Thursday, May 9, 2013
Red lines
How New and Assertive Is China's New Assertiveness?
Alastair Iain Johnston
International Security, Spring 2013, Pages 7-48
Abstract:
There has been a rapidly spreading meme in U.S. pundit and academic circles since 2010 that describes China's recent diplomacy as "newly assertive." This "new assertiveness" meme suffers from two problems. First, it underestimates the complexity of key episodes in Chinese diplomacy in 2010 and overestimates the amount of change. Second, the explanations for the new assertiveness claim suffer from unclear causal mechanisms and lack comparative rigor that would better contextualize China's diplomacy in 2010. An examination of seven cases in Chinese diplomacy at the heart of the new assertiveness meme finds that, in some instances, China's policy has not changed; in others, it is actually more moderate; and in still others, it is a predictable reaction to changed external conditions. In only one case - maritime disputes - does one see more assertive Chinese rhetoric and behavior. The speed and extent with which the newly assertive meme has emerged point to an understudied issue in international relations - namely, the role that online media and the blogosphere play in the creation of conventional wisdoms that might, in turn, constrain policy debates. The assertive China discourse may be a harbinger of this effect as a Sino-U.S. security dilemma emerges.
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Capabilities, Cooperation, and Culture: Mapping American Ambivalence Toward China
Shelley Wick
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Sino-American relationship is arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Whether this relationship remains peaceful or becomes conflictual will have far-reaching economic and political ramifications. For more than two decades, American analysts have been attempting to answer one question: Is China a threat to the United States? The result has been a voluminous collection of data that equally supports contradictory answers. I contend that if we want to understand the probable course of the Sino-American relationship, we need to ask a different question: When and why are Americans likely to perceive China as a threat? This paper reports the results of a social psychological experiment designed to explore the basis of American attitudes toward other states in general and toward China specifically. Contrary to expectations that economic insecurity drives American attitudes toward economic competitors, this study finds that American attitudes toward China are shaped primarily by cultural and institutional judgments. These results contribute to the field of IR by challenging preconceptions about the extent and potential impact of Americans' economic insecurities, by contributing to a nascent constructivist literature that examines how threat is constructed in the national imagination, and by informing how policymakers approach important bilateral relationships.
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"Generalissimo of the Nation": War Making and the Presidency in the Early Republic
William Adler
Presidential Studies Quarterly, June 2013, Pages 412-426
Abstract:
This article explores the nature of congressional-presidential relations regarding war making in the early republic. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that Congress was not primary in war making during this period. Examining small wars, particularly those against native tribes, demonstrates how little influence Congress had, with oversight generally occurring only after the fact. Rhetorical presidential support for Congress's role did not accord with their practical readiness to initiate and manage hostilities unilaterally. The willingness of modern presidents to act without congressional consent is therefore not necessarily a historical aberration.
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First Things First: The Pressing Danger of Crisis Instability in U.S.-China Relations
Avery Goldstein
International Security, Spring 2013, Pages 49-89
Abstract:
Since the mid-1990s, much has been written about the potentially disruptive impact of China if it emerges as a peer competitor challenging the United States. Not enough attention has been paid, however, to a more immediate danger - that the United States and a weaker China will find themselves locked in a crisis that could escalate to open military conflict. The long-term prospect for a new great power rivalry ultimately rests on uncertain forecasts about big shifts in national capabilities and debatable claims about the motivations of the two countries. By contrast, the danger of crisis instability involving these two nuclear-armed states is a tangible near-term concern. An analysis that examines the current state of U.S.-China relations and compares it with key aspects of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War indicates that a serious Sino-American crisis may be more likely and more dangerous than expected. The capabilities each side possesses, and specific features of the most likely scenarios for U.S.-China crises, suggest reasons to worry that escalation pressures will exist and that they will be highest early in a crisis, compressing the time frame for diplomacy to avert military conflict.
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Leaders' Cognitive Complexity, Distrust, and the Diversionary Use of Force
Dennis Foster & Jonathan Keller
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some scholars have suggested that when faced with domestic political problems, leaders employ simplified decision processes, preferring action to deliberation and highly visible diversionary uses of force to alternative policies. Others contend that domestically embattled leaders will pursue a more rational examination of the costs and benefits of various options - the sort of deliberation that will lead them to reject diversionary force in favor of less risky measures. Drawing on research in political psychology, we argue that leaders' cognitive processes are not constants but variables, and that both models are correct under certain circumstances. Leaders low in conceptual complexity (CC), and especially those with hawkish leanings, will pursue simplified decision-making procedures and embrace diversionary strategies, while leaders who are high in complexity will pursue a more thorough consideration of risks and alternatives and generally avoid diversionary actions. We examine these expectations by testing the interactive effect of economic misery and leaders' CC on American force usage for the period 1953-2000. The findings indicate that more conceptually simple leaders - particularly when high in distrust, a trait linked to more hawkish policy inclinations - are significantly more likely to engage in diversion.
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The Circuitous Nature of Operation Ajax
Ofer Israeli
Middle Eastern Studies, March/April 2013, Pages 246-262
Abstract:
In seeking to protect its economic interests and its control of oil resources in Iran, Britain planned to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Dr Mohammad Mossadegh in a military coup d'état following his decision to nationalize the Iranian oil industry in 1951. However, the British initially faced strong opposition to this plan from the US under the Truman administration, which preferred a more diplomatic approach to the crisis and did not see British interests as being in line with its own. Facing this opposition and after unsuccessful attempts to oust the Iranian leader through economic pressure and propaganda campaigns, the British skillfully leveraged American fear of Communism to secure Washington, under the Eisenhower Administration, as a partner to lead a joint US-UK mission to overthrow Mossadegh. This paper explores the reasons behind the shift in American policy regarding this issue, exploring whether it was the Brit's successful use of covert, circuitous tactics to achieve their intended outcomes or solely a result of ideological differences between the two US administrations
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Into Justice Jackson's Twilight: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis of Treaty Termination
David Schnitzer
Georgetown Law Journal, November 2012, Pages 243-280
Abstract:
Envision this scenario: a president, seeking a significant shift in foreign policy from the path of his predecessors, announces to the world that the United States is terminating a treaty between the nations. The overwhelming majority of Senators, two-thirds of which approved the treaty, strongly disagree with the decision; a majority of members of the House of Representatives, who, along with a majority of the Senate, approved enabling legislation, are similarly distressed. Consulting the Constitution, they discover that it is silent on the question of treaty termination authority. Seeking judicial relief, they are told that their claim is nonjusticiable, and should a president seek to terminate any of the other roughly 1,130 Senate-approved treaties on the books, they would be similarly without legal recourse. Imagine their further bafflement upon learning that the first time the United States terminated a treaty, only a decade after the Constitution was ratified, that termination was, without question, a power of Congress.
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Ian Fleming and the Public Profile of the CIA
Christopher Moran
Journal of Cold War Studies, Winter 2013, Pages 119-146
Abstract:
This article represents the first major analysis of the appearance of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the James Bond novels of British spy fiction writer Ian Fleming. The article shows that Fleming was remarkably influential during the early Cold War in establishing the public profile of the CIA. The novels, which include manifold references to the agency and its staff, were published at a time when the CIA kept out of the public limelight and when other cultural forms, including Hollywood, refrained from making too much fanfare about intelligence matters. Drawing on recently declassified material, including the papers of fabled CIA Director Allen Dulles, the article demonstrates that the agency took a keen interest in Bond, even drawing inspiration from his adventures and the novels' depictions of technology.
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The Decline of Arms Control: Media Coverage and Elite Opinion in the United States
Mischa Hansel
Contemporary Security Policy, Spring 2013, Pages 64-93
Abstract:
Is arms control becoming irrelevant? This analysis offers a new way of testing the decline of arms control. Rather than focusing on foreign policy outputs and international outcomes, this analysis examines perceptions of security policy decision makers and opinion leaders through their references to arms control. Salience and framing analysis are used to evaluate the marginalization of arms control in political communication. Empirically, the article examines selected American media coverage, research institute publications, and the Congressional Record. This research confirms a dwindling number of references to the concept of arms control over the last two decades. This trend is not explained by the emergence of new technological issues, nor does it follow the chronological pattern of actual arms control successes and failures. Rather it hints at a more fundamental transformation of political thought.
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Leaders First, Countries After: Mediated Political Personalization in the International Arena
Meital Balmas & Tamir Sheafer
Journal of Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study is the first comparative analysis of mediated political personalization in the international arena; its contribution to the research in the field is twofold: (a) through a longitudinal analysis, it shows that media coverage of foreign countries focuses increasingly on state leaders rather than on the countries per se; and (b) it accounts for variations in the level of mediated political personalization between pairs of countries: the greater the distance between a pair of countries, in terms of values, political interests, economic relations, and geographical distance, the more their news coverage of each other focuses on the foreign country's leader at the expense of other political aspects.
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Counterproductive Counternarcotic Strategies?
Camilla Andersson
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We model the economic incentives surrounding opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. Specifically, we examine the impact of eradication policies when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit, and when the crops are cultivated in sharecropping arrangements. The analysis suggests that when perfect credit markets are available, an increased risk of eradication will lead to less land being allocated to opium poppy. However, when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit, an eradication policy can rather increase land under poppy cultivation. Furthermore, the unintended effects of eradication can be augmented in sharecropping arrangements.
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The Geography of Inter-State Resource Wars
Francesco Caselli, Massimo Morelli & Dominic Rohner
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
We establish a theoretical as well as empirical framework to assess the role of resource endowments and their geographic location for inter-State conflict. The main predictions of the theory are that conflict tends to be more likely when at least one country has natural resources; when the resources in the resource-endowed country are closer to the border; and, in the case where both countries have natural resources, when the resources are located asymmetrically vis-a-vis the border. We test these predictions on a novel dataset featuring oilfield distances from bilateral borders. The empirical analysis shows that the presence and location of oil are significant and quantitatively important predictors of inter-State conflicts after WW2.
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Mission Afghanistan: Who Bears the Heaviest Burden
Marion Bogers & Robert Beeres
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, May 2013, Pages 32-55
Abstract:
This paper contributes to the literature concerning burden sharing in specific crisis response operations. We provide a quantitative expression of burden-sharing behaviour of the NATO and Non-NATO allies during the International Security Assistance Forces operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010. We conclude that the military contribution of the United States, as expressed by the average number deployed, surpasses the total contributions of the NATO EU and Non-NATO countries. However, the relative contribution of the United Kingdom, as expressed in terms of relative population size and Gross Domestic Product exceeds the contribution of the United States. We also conclude that the relative numbers of casualties of the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada exceed the burden of the United States.
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Explaining Nonratification of the Genocide Convention: A Nested Analysis
Brian Greenhill & Michael Strausz
Foreign Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
What explains the large variation in the time taken by states to ratify the 1948 Genocide Convention? The costs of ratification would appear to be relatively low, yet many states have waited several decades before ratifying this symbolically important treaty. This study employs a "nested analysis" that combines a large-n event history analysis with a detailed study of an important outlying case in order to explain the main sources of this variation. Surprisingly, the results of our event history analysis suggest that states do not become more likely to ratify once the treaty has become widely adopted by others. We use the case of Japan to examine this relationship in more detail. We argue that once the norm embodied in a human rights treaty develops a "taken-for-granted" character, the rate of ratification can slow down because the marginal costs of additional ratifications begin to outweigh the expected benefits.
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Azar Gat
Journal of Peace Research, March 2013, Pages 149-157
Abstract:
The article reviews and assesses the recent literature that claims a sharp decrease in fighting and violent mortality rate since prehistory and during recent times. It also inquires into the causes of this decrease. The article supports the view, firmly established over the past 15 years and unrecognized by only one of the books reviewed, that the first massive decline in violent mortality occurred with the emergence of the state-Leviathan. Hobbes was right, and Rousseau was wrong, about the great violence of the human state of nature. The rise of the state-Leviathan greatly reduced in-group violent mortality by establishing internal peace. Less recognized, it also decreased out-group war fatalities. Although state wars appear large in absolute terms, large states actually meant lower mobilization rates and reduced exposure of the civilian population to war. A second major step in the decline in the frequency and fatality of war has occurred over the last two centuries, including in recent decades. However, the exact periodization of, and the reasons for, the decline are a matter of dispute among the authors reviewed. Further, the two World Wars constitute a sharp divergence from the trend, which must be accounted for. The article surveys possible factors behind the decrease, such as industrialization and rocketing economic growth, commercial interdependence, the liberal-democratic peace, social attitude change, nuclear deterrence, and UN peacekeeping forces. It argues that contrary to the claim of some of the authors reviewed, war has not become more lethal and destructive over the past two centuries, and thus this factor cannot be the cause of war's decline. Rather, it is peace that has become more profitable. At the same time, the specter of war continues to haunt the parts of the world less affected by many of the above developments, and the threat of unconventional terror is real and troubling.
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Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization
Alexander Downes & Jonathan Monten
International Security, Spring 2013, Pages 90-131
Abstract:
Is military intervention effective in spreading democracy? Existing studies disagree. Optimists point to successful cases, such as the transformation of West Germany and Japan into consolidated democracies after World War II. Pessimists view these successes as outliers from a broader pattern of failure typified by cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Those in between agree that, in general, democratic military intervention has little liberalizing effect in target states, but contend that democracies can induce democratization when they explicitly pursue this objective and invest substantial effort and resources. Existing studies, however, often employ overly broad definitions of intervention, fail to grapple with possible selection effects in countries where democracies choose to intervene, and stress interveners' actions while neglecting conditions in targets. A statistical examination of seventy instances of foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) in the twentieth century shows that implementing prodemocratic institutional reforms, such as sponsoring elections, is not enough to induce democratization; interveners will meet with little success unless conditions in the target state - in the form of high levels of economic development and societal homogeneity, and previous experience with representative governance - are favorable to democracy. Given that prospective regime change operations are likely to target regimes in poor, diverse countries, policymakers should scale back their expectations that democracy will flourish after FIRC.
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The Effects of World War II on Economic and Health Outcomes across Europe
Iris Kesternich et al.
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate long-run effects of World War II on socio-economic status and health of older individuals in Europe. We analyze data from SHARELIFE, a retrospective survey conducted as part of SHARE in Europe in 2009. SHARELIFE provides detailed data on events in childhood during and after the war for over 20,000 individuals in 13 European countries. We construct several measures of war exposure - experience of dispossession, persecution, combat in local areas, and hunger periods. Exposure to war and more importantly to individual-level shocks caused by the war significantly predicts economic and health outcomes at older ages.
