategies by taking a group-based approach to reduce stereotype threat effects. Specifically, we investigated whether the success and numerical representation of women in STEM positively impacts women's math performance and affective reactions. We hypothesized that 1) women under threat (control) would perform worse than men; 2) there would be a larger performance difference for women than men when exposed to the success and balanced representation of women in STEM compared to the control condition; 3) there would be a larger performance difference for women than men between the balanced condition and the unbalanced condition where women are portrayed as successful, but not equally represented in STEM. For this study, male (n = 56) and female (n = 66) U.S. undergraduates from a large southern California state university read information about women's success and representation in STEM (or no information), completed a math exam under stereotype threat conditions, and then expressed their threat-based concerns. Results revealed that women performed worse than men in the control condition. Women in the balanced condition performed better than women in the control and unbalanced conditions. Men's performance was unaffected by the balance or imbalance of women in STEM. Women's affective reactions largely mirrored the performance results. This study provides compelling evidence for using a group-based approach highlighting women's advances in STEM to alleviate stereotype threat.
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Sex-Specific Differential Prediction of College Admission Tests: A Meta-Analysis
Franziska Fischer, Johannes Schult & Benedikt Hell
Journal of Educational Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This is the first meta-analysis that investigates the differential prediction of undergraduate and graduate college admission tests for women and men. Findings on 130 independent samples representing 493,048 students are summarized. The underprediction of women's academic performance (d = 0.14) and the overprediction of men's academic performance (d = -0.16) are generalizable, albeit small. Transferred onto a 4-point grading scale, women earn college grades that are 0.24 points higher than those of men with the same admission test result. Combining admission tests with indicators of previous academic achievements, such as high school grades, reduces the amount of under- and overprediction. Moderator analysis reveals that the underprediction of women's academic performance by admission tests is a problem of the past and present. Predictor differences as well as criterion differences are not associated with over- and underprediction. Rather, undergraduate college admission tests show more underprediction of women's academic performance than graduate admission tests. These results point to differences between undergraduate and graduate students, the latter being more selected.
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Worth the Weight: The Objectification of Overweight Versus Thin Targets
Elise Holland & Nick Haslam
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the negative ramifications of others objectifying the female body are well established, little research has examined whether certain portrayals of women are more susceptible to being objectified. The present study sought to examine the effect of two target characteristics - body size and clothing style - on objectification. One hundred and ninety-one Australian undergraduate participants (95 female; Mage = 19.35 years) viewed either an image of an overweight woman or a thin woman, who was either dressed in plain clothes or lingerie. Participants then completed three tasks measuring their objectification of the woman to include attributions of mind, attributions of moral status, and a dot probe task assessing attention towards the target's body relative to the face. Results indicate that overweight women, as well as those dressed in plain clothing, were attributed more agentic mental states and moral value, as well as elicited less of the objectifying gaze, than thin targets and those wearing lingerie. These findings suggest that contrary to popular opinion, there may be unforeseen benefits of being overweight.
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Elisa Puvia & Jeroen Vaes
Sex Roles, April 2013, Pages 484-495
Abstract:
When sexually objectified, women are reduced to their bodies or sexual body parts and become likely targets of dehumanization. Not only men, but also women engage in this process. In the present research, we tested the link between women's appearance related self-views and their tendency to dehumanize sexually objectified female targets. Specifically, we test two mediational models and predict that (1) women's motivation to look attractive to men and (2) their tendency to internalize the sociocultural beauty standards are linked with the dehumanization of sexually objectified female targets, and their level of self-objectification mediates both relations. To test these hypotheses, a sample of 55 heterosexual undergraduate female students from Northern Italy volunteered. Participants' motivation to look attractive to men, their level of internalization of the sociocultural beauty standards, and their tendency to self-objectify was measured. Results confirmed that only sexually objectified female targets were significantly dehumanized, while their non-objectified counterparts were not. Moreover, both participants' motivation to look attractive to men and their tendency to internalize the sociocultural beauty standards were positively linked with the dehumanization of sexually objectified female targets. As expected, these relations were mediated by participants' level of self-objectification. These results show that higher levels of self-objectification among those women who are motivated either to look attractive to men or to internalize the sociocultural beauty standards are linked with their tendency to dehumanize sexually objectified female targets.
