Thursday, March 1, 2012
Wrong side of the law
Dirty Hands or Deterrence? An Experimental Examination of the Exclusionary Rule
Kenworthey Bilz
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, March 2012, Pages 149-171
Abstract:
Historically, the Supreme Court has offered two justifications for the exclusionary rule: (1) it protects the integrity of the judicial system from "dirty" evidence and (2) it deters illegal searches by the police. The former justification has mostly fallen out of favor. Today, decisions turn on whether the rule would, in fact, deter illegal searches in a given class of cases. As such, most empirical studies about the rule have focused on whether or not the rule leads to fewer police searches (illegal or otherwise), or to fewer criminal convictions. This study takes a completely different approach, assessing support for the two competing justifications for the rule. Two experiments show support for the integrity justification for the rule, but not for the deterrence justification. Specifically, when deciding whether to exclude evidence found during a search conducted without probable cause, participants are sensitive to a police officer's motive (clean vs. dirty), but not to alternative means of punishing those officers (civil suit, citizen-police review board). A third experiment examines the integrity rationale in more detail. Participants who were obligated to use dirty evidence at trial disproportionately selected a bottle of Purell over a pen as a thank-you gift versus participants who were able to exclude that evidence. In other words, the exclusionary rule seems to protect the courts from being metaphorically tainted. These findings are important given that the rule is not constitutionally mandated. The Supreme Court has held that the rule can be ignored to the extent that it (1) does not achieve its goals and (2) undermines the perceived legitimacy of the courts by the public. Given this, the Court needs to be right about what those goals are, and whether or not its current deterrence-based jurisprudence enhances legitimacy. These experiments suggest the possibility that reinvigorating the integrity justification would serve the ends of the rule better than current doctrine does.
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David Baldus et al.
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 2011, Pages 1227-1336
Abstract:
This Article presents evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty in the United States Armed Forces from 1984 through 2005. Our database includes military prosecutions in all potentially death-eligible cases known to us (n = 105) during that time period. Over the last thirty years, studies of state death-penalty systems have documented three types of evidence of racial disparities in the treatment of similarly situated death-eligible offenders. The most common disparity or "race effect" is that capital charging and sentencing decisions are applied more punitively in cases involving one or more white victims than they are in similar cases with no white victims. These disparities are generally viewed as evidence of "race of victim" discrimination in the system. The next most common race-based disparity is the more punitive treatment of cases involving a black or minority defendant and one or more white victims compared to the treatment of cases involving all other similarly situated defendant/victim racial combinations. These disparities are viewed as evidence of "minority-defendant/white-victim" discrimination in the system. The least common racially based disparity is the more punitive treatment of cases involving black and minority defendants compared to the treatment of similarly situated white-defendant cases, regardless of the race of the victim involved in the case. These race effects are usually referred to as evidence of "independent" or "main effect" racial discrimination. The data in this study document white-victim and minority-accused/white-victim disparities in charging and sentencing outcomes that are consistent with these findings. The data also document independent minority-accused disparities of a magnitude that is rarely seen in state court systems. The principal source of the white-victim disparities in the system is the combined effect of convening authority charging decisions and court-martial panel findings of guilt at trial - decisions that advance death-eligible cases to capital sentencing hearings. The principal source of the independent minority-accused disparities in the system is the death-sentencing decisions of panel members in capital sentencing hearings. The evidence in the sixteen cases with multiple victims, which are the principal source of the race effects in the system, supports Supreme Court Justice Byron White's hypothesis that in death-eligible murder cases, the greatest risk of "racial prejudice" exists in highly aggravated minority-accused/white-victim cases. There is, however, little or no risk of racial prejudice among the small group of cases that constitute the most aggravated military cases - those with substantial military implications because they involve lethal attacks on United States troops or commissioned officer victims. Limiting death eligibility to death-eligible murders with substantial military implications could substantially reduce or entirely eliminate the risk of racial bias in the administration of the military death penalty. Without regard to the race of the defendant and victims, those cases uniformly receive more punitive treatment than "civilian-style" murder cases that have no military implications. This has particularly been the case between 1990 and 2005. Militarily implicated cases have accounted for 75% (6/8) of the military death sentences imposed during that period.
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Peter Leeson & Christopher Coyne
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyzes trial by poison ingestion, or "sassywood," as an institution of criminal justice in contemporary Liberia. We argue that effective criminal justice institutions must satisfy three conditions: they must be accessible to citizens, incentivize judicial administrators to pursue justice instead of private ends, and generate useful information about accused criminals' guilt or innocence. Liberia's formal criminal justice institutions fail to satisfy these conditions. Sassywood does a better job of fulfilling them. Sassywood is more accessible than Liberia's formal criminal justice institutions. It provides judicial administrators stronger incentives to pursue justice. And, unexpectedly, it's capable of generating useful information about criminal defendants' guilt or innocence where Liberia's formal criminal justice institutions do not. The theory this paper provides offers a plausible explanation of why sassywood is a sensible institutional substitute for formal Liberian criminal justice.
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Racial Threat, Suspicion, and Police Behavior: The Impact of Race and Place in Traffic Enforcement
Kenneth Novak & Mitchell Chamlin
Crime & Delinquency, March 2012, Pages 275-300
Abstract:
Racial bias in traffic enforcement has become a popular line of inquiry, but examinations into explanations for the disparity have been scant. The current research integrates theoretical insights from the racial threat hypothesis with inferences drawn from the empirical analyses of the factors that stimulate officer suspicion. The most intriguing finding from this beat-level examination of the structural predictors of several traffic stop outcome measures concerns the conditional effect of the racial composition of the beat on search rates. The analyses reveal that the search rate increases in areas where the proportion of Black residents is higher; however, this finding is observed only for White motorists. This finding is interpreted as indicating that structural characteristics of an area can provide cues to officers regarding who belongs in that environment. As a result, social control increases among groups whose racial characteristics are inconsistent with the neighborhood racial composition.