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Stopping the legal flow of weapons: Compliance with arms embargoes, 1981-2004
Jennifer Erickson
Journal of Peace Research, March 2013, Pages 159-174
Abstract:
This article examines sending state compliance with arms embargoes. Arms embargoes are one of the most frequently used types of economic sanctions but they are perceived as one of the least effective. One major problem with arms embargoes, many argue, is sending states' failure to implement them. Yet studies tend to focus on cases of arms embargo violations, not compliance in the context of arms export practice more broadly. Using a series of new arms embargo variables, I conduct a statistical analysis of the relationship between arms embargoes and small and major conventional arms transfers from 1981 to 2004. Contrary to popular expectations, I find that arms embargoes on average restrain sending states' arms exports. If arms embargoes do indeed have difficulty changing targets' behavior, or achieving other measures of ‘success', additional explanations must also be considered. I suggest that arms embargo target selection and the intractable challenge of cutting off illicit arms flows are two important plausible alternatives. This finding also provides optimism for compliance with international commitments in the absence of institutionalized enforcement mechanisms. Major exporters overall appear to implement sanctions, despite strong economic incentives to ignore them and a lack of formal accountability mechanisms to punish violators.
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Early stages in the evolution of covert action governance in the United States, 1951-1961
Kristian Gustafson
Public Policy and Administration, April 2013, Pages 144-160
Abstract:
The U.S. government started to establish a formalised covert action capability only in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to the perceived Soviet threat. The difficult process of establishing the first inter-agency management organisation for this new activity, the Psychological Strategy Board, and its successor, the Operational Coordination Board, serves to highlight the peculiar characteristics of covert action and its management. Very little current scholarship deals with inter-agency bodies in the U.S. context, and this article aims to fill this void. The article concludes that while covert action itself remains in the shadows, policy coordination for it must be well-managed at the very centre of government to account for strong policy interests in this activity from other agencies, particularly the Departments of State and Defense. This task is complicated by the nature of U.S. national security architecture and U.S. government culture overall, which poses high structural obstacles to inter-agency cooperation.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Bossy
Accountability and ideology: When left looks right and right looks left
Philip Tetlock et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, September 2013, Pages 22-35
Abstract:
Managers face hard choices between process and outcome systems of accountability in evaluating employees, but little is known about how managers resolve them. Building on the premise that political ideologies serve as uncertainty-reducing heuristics, two studies of working managers show that: (1) conservatives prefer outcome accountability and liberals prefer process accountability in an unspecified policy domain; (2) this split becomes more pronounced in a controversial domain (public schools) in which the foreground value is educational efficiency but reverses direction in a controversial domain (affirmative action) in which the foreground value is demographic equality; (3) managers who discover employees have subverted their preferred system favor tinkering over switching to an alternative system; (4) but bipartisan consensus arises when managers have clear evidence about employee trustworthiness and the tightness of the causal links between employee effort and success. These findings shed light on ideological and contextual factors that shape preferences for accountability systems.
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The Dirty Laundry of Employee Award Programs: Evidence from the Field
Timothy Gubler, Ian Larkin & Lamar Pierce
Harvard Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
Many scholars and practitioners have recently argued that corporate awards are a "free" way to motivate employees. We use field data from an attendance award program implemented at one of five industrial laundry plants to show that awards can carry significant spillover costs and may be less effective at motivating employees than the literature suggests. Our quasi-experimental setting shows that two types of unintended consequences limit gains from the reward program. First, employees strategically game the program, improving timeliness only when eligible for the award, and call in sick to retain eligibility. Second, employees with perfect pre-program attendance or high productivity suffered a 6-8% productivity decrease after program introduction, suggesting they were demotivated by awards for good behavior they already exhibited. Overall, our results suggest the award program decreased plant productivity by 1.4%, and that positive effects from awards are accompanied by more complex employee responses that limit program effectiveness.
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Labor unions and tax aggressiveness
James Chyz et al.
Journal of Financial Economics, June 2013, Pages 675-698
Abstract:
We examine the impact of unionization on firms' tax aggressiveness. We find a negative association between firms' tax aggressiveness and union power and a decrease in tax aggressiveness after labor union election wins. This relation is consistent with labor unions influencing managers' in one, or both, of two ways: (1) constraining managers' ability to invest in tax aggressiveness through increased monitoring; or (2) decreasing returns to tax aggressiveness that arise from unions' rent seeking behavior. We also find preliminary evidence that the market expects these reductions around union elections and discounts firms that likely add shareholder value via aggressive tax strategies.
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The Determinants and Effects of CEO-Employee Pay Ratios
Olubunmi Faleye, Ebru Reis & Anand Venkateswaran
Journal of Banking & Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the determinants and effects of the relative compensation of top executives and lower-level employees. First, we show that CEO-employee pay ratios depend on the balance of power between the CEO (relative to the board) and ordinary employees (relative to management). Second, our results suggest that employees do not perceive higher pay ratios as an inequitable outcome to be redressed via costly behaviors that lower productivity. We do not find a negative relation between relative pay and employee productivity, either in our full sample or in subsamples where employees are well-informed about executive pay and are protected against career retributions. Rather, we find that productivity increases with relative pay when the firm has fewer employees who are well-informed, and when promotion decisions are predominantly merit-based. We also find that firm value and operating performance both increase with relative pay. We conclude that ordinary employees appear to perceive an opportunity in higher pay ratios but the extent to which such perception incentivizes them depends on the likelihood of success in a series of sequential promotion tournaments.
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Contributions of Managerial Levels: Comparing MLB and NFL
Goff Brian
Managerial and Decision Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Sports differ according to the number of players, interdependencies among them, complexity of strategy, and other dimensions. For example, baseball has been described as ‘an individual game in which a team score is kept'. These differences suggest differences in the relative importance of managerial inputs: owners, general managers, and managers (or head coaches). Using panels over 1970-2011, I estimate performance production regressions for Major League Baseball and the National Football League that permit the relative importance of these managerial inputs to be assessed within and across sports while taking explicit account of the hierarchical structure of management levels. In addition, with predicted individual effects, I present rankings of best and worst managers, general managers, and owners.
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Does Management Matter? Evidence from India
Nicholas Bloom et al.
Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2013, Pages 1-51
Abstract:
A long-standing question is whether differences in management practices across firms can explain differences in productivity, especially in developing countries where these spreads appear particularly large. To investigate this, we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on management practices to randomly chosen treatment plants and compared their performance to a set of control plants. We find that adopting these management practices raised productivity by 17% in the first year through improved quality and efficiency and reduced inventory, and within three years led to the opening of more production plants. Why had the firms not adopted these profitable practices previously? Our results suggest that informational barriers were the primary factor explaining this lack of adoption. Also, because reallocation across firms appeared to be constrained by limits on managerial time, competition had not forced badly managed firms to exit.
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Tournament Incentives in the Field: Gender Differences in the Workplace
Josse Delfgaauw et al.
Journal of Labor Economics, April 2013, Pages 305-326
Abstract:
We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find that sales competitions have a large effect on sales growth, but only in stores where the store's manager and a sufficiently large fraction of the employees have the same gender. Remarkably, results are alike for sales competitions with and without monetary rewards, suggesting a high symbolic value of winning a tournament.
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Is Corporate Social Responsibility Associated with Lower Wages?
Karine Nyborg & Tao Zhang
Environmental and Resource Economics, May 2013, Pages 107-117
Abstract:
Firms with a reputation as socially responsible may have an important cost advantage: If workers prefer their employer to be socially responsible, equilibrium wages may be lower in such firms. We explore this hypothesis, combining Norwegian register data with data on firm reputation collected by an employer branding firm. Adjusting for a large set of background variables, we find that the firm's social responsibility reputation is significantly associated with lower wages.
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Opening the Black Box: Internal Capital Markets and Managerial Power
Markus Glaser, Florencio Lopez‐De‐Silanes & Zacharias Sautner
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the internal capital markets of a multinational conglomerate, using a unique panel data set of planned and actual allocations to business units and a survey of unit CEOs. Following cash windfalls, more powerful managers obtain larger allocations and increase investment substantially more than their less connected peers. We identify cash windfalls as a source of misallocation of capital, as more powerful managers overinvest and their units exhibit lower ex‐post performance and productivity. These findings contribute to our understanding of frictions in resource allocation within firms and point to an important channel through which power may lead to inefficiencies.
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The Cost of High-Powered Incentives: Employee Gaming in Enterprise Software Sales
Ian Larkin
Journal of Labor Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the pricing distortions that arise from the use of a common non-linear incentive scheme at a leading enterprise software vendor. The empirical results demonstrate that salespeople are adept at gaming the timing of deal closure to take advantage of the vendor's accelerating commission scheme. Specifically, salespeople agree to significantly lower pricing in quarters where they have a financial incentive to close a deal, resulting in mispricing that costs the vendor 6-8% of revenue. Robustness checks demonstrate that price discrimination by the vendor does not explain the identified effects.
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Small steps for workers, a giant leap for productivity
Igal Hendel & Yossi Spiegel
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We document the evolution of productivity in a steel mini mill with fixed capital, producing an unchanged product with Leontief technology. Despite the fact that production conditions did not change dramatically, production doubles within the sample period (almost 12 years). We decompose the gains into: downtime reductions, more rounds of production per time, and more output per run. After attributing productivity gains to investment and an incentive plan, we are left with a large unexplained component. Learning by experimentation, or tweaking, seems to be behind the continual and gradual process of productivity growth. The findings suggest that capacity is not as well defined, even in batch-oriented manufacturing.
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Jonathon Cummings et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Heterogeneous groups are valuable, but differences among members can weaken group identification. Weak group identification may be especially problematic in larger groups, which, in contrast with smaller groups, require more attention to motivating members and coordinating their tasks. We hypothesized that as groups increase in size, productivity would decrease with greater heterogeneity. We studied the longitudinal productivity of 549 research groups varying in disciplinary heterogeneity, institutional heterogeneity, and size. We examined their publication and citation productivity before their projects started and 5 to 9 years later. Larger groups were more productive than smaller groups, but their marginal productivity declined as their heterogeneity increased, either because their members belonged to more disciplines or to more institutions. These results provide evidence that group heterogeneity moderates the effects of group size, and they suggest that desirable diversity in groups may be better leveraged in smaller, more cohesive units.
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Replacing trust with control: A field test of motivation crowd out theory
Niklas Bengtsson & Per Engstrom
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Results in behavioural economics suggest that material incentives can crowd out motivation if agents are mission-oriented rather than self-interested. We test this prediction on a sample of non-profit organisations in Sweden. Traditionally, contracts with the main principal (the Swedish foreign aid agency) have been based on trust and self-regulation. We designed a randomised policy experiment, effectively replacing the trust-based contract with an increased level of monitoring from the principal. Overall, using both self-reported and observed measures of outreach, we find that the intervention increased outreach, reduced expenditures and reduced the number of financial irregularities.
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Alicia Grandey, Nai-Wen Chi & Jennifer Diamond
Personnel Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does satisfaction from performing emotional labor (EL) - maintaining positive emotions with customers as part of the job - depend on the financial rewards available for good service? According to a "controlling perspective" of rewards, satisfaction from performing EL may be undermined by financial incentives, but based on a "valuing perspective" of rewards the relationship should be enhanced. We contribute to the literatures on EL and performance-contingent rewards with a "full-cycle" inquiry of this question conducted with 1) a field survey of diverse occupations in the U.S., 2) an experimental call center simulation with U.S. college students, and 3) a multi-level study of Taiwanese sales firms. Overall, financial rewards for service performance enhanced, rather than undermined, satisfaction from high EL job requirements and from EL by faking expressions (i.e., surface acting) with customers. Performing EL by modifying feelings (i.e., deep acting) was positively related to job satisfaction regardless of rewards, beyond rewards and personality traits. Results have implications for reward structures and enhancing job satisfaction for this increasingly common form of labor.
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A Two-Stage Double Bootstrap DEA: The Case of the Top 25 European Football Clubs' Efficiency Levels
George Halkos & Nickolaos Tzeremes
Managerial and Decision Economics, March 2013, Pages 108-115
Abstract:
This paper analyzes how European football clubs' current value and debt levels influence their performance. The Simar and Wilson (J Econometrics, 136: 31-64, 2007) procedure is used to bootstrap the data envelopment analysis scores in order to establish the effect of football clubs' current value and debt levels on their obtained efficiency scores. The results reveal that football clubs' current value levels have a negative influence on their performances, indicating that football clubs' high value does not ensure higher performance. At the same time, the empirical evidence suggests that football clubs' debt levels do not influence their efficiency levels.
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Hiring from High-Risk Populations: Lessons from the U.S. Military
Lauren Malone
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this study, we evaluate the performance of waivered recruits in the U.S. military. Unlike the private sector, the military has formal standards for identifying ideal recruits and uses a formal screening process to determine those within risky populations who are most likely to succeed. (Recruits who make it through the screening process are issued a waiver.) The military's establishment of waiver categories and its tracking of waiver status provide us with a case study for determining whether such risk-identification strategies work. Using FY99-FY08 service-level waiver and personnel data, we evaluate whether the military recruiting strategy has been successful and whether firms should consider adopting similar screening mechanisms. We estimate the effect of waiver status on attrition and promotion, our primary performance indicators, after controlling for other quality indicators. We find that waivered recruits, on the whole, are not particularly poor performers, although their inherent riskiness does vary by service and by waiver type.
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The Impact of Furloughs on Emotional Exhaustion, Self-Rated Performance, and Recovery Experiences
Jonathon Halbesleben, Anthony Wheeler & Samantha Paustian-Underdahl
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The notion that strain can result as employees' resources are threatened or lost is well established. However, the transition from resource threats to resource losses is an important but understudied aspect of employee strain. We argue that the threat-to-loss transition triggers accelerated resource loss and a shift in how employees utilize their remaining resources unless employees engage in recovery experiences during the transition. Using a discontinuous change framework, we examine employee furloughs - the placement of employees on leave with no salary of any kind - in terms of the transition from resource threat to loss: Resources may be threatened when the furlough is announced and lost when the furlough occurs. Using 4 data collections with 180 state government employees, we found mean levels of emotional exhaustion increased and mean levels of self-reported performance decreased following the furlough. The discontinuous changes in exhaustion and performance were significantly impacted by employees' recovery experiences during the furlough. We discuss the implications of these findings for other threat-to-loss and recovery research as well as for organizations implementing furloughs.