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Gijsbert Stoet & David Geary
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Abstract:
We analyzed one decade of data collected by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including the mathematics and reading performance of nearly 1.5 million 15 year olds in 75 countries. Across nations, boys scored higher than girls in mathematics, but lower than girls in reading. The sex difference in reading was three times as large as in mathematics. There was considerable variation in the extent of the sex differences between nations. There are countries without a sex difference in mathematics performance, and in some countries girls scored higher than boys. Boys scored lower in reading in all nations in all four PISA assessments (2000, 2003, 2006, 2009). Contrary to several previous studies, we found no evidence that the sex differences were related to nations' gender equality indicators. Further, paradoxically, sex differences in mathematics were consistently and strongly inversely correlated with sex differences in reading: Countries with a smaller sex difference in mathematics had a larger sex difference in reading and vice versa. We demonstrate that this was not merely a between-nation, but also a within-nation effect. This effect is related to relative changes in these sex differences across the performance continuum: We did not find a sex difference in mathematics among the lowest performing students, but this is where the sex difference in reading was largest. In contrast, the sex difference in mathematics was largest among the higher performing students, and this is where the sex difference in reading was smallest. The implication is that if policy makers decide that changes in these sex differences are desired, different approaches will be needed to achieve this for reading and mathematics. Interventions that focus on high-achieving girls in mathematics and on low achieving boys in reading are likely to yield the strongest educational benefits.
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Vincent Fogliati & Kay Bussey
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to stereotype threat theory, negative stereotypes impair performance and can lead to reduced motivation. In the present study, we examined whether the female-mathematics stereotype not only impairs women's performance but also buffers their self-esteem from negative feedback and reduces their motivation to improve. Before completing a mathematics test, 80 (54 female) participants were informed either that men outperform women on the test (stereotype threat condition) or that men and women perform equally well (no-stereotype condition). Following the test, participants received positive or negative feedback prior to rating their self-esteem. Finally, participants were invited to attend free mathematics tutorials and asked to indicate their likelihood of attending. Women under stereotype threat performed worse and were less motivated than non-stereotyped women to attend mathematics tutorials after receiving negative feedback. Furthermore, although men's self-esteem was higher if they received positive rather than negative feedback, feedback valence had no effect on women's self-esteem. These results suggest that the effect of stereotype threat on women's mathematical performance is potentially compounded by its capacity to reduce motivation to improve. Practical implications are discussed, with a particular focus on the need for interventions that produce an identity-safe environment, foster an incremental view of mathematical ability, and provide information about successful role models.
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Toni Schmader, Alyssa Croft & Jessica Whitehead
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined the hypothesis that stereotype threat disrupts reflexive cuing of the default self-concept and instead evokes a more reflective process of self-definition. Across two studies, a reaction time measure of math schematicity assessed prior to a math test was predicted by baseline math schematicity among men (Study 1) and women in a nonthreatening condition (Study 2). However, among women under stereotype threat, math schematicity measured prior to a diagnostic math test was unrelated to baseline math schematicity and was instead associated with explicit endorsement of math. These effects occurred for math and not language self-schemas, suggesting that under threat, the working self-concept might be derived from conscious reflection rather than automatic activation.
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Soledad de Lemus et al.