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Age Matters: Race Differences in Police Searches of Young and Older Male Drivers
Richard Rosenfeld, Jeff Rojek & Scott Decker
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, February 2012, Pages 31-55
Abstract:
Prior research on police searches of motorists has consistently found that Black drivers are more likely to be searched than White drivers. The authors argue that race differences in police searches depend on the driver's age. In logistic regression and propensity-score matching analyses of St. Louis police traffic stops, the authors find that young Black males are subjected to discretionary searches at higher rates than are young White males. By contrast, among drivers age 30 and older, Black males are no more likely, and in some analyses are less likely, than White males to be subjected to a discretionary search. The study findings are consistent with studies of young Black males' negative experience with and attitudes toward the police. If replicated in future research, however, the findings suggest that it may be difficult to prove that police searches of young Black males result primarily from racial bias or unlawful discrimination.
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David Kirk
Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many former prisoners return home to the same residential environment, with the same criminal opportunities and criminal peers, where they resided before incarceration. If the path to desistance from crime largely requires knifing off from past situations and establishing a new set of routine activities, then returning to one's old environment and routines may drastically limit an ex-prisoner's already dismal chances of desisting from crime. This study tests these ideas by examining how forced residential migration caused by Hurricane Katrina affected the likelihood of reincarceration among a sample of ex-prisoners originally from New Orleans, LA. Property damage from the hurricane induced some ex-prisoners who otherwise would have moved back to their former neighborhoods to move to new neighborhoods. Findings from an instrumental variables survival analysis reveal that those parolees who moved to a new parish following release were substantially less likely to be reincarcerated during the first 3 years after release than those ex-offenders who moved back to the parish where they were originally convicted. Moreover, at no point in the 3-year time period was the hazard of reincarceration greater for those parolees who moved than for those who returned to the same parish.
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Assessing the impact of imprisonment on recidivism
William Bales & Alex Piquero
Journal of Experimental Criminology, March 2012, Pages 71-101
Objectives: There is debate about the extent to which imprisonment deters reoffending. Further, while there is a large literature on the effects of imprisonment, methodologically sound and rigorous studies are the exception due to problematic sample characteristics and study designs. This paper assesses the effect of imprisonment on reoffending relative to a prison diversion program, Community Control, for over 79,000 felons sentenced to state prison and 65,000 offenders sentenced to Community Control between 1994 and 2002 in Florida.
Methods: The effect of imprisonment on recidivism is examined within one-, two-, and three-year follow-up periods using Logistic Regression, Precision Matching, and Propensity Score Matching.
Results: Findings indicate that imprisonment exerts a criminogenic effect and that this substantive conclusion holds across all three methods.
Conclusions: The main contribution of this study is that various methods yield results that are at least in a similar direction and support overall conclusions of prior literature that imprisonment has a criminogenic effect on reoffending compared to non-incarcerative sanctions. Limitations and directions for future research are noted.
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The Use of Life and Death as Tools in Plea Bargaining
Susan Ehrhard-Dietzel
Criminal Justice Review, March 2012, Pages 89-109
Abstract:
Given its severity, the death penalty may play a unique role in plea bargaining, unlike that of a lesser maximum sentence of life without parole, which involves the defendant's loss of his freedom but not the loss of his life. The possibility of a death sentence may be powerful incentive for the defense to accept a plea bargain; accordingly, prosecutors may use the death penalty as leverage to induce a guilty plea in death-eligible cases. Interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in a state where the maximum punishment for murder is death and a state where the maximum punishment for murder is life without parole are used to explore the role of the death penalty as leverage in plea bargaining, as compared to the role of a maximum sentence of life without parole. Findings suggest that prosecutors are not necessarily inclined to charge capital murder in order to induce a guilty plea, given considerations including ethics and financial cost, considerations that are largely absent from decision making in cases where the maximum possible sentence is life without parole.
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Judicial Expenditures and Litigation Access: Evidence from Auto Injuries
Paul Heaton & Eric Helland
Journal of Legal Studies, June 2011, Pages 295-332
Abstract:
Despite claims of a judicial funding crisis, there exists little direct evidence linking judicial budgets to court utilization. Using data on thousands of auto injuries covering a 15-year period, we measure the relationship between state-level court expenditures and the propensity of injured parties to pursue litigation. Controlling for state and plaintiff characteristics and accounting for the potential endogeneity of expenditures, we show that expenditures increase litigation access, with our preferred estimates indicating that a 10 percent budget increase increases litigation rates by 3 percent. Consistent with litigation models in which high litigation costs undermine the threat posture of plaintiffs, increases in court resources also augment payments to injured parties. We present suggestive evidence that these effects are driven by general expenditures rather than judicial salaries.
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E. Rely Vîlcică
Journal of Criminal Justice, March-April 2012, Pages 103-116
Purpose: The role of dismissal as a major case disposition in criminal courts in America has been largely neglected in empirical studies to date, despite long-lasting questions about its nature and important implications for justice goals. This paper is a first attempt to fill in this gap. Drawing on untested assumptions about a possible dismissal-reoffending connection, the paper proposes a public safety framework for examining the nature of dismissals and their consequences for the community. Under this perspective, dismissal is a function of defendants' risk attributes and contributes to subsequent public safety threat.
Methods: To test these hypotheses, predictive and causal analyses were conducted on an 800-case sample of criminal defendants in one large urban American jurisdiction, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Cases were sampled at the first judicial stage and followed as a cohort for one year to record disposition and post-disposition outcomes.
Results: The findings indicate that defendants' risk attributes contribute to the explanation of dismissal and that dismissal in itself adds to the probability of subsequent offending.
Conclusions: The findings raise questions about the justice system goals, particularly deterrence and have important policy implications for the processing and disposition of criminal cases in American jurisdictions.