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Other-regarding preferences and management styles
Martin Kocher, Ganna Pogrebna & Matthias Sutter
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, April 2013, Pages 109-132
Abstract:
We use a laboratory experiment to examine whether and to what extent other-regarding preferences (efficiency, inequality aversion and maximin concerns) of team managers influence their management style in choice under risk. We find that managers who prefer efficiency are more likely to exercise an autocratic management style by ignoring preferences of their team members. Equality concerns have no significant impact on management styles. Elected managers have a higher propensity than exogenously assigned managers to use a democratic management style by reaching team consensus. We also find that male managers employ a democratic style more often than women.
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The hidden costs of surveillance for performance and helping behavior
Aisling O'Donnell, Michelle Ryan & Jolanda Jetten
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, March 2013, Pages 246-256
Abstract:
Common sense and prior research into performance suggests that people will work harder and more productively when they are monitored. However, we predict that there are boundary conditions to this effect. High levels of surveillance may undermine aspects of people's performance and their willingness to provide extra help, especially when they expect to share a sense of identity with those in power. In an experimental study (N = 98) we demonstrated that, compared to low surveillance, high surveillance led to higher productivity on a task, but also that the quality of work suffered. Additionally, we demonstrated that when surveillance was low, individuals offered more help to a leader they shared identity with, rather than to an outgroup leader. However, the beneficial effect of shared identity disappeared when surveillance was high. The results point to the rather paradoxical finding that surveillance, where it is not needed, can do more harm than good.
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Helping and Quiet Hours: Interruption-Free Time Spans Can Harm Performance
Philipp Käser, Urs Fischbacher & Cornelius König
Applied Psychology, April 2013, Pages 286-307
Abstract:
Whereas helping is costly for the helper, it is beneficial for the person who requests help. However, there is only scarce evidence on the relative costs and benefits of helping and this evidence is mixed. In addition, hardly any research investigates how these costs and benefits can be manipulated. With a laboratory experiment, we first examined how helping affects the performance of the helper, the help requester, and the dyad. Second, we investigated whether quiet hours that structure time into spans with interruptions and spans without interruptions decrease the costs of helping while keeping its benefits. We found that the requester's performance was higher and the helper's performance lower when help requests were permitted at any time rather than when no help was allowed. However, overall performance fell short of being significantly higher with help at any time. In addition, the helper's performance failed to be higher with quiet hours compared to interruptions at any time. Instead, both the helper's and the requester's performance were lower with quiet hours, resulting also in a lower overall performance. In search of an explanation, our data indicate that structuring time into spans with and without interruptions might generate costs of their own that could be reduced by setting fewer but longer spans without interruptions.
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Ilse Cornelis et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2013, Pages 605-613
Abstract:
Previous studies on procedural fairness have largely neglected to examine factors that influence leaders' enactment of fairness. Two controlled laboratory experiments and a field study with leaders working within organizations investigated the combined impact of follower belongingness needs and leader empathy. It was revealed that leaders are more apt to enact fair procedures when followers' belongingness needs are high rather than low. This effect was further moderated by leader empathy, such that highly empathic leaders, either because of individual differences or through situational induction, take followers' belongingness needs more into account. The relevance of these findings for procedural rule adherence and violation as a dependent variable and empathic leadership is discussed.
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Effects of power on social perception: All your boss can see is agency
Aleksandra Cislak
Social Psychology, Spring 2013, Pages 138-146
Abstract:
Three studies explored the relationship between power and the perception of others in terms of agency and communion. In Study 1, participants taking a manager perspective were more interested in the agency of their future employee than those asked to take a subordinate perspective were in the agency of their future employer. Moreover, they showed more interest in the agency than in the communion of their future employee. Study 2 extended these findings to perceptions of others unrelated to the context of work. In Study 3, participants taking the manager perspective favored agency traits in their employee more than those taking the subordinate perspective favored agency in their employer. This effect was mediated by an increased task orientation among those in positions of greater relative power. Using two manipulations and three dependent measures, power was found to enhance the focus on the agency dimension across the three studies, mediated by increases in orientation to tasks versus relationships.
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Does risk management matter? Evidence from the U.S. Agricultural industry
Jess Cornaggia
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article constructs triple-difference tests around shifts in the supply of risk management instruments available to agricultural producers to reveal a positive relation between risk management and productivity. This relation is more robust when producers adopt instruments with payoffs linked to group performance and weaker when payoffs are linked to individual performance. Additionally, productivity is particularly high among risk-managing producers in counties containing high levels of bank deposits, a proxy for access to finance. Overall, this article illuminates the relation between hedging and real firm outcomes as well as the interaction between access to finance and firms' risk management choices.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Blind to sex and race
Voice pitch and the labor market success of male chief executive officers
William Mayew, Christopher Parsons & Mohan Venkatachalam
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
A deep voice is evolutionarily advantageous for males, but does it confer benefit in competition for leadership positions? We study ecologically valid speech from 792 male public-company Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and find that CEOs with deeper voices manage larger companies, and as a result, make more money. After including proxies for other CEO attributes including experience, education and formant position, we document economically significant voice pitch effects. For the median CEO of the median sample firm, an interquartile increase in voice pitch (22.1 Hz) is associated with a $440 million increase in the size of the firm managed, and in turn, $187 thousand more in annual compensation. Deep voiced CEOs also enjoy longer tenures. Although this is a study of association, the results are consistent with recent experimental predictions suggesting a role for voice pitch in leadership selection and also suggest economically meaningful effects of voice pitch reach the upper echelons of corporate management.
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Jessica Kennedy & Laura Kray
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women select into business school at a lower rate than men and are underrepresented in high-ranking positions in business organizations. We examined gender differences in reactions to ethical compromises as one possible explanation for these disparities. In Study 1, when reading decisions that compromised ethical values for social status and monetary gains, women reported feeling more moral outrage and perceived less business sense in the decisions than men. In Study 2, we established a causal relationship between aversion to ethical compromises and disinterest in business careers by manipulating the presence of ethical compromises in job descriptions. As hypothesized, an interaction between gender and presence of ethical compromises emerged. Only when jobs involved making ethical compromises did women report less interest in the jobs than men. Women's moral reservations mediated these effects. In Study 3, we found that women implicitly associated business with immorality more than men did.
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Estimating Benefits from University-Level Diversity
Barbara Wolfe & Jason Fletcher
NBER Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
One of the continuing areas of controversy surrounding higher education is affirmative action. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Fisher v. Texas, and their ruling may well influence universities' diversity initiatives, especially if they overturn Grutter v. Bollinger and rule that diversity is no longer a "compelling state interest." But what lies behind a compelling state's interest? One issue that continues to require more information is estimating and understanding the gains for those attending colleges and universities with greater diversity. Most existing studies are either based on evidence from one institution, which has issues of both selectivity and limited "treatments," or focus on selective institutions, which also face issues of selection bias from college choice behaviors. In this research we use Wave 3 of Add Health, collected in 2001-02 of those then attending college. Add Health collected the IPEDS number of each college and matched these to the racial/ethnic composition of the student body. We convert these data into an index of diversity and then ask whether attending a college/university with a more diverse student body influences a variety of outcomes at Wave 4 (2007-08), including years of schooling completed, earnings, family income, composition of friends, and probability of voting. Our results provide evidence of a positive link between attending a college with greater diversity and higher earnings and family income, but not with more schooling or the probability of voting.
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Do Racial Preferences Affect Minority Learning in Law Schools?
Doug Williams
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, June 2013, Pages 171-195
Abstract:
An analysis of the The Bar Passage Study (BPS) reveals that minorities are both less likely to graduate from law school and less likely to pass the bar compared to whites even after adjustments are made for group differences in academic credentials. To account for these adjusted racial gaps in performance, some researchers put forward the "mismatch hypothesis," which proposes that students learn less when placed in learning environments where their academic skills are much lower than the typical student. This article presents new results from the BPS that account for both measurement-error bias and selection-on-unobservables bias that makes it more difficult to find a mismatch effect if in fact one exists. I find much more evidence for mismatch effects than previous research and report magnitudes from mismatch effects more than sufficient to explain racial gaps in performance.
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Law School Admissions under the UC Affirmative Action Ban
Danny Yagan
University of California Working Paper, December 2012
Abstract:
The consequences of banning affirmative action depend on schools' ability and willingness to avoid it. This paper uses a seventeen-year sample of law school applications to estimate how completely UC law schools avoided the 1996 UC affirmative action ban. Controlling for selective attrition from applicant pools, I find that the ban reduced the black admission rate to 31% -- well below the 61% pre-ban rate but still four times higher than the 8% rate that would prevail under observed white admission standards. Observed black admission advantages at intermediate credential levels were as large as 99 percentage points before the ban and 63 percentage points after the ban. The results have implications for modeling affirmative action bans, sustaining racial diversity under a ban, affirmative action constitutionality, the effectiveness of mandating nondiscrimination, and identifying discrimination in cross-sectional data.
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University Differences in the Graduation of Minorities in STEM Fields: Evidence from California
Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Aucejo & Joseph Hotz
NBER Working Paper, February 2013
Abstract:
The low number of college graduates with science degrees -- particularly among under-represented minorities -- is of growing concern. We examine differences across universities in graduating students in different fields. Using student-level data on the University of California system during a period in which racial preferences were in place, we show significant sorting into majors based on academic preparation, with science majors at each campus having on average stronger credentials than their non-science counterparts. Students with relatively weaker academic preparation are significantly more likely to leave the sciences and take longer to graduate at each campus. We show the vast majority of minority students would be more likely to graduate with a science degree and graduate in less time had they attended a lower ranked university. Similar results do not apply for non-minority students.
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Where are the female athletes in Sports Illustrated? A content analysis of covers (2000-2011)
Jonetta Weber & Robert Carini
International Review for the Sociology of Sport, April 2013, Pages 196-203
Abstract:
We content analyzed more than 11 years of Sports Illustrated (SI) covers (2000-2011) to assess how often females were portrayed, the sports represented, and the manner of their portrayal. Despite females' increased participation in sport since the enactment of Title IX and calls for greater media coverage of female athletes, women appeared on just 4.9 percent of covers. The percentage of covers did not change significantly over the span and were comparable to levels reported for the 1980s by other researchers. Indeed, women were depicted on a higher percentage of covers from 1954-1965 than from 2000-2011. Beyond the limited number of covers, women's participation in sport was often minimized by sharing covers with male counterparts, featuring anonymous women not related directly to sports participation, sexually objectifying female athletes, and promoting women in more socially acceptable gender-neutral or feminine sports.
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Sara Goodkind et al.
Children and Youth Services Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
There has been a widespread increase in single-sex public schooling in the U.S. following 2006 changes to the Department of Education regulations motivated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Single-sex public schooling is viewed as a means to improve the educational experiences and performance of low-income youth of color. Yet little is known about its effects and efficacy, particularly for these populations. This article is based on a community-based participatory research project, on which high school students and university researchers collaborated, conducted in a low-income, African American high school implementing single-sex courses. Our findings challenge proponents' key assumptions that single-sex education will improve the academic achievement of low-income youth of color by 1) eliminating distraction from the other sex; 2) addressing the different learning styles of girls and boys; and 3) remedying inequities by offering these youth opportunities traditionally afforded to more privileged youth. While some distractions were decreased, others were increased or ignored; racialized stereotypes of hypersexuality and essentialized notions of gender were reinforced; and students felt punished rather than privileged by being separated by sex. We conclude that single-sex education as a public school option is a neoliberal approach to addressing low achievement that deflects attention from the structural inequities that created the problem and implicitly blames those experiencing oppression.
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Lei Lai & Linda Babcock
Journal of Organizational Behavior, April 2013, Pages 310-326
Abstract:
In two role-playing scenarios, we investigate how White male and female evaluators perceive an Asian American versus White job candidate on the dimensions of competence and social skills and how these perceptions affect evaluators' decisions in hiring and promotion. Specifically, Study 1 examines how the perceptions of competence and social skills affect Asian (versus White) college graduates' chance of obtaining a non-technical (versus technical) position, and Study 2 tests how these perceptions affect Asians' probability of promotion relative to Whites'. Our findings suggest that female evaluators were less likely to select Asian than White candidates into positions involving social skills and were less likely to promote Asian than White candidates into these types of positions. Furthermore, female evaluators' perception that Asians were less socially skilled than Whites mediated both of these decisions. This paper contributes to the understanding of workplace discrimination of Asian Americans.
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Nurit Shnabel et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, May 2013, Pages 663-676
Abstract:
Two experiments examined for the first time whether the specific content of participant-generated affirmation essays - in particular, writing about social belonging - facilitated an affirmation intervention's ability to reduce identity threat among negatively stereotyped students. Study 1, a field experiment, revealed that seventh graders assigned to a values-affirmation condition wrote about social belonging more than those assigned to a control condition. Writing about belonging, in turn, improved the grade point average (GPA) of Black, but not White students. In Study 2, using a modified "belonging-affirmation" intervention, we directly manipulated writing about social belonging before a math test described as diagnostic of math ability. The more female participants wrote about belonging, the better they performed, while there was no effect of writing about belonging for males. Writing about social belonging improved performance only for members of negatively stereotyped groups. Implications for self-affirmation theory and practice are discussed.
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DeLeon Gray & Aaron Wichman
Social Psychology of Education, December 2012, Pages 465-481
Abstract:
We conducted an investigation into a determinant of academic motivation that has implications for how we respond to school violence and tragedy. We conducted two studies to examine whether exposure to messages related to the salience of one's own mortality cause people to align their own academic beliefs more closely with stereotypical beliefs about their social groups. When exposed to graffiti images that contained messages such as R.I.P. (i.e., rest in peace), males and females in Study 1 expressed math attitudes that resembled the American stereotype of male superiority and female inferiority in this domain. In Study 2, writing about death caused participants to express ethnic stereotype-consistent math attitudes. As one example, our studies highlight a potential psychological barrier associated with student advancement in STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). These findings indicate that death reminders, even when they do not follow from direct exposure to school trauma, may impact the academic motivation of stereotypically disadvantaged groups. With the larger goal of reducing psychological barriers associated with inequality in the pursuit of STEM career pathways, these studies are intended to spur further examination of how cases of extreme violence in schools potentially can affect patterns of academic motivation. Even in its early stages, this research should provide new considerations for educational policy-makers aiming to design damage control protocols in response to extreme school violence.