Social Psychology, Spring 2013, Pages 109-116
Abstract:
We examined the influence of exposure to traditional gender roles on the activation of gender stereotypes in Spanish women. An associative procedure was used to expose participants to stereotypical vs. counterstereotypical gender roles, and a word categorization task with stereotypically feminine communal/warmth and stereotypically masculine agentic/competence trait words measured participants' automatic responses. Results show that women exposed to traditional roles reverse the activation of gender stereotypes. That is, they activated competence/agency faster for female primes and warmth/communion faster for male primes in a subsequent task. The implicit stereotype reversal was predicted by participants' endorsement of positive attitudes toward affirmative action policies. The results are discussed in terms of the motivational influence of perceived discrimination in intergroup relations.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
New way of doing business
Michele Boldrin & David Levine
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013, Pages 3-22
Abstract:
The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded - which, as evidence shows, has no correlation with measured productivity. Both theory and evidence suggest that while patents can have a partial equilibrium effect of improving incentives to invent, the general equilibrium effect on innovation can be negative. A properly designed patent system might serve to increase innovation at a certain time and place. Unfortunately, the political economy of government-operated patent systems indicates that such systems are susceptible to pressures that cause the ill effects of patents to grow over time. Our preferred policy solution is to abolish patents entirely and to find other legislative instruments, less open to lobbying and rent seeking, to foster innovation when there is clear evidence that laissez-faire undersupplies it. However, if that policy change seems too large to swallow, we discuss in the conclusion a set of partial reforms that could be implemented.
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Innovation, Reallocation and Growth
Daron Acemoglu et al.
Harvard Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth and reallocation to investigate the economic implications of "industrial policy" supporting incumbent firms. We estimate the parameters of the model using simulated methods of moments on detailed US Census micro data on firm-level output, R&D and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output and R&D, and its implied elasticities are in the ballpark of a range of (credible) micro estimates. We find that policies that subsidize R&D by incumbents not only increase economic growth but are essentially as effective as subsidizing entrants: a subsidy equivalent to 1% of GDP to either entrants or incumbents increases the growth rate of the economy by about 0.08 percentage points and welfare by 0.8-1.25% in consumption equivalent terms. However, a (non-R&D) subsidy to the continued operation of incumbents of the same magnitude has a large negative effect on growth, reducing it by about 0.04 percentage points and welfare by 0.7% in consumption equivalent terms.
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Poisoning the Next Apple? The America Invents Act and Individual Inventors
David Abrams & Polk Wagner
Stanford Law Review, March 2013, Pages 517-563
Abstract:
The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the most significant patent law reform effort in two generations, may have a dark side: it seems likely to decrease the patenting behavior of individual inventors, a category which occupies special significance in American innovation history. In this Article, we empirically predict the effects of the major change in the law, which shifts the patent priority rules from the United States' traditional "first-to-invent" system to the internationally predominant "first-to-file" system. While there has been some theoretical work on this topic, we use an analogous law change in Canada as a natural experiment to shed the first empirical light on the question. Our analysis uses a difference-in-difference framework to estimate the impact of the Canadian law change on small inventors. Using data on all patents granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, we find a significant drop in the share of patents granted to individual inventors in Canada coincident with the implementation of a first-to-file system. We find no measurable changes in patent quality and perform several additional analyses to rule out alternative explanations. While the net welfare impact that can be expected from a shift to first-to-file is unclear, our results reveal that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the March 2013 implementation of a first-to-file rule in the United States is likely to result in a reduced share of patents granted to individual inventors.
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Is Pay for Performance Detrimental to Innovation?
Florian Ederer & Gustavo Manso
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research in economics shows that compensation based on the pay-for-performance principle is effective in inducing higher levels of effort and productivity. On the other hand, research in psychology argues that performance-based financial incentives inhibit creativity and innovation. How should managerial compensation be structured if the goal is to induce managers to pursue more innovative business strategies? In a controlled laboratory setting, we provide evidence that the combination of tolerance for early failure and reward for long-term success is effective in motivating innovation. Subjects under such an incentive scheme explore more and are more likely to discover a novel business strategy than subjects under fixed-wage and standard pay-for-performance incentive schemes. We also find evidence that the threat of termination can undermine incentives for innovation, whereas golden parachutes can alleviate these innovation-reducing effects.