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Mario Cano & Cassia Spohn
Criminal Justice and Behavior, March 2012, Pages 308-332
Abstract:
Although sentencing of drug offenders in federal courts is complicated by minimum penalties, which trump the guidelines, the mandatory penalties can be avoided if offenders receive substantial assistance departures. Nagel and Schulhofer contend that substantial assistance departures are used to mitigate the sentences of "sympathetic" and "salvageable" offenders. The authors tested this contention, using data on drug offenders facing mandatory minimum sentences in three U.S. district courts. Results reveal that substantial assistance departures are used to reduce the sentences of certain types of offenders facing mandatory minimum penalties: females, U.S. citizens, employed persons, those with some college, those with dependent children, and those who played a minor or minimal role in the offense. Findings also revealed that racial-ethnic differences among male offenders were masked by the racial-ethnic similarities among female offenders in the full model and that the effect of gender was confined to Black and Hispanic offenders.
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The Booker Decision and Discrimination in Federal Criminal Sentences
Andrew Nutting
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
I test how federal criminal sentences changed after the Supreme Court decision U.S. v. Booker changed the sentencing guidelines from "mandatory" to "advisory." Conditional on final guideline cell, results show Booker significantly reduced sentences, especially for women and defendants with a terminal high school degree, but less so for college graduates. This suggests discrimination among federal judges. When accounting for judges' control over final offense level, evidence regarding high school graduates and college graduates is unchanged, but evidence that sentences fell for women and the default group weakens substantially. This latter result suggests, perhaps, a new methodology by which judges applied offense levels and guideline-conditional sentences post-Booker.
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Bruce Taylor, Christopher Koper & Daniel Woods
Criminal Justice Review, March 2012, Pages 24-50
Abstract:
This article focuses on a relatively new innovation for use by law enforcement, license plate recognition (LPR) systems, in fighting auto theft. While it is a promising technology, there has not been much research on the effectiveness of LPR systems. The authors conducted a randomized experiment to study the effects of LPR devices on auto theft. The authors found that the LPR is achieving its most basic purpose of increasing the number of plates scanned by officers (8 times greater) compared to manual plate checking. Further, when compared to manual checking, the LPR was associated with more "hits" (i.e., positive scans) for auto theft and stolen plates, more arrests for stolen vehicles, and more stolen vehicle recoveries. Unexpectedly, the authors found that manual plate checking by a special auto theft unit (but not LPR scanning by the same unit) was associated with less auto theft 2 weeks after the intervention (based on both police crime reports and calls for police service) than the control group (regular nonspecialized patrol without LPR). Finally, the authors found no evidence of crime displacement occurring from their targeted routes to adjacent areas for any of their models. This study provides evidence that LPR use can achieve demonstrable benefits in combating auto theft (i.e., more plates scanned, "hits," arrests and recoveries with LPR). These results are impressive for the field of auto theft where so little research tested interventions exist. Future work will involve developing strategies that maintains the documented benefits of LPR use by a specialized unit, but also achieve the benefits associated with manual checking by a specialized unit.
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Traffic Stop Encounters: Officer and Citizen Race and Perceptions of Police Propriety
Christopher Huggins
American Journal of Criminal Justice, March 2012, Pages 92-110
Abstract:
The continued legacy of racism and discrimination contribute to racial and ethnic differences in attitudes about the police. This research investigates citizen reports of proper police behavior during traffic stops to understand how officer/citizen race and ethnic pairs influence reports of impropriety. Analysis of 6,301 citizen reports of traffic stop encounters with the police from a unique national survey reveals that net of other important explanatory variables, African-Americans are less likely than whites to report proper police behavior when they encounter officers of any race. In addition, citizen reports indicate that the white/black and black/white officer/citizen encounters are significantly less likely to result in a report of proper police behavior than the white/white officer/citizen pairing. The results show limited support for the importance of citizen race and officer/citizen pairs in determining perception of police behavior.
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Selected to Serve: An Analysis of Lifetime Jury Participation
Mary Rose, Shari Seidman Diamond & Marc Musick
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, March 2012, Pages 33-55
Abstract:
Using a survey of a random sample of 1,380 Texas adults, we consider what factors distinguish those who have ever had an opportunity to serve on a jury from those who have not ("lifetime participation"). Residential stability and willingness to serve distinguished former jurors from those who had never been summoned or had never been questioned for a case. After controlling for age, neither race nor ethnicity accounted for participation, a finding replicated in data from another state. No factors differentiated former jurors from people who have been questioned but never selected. Our results strongly indicate that improvements to participation should focus on attrition that occurs before potential jurors reach the courtroom.
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Nirej Sekhon
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Fall 2011, Pages 1171-1226
Abstract:
Police departments have broad policymaking discretion to arrest some offenders and permit others to engage in criminal misconduct. The way police departments exercise this discretion has harmful distributive consequences. Yet, courts do virtually nothing to constrain departmental discretion. This is because constitutional criminal procedure is preoccupied with individual officer discretion and assumes that the most significant decision moment an officer faces is distinguishing guilt from innocence. I argue that this framing obscures the vast policymaking discretion police departments wield and the central choice they confront: distinguishing among the guilty. This Article identifies the mechanics and anti-egalitarian consequences of departmental discretion. Departmental discretion has three dimensions: geographic deployment, enforcement priority, and enforcement tactics. Through these policy choices, police departments are able to distribute the costs and benefits of proactive policing within jurisdictions. Case studies of narcotics enforcement and quality-of-life policing concretely demonstrate how departmental choices create inegalitarian distributive consequences. I argue that courts and other public institutions ought to prevent such consequences. This prescription requires conceptualizing arrests, and proactive policing more generally, in terms of distributive justice. Unlike dominant theories of criminal enforcement, distributive justice offers a normative vision that privileges democratic equality. Distributive justice suggests that, for crimes that are subject to proactive policing, probable cause alone should not justify arrest. Rather, police departments should also be required to demonstrate that a given arrest is part of an egalitarian distribution of arrests.
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Sungwoo Lim et al.