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Do Racial and Ethnic Group Differences in Performance on the MCAT Exam Reflect Test Bias?
Dwight Davis et al.
Academic Medicine, May 2013, Pages 593-602
Abstract:
The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) is a standardized examination that assesses fundamental knowledge of scientific concepts, critical reasoning ability, and written communication skills. Medical school admission officers use MCAT scores, along with other measures of academic preparation and personal attributes, to select the applicants they consider the most likely to succeed in medical school. In 2008-2011, the committee charged with conducting a comprehensive review of the MCAT exam examined four issues: (1) whether racial and ethnic groups differ in mean MCAT scores, (2) whether any score differences are due to test bias, (3) how group differences may be explained, and (4) whether the MCAT exam is a barrier to medical school admission for black or Latino applicants. This analysis showed that black and Latino examinees' mean MCAT scores are lower than white examinees', mirroring differences on other standardized admission tests and in the average undergraduate grades of medical school applicants. However, there was no evidence that the MCAT exam is biased against black and Latino applicants as determined by their subsequent performance on selected medical school performance indicators. Among other factors which could contribute to mean differences in MCAT performance, whites, blacks, and Latinos interested in medicine differ with respect to parents' education and income. Admission data indicate that admission committees accept majority and minority applicants at similar rates, which suggests that medical students are selected on the basis of a combination of attributes and competencies rather than on MCAT scores alone.
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The Impact of City Contracting Set-Asides on Black Self-Employment and Employment
Aaron Chatterji, Kenneth Chay & Robert Fairlie
NBER Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black business ownership rates increased significantly after program initiation, with the black-white gap falling three percentage points. The evidence that the racial gap in employment also fell is less clear as it is depends on assumptions about the continuation of pre-existing trends. The black gains were concentrated in industries heavily affected by set-asides and mostly benefited the better educated.
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Renata Bongiorno, Paul Bain & Barbara David
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Role congruity theory predicts prejudice towards women who meet the agentic requirements of the leader role. In line with recent findings indicating greater acceptance of agentic behaviour from women, we find evidence for a more subtle form of prejudice towards women who fail to display agency in leader roles. Using a classic methodology, the agency of male and female leaders was manipulated using assertive or tentative speech, presented through written (Study 1, N = 167) or verbal (Study 2, N = 66) communications. Consistent with predictions, assertive women were as likeable and influential as assertive men, while being tentative in leadership reduced the likeability and influence of women, but not of men. Although approval of agentic behaviour from women in leadership reflects progress, evidence that women are quickly singled out for disapproval if they fail to show agency is important for understanding how they continue to be at a distinct disadvantage to men in leader roles.
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Andrew Seltzer
Economic History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British labour market experienced an influx of female clerical workers. Employers argued that female employment increased opportunities for men to advance; however, most male clerks regarded this expansion of the labour supply as a threat to their pay and status. This article examines the effects of female employment on male clerks using data from Williams Deacon's Bank covering a period 25 years prior to and 25 years subsequent to the initial employment of women. It is shown that, within position, women were substitutes for younger men, but not for senior men. In addition, the employment of women in routine positions allowed the bank to expand its branch network, creating new higher-level positions, which were almost always filled by men.
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Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Carroll Glynn & Michael Huge
Science Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
An experiment with 243 young communication scholars tested hypotheses derived from role congruity theory regarding impacts of author gender and gender typing of research topics on perceived quality of scientific publications and collaboration interest. Participants rated conference abstracts ostensibly authored by females or males, with author associations rotated. The abstracts fell into research areas perceived as gender-typed or gender-neutral to ascertain impacts from gender typing of topics. Publications from male authors were associated with greater scientific quality, in particular if the topic was male-typed. Collaboration interest was highest for male authors working on male-typed topics. Respondent sex did not influence these patterns.
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David Purcell
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, June 2013, Pages 291-319
Abstract:
I use cultural capital as a conceptual framework for examining gender inequality at work. While much previous research has been situated in hypermasculine work settings, this study takes place in an industry (retail fashion) and an organization that are not hypermasculine - yet, the company's cultural capital is dominated by men, and a glass ceiling persists. Using ethnographic data collected at the headquarters of a major Midwestern multinational retail corporation, I examine this puzzle. I explain how the cultural capital valued by upper management is gendered and contributes to the maintenance of the glass ceiling, and how members of upper management succeed or fail at activating their cultural capital. I also illustrate how the company's industry and internal structure enable some women and gay men to successfully navigate a men-dominated work culture. In doing so, I attempt to synthesize previous studies on homophily and gendered organizations.
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Benjamin Nagengast, Herbert Marsh & Kit-Tai Hau
Sex Roles, forthcoming
Abstract:
Typically, the effects of single-sex schooling are small at best, and tend to be statistically non-significant once pre-existing differences are taken into account. However, researchers often have had to rely on observational studies based on small non-representative samples and have not used more advanced propensity score methods to control the potentially confounding effects of covariates. Here, we apply optimal full matching to the large historical longitudinal dataset best suited to evaluating this issue in US high schools: the nationally representative High School and Beyond study. We compare the effects of single-sex education in the final 2 years of high school on Grade 12 and post-secondary outcomes using the subsample of students attending Catholic schools (N = 2379 students, 29 girls' schools, 22 boys' schools, 33 coeducational schools) focusing on achievement-related, motivational and social outcomes. We contrast conventional Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) with optimal full matching based on the propensity score that provides a principled way of controlling for selection bias. Results from the two approaches converged: When background and Year 10 covariates were controlled, uncorrected apparent differences between the school types disappeared and the pattern of effects was very similar across the two methods. Overall, there was little evidence for positive effects of single-sex schooling for a broad set of outcomes in the final 2 years of high school and 2 years after graduation. We conclude with a discussion of the advantages of propensity score methods compared to ANCOVA.
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Breaking the Caste Barrier: Intergenerational Mobility in India
Viktoria Hnatkovska, Amartya Lahiri & Sourabh Paul
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2013, Pages 435-473
Abstract:
We contrast the intergenerational mobility rates of the historically disadvantaged scheduled castes and tribes (SC/ST) in India with the rest of the workforce in terms of their education attainment, occupation choices and wages. Using survey data from successive rounds of the National Sample Survey between 1983 and 2005, we find that intergenerational education and income mobility rates of SC/STs have converged to non-SC/ST levels during this period. Moreover, SC/STs have matched non-SC/STs in occupation mobility rates. We conclude that the last 20 years of structural changes in India have coincided with a breaking down of caste-based barriers to socioeconomic mobility.
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Maya Beasley & Mary Fischer
Social Psychology of Education, December 2012, Pages 427-448
Abstract:
This paper examines the effects of group performance anxiety on the attrition of women and minorities from science, math, and engineering majors. While past research has relied primarily on the academic deficits and lower socioeconomic status of women and minorities to explain their absence from these fields, we focus on the impact of stereotype threat - the anxiety caused by the expectation of being judged based on a negative group stereotype. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, our findings indicate that minorities experience stereotype threat more strongly than whites, although women do not suffer from stereotype threat more than men. Our findings also reveal that stereotype threat has a significant positive effect on the likelihood of women, minorities, and surprisingly, white men leaving science, technology, engineering and math majors.
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Men's Race-Based Mobility into Management: Analyses at the Blue Collar and White Collar Job Levels
George Wilson & David Maume
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
There are few theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of race-based mobility in the American workplace. The "particularistic mobility thesis" fills this gap: it maintains that even when groups work in similar jobs, discriminatorily-induced dynamics associated with the relative inability of minorities to demonstrate informal characteristics - such as loyalty and sound judgment - constitute a handicap in mobility into managerial positions. Findings based on the 2004-2010 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics support theory and indicate that from both white collar and blue collar job levels African American and Latino men, relative to White gender counterparts, are disadvantaged: they have lower rates of mobility, are restricted to a formal route to reach managerial positions that is less dependent on a traditional range of stratification-based causal factors including background status, human capital, and job/labor market characteristics, and take longer to reach management. Further, as predicted by theory, along all issues differences, relative to Whites, are greater among African Americans than Latinos and greater among those tracked from blue collar jobs than white collar jobs. Implications of the findings for understanding short-term and long-term minority disadvantage in the American labor market are discussed.
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A Female Style in Corporate Leadership? Evidence from Quotas
David Matsa & Amalia Miller
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of gender quotas for corporate board seats on corporate policy decisions. We examine the introduction of Norway's 2006 quota, comparing affected firms to other Scandinavian companies, public and private, that were unaffected by the rule. Based on differences-in-differences and triple-difference models, we find that firms affected by the quota undertook fewer workforce reductions than comparison firms, increasing relative labor costs and employment levels and reducing short-term profits. The effects are strongest among firms that had no female board members before the quota was introduced and present even for boards with older and more experienced members. The boards appear to be affecting corporate strategy in part by selecting likeminded executives.
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Women and Top Leadership Positions: Towards an Institutional Analysis
Alison Cook & Christy Glass
Gender, Work & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women remain under-represented in top leadership positions in work organizations, a reality that reflects a variety of barriers that create a glass ceiling effect. However, some women do attain top leadership positions, leading scholars to probe under what conditions women are promoted despite seemingly intractable and well-documented barriers. Previous scholarship tends to posit individual-level explanations, suggesting either that women who attain top leadership positions are exceptional or that potential women leaders lack key qualities, such as assertiveness. Much less scholarship has explored institutional-level mechanisms that may increase women's ascension to top positions. This analysis seeks to fill this gap by testing three institutional-level theories that may shape women's access to and tenure in top positions: the glass cliff, decision-maker diversity, and the saviour effect. To test these theories we rely on a dataset that includes all CEO transitions in Fortune 500 companies over a 20-year period. Contrary to the predictions of the glass cliff, we find that diversity among decision makers - not firm performance - significantly increases women's likelihood of being promoted to top leadership positions. We also find, contrary to the predictions of the saviour effect, that diversity among decision makers increases women leaders' tenure as CEOs regardless of firm performance. By identifying contextual factors that increase women's mobility, the paper makes an important contribution to the processes that shape and reproduce gender inequality in work organizations.
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Gender, Single-Sex Schooling and Maths Achievement
Aedín Doris, Donal O'Neill & Olive Sweetman
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses a distinctive feature of the Irish education system to examine the impact of single-sex education on the gender difference in mathematical achievement at the top of the distribution. The Irish primary school system is interesting both for the fact that many children attend single-sex schools, and because these single-sex schools are part of the general educational system, rather than serving a particular socio-economic group. In keeping with research on other countries, we find a significant gender gap in favour of boys, but contrary to suggestions in the literature, our results provide no evidence that single-sex schooling reduces the gap. If anything, the gender differential is larger for children educated in single-sex schools than in coeducational schools.
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Effects of School Racial Composition on K-12 Mathematics Outcomes: A Metaregression Analysis
Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, Martha Cecilia Bottia & Richard Lambert
Review of Educational Research, March 2013, Pages 121-158
Abstract:
Recently published social science research suggests that students attending schools with concentrations of disadvantaged racial minority populations achieve less academic progress than their otherwise comparable counterparts in more racially balanced or integrated schools, but to date no meta-analysis has estimated the effect size of school racial composition on mathematics outcomes. This metaregression analysis reviewed the social science literature published in the past 20 years on the relationship between mathematics outcomes and the racial composition of the K-12 schools students attend. The authors employed a two-level hierarchical linear model to analyze the 25 primary studies with 98 regression effects. Results indicate that school racial isolation has a small statistically significant negative effect on overall building-level mathematics outcomes. This relationship is moderated by the size of the sample in the study and by the way the independent variable was operationalized. Although it is small, the effect size is substantively meaningful. The effects are stronger in secondary compared to elementary grades, and racial gaps widen as students age. The emergence and widening of the race gaps as students move through the grades suggest that the association of racial segregation with mathematics performance compounds over time. Implications for educational policy and future research are discussed.
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The Unfairness Trap: A Key Missing Factor in the Economic Theory of Discrimination
Jordan Siegel, Naomi Kodama & Hanna Halaburda
Harvard Working Paper, March 2013
Abstract:
Prior evidence linking increased female representation in management to corporate performance has been surprisingly mixed, due in part to data limitations and methodological difficulties, and possibly to omission of a fairness factor in the economic theory of discrimination. Using modified theory and panel data from a nationally representative sample of Japanese firms in the 2000s, we address several of these shortcomings. We find that increases in the ratio of female executives, the presence of at least one female executive, and the presence of at least one female section chief are associated with increases in corporate profitability in the manufacturing sector. North American multinationals operating in Japan also enjoy outsized benefits from hiring and promoting female managers. The results are robust to controlling for time effects and company fixed effects and the time-varying use of temporary and part-time employees. Some of the competitive benefit of employing female managers is shown to flow from compensation savings, but a much larger part arises from direct productivity increases. Prior economic theory on discrimination implied that those who hire inexpensive and underutilized female talent will see a performance benefit; we find, however, that due to possible social comparison costs, only companies whose compensation of female talent compares well with an external benchmark will see a significant performance benefit.
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Ideological Wage Inequalities? The Technical/Social Dualism and the Gender Wage Gap in Engineering
Erin Cech
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can professional cultures contribute to wage inequality? Recent literature has demonstrated how widely held cultural biases reproduce ascriptive inequalities in the workforce, but cultural belief systems within professions have largely been ignored as mechanisms of intra-profession inequality. I argue that cultural ideologies about professional work, which may seem benign and have little salience outside of a profession's boundaries, play an important role in reproducing wage inequalities therein. Using nationally representative data on engineers, I demonstrate that patterns of sex segregation and gendered wage allocation in engineering break consistently along the lines predicted by its "technical/social dualism" - an ideological distinction between "technical" and "social" engineering subfields and work activities. After explaining how these findings deepen our understanding of gender inequality in engineering, the article discusses how the consideration of professional cultures may open up fresh areas of inquiry into intra-profession inequality more generally.