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Julian Atanassov
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
I examine how strong corporate governance proxied by the threat of hostile takeovers affects innovation and firm value. I find a significant decline in the number of patents and citations per patent for firms incorporated in states that pass antitakeover laws relative to firms incorporated in states that do not. Most of the impact of antitakeover laws on innovation occurs two or more years after they are passed, indicating a causal effect. The negative effect of antitakeover laws is mitigated by the presence of alternative governance mechanisms such as large shareholders, pension fund ownership, leverage, and product market competition.
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Forecasting the Technology Revolution: Results and learnings from the TechCast Project
William Halal
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research report presents latest results on the TechCast Project, first reported in Technology Forecasting & Social Change 14 years ago. TechCast is an online Delphi system that pools background trends and the judgment of experts around the world to forecast breakthroughs in all fields. Results are presented for strategic technological advances that are likely to enter the mainstream and their expected impacts, providing an overview of the Technology Revolution. Aggregating the forecast data then provides macro-forecasts of broad timetables for economic and social change. This analysis suggests that the global economy is likely to enter a new economic upcycle about 2015 and reach an advanced stage of development about 2020. We also examine examples of how organizations develop technology strategy to compete in an era of economic transformation, and conclude by analyzing the role of forecasting as one of many methods for reducing uncertainty.
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How Paris Gave Rise to Cubism (and Picasso): Ambiguity and Fragmentation in Radical Innovation
Stoyan Sgourev
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In structural analyses of innovation, one substantive question looms large: What makes radical innovation possible if peripheral actors are more likely to originate radical ideas but are poorly positioned to promote them? An inductive study of the rise of Cubism, a revolutionary paradigm that overthrew classic principles of representation in art, results in a model where not only the periphery moves toward the core through collective action, as typically asserted, but the core also moves toward the periphery, becoming more receptive to radical ideas. The fragmentation of the art market in early 20th-century Paris served as the trigger. The proliferation of market niches and growing ambiguity over evaluation standards dramatically reduced the costs of experimentation in the periphery and the ability of the core to suppress radical ideas. A multilevel analysis linking individual creativity, peer networks, and the art field reveals how market developments fostered Spanish Cubist Pablo Picasso's experiments and facilitated their diffusion in the absence of public support, a coherent movement, and even his active involvement. If past research attests to the importance of framing innovations and mobilizing resources in their support, this study brings attention to shifts in the structure of opportunities to do so.
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James Ang, Yingmei Cheng & Chaopeng Wu
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a unique and rich database of high technology firms in China, we show effective enforcement of intellectual property rights at the provincial level is critical in encouraging financing and investing in R&D. Better enforcement of IP rights positively affects firms' ability to acquire new external debt, and allows firms to invest in more R&D, generate more innovation patents, and produce more sales from new products. Our results suggests that facilitating financing and investing in R&D are the channels through which better IP rights enforcement can affect the growth of the economy.
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Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress
Béla Nagy et al.
PLoS ONE, February 2013
Abstract:
Forecasting technological progress is of great interest to engineers, policy makers, and private investors. Several models have been proposed for predicting technological improvement, but how well do these models perform? An early hypothesis made by Theodore Wright in 1936 is that cost decreases as a power law of cumulative production. An alternative hypothesis is Moore's law, which can be generalized to say that technologies improve exponentially with time. Other alternatives were proposed by Goddard, Sinclair et al., and Nordhaus. These hypotheses have not previously been rigorously tested. Using a new database on the cost and production of 62 different technologies, which is the most expansive of its kind, we test the ability of six different postulated laws to predict future costs. Our approach involves hindcasting and developing a statistical model to rank the performance of the postulated laws. Wright's law produces the best forecasts, but Moore's law is not far behind. We discover a previously unobserved regularity that production tends to increase exponentially. A combination of an exponential decrease in cost and an exponential increase in production would make Moore's law and Wright's law indistinguishable, as originally pointed out by Sahal. We show for the first time that these regularities are observed in data to such a degree that the performance of these two laws is nearly the same. Our results show that technological progress is forecastable, with the square root of the logarithmic error growing linearly with the forecasting horizon at a typical rate of 2.5% per year. These results have implications for theories of technological change, and assessments of candidate technologies and policies for climate change mitigation.