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors assessed the risks of drug-related death, suicide, and homicide after release from New York City jails in 155,272 people who were incarcerated anytime from 2001 through 2005 and examined whether the mortality rate was associated with homelessness. Using jail records matched with death and single-adult homeless registries in New York City, they calculated standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) and relative risks. After adjustment for age, sex, race, and neighborhood, the risks of drug-related death and homicide in formerly incarcerated persons were 2 times higher than those of New York City residents who had not been incarcerated in New York City jails during the study period. These relative risks were greatly elevated during the first 2 weeks after release (for drug-related causes, SMR = 8.0, 95% confidence interval (CI): 5.2, 11.8; for homicide, SMR = 5.1, 95% CI: 3.2, 7.8). Formerly incarcerated people with histories of homelessness had higher rates of drug-related death (RR = 3.4, 95% CI: 2.1, 5.5) and suicide (RR = 2.1, 95% CI: 1.2, 3.4) than did persons without such histories. For individuals who died of drug-related causes, longer jail stays were associated with a shorter time until death after release. These results suggest that jail- and community-based interventions are needed to reduce the excess mortality risk among formerly incarcerated people.
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Linguistic Recognition as a Source of Confidence in the Justice System
Amy Liu & Vanessa Baird
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does linguistic recognition in the courtroom affect popular confidence in the justice system among minorities? The authors argue (a) the recognition of either a minority language and/or a third-party's language (lingua franca) during judicial proceedings increases confidence levels but (b) the use of a lingua franca is more effective. This is because minorities are more likely to favor an arrangement that levels the playing field by having everyone speak a lingua franca (relative fairness) than one that allows them to use their own language in a courtroom that is otherwise dominated by the majority language (absolute fairness). Using original data measuring the linguistic recognition in the judiciary, the authors find a significant and robust relationship between languages of the court and popular confidence in the justice system.
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Mock Jurors' Perception of Stalking: The Impact of Gender and Expressed Fear
Emily Dunlap et al.
Sex Roles, March 2012, Pages 405-417
Abstract:
Two experiments investigated mock-juror perceptions of intimate stalking using Kentucky's (United States) anti-stalking legislation. Experiment 1 used a mock-juror methodology in which 177 undergraduates (87 men and 90 women) from a large southeastern US university read a stalking trial summary and rendered individual judgments as mock jurors. The main research question of Experiment 1 was how participant gender impacted trial judgments (e.g., verdict) when the gender of both the defendant and victim were manipulated. Overall, the results showed that men rendered significantly fewer guilty verdicts than women, particularly in conditions that included the prototypical type of intimate stalking (female victim/male defendant). In Experiment 2, also using a mock-juror methodology, 129 undergraduates (51 men and 78 women) from a large southeastern U.S. university read a stalking trial summary (involving a female victim and male defendant) and rendered individual judgments as mock jurors. The main research question of Experiment 2 focused on whether victim fear (high or low) impacted trial judgments (e.g., verdict). The results yielded an interaction of participant gender and victim fear. Specifically, whereas different levels of fear did not impact women, men yielded fewer guilty verdicts in the low victim fear condition compared to the high victim fear condition. The results of the present experiments are discussed in terms of the implications of stalking allegations brought to trial.
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Police Perceptions of Sexual Assault Victims: Exploring the Intra-Female Gender Hostility Thesis
Ericka Wentz & Carol Archbold
Police Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 25-44
Abstract:
This study explores variation in the perception of sexual assault victims among male and female police officers in a Midwestern police agency. Surveys that include both qualitative and quantitative questions are completed by 100 patrol officers. An analysis of qualitative data revealed some support for the Intra-Female Gender Hostility Thesis, which posits that female officers subscribe to rape myths and victim blaming more than male officers. Quantitative analysis showed no significant differences in the way that male and female officers perceived sexual assault victims. Policy implications based on these findings are presented and discussed at the end of this article.
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Michael White & David Klinger
Crime & Delinquency, March 2012, Pages 196-221
Abstract:
Recent police shootings in which multiple officers fired numerous rounds at suspects have led some observers to assert that such situations involve "contagious fire," where an initial officer's shots launch a cascade of gunfire from other officers present. Although there is anecdotal recognition of the contagious fire phenomenon among police and the media, there is not a single empirical study documenting its existence in more than 50 years of deadly force research. This article uses Philadelphia Police Department shooting data to explore the potential for police shootings to become contagious. The article provides a testable definition of contagious shootings and identifies predictors of three outcomes: multiple officer shootings, the average number of shots fired per officer, and multi-officer, multi-shot incidents. Findings show that the requisite preconditions for a contagious shooting rarely occur, and when the preconditions were met, there is no evidence to support the existence of a contagion effect.
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Citizens' Attitudes Toward Wrongful Convictions
Marvin Zalman, Matthew Larson & Brad Smith
Criminal Justice Review, March 2012, Pages 51-69
Abstract:
Perhaps no problem challenges the legitimacy of the criminal justice system more than the conviction of factually innocent individuals. Numerous highly publicized exonerations that occurred since 1989 have raised the visibility of wrongful conviction, eliciting the attention of both scholars and policy makers. Much of the research in this area focuses on the causes and incidence of the phenomenon. Despite the growing body of research, however, there has been no examination of how citizens view this problem. Using data from a statewide survey of Michigan residents, the present study aims to fill that gap in the literature by reporting on citizens' attitudes regarding the issue of wrongful conviction. Overall, the results of this exploratory study suggest that respondents not only recognize the incidence of wrongful conviction but also believe that such errors occur with some regularity. Further results show that respondents believe wrongful convictions occur frequently enough to justify major criminal justice system reform. Attitudes varied significantly across demographic groups as well. Additional findings and policy implications are discussed.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Progeny
The Effect of Parental Involvement Laws on Youth Suicide
Joseph Sabia & Daniel Rees
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using state-level data on suicides from the period 1987 to 2003, we find that the adoption of a law requiring a parent's notification or consent before a minor can obtain an abortion is associated with an 11%-21% reduction in the number of 15- through 17-year-old females who commit suicide. In contrast, the adoption of a parental involvement law is not associated with a reduction in the number of older females who commit suicide or in the number of 15- through 17-year-old males who commit suicide. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that parental involvement laws represent an increase in the expected cost of having unprotected sex, and, as a consequence, serve to protect young females from depression and what have been termed "stressful life events" such as conflict with a parent or an abortion.
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Decreased births among black female adolescents following school desegregation
Sze Yan Liu et al.