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Littisha Bates & Jennifer Glick
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Black youth often lag behind their non-Hispanic white peers in educational outcomes, including teacher-evaluated school performance. Using data from four waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, the analyses presented here identify the extent to which children receive different evaluations from their teachers depending on the racial/ethnic match of teachers and students. This study is distinct from previous work because we examine the assessment of an individual child by multiple teachers. The results indicate that Black children receive worse assessments of their externalizing behaviors (e.g. arguing in class, disrupting instruction) when they have a non-Hispanic white teacher than when they have a Black teacher. Further, these results exist net of school context and the teacher's own ratings of the behavior of the class overall.
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Gender Sorting across K-12 Schools in the United States
Mark Long & Dylan Conger
American Journal of Education, May 2013, Pages 349-372
Abstract:
This article documents evidence of nonrandom gender sorting across K-12 schools in the United States. The sorting exists among coed schools and at all grade levels, and it is highest in the secondary school grades. We observe some gender sorting across school sectors and types: for instance, males are slightly underrepresented in private schools and charter schools and are substantially overrepresented in irregular public schools, a large share of which educates students with special needs and juvenile justice involvement. Gender sorting within sectors and types is also quite prevalent and appears to be highest within the private schools (where single-sex schools are more common) and irregular public schools. We find that gender sorting is higher in counties that have higher shares of enrollment in private and nonregular public schools. This sorting occurs even though parents have similar stated preferences for school attributes for their sons and daughters.
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Are firms willing to employ a greying and feminizing workforce?
V. Vandenberghe
Labour Economics, June 2013, Pages 30-46
Abstract:
Are employers willing to employ more older individuals, in particular older women? Higher employment among the older segments of the population will only materialize if firms are willing to employ them. Although several economists have started considering the demand side of the labour market for older individuals, few have considered its gender dimension properly; despite evidence that lifting the overall senior employment rate in the EU requires significantly raising that of women older than 50. In this paper, we posit that labour demand and employability depend to a large extent on how the age/gender composition of the workforce affects firm's profits. Using unique firm-level panel data we produce robust evidence on the causal effect of age/gender on productivity (value added per worker), total labour costs and gross profits. We take advantage of the panel structure of data and resort to first differences to deal with a potential time-invariant heterogeneity bias. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production function estimation literature, we also address the risk of simultaneity bias (endogeneity of firm's age-gender mix choices in the short run) by combining first differences with i) the structural approach suggested by Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2006), ii) alongside more traditional IV-GMM methods (Blundell and Bond, 1998) where lagged values of labour inputs are used as instruments. Results suggest no negative impact of rising shares of older men on firm's gross profits, but a large negative effect of larger shares of older women. Another interesting result is that the vast and highly feminized services industry does not seem to offer working conditions that mitigate older women's productivity and employability disadvantage, on the contrary. This is not good news for older women's employability and calls for policy interventions in the Belgian private economy aimed at combating women's decline of productivity with age and/or better adapting labour costs to age-gender productivity profiles.
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Gender Differences in Involuntary Job Loss: Why Are Men More Likely to Lose Their Jobs?
Roger Wilkins & Mark Wooden
Industrial Relations, April 2013, Pages 582-608
Abstract:
Empirical studies have consistently reported that rates of involuntary job loss are significantly lower among female employees than among males. Only rarely, however, have the reasons for this differential been the subject of detailed investigation. In this article, household panel survey data from Australia are used that also find higher rates of job loss among men than among women. This differential, however, largely disappears once controls for industry and occupation are included. These findings suggest that the observed gender differential primarily reflects systematic differences in the types of jobs into which men and women select.
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Alan Gregory et al.
British Journal of Management, June 2013, Pages 174-190
Abstract:
Attitudes towards male and female managers within organizations are well documented, but how the stock market perceives their relative capabilities is less studied. Recent evidence documents a negative short-run market reaction to the appointment of female chief executive officers and suggests that female executives are less informed than their male counterparts about future corporate performance. These results appear to dispute the stock market value of having women on corporate boards. However, such short-run market reactions may retain a ‘gender bias', reflecting the prevalence of negative stereotypes, where the market reacts to ‘beliefs' rather than ‘performance'. This study tests for such bias by examining the stock market reaction to directors' trades in their own companies' shares, by measuring both the short-run and longer-term returns after the directors' trades. Allowing for firm and trade effects, some evidence is found that, in the longer term, markets recognize that female executives' trades are informative about future corporate performance, although initially markets underestimate these effects. This has important implications for research that has attempted to assess the value of board diversity by examining only short-run stock market responses.
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Darrell Steffensmeier, Jennifer Schwartz & Michael Roche
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We extend the scarce research on corporate crime to include gender by developing and testing a gendered focal concerns and crime opportunities framework that predicts minimal and marginal female involvement in corporate criminal networks. Lacking centralized information, we developed a rich database covering 83 corporate frauds involving 436 defendants. We extracted information from indictments and secondary sources on corporate conspiracy networks (e.g., co-conspirator roles, company positions, and distribution of profit). Findings support the gendered paradigm. Typically, women were not part of conspiracy groups. When women were involved, they had more minor roles and made less profit than their male co-conspirators. Two main pathways defined female involvement: relational (close personal relationship with a main male co-conspirator) and utility (occupied a financial-gateway corporate position). Paralleling gendered labor market segmentation processes that limit and shape women's entry into economic roles, sex segregation in corporate criminality is pervasive, suggesting only subtle shifts in gender socialization and women's opportunities for significant white-collar crimes. Our findings do not comport with images of highly placed or powerful white-collar female criminals.
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Sexual Harassment in Law Enforcement: Incidence, Impact, and Perception
Kimberly Lonsway, Rebecca Paynich & Jennifer Hall
Police Quarterly, June 2013, Pages 177-210
Abstract:
The present study was designed to examine the incidence, impact, and perception of sexual harassment in law enforcement by utilizing a mixed methods approach and two data sources. In Study 1, quantitative data were provided by 679 male and female personnel in a large law enforcement agency. In Study 2, 531 female police officers provided qualitative responses to a national survey addressing a range of professional experiences. Most respondents from these two studies experienced behaviors that could potentially be sexually harassing. Very few were reported with a formal complaint, but retaliation was common and often severe. Regression analyses demonstrate that such experiences have a negative impact on both personal and professional outcomes. Yet narrative responses reveal that respondents do not typically appraise them negatively. Patterns are explored for the various types of behavior, the organizational status of those involved, the response strategy employed, and the outcome of the situation.
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The Power of Gendered Stereotypes in the US Marine Corps
Emerald Archer
Armed Forces & Society, April 2013, Pages 359-391
Abstract:
Gendered stereotypes in the US military context often result in the creation of barriers for women. Constant confrontation with these barriers may negatively impact a servicewoman's career. The author argues that gendered stereotypes in the US Marine Corps (USMC) have the potential to undermine a female Marine's performance, and sometimes the performance of others around her. Through the application of ethnographic content analysis to thirty-five in-depth interviews (seventeen female and eighteen male Marines), this article investigates the possible consequences of gendered stereotypes in the USMC. Four themes regarding the origination, socialization, and reinforcement of gender-role stereotypes in the USMC emerge through the interview process. Findings suggest gender-role stereotypes influence (1) the perceived abilities of female Marines, (2) the initial socialization of Marines, (3) camaraderie and opportunities for female Marine mentorship, and (4) a culture of double standards. The aforementioned themes are compared to findings in the literature and implications for camaraderie, shared sense of mission, and leadership are discussed.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Criminal minds
Carl Kitchens
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Between the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 seasons, the National Football League (NFL) repositioned one of its officials in order to prevent injuries among officials. This creates a quasi-experiment for studying how a change in the extent of policing affects detection of offenses. Using play-by-play data from the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 NFL season, I estimate how the detection of offensive holding changes when the positioning of an official changes. I find that there is approximately a 20 increase in the number of offensive holding penalties called after the NFL repositioned the official. Penalties called on defensive linemen fell as a result of the repositioning. Overall, there was no change in the total number of penalties called. Using the estimated change in the probability of a penalty, I estimate the probability of an official calling a penalty. I infer that NFL officials detect approximately 60% of crimes committed on the field.
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Kendall Weir
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We observe all 1,273 players drafted into the National Football League between 2005 and 2009 to determine the effects of character concerns on draft status and performance in the National Football League. Prospects that have a history of formal criminal charges or are suspended for team or university violations fall between 16 and 22 spots in the draft. The impacts of character concerns on performance depend on the nature of the issue. Players who have a history of suspension (noncriminal related) perform worse than other players but having an encounter with law enforcement does not negatively predict performance.
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In School and Out of Trouble? The Minimum Dropout Age and Juvenile Crime
Mark Anderson
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the relationship between the minimum high school dropout age and juvenile arrest rates by exploiting state-level variation in dropout age laws. Using county-level arrest data for the period 1980-2008, a difference-in-difference-in-difference-type empirical strategy compares the arrest behavior over time of various age groups within counties that differ by their state's minimum dropout age. The evidence suggests that minimum dropout age requirements have a significant and negative effect on property and violent crime arrest rates for individuals aged 16 to 18 years-old. The results are consistent with an incapacitation effect; school attendance decreases the time available for crime.
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The minimum dropout age and student victimization
Mark Anderson, Benjamin Hansen & Mary Beth Walker
Economics of Education Review, August 2013, Pages 66-74
Abstract:
Over the years, the minimum dropout age has been raised to 18 in 21 states. Although these policy changes are promoted for their educational benefits, they have been shown to reduce crimes committed by youths in the affected age groups. However, an unintended consequence of increasing the minimum dropout age could be the displacement of crime from the streets to schools. We use data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys to estimate the relationship between minimum dropout age laws and student victimization. Our results suggest that higher minimum dropout ages increase the likelihood that females and younger students report missing school for fear of their safety and younger students are more likely to report being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property. Our results also yield some evidence that students are more likely to report being victims of in-school theft when the minimum dropout age is higher.
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Preventing Youth Violence and Dropout: A Randomized Field Experiment
Sara Heller et al.
NBER Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
Improving the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth remains a top policy priority in the United States, although identifying successful interventions for adolescents - particularly males - has proven challenging. This paper reports results from a large randomized controlled trial of an intervention for disadvantaged male youth grades 7-10 from high-crime Chicago neighborhoods. The intervention was delivered by two local non-profits and included regular interactions with a pro-social adult, after-school programming, and - perhaps the most novel ingredient - in-school programming designed to reduce common judgment and decision-making problems related to automatic behavior and biased beliefs, or what psychologists call cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). We randomly assigned 2,740 youth to programming or to a control group; about half those offered programming participated, with the average participant attending 13 sessions. Program participation reduced violent-crime arrests during the program year by 8.1 per 100 youth (a 44 percent reduction). It also generated sustained gains in schooling outcomes equal to 0.14 standard deviations during the program year and 0.19 standard deviations during the follow-up year, which we estimate could lead to higher graduation rates of 3-10 percentage points (7-22 percent). Depending on how one monetizes the social costs of crime, the benefit-cost ratio may be as high as 30:1 from reductions in criminal activity alone.
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Guns, germs, and stealing: Exploring the link between infectious disease and crime
Ilan Shrira, Arnaud Wisman & Gregory Webster
Evolutionary Psychology, March 2013, Pages 270-287
Abstract:
Can variation in crime rates be traced to the threat of infectious disease? Pathogens pose an ongoing challenge to survival, leading humans to adapt defenses to manage this threat. In addition to the biological immune system, humans have psychological and behavioral responses designed to protect against disease. Under persistent disease threat, xenophobia increases and people constrict social interactions to known in-group members. Though these responses reduce disease transmission, they can generate favorable crime conditions in two ways. First, xenophobia reduces inhibitions against harming and exploiting out-group members. Second, segregation into in-group factions erodes people's concern for the welfare of their community and weakens the collective ability to prevent crime. The present study examined the effects of infection incidence on crime rates across the United States. Infection rates predicted violent and property crime more strongly than other crime covariates. Infections also predicted homicides against strangers but not family or acquaintances, supporting the hypothesis that in-group-out-group discrimination was responsible for the infections-crime link. Overall, the results add to evidence that disease threat shapes interpersonal behavior and structural characteristics of groups.
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The Transformation of America's Penal Order: A Historicized Political Sociology of Punishment
Michael Campbell & Heather Schoenfeld
American Journal of Sociology, March 2013, Pages 1375-1423
Abstract:
Comparative historical methods are used to explain the transformation of the U.S. penal order in the second half of the 20th century. The analysis of multiple state-level case studies and national-level narratives suggests that this transformation has three distinct, but interconnected, historical periods and reveals that the complex interaction between national and state-level politics and policy helps explain the growth in imprisonment between 1970 and 2001. Specifically, over time, national political competition, federal crime control policy, and federal court decisions helped create new state-level political innovation and special interest groups that compelled lawmakers to increasingly define the crime problem as a lack of punishment and to respond by putting more people in prison for longer periods of time. In turn, state-level developments facilitated increasingly radical crime control politics and policies at the national level that reflected historical traditions found in Sun Belt states.
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Criminal Recidivism after Prison and Electronic Monitoring
Rafael Di Tella & Ernesto Schargrodsky
Journal of Political Economy, February 2013, Pages 28-73
Abstract:
We study criminal recidivism in Argentina by focusing on the rearrest rates of two groups: individuals released from prison and individuals released from electronic monitoring. Detainees are randomly assigned to judges, and ideological differences across judges translate into large differences in the allocation of electronic monitoring to an otherwise similar population. Using these peculiarities of the Argentine setting, we argue that there is a large, negative causal effect on criminal recidivism of treating individuals with electronic monitoring relative to prison.
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A Tip of the Iceberg? The Probability of Catching Cartels
Peter Ormosi
Journal of Applied Econometrics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reliable estimates of crime detection probabilities could help in designing better sanctions and improve our understanding of the efficiency of law enforcement. For cartels, we only have limited knowledge on the rate at which these illegal practices are discovered. In comparison to previous works, this paper offers a more parsimonious and simple-to-use method to estimate time-dependent cartel discovery rates, while allowing for heterogeneity across firms. It draws on capture-recapture methods that are frequently used in ecology to make inferences on various wildlife population characteristics. An application of this method provides evidence that less than a fifth of cartelising firms are discovered.
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Ryang Hui Kim & David Clark
Journal of Criminal Justice, May-June 2013, Pages 196-204
Purpose: Most prior research reports that prison-based college education reduces recidivism, but fails to address the potential problem of self-selection bias. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the true treatment effect of prison-based college education on recidivism.