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Patent protection, capital accumulation, and economic growth
Tatsuro Iwaisako & Koichi Futagami
Economic Theory, March 2013, Pages 631-668
Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate how strengthening patent protection affects economic growth in an endogenous growth model where both innovation and capital accumulation are the driving forces of economic growth. In this model, stronger patent protection raises the profit flow obtained by innovation but reduces the factor demand for capital. This process accelerates innovation but discourages capital accumulation, and because of the negative effect on economic growth through reducing capital accumulation, strengthening patent protection may then impede economic growth. This result contrasts with earlier studies where innovation is the sole driving force for economic growth. Moreover, in an open economy model where technologies are transferred and capital is imported from abroad, the strictest protection of patents enhances technology adoption from abroad but impedes capital accumulation, and thus, the relation derived between patent protection and output can be nonmonotone. In terms of implications, these findings may be able to partly explain the complex relation found by some empirical studies in this area.
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The dark side of analyst coverage: The case of innovation
Jie (Jack) He & Xuan Tian
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the effects of financial analysts on the real economy in the case of innovation. Our baseline results show that firms covered by a larger number of analysts generate fewer patents and patents with lower impact. To establish causality, we use a difference-in-differences approach that relies on the variation generated by multiple exogenous shocks to analyst coverage, as well as an instrumental variable approach. Our identification strategies suggest a negative causal effect of analyst coverage on firm innovation. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that analysts exert too much pressure on managers to meet short-term goals, impeding firms' investment in long-term innovative projects. We further discuss possible underlying mechanisms through which analysts impede innovation and show that there is a residual effect of analysts on innovation even after controlling for these mechanisms. Our paper offers novel evidence on a previously under-explored adverse consequence of analyst coverage - its hindrance to firm innovation.
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A Dynamic Perspective on Affect and Creativity
Ronald Bledow, Kathrin Rosing & Michael Frese
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors argue that creativity is influenced by the dynamic interplay of positive and negative affect: High creativity results if a person experiences an episode of negative affect that is followed by a decrease in negative affect and an increase in positive affect, a process referred to as an affective shift. An experience-sampling study with 102 full-time employees provided support for the hypotheses. An experimental study with 80 students underlined the proposed causal effect of an affective shift on creativity. Practical implications for facilitating creativity in organizations are discussed.
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Learning by Doing and the Locus of Innovative Capability in Biotechnology Research
Amit Jain
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Innovative capability, the knowledge a firm uses to innovate, is an input into and an output of the process of innovation. In this paper, I put forward the notion that innovative capability, similar to experience in production, accumulates by learning by doing and that innovation is characterized by a learning curve. Using patent data from 20,886 scientists working in 611 biotechnology firms in the U.S. and Canadian biotechnology industry from 1970 to 2007, I estimate a learning curve in innovation and determine the loci of innovative capability. Although knowledge stocks in the different loci accumulate over time in day-to-day firm activities, empirical results suggest that the individual is the primary repository of innovative capability and that experience working together in teams has a secondary influence on productivity. Contrary to prior learning curve research, accumulated firm experience has no direct effect on productivity. However, when individuals possess relevant domain knowledge and have experience working together, they benefit from knowledge spillovers within the firm. This suggests that knowledge stocks in the different loci are complementary to one another and that the comingling of these disparate bins of knowledge is an important facet of innovative capability.