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the socioeconomic impact of school desegregation in the U.S. has been well documented, little is known about the health consequences of this policy. The purpose of this study was to quantify the associations between school desegregation and adolescent births among black and white females. We compared the change in prevalence of adolescent births in areas that implemented school desegregation plans in the 1970s with areas that implemented school desegregation plans in other decades, using difference-in-difference methods with 1970 and 1980 Census microdata. School desegregation policy in the U.S. in the 1970s was associated with a significant reduction of 3.2 percentage points in the prevalence of births among black female adolescents between 1970 and 1980. This association was specific to black female adolescents and was not observed among white adolescents.
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Effects of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations on female fertility
Ken Smith et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 7 April 2012, Pages 1389-1395
Abstract:
Women with BRCA1/2 mutations have a significantly higher lifetime risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer. We suggest that female mutation carriers may have improved fitness owing to enhanced fertility relative to non-carriers. Here we show that women who are carriers of BRCA1/2 mutations living in natural fertility conditions have excess fertility as well as excess post-reproductive mortality in relation to controls. Individuals who tested positive for BRCA1/2 mutations who linked into multi-generational pedigrees within the Utah Population Database were used to identify putative obligate carriers. We find that women born before 1930 who are mutation carriers have significantly more children than controls and have excess post-reproductive mortality risks. They also have shorter birth intervals and end child-bearing later than controls. For contemporary women tested directly for BRCA1/2 mutations, an era when modern contraceptives are available, differences in fertility and mortality persist but are attenuated. Our findings suggest the need to re-examine the wider role played by BRCA1/2 mutations. Elevated fertility of female mutation carriers indicates that they are more fecund despite their elevated post-reproductive mortality risks.
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Are Difficulties Balancing Work and Family Associated With Subsequent Fertility?
Siwei Liu & Kathryn Hynes
Family Relations, February 2012, Pages 16-30
Abstract:
Despite considerable interest in the causes and consequences of work-family conflict, and the frequent suggestion in fertility research that difficulty in balancing work and family is one of the factors leading to low fertility rates in several developed countries, little research uses longitudinal data to examine whether women who report difficulty in balancing their work and family roles go on to have fewer subsequent births. This article uses longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care (N = 809) to examine whether difficulties in balancing work and family are associated with fewer subsequent births. Our results provide little support for the idea that working women in the United States who have difficulty in balancing work and family delay or forgo having additional children. Instead, women in the United States may achieve their fertility goals at the expense of continued labor force participation.
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The Effect of Child Support Enforcement on Abortion in the United States
Jocelyn Crowley, Radha Jagannathan & Galo Falchettore
Social Science Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 152-172
Objectives: This project aims to answer a critically important question of public policy: Does effective child support enforcement lead to a change in the incidence of abortion across the United States?
Methods: Using state-level data collected from 1978-2003 from a variety of sources, we employ fixed effects regression analysis to examine whether financial security as measured by five types of child support enforcement effectiveness impacts abortion outcomes.
Results: We find that child support enforcement effectiveness decreases the incidence of abortion as measured by the abortion rate, but not the abortion ratio.
Conclusions: Income transfer policies such as child support enforcement can affect certain fertility outcomes such as abortion rates across the states.
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Offspring Sex Preference in Frontier America
Nora Bohnert et al.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Spring 2012, Pages 519-541
Abstract:
Analysis of the fertility histories of women born between 1850 and 1900, as given in the Utah Population Database (UPDB), reveals the effect of the number, as well as the sex composition, of previous children on birth-stopping and birth-spacing decisions. Specifically, agricultural and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) households - two sub-populations that might have placed different values on male and female children for economic, social, and/or cultural reasons - showed a distinct preference for male children, as expressed by birth stopping after the birth of a male child and shorter birth intervals in higher-parity births when most previous children were female. Remarkably, women in both the early "natural fertility" and the later contraceptive eras used spacing behavior to achieve a desired sex mix. Although the LDS population had relatively high fertility rates, it had the same preferences for male children as the non-LDS population did. Farmers, who presumably had a need for family labor, were more interested in the quantity than in the sex mix of their children.
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A curvilinear effect of height on reproductive success in human males
Gert Stulp et al.
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, March 2012, Pages 375-384
Abstract:
Human male height is associated with mate choice and intra-sexual competition, and therefore potentially with reproductive success. A literature review (n = 18) on the relationship between male height and reproductive success revealed a variety of relationships ranging from negative to curvilinear to positive. Some of the variation in results may stem from methodological issues, such as low power, including men in the sample who have not yet ended their reproductive career, or not controlling for important potential confounders (e.g. education and income). We investigated the associations between height, education, income and the number of surviving children in a large longitudinal sample of men (n = 3,578; Wisconsin Longitudinal Study), who likely had ended their reproductive careers (e.g. > 64 years). There was a curvilinear association between height and number of children, with men of average height attaining the highest reproductive success. This curvilinear relationship remained after controlling for education and income, which were associated with both reproductive success and height. Average height men also married at a younger age than shorter and taller men, and the effect of height diminished after controlling for this association. Thus, average height men partly achieved higher reproductive success by marrying at a younger age. On the basis of our literature review and our data, we conclude that men of average height most likely have higher reproductive success than either short or tall men.
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Means, variances, and ranges in reproductive success: Comparative evidence
Laura Betzig
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Data on reproductive success in traditional cultures suggest that for men, but not for women, range and variance rise as subsistence intensifies. For hunter-gatherers, ranges and variances tend to cluster in single digits: they reach 15 or 16, at the high end. For herder-gardeners, ranges and variances are more consistently in double digits: they get as high as 80 or 85. And for full-time agriculturalists in the first civilizations, ranges consistently ran to triple digits: emperors from Mesopotamia to Peru were the fathers of hundreds of children. In human societies, as in other animal societies, reproductive skew goes up with a more sedentary life.