Methods: Using data acquired from New York State, we use the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method to control for self-selection bias. The recidivism rate is compared between the treatment and matched comparison group. Also, fixed-effects logistic regression and Cox regression models are utilized to measure the effect of prison-based college programs on recidivism.
Results: We find that the recidivism rates within three years after release for college program completers and a PSM derived comparison group were 9.4% and 17.1% respectively. However, the recidivism rate for a comparison group not derived by the PSM method was more than double the rate of the PSM derived comparison group. Fixed-effects logistic regression and Cox regression models also confirm that prison-based college programs have a positive effect on reducing recidivism.
Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that inflated estimates of the treatment effect may result when research does not take self-selection bias into account and apply appropriate methods to compensate for that bias.
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Blessed Be the Social Tie That Binds: The Effects of Prison Visitation on Offender Recidivism
Grant Duwe & Valerie Clark
Criminal Justice Policy Review, May 2013, Pages 271-296
Abstract:
Following recent studies in Florida and Canada, we examine the effects of prison visitation on recidivism among 16,420 offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2007. Using multiple measures of visitation (any visit, total number of visits, visits per month, timing of visits, and number of individual visitors) and recidivism (new offense conviction and technical violation revocation), we found that visitation significantly decreased the risk of recidivism, a result that was robust across all of the Cox regression models that were estimated. The results also showed that visits from siblings, in-laws, fathers, and clergy were the most beneficial in reducing the risk of recidivism, whereas visits from ex-spouses significantly increased the risk. The findings suggest that revising prison visitation policies to make them more "visitor friendly" could yield public safety benefits by helping offenders establish a continuum of social support from prison to the community. We anticipate, however, that revising existing policies would not likely increase visitation to a significant extent among unvisited inmates, who comprised 39% of our sample. Accordingly, we suggest that correctional systems consider allocating greater resources to increase visitation among inmates with little or no social support.
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Jonathan Rolison, Yaniv Hanoch & Michaela Gummerum
Risk Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Risk-taking tendencies and environmental opportunities to commit crime are two key features in understanding criminal behavior. Upon release from prison, ex-prisoners have a much greater opportunity to engage in risky activity and to commit criminal acts. We hypothesized that ex-prisoners would exhibit greater risk-taking tendencies compared to prisoners who have fewer opportunities to engage in risky activity and who are monitored constantly by prison authorities. Using cumulative prospect theory to compare the risky choices of prisoners and ex-prisoners our study revealed that ex-prisoners who were within 16 weeks of their prison release made riskier choices than prisoners. Our data indicate that previous studies comparing prisoners behind bars with nonoffenders may have underestimated the risk-taking tendencies of offenders. The present findings emphasize the central role played by risk-taking attitudes in criminal offending and highlight a need to examine offenders after release from prison.
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Gordon Crews, Angela Crews & Catherine Burton
American Journal of Criminal Justice, June 2013, Pages 183-199
Abstract:
With the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT, the public and the government are looking for solutions to school violence. The National Rifle Association (NRA), a Second Amendment, pro-gun advocacy group, has proposed an "education and training emergency response program" called The National School Shield, which advocates the placement of armed security in schools. Although the program sounds provocative, serious questions complicate its plausibility, necessity, motive, and effectiveness. Furthermore, the potential policy and practical ramifications of encouraging armed security forces in U.S. schools are complex. The authors examined the proposal's key elements from a public policy perspective and determined that the NRA program would be expensive in terms of both implementation and civil and/or criminal liability, would increase juvenile contact with the criminal justice system, would increase the potential for injuries and deaths from firearms, and would potentially only serve to increase profits for those invested in security industries. More potentially effective and safe policy alternatives are offered.
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What's Yours Is Now Mine: Deviant Consumption Through Acquisitive Crime
Kelly Martin, John Cullen & Michael Martin
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, May 2013, Pages 140-157
Abstract:
Deviant consumption in the form of acquisitive crime, or the theft of material possessions by one person from another person or household, is prevalent in countries across the globe. Anomie theory provides a multilevel framework for understanding this prevalent and damaging form of consumer misbehavior, highlighting the societal factors propagating it. The authors conduct a multilevel study that analyzes reports from more than 58,000 households in 26 countries worldwide. Using hierarchical generalized linear modeling, they contrast household-level crime reports with country data on inequality and cultural values. The findings reveal that wealth inequality, achievement orientation, individualism, future orientation, and uncertainty - both individually and in combination - influence acquisitive crime prevalence. In particular, greater societal wealth inequality increases the positive effects of achievement orientation and uncertainty to promote acquisitive crime. The negative effects of a low future orientation in promoting acquisitive crime are also enhanced under greater inequality. The findings suggest public policy implications at both societal and individual household levels of analysis. Specifically, policies directed at underground markets coupled with consumption adequacy efforts may prove effective in curbing acquisitive crime.
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Mass Incarceration, Macrosociology, and the Poor
Bruce Western & Christopher Muller
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2013, Pages 166-189
Abstract:
The U.S. prison and jail population has grown fivefold in the 40 years since the early 1970s. The aggregate consequences of the growth in the penal system are widely claimed but have not been closely studied. We survey evidence for the aggregate relationship among the incarceration rate, employment rates, single-parenthood, public opinion, and crime. Employment among very low-skilled men has declined with rising incarceration. Punitive sentiment in public opinion has also softened as imprisonment increased. Single-parenthood and crime rates, however, are not systematically related to incarceration. We conclude with a discussion of the conceptual and empirical challenges that come with assessing the aggregate effects of mass incarceration on American poverty.
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Martin Hällsten, Ryszard Szulkin & Jerzy Sarnecki
British Journal of Criminology, May 2013, Pages 456-481
Abstract:
We examine the gap in registered crime between the children of immigrants and the children of native Swedes. We follow all individuals who completed compulsory schooling during the period 1990-93 in the Stockholm Metropolitan area (N = 63,462) up to their thirties and analyse how family of origin and neighbourhood segregation during adolescence, subsequent to arriving in Sweden, influence the gap in recorded crimes. For males, we are able to explain between half and three-quarters of the gap in crime by reference to parental socio-economic resources and neighbourhood segregation. For females, we can explain even more, sometimes the entire gap. In addition, we tentatively examine the role of co-nationality or culture by comparing the crime rates of randomly chosen pairs of individuals originating from the same country. We find only a small correlation in the crime of individuals who share the same origin, indicating that culture is unlikely to be a strong cause of crime among immigrants.
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Institutional Isolation And Crime: The Mediating Effect Of Disengaged Youth On Levels Of Crime
Shaun Thomas & Edward Shihadeh
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose that structural resource deprivation and a weak civic participatory culture foster institutional isolation among youth, which, in turn, elevates rates of crime. Robust institutional attachments are essential to mainstream cultural learning, the internalization of mainstream values, the development of local network ties, and pro-social behavior. Communities that fail to embed residents, particularly youth, within a conventional institutional framework are ill-equipped for concerted action and unable to defend community interest and solve common problems, including crime. Using county-level census data we identify a group of youth who are simultaneously disengaged from a wide swath of mainstream social institutions, those we term "floaters." Analyses of aggregate levels of homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and burglary around 2000 offer strong support for a mediation model indicating that structural deprivation and a weak civic participatory culture increase the presence of floaters which, in turn, raises levels of violent and property crime. We discuss the implications of our findings.
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Egohoods as Waves Washing across the City: A New Measure of "Neighborhoods"
John Hipp & Adam Boessen
Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Defining "neighborhoods" is a bedeviling challenge faced by all studies of neighborhood effects and ecological models of social processes. Although scholars frequently lament the inadequacies of the various existing definitions of "neighborhood," we argue that previous strategies relying on nonoverlapping boundaries such as block groups and tracts are fundamentally flawed. The approach taken here instead builds on insights of the mental mapping literature, the social networks literature, the daily activities pattern literature, and the travel to crime literature to propose a new definition of neighborhoods: egohoods. These egohoods are conceptualized as waves washing across the surface of cities, as opposed to independent units with nonoverlapping boundaries. This approach is illustrated using crime data from nine cities: Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Tucson. The results show that measures aggregated to our egohoods explain more of the variation in crime across the social environment than do models with measures aggregated to block groups or tracts. The results also suggest that measuring inequality in egohoods provides dramatically stronger positive effects on crime rates than when using the nonoverlapping boundary approach, highlighting the important new insights that can be obtained by using our egohood approach.
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White supremacist groups and hate crime
Sean Mulholland
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hate group activity may incite criminal behavior or serve as protection from bias-based violence. I find that the presence of one or more active white supremacist chapters is associated with higher hate crime rates. I reject the hypothesis that chapter presence and hate crimes are symptomatic of the overall level of bias-based violence. Moreover, I reject the hypothesis that white supremacist groups form in response to an increase in antiwhite hate crimes, particularly those perpetrated by nonwhites.
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Infanticide/Neonaticide: The Outlier Situation in the United States
Carl Malmquist
Aggression and Violent Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Comparing the contemporary situation of neonaticides and infanticides in the United States with other countries reveals two salient factors: (1) The punishment and disposition exacted on women in the United States is often extreme, and (2) The unpredictability of the legal disposition in such cases is pervasive, varying from a homicide conviction to probation. This is partly due, at least initially, to cases being classified under some degreee of homicide. Although the focus in this article is on neonaticides, none of the 50 states have any special infanticide or neonaticide stautes in contrast to the majority of other countries. Statutes of 50 other countries are provided in an Appendix. A review of earlier historical and cultural approaches is given preliminary to discussion of the outlier situation presently existing in the United States.
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Genital Abnormalities in Early Childhood in Sexual Homicide Perpetrators
Martin Rettenberger et al.
Journal of Sexual Medicine, April 2013, Pages 972-980
Introduction: The present study investigates the relevance of genital abnormalities (GA) like cryptorchidism, hypospadias, and phimosis usually diagnosed in early childhood for the development of psychosexual problems and deficits in a sample of N = 163 convicted sexual homicide perpetrators.
Aims: The first aim was to investigate the prevalence of early childhood GA in a sample of sexual homicide perpetrators. The second was to explore differences in the psychosexual development of participants with GA in early childhood compared with those without GA. It was expected that offenders with GA show specific problems in their psychosexual development compared with offenders without GA.
Methods: The data for the present study were obtained by reanalyzing an existing database derived from a large-scale research project about sexual homicide. Using a predominantly exploratory design we, therefore, divided the total sample into two subgroups (with vs. without indicators of GA).
Main Outcome Measures: Main outcome measures were the number of sexual homicide perpetrators showing GA in early childhood and the differences of subjects with and without GA with regard to their psychosexual development (i.e., according to sexual deviant interests or sexual dysfunctions).
Results: The prevalence of GA is substantially higher in this sample than epidemiological studies indicated in the normal population. This result provided first support for the importance of GA in the population of sexual homicide perpetrators. Further analyses indicate significant differences between both subgroups: Offenders with GA in early childhood showed indicators for more sexual dysfunctions (e.g., erectile dysfunction) in adulthood and a distinct tendency of more masochistic sexual interests.
Conclusion: Even if the exploratory design of the present investigation allows no causal conclusions between GA and sexual homicide offenses, the result provided support for the relevance of early childhood sexual diseases in the assessment (and treatment) of offenders who have committed severe sexual violence.
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Official Bias in Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Behaviour
Sytske Besemer, David Farrington & Catrien Bijleveld
British Journal of Criminology, May 2013, Pages 438-455
Abstract:
We investigated to what extent children of convicted parents might have a higher risk of a conviction themselves because criminal justice systems, such as the police and courts, focus more attention towards certain criminal families - a concept called official bias. Bias was measured using several variables: a convicted parent, low family income, low family socio-economic status, poor housing and a father's poor job record. A convicted parent as well as poorer social circumstances such as a father's poor job record, low family income and poor housing predicted an increased conviction risk while controlling for self-reported offending. The results support the official bias mechanism, but also suggest that other mechanisms are needed to explain intergenerational transmission of criminal convictions.
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Can student-perpetrated college crime be predicted based on precollege misconduct?
Carol Runyan et al.
Injury Prevention, forthcoming
Objectives: Many colleges assess criminal histories during the admissions process, in part, to address violence on campus. This study sought to examine the utility of screening as a means of reducing violence.
Methods: Using cohort and case-control analyses, we identified college misconduct through college records and self-reports on a confidential survey of graduating seniors, and examined precollege behaviour as indicated on admissions records, a survey and criminal background checks.
Results: One hundred and twenty students met our case definition of college misconduct, with an estimated OR of 5.28 (95% CI 1.92 to 14.48) associated with precollege misconduct revealed on the college application. However, only 3.3% (95% CI 1.0% to 8.0%) of college seniors engaging in college misconduct had reported precollege criminal behaviours on their applications and 8.5% (95% CI 2.4% to 20.4%) of applicants with a criminal history engaged in misconduct during college.
Discussion: Though precollege behaviour is a risk factor for college misconduct, screening questions on the application are not adequate to detect which students will engage in college misconduct. This pilot work would benefit from replication to determine the utility of criminal background investigations as part of admissions.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Going positive
Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?
Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers
NBER Working Paper, April 2013
Abstract:
Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple datasets, multiple definitions of "basic needs" and multiple questions about well-being, we find no support for this claim. The relationship between well-being and income is roughly linear-log and does not diminish as incomes rise. If there is a satiation point, we are yet to reach it.
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John Zelenski et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People report enjoying momentary extraverted behavior, and this does not seem to depend on trait levels of introversion-extraversion. Assuming that introverts desire enjoyment, this finding raises the question, why do introverts not act extraverted more often? This research explored a novel explanation, that trait introverts make an affective forecasting error, underpredicting the hedonic benefits of extraverted behavior. Study 1 (n = 97) found that trait introverts forecast less activated positive and pleasant affect and more negative and self-conscious affect (compared to extraverts) when asked to imagine acting extraverted, but not introverted, across a variety of hypothetical situations. Studies 2-5 (combined n = 495) found similar results using a between-subjects approach and laboratory situations. We replicated findings that people enjoy acting extraverted and that this does not depend on disposition. Accordingly, the personality differences in affective forecasts represent errors. In these studies, introverts tended to be less accurate, particularly by overestimating the negative affect and self-consciousness associated with their extraverted behavior. This may explain why introverts do not act extraverted more often (i.e., they overestimate hedonic costs that do not actually materialize) and have implications for understanding, and potentially trying to change, introverts' characteristically lower levels of happiness.