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Competition and Innovation: The Inverted-U Relationship Revisited
Aamir Rafique Hashmi
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
I re-examine the inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation (modeled and tested by Aghion et al. [2005]) by using data from publicly traded manufacturing firms in the US. I control for the possible endogeneity of competition by using a trade-weighted average of industry exchange rates as an instrument. I find a mildly negative relationship between competition (as measured by the inverse of markups) and innovation (as measured by citation-weighted patents). The negative relationship is robust to many alternative assumptions and specifications. To reconcile the mildly negative relationship in the US data with the inverted-U relationship that Aghion et al. [2005] find in the UK data, I modify their theoretical model and show that the modified model can explain both negative and inverted-U relationships. The key theoretical assumption is that the UK manufacturing industries are technologically more neck-and-neck than their counterparts in the US. I find support for this assumption in the data. The different empirical results between the two countries may also arise because of differences in data and samples.
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J.P. Eggers
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates the post-entry implications of pre-entry technological choices made during the uncertain period before a dominant design. Building on work on technological dynamics and organizational inertia, I argue that too early commitments to the winning technology may impede the ability to bring the best product to market, but delaying investment too long limits the ability to accumulate useful knowledge. Using data from the evolution of the flat panel display industry from 1965 to 2005, the study shows empirical support for the two theoretical mechanisms and offers the surprising result that firms starting in the losing technology before switching outperform other firms in terms of product value. Switching, while difficult behaviorally in recovering from failure, both delays difficult-to-reverse technological commitments and develops market knowledge.
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Spending Wisely? How Resources Affect Knowledge Production in Universities
Alexander Whalley & Justin Hicks
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Every year billions of dollars are spent on research grants to produce new knowledge in universities. However, as grants may also affect other research funding, the effects of financial resources on knowledge production remain unclear. To uncover how financial resources affect knowledge production, we study the effects of research spending itself. Utilizing the legal constraints on university spending from an endowment we develop an instrumental variables approach. Our approach instruments for university research spending with time-series variation in stock prices interacted with cross-sectional variation in initial endowment market values for research universities in the United States. Our analysis reveals that research spending has a substantial positive effect on the number of papers produced, but not their impact. We also demonstrate that research spending effects are quite similar at private and public universities.
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Knowledge Spillovers from Research Universities: Evidence from Endowment Value Shocks
Shawn Kantor & Alexander Whalley
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate the local spillovers from research university activity in a sample of urban counties. Our approach uses the interaction between university endowment values and stock market shocks over time for identification. We find statistically significant local spillover effects from university activity. The effects are significantly larger when local universities are more research intensive or local firms are technologically close to universities. Our results suggest that the longer-term effects that universities have on their local economies may grow over time as the composition of local industries adjusts to take advantage of the heterogeneous knowledge spillovers we identify.
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Unions and Innovation: New Insights From the Cross-Country Evidence
Hristos Doucouliagos & Patrice Laroche
Industrial Relations, April 2013, Pages 467-491
Abstract:
We apply meta-regression analysis to the extant econometric studies and find that unions depress investment in innovation at the firm and industry level in all countries considered. However, this adverse effect has been declining over time and is moderated by country differences in industrial relations and regulations: The adverse effect appears to increase with labor market flexibility.
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Explaining the "unpredictable": An empirical analysis of U.S. patent infringement awards
Michael Mazzeo, Jonathan Hillel & Samantha Zyontz
International Review of Law and Economics, August 2013, Pages 58-72
Abstract:
Patent infringement awards are commonly thought to be unpredictable, which raises concerns that patents can lead to unjust enrichment and impede the progress of innovation. We investigate the unpredictability of patent damages by conducting a large-scale econometric analysis of award values. We begin by analyzing the outcomes of 340 cases decided in US federal courts between 1995 and 2008 in which infringement was found and damages were awarded. Our data include the amount awarded, along with information about the litigants, case specifics and economic value of the patents-at-issue. Using these data, we construct an econometric model that explains over 75% of the variation in awards. We further conduct in-depth analysis of the key factors affecting award value, via targeted regressions involving selected variables. We find a high degree of significance between award value and ex ante-identifiable factors collectively, and we also identify significant relationships with accepted indicators of patent value. Our findings demonstrate that infringement awards are not systematically unpredictable and, moreover, highlight the critical elements that can be expected to result in larger or smaller awards.