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State abstinence education programs and teen birth rates in the US
Colin Cannonier
Review of Economics of the Household, March 2012, Pages 53-75
Abstract:
Title V, Section 510 of the Social Security Act, passed in 1996 and implemented in 1998, appropriates funding to states for the purpose of educating minors on the benefits of abstinence before marriage. Despite considerable research on the impact of abstinence education on teen fertility outcomes, high quality population-level studies on state abstinence education using panel data are absent. This paper uses state-level data to analyze the impact of abstinence education on the birth rates for teens 15-17 years by evaluating the Title V, Section 510 State Abstinence Education (SAE) program. For an average state, increasing spending by 50000/year on SAE can help avoid approximately four births to teenagers, resulting in net savings of 15,652 to the public for each birth avoided.
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Variation in State Unintended Pregnancy Rates In the United States
Kathryn Kost, Lawrence Finer & Susheela Singh
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, forthcoming
Context: Newly available data show large differences in rates of unintended pregnancy across states. Because key policy and program decisions that could affect these rates are made by state governments, it is important to assess whether characteristics of the states are associated with this variation.
Methods: Regression analysis was used to assess the relationship between the variation in state unintended pregnancy rates in 2006 and state-level aggregate measures of demographic composition, socioeconomic conditions, contraceptive use, and funding of and access to family planning services.
Results: State unintended pregnancy rates were positively associated with the proportion of resident women who were black or Hispanic. However, these associations were almost entirely accounted for by differences in the age and marital status of women, the proportion without health insurance and the proportion receiving Medicaid. In addition, these last two measures were strongly associated with state unintended pregnancy rates after the other measures were controlled for: An increase in the proportion of women uninsured was associated with elevated unintended pregnancy rates, and an increase in the proportion receiving Medicaid coverage was associated with reduced rates.
Conclusions: State programs and policies should pay particular attention to increasing support for family planning services for minority groups. Findings also suggest that insurance coverage and receipt of Medicaid among women of reproductive age deserve further exploration as potentially important mechanisms for reducing state unintended pregnancy rates.
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Three Strategies to Prevent Unintended Pregnancy
Adam Thomas
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents results from fiscal impact simulations of three national-level policies designed to prevent unintended pregnancy: A media campaign encouraging condom use, a pregnancy prevention program for at-risk youth, and an expansion in Medicaid family planning services. These simulations were performed using FamilyScape, a recently developed agent-based simulation model of family formation. In some simulation specifications, policies' benefits are monetized by accounting for projected reductions in government expenditures on medical care for pregnant women and infants. In a majority of these specifications, policies' fiscal benefit-cost ratios are less than 1. However, in specifications that account additionally for projected savings to programs that provide a broader range of benefits and services to young children, all three policies have benefit-cost ratios that are comfortably greater than 1. The results from my preferred specifications suggest that the simulated policies would produce returns to taxpayers on each dollar spent of between $2 to $6. On the whole, the results of these simulations imply that all three policies are sound public investments.
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Veronika Halvarsson, Sara Ström & Fredrik Liljeros
Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, February 2012, Pages 85-91
Aims: The aim of this study is to examine the association between the prescription of oral contraceptives and the incidence of chlamydia, and between the prescription of oral contraceptives and the number of abortions in a population-based ecological study.
Methods: For this study we used register data from the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (chlamydia incidence), the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (number of abortions), Statistics Sweden (population data), and Apoteket (Swedish pharmacy) (prescriptions for oral contraceptives). We conducted ordinary least squares regression analysis of the association between chlamydia or abortions and the prescription of oral contraceptives.
Results: The prescription of oral contraceptives has a positive association on both the incidence of chlamydia and the numbers of abortion. Our best model predicts that prescription of 100 yearly doses of oral contraceptives increase the abortions by 3.3 cases among 16-year-old women and 0.7 cases among 29-year-old women, while cases of chlamydia increase by 6.7 among 16-year-old women and 1.5 among 29-year-old women.
Conclusions: Our findings indicate that the use of oral contraceptives among young people and young adults is positively associated with the chlamydia incidence and the abortion rate in these populations in Sweden.
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Boguslaw Pawlowski & Agnieszka Zelazniewicz
American Journal of Human Biology, forthcoming
Objectives: Neonatal weight and health depend on many epigenetic and environmental factors and also on a child's genes as inherited from the mother and the father. The "Hunting for Good Genes" (HfGG) hypothesis claims that women pursue short-term mating strategies in order to obtain good genes for their progeny. If this is true, one should expect that in comparison to children born in long-term relationships (LR), children born in short-term relationships (SR) should have a larger neonatal size and be healthier.
Methods: To test the HfGG hypothesis, and whether sexual strategy influences neonatal parameters, we used an on-line questionnaire aimed at mothers. Totally, 1,558 women took part in this study, and among them 130 conceived their first-born child in a short-term relationship (SR mothers) and 1,428 in a long-term relationship (LR mothers).
Results: There was no difference between those two groups of children in terms of birth weight and Apgar score. Although we found no difference in the occurrence of genetic diseases and birth defects between SR and LR boys, the girls born by LR mothers were healthier than those born by SR mothers. We also did not find any difference in the sex ratio of the children born to SR and LR mothers.
Conclusions: The results of our study do not support the "Hunting for Good Genes" hypothesis for the first born child. In the contemporary western society of the study, women do not seem to derive genetic benefits expressed as child condition at birth from short-term relationships.
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Use of Levonorgestrel Emergency Contraception In Utah: Is It More than "Plan B"?
Lindsay Melton, Joseph Stanford & Jann Dewitt
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, forthcoming
Context: It is important to understand why some women use levonorgestrel emergency contraceptive pills repeatedly, because the method is not intended for repeated use, and current evidence suggests that it is approximately 77% effective at preventing pregnancy.
Methods: An anonymous patient survey of 1,040 women aged 18-29 purchasing levonorgestrel at Planned Parenthood clinics in Utah was conducted during a 4-6-week period in 2007. Chi-square tests and analyses of variance were used to examine associations between selected characteristics and level of levonorgestrel use. Logistic regression was used to assess characteristics independently associated with repeated use.