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The Thrill of (Absolute) Victory: Success Among Many Enhances Emotional Payoffs
Ed O'Brien & Linda Hagen
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
The emotional value of placing in a given percentile of a competition (e.g., placing in the "top 10%") depends on how many competitors are involved. Five studies reveal that winning among larger groups is associated with more positive emotional reactions than winning among smaller groups, even when the objective chances for success are held constant. Participants thought that a runner would feel happier after placing in the top 10% in a race with many (vs. few) competitors (Experiment 1); participants who imagined placing in the top 10% of a trivia quiz predicted that they would feel happier after succeeding among many (vs. few) respondents (Experiment 2); and participants who were given randomly assigned false feedback that they placed in the top 10% of a real creativity challenge actually felt happier when the pool was described as containing many (vs. few) contestants (Experiment 3). This effect appears to be driven by participants' intuitions about the statistical law of large numbers: when people think about success among large pools, they infer that the outcome is more diagnostic of "true" abilities - that the performance must not be a fluke - compared with identical success among small pools, which provides an affective boost (Experiments 4-5).
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Hope in the Middle East: Malleability Beliefs, Hope, and the Willingness to Compromise for Peace
Smadar Cohen-Chen et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The importance of hope has long been asserted in the field of conflict resolution. However, little is actually known about either how to induce hope or what effects hope has on conciliatory attitudes. In the current research, we tested whether (1) hope is based upon beliefs regarding conflict malleability and (2) hope predicts support for concessions for peace. Study 1, a correlational study conducted among Israeli Jews, revealed that malleability beliefs regarding conflicts in general are associated with hope regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as with support for concessions. In Study 2, we established causality using an experimental manipulation of beliefs regarding conflicts being malleable (vs. fixed). Findings have both theoretical and practical implications regarding inducing hope in intractable conflicts, thus promoting the attitudes so critical for peacemaking.
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Ori Heffetz & Matthew Rabin
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
A growing literature explores differences in subjective well-being across demographic groups, often relying on surveys with high nonresponse rates. By using the reported number of call attempts made to participants in the University of Michigan's Surveys of Consumers, we show that comparisons among easy-to-reach respondents differ from comparisons among hard-to-reach ones. Notably, easy-to-reach women are happier than easy-to-reach men, but hard-to-reach men are happier than hard-to-reach women, and conclusions of a survey could reverse with more attempted calls. Better alternatives to comparing group sample averages might include putting greater weight on hard-to-reach respondents or even extrapolating trends in responses.
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Kristin Layous, Katherine Nelson & Sonja Lyubomirsky
Journal of Happiness Studies, April 2013, Pages 635-654
Abstract:
A 4-week-long experiment examined the effects of a positive activity intervention in which students wrote about their "best possible selves" (BPS) once a week. We manipulated two factors that might affect the success of the happiness-increasing activity - whether the positive activity was administered online versus in-person and whether the participant read a persuasive peer testimonial before completing the activity. Our results indicated that the BPS activity significantly boosted positive affect and flow and marginally increased feelings of relatedness. No differences were found between participants who completed the positive activity online versus in-person. However, students who read a testimonial extolling the virtues of the BPS activity showed larger gains in well-being than those who read neutral information or completed a control task. The results lend legitimacy to online self-administered happiness-increasing activities and highlight the importance of participants' beliefs in the efficacy of such activities for optimum results.
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Encounters With Objective Coherence and the Experience of Meaning in Life
Samantha Heintzelman, Jason Trent & Laura King
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The experience of meaning is often conceptualized as involving reliable pattern or coherence. However, research has not addressed whether exposure to pattern or coherence influences the phenomenological experience of meaning in life. Four studies tested the prediction that exposure to objective coherence (vs. incoherence) would lead to higher reports of meaning in life. In Studies 1 and 2 (combined N = 214), adults rated photographs of trees presented in patterns (organized around their seasonal content) or randomly. Participants in the pattern conditions reported higher meaning in life than those in the random conditions. Studies 3 and 4 (combined N = 229) yielded similar results when participants read coherent, as opposed to incoherent, linguistic triads. The manipulations did not influence explicit or implicit affect. Implications for understanding the human experience of meaning, the processes that support that experience, and its potential role in adaptation are discussed.
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Thanks? Gratitude and well-being over the Thanksgiving holiday among college students
Blake Allan, Michael Steger & Joo Yeon Shin
Journal of Positive Psychology, March/April 2013, Pages 91-102
Abstract:
This study examined the interaction of the Thanksgiving holiday with gratitude in relation to well-being using a three-week long, daily diary design with a sample of 172 undergraduate students. Multilevel modeling revealed that without controlling for gratitude, people reported higher levels of positive affect on Thanksgiving holiday than during other days of the study. Reports of life satisfaction, meaning in life, and negative affect did not differ during the holiday. When within-person and between-person levels of gratitude were included, negative relationships were revealed between Thanksgiving and life satisfaction and positive affect. The results from this study sustain the argument that holidays impact people's well-being depending on certain individual psychological characteristics. In the case of Thanksgiving, gratitude was critical for understanding whether the holiday appeared to positively or negatively influence life satisfaction and positive affect. The present study also supported an important role for gratitude in achieving and maintaining well-being.
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Neural correlates of the "good life": Eudaimonic well-being is associated with insular cortex volume
Gary Lewis et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Eudaimonic well-being reflects traits concerned with personal growth, self-acceptance, purpose in life, and autonomy (among others), and is a substantial predictor of life events, including health. While interest in the etiology of eudaimonic well-being has blossomed in recent years, little is known of the underlying neural substrates of this construct. To address this gap in our knowledge, here we examined whether regional gray matter volume was associated with eudaimonic-wellbeing. Structural MR images from 70 young, healthy adults who also completed Ryff's 42-item measure of the six core facets of eudaimonia were analysed with voxel-based morphometry techniques. We found that eudaimonic well-being was positively associated with right insular cortex gray matter volume. This association was also reflected in three of the sub-scales of eudaimonia: personal growth, positive relations, and purpose in life. Positive relations also showed a significant association with left insula volume. No other significant associations were observed, although personal growth was marginally associated with left insula, and purpose in life exhibited a marginally significant negative association with middle temporal gyrus gray matter volume. These findings are the first to our knowledge linking eudaimonic well-being with regional brain structure.
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Would You Be Happier Living in a Greener Urban Area? A Fixed-Effects Analysis of Panel Data
Mathew White et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Urbanization is a potential threat to mental health and well-being. Cross-sectional evidence suggests that living closer to urban green spaces, such as parks, is associated with lower mental distress. However, earlier research was unable to control for time-invariant heterogeneity (e.g., personality) and focused on indicators of poor psychological health. The current research advances the field by using panel data from over 10,000 individuals to explore the relation between urban green space and well-being (indexed by ratings of life satisfaction) and between urban green space and mental distress (indexed by General Health Questionnaire scores) for the same people over time. Controlling for individual and regional covariates, we found that, on average, individuals have both lower mental distress and higher well-being when living in urban areas with more green space. Although effects at the individual level were small, the potential cumulative benefit at the community level highlights the importance of policies to protect and promote urban green spaces for well-being.
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Jessica de Bloom, Sabine Geurts & Michiel Kompier
Journal of Happiness Studies, April 2013, Pages 613-633
Abstract:
Most vacations seem to have strong, but rather short-lived effects on health and well-being (H&W). However, the recovery-potential of relatively long vacations and the underlying processes have been disregarded. Therefore, our study focused on vacations longer than 14 days and on the psychological processes associated with such a long respite from work. In the present study, we investigated (1) how health and well-being (H&W) develop during and after a long summer vacation, (2) whether changes in H&W during and after vacation relate to vacation activities and experiences and (3) whether changes in H&W during and after vacation relate to sleep. Fifty-four employees reported their H&W before, three or four times during and five times after vacation. Vacations lasted 23 days on average. Information on vacation experiences, work-related activities and sleep was collected during vacation. Vacation activities were assessed immediately after vacation. H&W increased quickly during vacation, peaked on the eighth vacation day and had rapidly returned to baseline level within the first week of work resumption. Vacation duration and most vacation activities were only weakly associated with H&W changes during and after vacation. Engagement in passive activities, savoring, pleasure derived from activities, relaxation, control and sleep showed strong relations with improved H&W during and to a lesser degree after vacation. In conclusion, H&W improved during long summer vacations, but this positive effect was short-lived. Vacation experiences, especially pleasure, relaxation, savoring and control, seem to be especially important for the strength and persistence of vacation (after-) effects.
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The unbearable lightness of meaning: Well-being and unstable meaning in life
Michael Steger & Todd Kashdan
The Journal of Positive Psychology, March/April 2013, Pages 103-115
Abstract:
Psychological theories prioritize developing enduring sources of meaning in life. As such, unstable meaning should be detrimental to well-being. Two daily experience sampling studies were conducted to test this hypothesis. Across the studies, people with greater instability of daily meaning reported lower daily levels of meaning in life, and lower global levels of life satisfaction, positive affect, social connectedness and relationship satisfaction, along with higher global levels of negative affect and depression. In addition, instability of meaning interacted with average daily levels of meaning to account for significant variance in meaning in life scores. Relative to people with more stable meaning, people with unstable meaning tended to score near the middle of the distribution of well-being, whether they reported high or low levels of daily meaning. Results are discussed with an eye toward a better understanding of meaning in life and developing interventions to stabilize and maximize well-being.
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Easy to Retrieve but Hard to Believe: Metacognitive Discounting of the Unpleasantly Possible
Ed O'Brien
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People who recall or forecast many pleasant moments should perceive themselves as happier in the past or future than people who generate few such moments; the same principle should apply to generating unpleasant moments and perceiving unhappiness. Five studies suggest that this is not always true. Rather, people's metacognitive experience of ease of thought retrieval ("fluency") can affect perceived well-being over time beyond actual thought content. The easier it is to recall positive past experiences, the happier people think they were at the time; likewise, the easier it is to recall negative past experiences, the unhappier people think they were. But this is not the case for predicting the future. Although people who easily generate positive forecasts predict more future happiness, people who easily generate negative forecasts do not infer future unhappiness. Given pervasive tendencies to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events, people apparently discount hard-to-believe metacognitive feelings (e.g., easily imagined unpleasant futures). Paradoxically, people's well-being may be maximized when they contemplate some bad moments or just a few good moments.
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Feelings of restoration from recent nature visits
Mathew White et al.
Journal of Environmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Exposure to natural environments can help restore depleted emotional and cognitive resources. However, investigation of the relative impacts of different natural environments among large samples is limited. Using data from 4,255 respondents drawn from Natural England's Monitoring Engagement with the Natural Environment survey (2009-2011), we investigated feelings of restoration (calm, relaxed, revitalized and refreshed) recalled by individuals after visits to different natural environments within the last week. Controlling for demographic and visit characteristics we found that of the broad environmental categories, coastal visits were associated with the most restoration and town and urban parks with the least. In terms of specific environmental types two "green space" locations (woodlands/forests and hills/moorland/mountains) were associated with levels of restoration comparable to coastal locations. Urban playing fields were associated with the least restoration. Restoration was positively associated with visit duration (a potential dose-response effect), and visits with children were associated with less restoration than visits alone. There was little evidence that different activities (e.g. walking, exercising) were associated with differences in restoration. The data may improve our understanding of the "cultural eco-system services" provided by different natural environments and help decision makers keen to invest scare resources in those environments most associated with psychological benefits.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Going negative
Loneliness Promotes Inflammation During Acute Stress
Lisa Jaremka et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although evidence suggests that loneliness may increase risk for health problems, the mechanisms responsible are not well understood. Immune dysregulation is one potential pathway: Elevated proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-6 (IL-6) increase risk for health problems. In our first study (N = 134), lonelier healthy adults exposed to acute stress exhibited greater synthesis of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) and IL-6 by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) stimulated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) than their less lonely counterparts. Similarly, in the second study (N = 144), lonelier posttreatment breast-cancer survivors exposed to acute stress exhibited greater synthesis of IL-6 and interleukin-1 beta (IL-1β) by LPS-stimulated PBMCs than their counterparts who felt more socially connected. However, loneliness was unrelated to TNF-α in Study 2, although the result was in the expected direction. Thus, two different populations demonstrated that lonelier participants had more stimulated cytokine production in response to stress than less lonely participants, which reflects a proinflammatory phenotype. These data provide a glimpse into the pathways through which loneliness may affect health.
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The Effect of High-Anxiety Situations on Conspiracy Thinking
Monika Grzesiak-Feldman
Current Psychology, March 2013, Pages 100-118
Abstract:
The aim of the present studies was to examine a possible relationship between anxiety and conspiracy thinking about ethnic and national groups. Two hundred university student volunteers participated in 3 studies. Study One (N = 87; mixed male and female sample) found that state-anxiety and trait-anxiety, measured with the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), were positively correlated with conspiracy thinking about Jewish people, Germans and Arabs. Study Two (N = 46; male sample) and Study Three (N = 67; female sample) were designed to check whether a high-anxiety situation (connected with waiting for an examination) would increase conspiracy thinking. Findings from Studies Two and Three showed that the pre-exam (high-anxiety) situation increased conspiracy thinking about Jewish people. This effect was not mediated by state-anxiety. Hence, further research should focus on searching for possible mediators of the relationship between a pre-exam situation and conspiracy thinking. The obtained results are consistent with previous findings showing that conspiracy thinking about Jewish people is sensitive to situational factors and with findings on links between anxiety and processing information about threat-related stimuli.
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Predicting National Suicide Numbers with Social Media Data
Hong-Hee Won et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2013
Abstract:
Suicide is not only an individual phenomenon, but it is also influenced by social and environmental factors. With the high suicide rate and the abundance of social media data in South Korea, we have studied the potential of this new medium for predicting completed suicide at the population level. We tested two social media variables (suicide-related and dysphoria-related weblog entries) along with classical social, economic and meteorological variables as predictors of suicide over 3 years (2008 through 2010). Both social media variables were powerfully associated with suicide frequency. The suicide variable displayed high variability and was reactive to celebrity suicide events, while the dysphoria variable showed longer secular trends, with lower variability. We interpret these as reflections of social affect and social mood, respectively. In the final multivariate model, the two social media variables, especially the dysphoria variable, displaced two classical economic predictors - consumer price index and unemployment rate. The prediction model developed with the 2-year training data set (2008 through 2009) was validated in the data for 2010 and was robust in a sensitivity analysis controlling for celebrity suicide effects. These results indicate that social media data may be of value in national suicide forecasting and prevention.