Results: Twenty-nine percent of participants had used levonorgestrel more than twice in the prior year. Fifty-eight percent believed that levonorgestrel is at least 90% effective in protecting against pregnancy; 16% believed that it is 100% effective. In univariate analyses, lifetime number of partners, currently having multiple partners, substance use at last intercourse and perceived effectiveness of levonorgestrel were positively associated with repeated levonorgestrel use in the previous year. The measure most strongly associated with repeated levonorgestrel use in multivariate analyses was perceived effectiveness: Women who believed that the method is 90-99% or 100% effective in preventing pregnancy had greater odds of repeated use than those who believed it is 75-89% effective (odds ratios, 1.8 each).
Conclusion: Women who repeatedly use levonorgestrel may have an inflated perception of its effectiveness. Future research, including qualitative research, may help clarify factors that lead to inflated perceptions of effectiveness.
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May Lau, Hua Lin & Glenn Flores
Journal of Adolescent Health, February 2012, Page S14
Purpose: Adolescent pregnancy is a major U.S. public-health problem, but little is known about clusters of factors associated with the highest and lowest prevalence of partner pregnancy for adolescent males. The study goal was to identify factors that, when clustered, are associated with the highest and lowest pregnancy prevalence for US adolescent males.
Methods: The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) is a nationally representative survey of 15-44 year olds. Bivariate analyses of the public 2002 and 2006-08 NSFG cycles were performed to identify factors associated with partner pregnancy in males 15-19 years old. Recursive partitioning analysis (RPA) was done to identify markers which, when combined, are associated with the highest and lowest partner pregnancy prevalence in adolescent males.
Results: The partner pregnancy prevalence for 2,506 U.S. adolescent males was 3%. In bivariate analyses, compared with males never involved with a pregnancy, males involved with a pregnancy were significantly (p<.05) more likely to have public insurance (51% vs. 26%), have accompanied their female partner to a family planning clinic/Planned Parenthood (PP)(45% vs. 6%), agree that unmarried females can have children (74% vs. 57%), and feel uncomfortable talking with their female partner about condom use (79% vs. 48%), and less likely to have received first contraceptive education <= 6th grade (10% vs. 24%). In RPA, males who had never accompanied their female partner to a family planning clinic/PP had a 2% partner pregnancy prevalence vs. 15% in those who had ever accompanied their female partner to a family planning clinic/PP. The combination of ever accompanying female partners to family planning clinics/PP, ever HIV tested, agreeing a man should work and a woman should take care of the home, and age of first sexual activity >14 years old was associated with the highest partner pregnancy prevalence (78%). The combination of ever accompanying female partners to family planning clinics/PP, ever HIV tested, agreeing a man should work and a woman should take care of the home, and age of first sexual activity <=14 years old had a partner pregnancy prevalence of 39%.
Conclusions: The following cluster of factors was associated with three in four U.S. males impregnating their female partners: ever accompanying their female partner to a family planning clinic/PP, ever HIV tested, agreeing a man should work and a woman should take care of the home, and age of first sexual activity >14 years old. Partner pregnancy prevalence was only 39% for those who never went with their female partner to a family planning clinic/PP. These findings suggest that pregnancy prevention efforts may be most promising when they target adolescent males characterized by the combinations of ever going to a family planning clinic/PP, ever testing for HIV, holding traditional views on male and female roles in the home, and older age at first sexual activity.
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Grandparental investment and reproductive decisions in the longitudinal 1970 British cohort study
David Waynforth
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 March 2012, Pages 1155-1160
Abstract:
There has been a recent increase in interest among evolutionary researchers in the hypothesis that humans evolved as cooperative breeders, using extended family support to help decrease offspring mortality and increase the number of children that can be successfully reared. In this study, data drawn from the 1970 longitudinal British cohort study were analysed to determine whether extended family support encourages fertility in contemporary Britain. The results showed that at age 30, reported frequency that participants saw their own parents (but not in-laws) and the closeness of the bond between the participant and their own parents were associated with an increased likelihood of having a child between ages 30 and 34. Financial help and reported grandparental childcare were not significantly positively associated with births from age 30 to 34. Men's income was positively associated with likelihood of birth, whereas women's income increased likelihood of birth only for working women with at least one child. While it was predicted that grandparental financial and childcare help would increase the likelihood of reproduction by lowering the cost to the parent of having a child, it appears that the mere physical presence of supportive parents rather than their financial or childcare help encouraged reproduction in the 1970 British birth cohort sample.
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Intergenerational Transmission of Reproductive Behavior during the Demographic Transition
Julia Jennings, Allison Sullivan & David Hacker
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Spring 2012, Pages 543-569
Abstract:
New evidence from the Utah Population Database (UPDB) reveals that at the onset of the fertility transition, reproductive behavior was transmitted across generations - between women and their mothers, as well as between women and their husbands' family of origin. Age at marriage, age at last birth, and the number of children ever born are positively correlated in the data, most strongly among first-born daughters and among cohorts born later in the fertility transition. Intergenerational ties, including the presence of mothers and mothers-in-law, influenced the hazard of progressing to a next birth. The findings suggest that the practice of parity-dependent marital fertility control and inter-birth spacing behavior derived, in part, from the previous generation and that the potential for mothers and mothers-in-law to help in the rearing of children encouraged higher marital fertility.
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Chelsea Bernhardt Polis & Laurie Schwab Zabin
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, forthcoming
Context: Perceived infertility is an individual's belief that she or he is unable to conceive or impregnate, regardless of whether this belief is medically accurate. This perception may lead to contraceptive nonuse, which may, in turn, lead to unintended pregnancy. Little research has examined perceived infertility among young adults, including potential associations with contraceptive behaviors.
Methods: The frequency of perceived infertility among young adults was assessed using 2009 data from a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,800 unmarried men and women aged 18-29. Multinomial regression analyses assessed associations between respondents' perceived infertility and selected background, reproductive knowledge, sexual experience and contraceptive use characteristics.
Results: Overall, 19% of women and 13% of men believed that they were very likely to be infertile. Hispanic women and women who had received public assistance in the past year had elevated odds of perceived infertility (odds ratios, 3.4 and 3.0, respectively), as did Hispanic men and men of other racial or ethnic minorities, except blacks (2.5 and 6.1, respectively). Men who had some college education, had received sex education or were not in a current relationship had decreased odds of thinking they were very likely to be infertile (0.3-0.4). Among men, perceived infertility was associated with the belief that they were likely to have sex without using a contraceptive in the next three months (2.6).