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Seth Disner et al.
Clinical Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Biased attention toward negative stimuli is a known vulnerability for affective psychopathology. However, factors that contribute to the development of this cognitive bias are largely unknown. Variation within the serotonin transporter gene (i.e., 5-HTTLPR) is associated with increased susceptibility to environmental influence and biased processing of negative stimuli. Using a passive viewing eye-tracking paradigm, this study examined gaze fixation for emotion stimuli in 91 U.S. Army soldiers before and after deployment to Iraq. In addition, participants underwent genetic assay and provided in situ measures of war zone stress exposure. 5-HTTLPR short allele homozygotes were more likely than other genotype groups to develop a gaze bias toward negative stimuli as a function of increasing war zone stress, even when controlling for postdeployment posttraumatic stress disorder and depression severity. Short allele homozygotes appear especially sensitive to environmental influence, which likely contributes to the development of cognitive vulnerability to anxiety and mood disorders.
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Tong Wu & J.C. Barnes
Journal of Criminal Justice, May-June 2013, Pages 188-195
Purpose: Psychopathy is often defined as a personality disorder that manifests as a constellation of characteristics including a lack of affective emotions, manipulative and irresponsible interpersonal reactions, and impulsive and sometimes violent behaviors. Prior studies have shown that genetic factors may have some influence on the etiology of psychopathy, but there is little evidence on which specific genes may play a role.
Methods: This study examines the correlation between three dopamine genes - DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4 - and psychopathic personality traits.
Results: The results of this study demonstrate that two of the examined genes predict psychopathic personality traits in the hypothesized direction (DRD2: b = .69 p < .05; DRD4: b = 1.02 p < .05).
Conclusions: These findings emphasize the importance of the dopaminergic system in the etiology of psychopathic personality traits, providing guidance for future researchers.
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Alison Parkes et al.
Archives of Disease in Childhood, May 2013, Pages 341-348
Background: Screen entertainment for young children has been associated with several aspects of psychosocial adjustment. Most research is from North America and focuses on television. Few longitudinal studies have compared the effects of TV and electronic games, or have investigated gender differences.
Purpose: To explore how time watching TV and playing electronic games at age 5 years each predicts change in psychosocial adjustment in a representative sample of 7 year-olds from the UK.
Methods: Typical daily hours viewing television and playing electronic games at age 5 years were reported by mothers of 11 014 children from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Conduct problems, emotional symptoms, peer relationship problems, hyperactivity/inattention and prosocial behaviour were reported by mothers using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Change in adjustment from age 5 years to 7 years was regressed on screen exposures; adjusting for family characteristics and functioning, and child characteristics.
Results: Watching TV for 3 h or more at 5 years predicted a 0.13 point increase (95% CI 0.03 to 0.24) in conduct problems by 7 years, compared with watching for under an hour, but playing electronic games was not associated with conduct problems. No associations were found between either type of screen time and emotional symptoms, hyperactivity/inattention, peer relationship problems or prosocial behaviour. There was no evidence of gender differences in the effect of screen time.
Conclusions: TV but not electronic games predicted a small increase in conduct problems. Screen time did not predict other aspects of psychosocial adjustment. Further work is required to establish causal mechanisms.
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Cognitive Vulnerability to Depression Can Be Contagious
Gerald Haeffel & Jennifer Hames
Clinical Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cognitive vulnerability is a potent risk factor for depression. Individual differences in cognitive vulnerability solidify in early adolescence and remain stable throughout the life span. However, stability does not mean immutability. We hypothesized that cognitive vulnerability would be susceptible to change during major life transitions when social milieus undergo significant changes (e.g., moving to college). Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that cognitive vulnerability could change via a contagion effect. We tested this hypothesis using a prospective longitudinal design with a sample of randomly assigned college freshmen roommate pairs (103 pairs). Results supported the hypotheses. Participants who were randomly assigned to a roommate with high levels of cognitive vulnerability were likely to "catch" their roommate's cognitive style and develop higher levels of cognitive vulnerability. Moreover, those who experienced an increase in cognitive vulnerability had significantly greater levels of depressive symptoms over the prospective interval than those who did not.
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The role of under-employment and unemployment in recent birth cohort effects in Australian suicide
Andrew Page et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
High suicide rates evident in Australian young adults during an epidemic period in the 1990s appear to have been sustained in older age-groups in the subsequent decade. This period also coincides with changes in employment patterns in Australia. This study investigates age, period, and birth cohort effects in Australian suicide over the 20th century, with particular reference to the period subsequent to the 1990s youth suicide epidemic in young males. Period- and cohort-specific trends in suicide were examined for 1907-2010 based on descriptive analysis of age-specific suicide rates and a series of age-period-cohort (APC) models using Poisson regression. Under-employment rates (those employed part-time seeking additional hours of work) and unemployment rates (those currently seeking employment) for the latter part of this time series (1978-2010) were also examined and compared with period- and cohort-specific trends in suicide. A significant increasing birth cohort effect in male suicide rates was evident in birth cohorts born after 1970-74, after adjusting for the effects age and period. An increasing birth cohort effect was also evident in female suicide rates, but was of a lesser magnitude. Increases in male cohort-specific suicide rates were significantly correlated with increases in cohort-specific under-employment and unemployment rates. Birth cohorts that experienced the peak of the suicide epidemic during the 1990s have continued to have higher suicide rates than cohorts born in earlier epochs. This increase coincides with changes to a labour force characterised by greater ‘flexibility' and ‘casualised' employment, especially in younger aged cohorts.
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Divya Mehta et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Childhood maltreatment is likely to influence fundamental biological processes and engrave long-lasting epigenetic marks, leading to adverse health outcomes in adulthood. We aimed to elucidate the impact of different early environment on disease-related genome-wide gene expression and DNA methylation in peripheral blood cells in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Compared with the same trauma-exposed controls (n = 108), gene-expression profiles of PTSD patients with similar clinical symptoms and matched adult trauma exposure but different childhood adverse events (n = 32 and 29) were almost completely nonoverlapping (98%). These differences on the level of individual transcripts were paralleled by the enrichment of several distinct biological networks between the groups. Moreover, these gene-expression changes were accompanied and likely mediated by changes in DNA methylation in the same loci to a much larger proportion in the childhood abuse (69%) vs. the non-child abuse-only group (34%). This study is unique in providing genome-wide evidence of distinct biological modifications in PTSD in the presence or absence of exposure to childhood abuse. The findings that nonoverlapping biological pathways seem to be affected in the two PTSD groups and that changes in DNA methylation appear to have a much greater impact in the childhood-abuse group might reflect differences in the pathophysiology of PTSD, in dependence of exposure to childhood maltreatment. These results contribute to a better understanding of the extent of influence of differences in trauma exposure on pathophysiological processes in stress-related psychiatric disorders and may have implications for personalized medicine.
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Jonathan Hill et al.
Genes, Brain and Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The low activity variant of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) functional promoter polymorphism, MAOA-LPR, in interaction with adverse environments (G x E) is associated with child and adult antisocial behavior disorders. MAOA is expressed during fetal development so in utero G x E may influence early neurodevelopment. We tested the hypothesis that MAOA G x E during pregnancy predicts infant negative emotionality soon after birth. In an epidemiological longitudinal study starting in pregnancy, using a two stage stratified design, we ascertained MAOA-LPR status (low versus high activity variants) from the saliva of 209 infants (104 boys, 105 girls), and examined predictions to observed infant negative emotionality at 5 weeks post-partum from life events during pregnancy. In analyses weighted to provide estimates for the general population, and including possible confounders for life events, there was an MAOA status by life events interaction (p = .017). There was also an interaction between MAOA status and neighborhood deprivation (p = .028). Both interactions arose from a greater effect of increasing life events on negative emotionality in the MAOA-LPR low activity, compared to MAOA-LPR high activity infants. The study provides the first evidence of moderation by MAOA-LPR of the effect of the social environment in pregnancy on negative emotionality in infancy, an early risk for the development of child and adult antisocial behavior disorders.
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Impact of early vs. late childhood early life stress on brain morphometrics
Laurie Baker et al.
Brain Imaging and Behavior, June 2013, Pages 196-203
Abstract:
Previous studies of early life trauma suggest that in addition to its emotional impact, exposure to early life stress (ELS) is associated with alterations in brain structure. However, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between emotional processing and brain integrity as a function of age of ELS onset. In the present study we examined whether ELS onset in older ages of youth rather than younger ages is associated with smaller limbic and basal ganglia volumes as measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We hypothesized that later age of manifestation during youth is associated with smaller volumetric morphology in limbic and basal ganglia volumes in adulthood. A total of 173 individuals were divided into three groups based on the age of self-reported ELS. The three groups included individuals only experiencing early childhood ELS (1 month-7 years, n = 38), those only experiencing later childhood ELS (8 years -17 years, n = 59), and those who have not experienced ELS (n = 76). Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), hippocampus, amygdala, insula and caudate volumes were measured using a T1-weighted MRI. Analyses confirmed that later childhood ELS was associated with volumetric reductions in the ACC and insula volumes, while ELS experienced between the ages of 1 month and 7 years was not associated with lower brain volumes in these regions. The results may reflect the influence of more fully developed emotional processing of ELS on the developing brain and reinforce a body of research implicating both the ACC and insula in neuropsychiatric disorders and emotional regulation.
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When Early Experiences Build a Wall to Others' Emotions: An Electrophysiological and Autonomic Study
Martina Ardizzi et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2013
Abstract:
Facial expression of emotions is a powerful vehicle for communicating information about others' emotional states and it normally induces facial mimicry in the observers. The aim of this study was to investigate if early aversive experiences could interfere with emotion recognition, facial mimicry, and with the autonomic regulation of social behaviors. We conducted a facial emotion recognition task in a group of "street-boys" and in an age-matched control group. We recorded facial electromyography (EMG), a marker of facial mimicry, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an index of the recruitment of autonomic system promoting social behaviors and predisposition, in response to the observation of facial expressions of emotions. Results showed an over-attribution of anger, and reduced EMG responses during the observation of both positive and negative expressions only among street-boys. Street-boys also showed lower RSA after observation of facial expressions and ineffective RSA suppression during presentation of non-threatening expressions. Our findings suggest that early aversive experiences alter not only emotion recognition but also facial mimicry of emotions. These deficits affect the autonomic regulation of social behaviors inducing lower social predisposition after the visualization of facial expressions and an ineffective recruitment of defensive behavior in response to non-threatening expressions.
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What's Mine is Mine and What's Yours is Mine: The Dark Triad and Gambling with your Neighbor's Money
Daniel Jones
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
Risking other people's money for personal gain is a growing problem. Three traits (termed the Dark Triad) predicted selfish financial behavior: (a) reckless psychopathy, and (b) overconfident narcissism, and (c) strategic Machiavellianism. Participants in Study 1 completed Dark Triad measures and were randomly assigned to gamble with their own bonus or a bonus belonging to the next participant. Psychopathy correlated with gambling with someone else's money, but not one's own money, in a game of certain loss. Narcissism correlated with losing more of someone else's money. Study 2 produced similar results even when participants' bonuses were untouched. Overall, psychopathy predicted gambling with someone else's bonus, and narcissism predicted greater losses. These findings highlight differential financial consequences among the Dark Triad.
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Marieke Tollenaar et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Background: Oxytocin is known to enhance recognition of emotional expressions and may increase attention to the eye region. Therefore, we investigated whether oxytocin administration would lead to increased orienting of attention in response to gaze cues of emotional faces.
Methods: In a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind crossover study 20 healthy males received 24 IU of oxytocin or placebo. Thirty-five minutes after administration they performed a gaze cueing task with happy, fearful and neutral faces. Stress levels were measured throughout the study.
Results: Oxytocin did not affect stress levels during the study, but significantly increased gaze cueing scores for happy and fearful expressions compared to placebo. No effects were found for neutral expressions. Trait anxiety or depression did not moderate the effect.
Conclusions: Oxytocin increases orienting of attention in response to emotional gaze cues, both for happy and fearful expressions. Replication is needed in female and clinical populations. Effects of oxytocin on early, automatic processing levels should be studied in relation to previously found pro-social and behavioral effects of oxytocin.
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Kristin Prehn et al.
Psychophysiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
To investigate the mechanisms by which oxytocin improves socioaffective processing, we measured behavioral and pupillometric data during a dynamic facial emotion recognition task. In a double-blind between-subjects design, 47 men received either 24 IU intranasal oxytocin (OXT) or a placebo (PLC). Participants in the OXT group recognized all facial expressions at lower intensity levels than did participants in the PLC group. Improved performance was accompanied by increased task-related pupil dilation, indicating an increased recruitment of attentional resources. We also found increased pupil dilation during the processing of female compared with male faces. This gender-specific stimulus effect diminished in the OXT group, in which pupil size specifically increased for male faces. Results suggest that improved emotion recognition after OXT treatment might be due to an intensified processing of stimuli that usually do not recruit much attention.
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Experimental Human Endotoxemia Enhances Brain Activity During Social Cognition
Jennifer Kullmann et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Acute peripheral inflammation with corresponding increases in peripheral cytokines affects neuropsychological functions and induces depression-like symptoms. However, possible effects of increased immune responses on social cognition remain unknown. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of experimentally induced acute inflammation on performance and neural responses during a social cognition task assessing Theory of Mind (ToM) ability. In this double-blind, randomized crossover functional magnetic resonance imaging study, 18 healthy, right-handed male volunteers received an injection of bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS; 0.4 ng/kg) or saline, respectively. Plasma levels of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines as well as mood ratings were analyzed together with brain activation during a validated ToM task (i.e., Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test). LPS administration induced pronounced transient increases in pro- (IL-6, TNF-α) and anti-inflammatory (IL-10, IL-1ra) cytokines as well as decreases in mood. Social cognition performance was not affected by acute inflammation. However, altered neural activity was observed during the ToM task after LPS administration reflected by increased responses in the fusiform gyrus, temporo-parietal junction, superior temporal gyrus and precuneus. The increased task-related neural responses in the LPS condition may reflect a compensatory strategy or a greater social cognitive processing as a function of sickness.
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.