Conclusions: A substantial proportion of young adults believe they are infertile. Improved provider counseling and sex education may be useful in helping them to better understand their actual probability of infertility, and this knowledge may lead to improved contraceptive use.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
In the Money
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
Paul Piff et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals' unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
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The Incentive Effects of Marginal Tax Rates: Evidence from the Interwar Era
Christina Romer & David Romer
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
This paper uses the interwar period in the United States as a laboratory for investigating the incentive effects of changes in marginal income tax rates. Marginal rates changed frequently and drastically in the 1920s and 1930s, and the changes varied greatly across income groups at the top of the income distribution. We examine the effect of these changes on taxable income using time-series/cross-section analysis of data on income and taxes by small slices of the income distribution. We find that the elasticity of taxable income to changes in the log after-tax share (one minus the marginal rate) is positive but small (approximately 0.2) and precisely estimated (a t-statistic over 6). The estimate is highly robust. We also examine the time-series response of available indicators of investment and entrepreneurial activity to changes in marginal rates. We find suggestive evidence of an impact on business formation, but no evidence of an important impact on other indicators.
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Wealth Transfer Receipt and Later Life Wealth
Michael Nau & Dmitry Tumin
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
Wealth ownership is highly concentrated in the U.S. and this inequality may be reproduced in subsequent generations through wealth transfers. Yet we do not know how households respond to the receipt of a wealth transfer and whether time amplifies the initial benefit of a wealth transfer. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we test whether wealth transfer recipients gain an advantage that cumulates with time. We find that the positive association between transfer amount and present net worth weakens as time elapsed since transfer receipt increases. The larger the wealth transfer, the more its association with net worth is diminished by time since transfer receipt. Though wealth transfers provide recipients with a significant initial advantage, households appear to adapt to wealth transfer receipt by some combination of reduced savings and increased consumption. We demonstrate an association between receiving a larger wealth transfer and one type of increased consumption, gift-giving.
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Tax policy and state economic growth: The long-run and short-run of it
Andrew Ojede & Steven Yamarik
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses a pooled mean group (PMG) estimator to evaluate the effects of tax policy on state-level growth. We find that property and sales tax rates have negative effects on long-run income growth, while income tax rates have no impact.
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Resolving Debt Overhang: Political Constraints in the Aftermath of Financial Crises
Atif Mian, Amir Sufi & Francesco Trebbi
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
Debtors bear the brunt of a decline in asset prices associated with financial crises and policies aimed at partial debt relief may be warranted to boost growth in the midst of crises. Drawing on the US experience during the Great Recession of 2008-09 and historical evidence in a large panel of countries, we explore why the political system may fail to deliver such policies. We find that during the Great Recession creditors were able to use the political system more effectively to protect their interests through bailouts. More generally we show that politically countries become more polarized and fractionalized following financial crises. This results in legislative stalemate, making it less likely that crises lead to meaningful macroeconomic reforms.
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Maggie Sweitzer et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Inconsistent or null findings among studies associating behaviors on the externalizing spectrum-addictions, impulsivity, risk-taking, novelty-seeking traits-with presence of the 7-repeat allele of a common length polymorphism in the gene encoding the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) may stem from individuals' variable exposures to prominent environmental moderators (gene x environment interaction). Here, we report that relative preference for immediate, smaller rewards over larger rewards delayed in time (delay discounting), a behavioral endophenotype of impulsive decision-making, varied by interaction of DRD4 genotype with childhood socioeconomic status (SES) among 546 mid-life community volunteers. Independent of age, sex, adulthood SES, and IQ, participants who were both raised in families of distinctly low SES (low parental education and occupational grade) and carried the DRD4 7-repeat allele discounted future rewards more steeply than like-reared counterparts of alternate DRD4 genotype. In the absence of childhood socioeconomic disadvantage, however, participants carrying the 7-repeat allele discounted future rewards less steeply. This bidirectional association of DRD4 genotype with temporal discounting, conditioned by participants' early life circumstances, accords with a recently proposed developmental model of gene x environment interaction ("differential susceptibility") that posits genetically modulated sensitivity to both adverse and salubrious environmental influences.
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Can 401(k) Plans Provide Adequate Retirement Resources?
Peter Brady
Public Finance Review, March 2012, Pages 177-206
Abstract:
Even though they have only existed since 1981, some analysts have concluded that 401(k) plans are a failure. For example, some argue that 401(k) plans are "coming up short" due to, among other factors, the low contribution rates of participants. A recent government report concluded that "low defined contribution plan savings may pose challenges to retirement security." There are also proposals to replace 401(k) plans with mandated savings. This article illustrates that moderate 401(k) contribution rates can lead to adequate retirement income for many workers; that adequate asset accumulation can be achieved using only a 401(k) plan; and that these results do not rely on earning an investment premium on risky assets. Using Monte Carlo simulation techniques, this study also illustrates the investment risk faced by participants who choose to invest in risky assets, or who choose to make systematic withdrawals in retirement rather than annuitize their account balance.
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Were They Prepared for Retirement? Financial Status at Advanced Ages in the HRS and AHEAD Cohorts
James Poterba, Steven Venti & David Wise
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
Many analysts have considered whether households approaching retirement age have accumulated enough assets to be well prepared for retirement. In this paper, we shift from studying household finances at the start of the retirement period, an ex ante measure of retirement preparation, to studying the asset holdings of households in their last years of life. The analysis is based on Health and Retirement Study with special attention to Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) cohort that was first surveyed in 1993. We consider the level of assets that households hold in the last survey wave preceding their death. We study how assets at the end of life depend on three family status pathways prior to death - (1) original one-person households in 1993, (2) persons in two-person household in 1993 with a deceased spouse in the last year observed, and (3) persons in two-person households in 1993 with the spouse alive when last observed. We find that a substantial fraction of persons die with virtually no financial assets - 46.1 percent with less than $10,000 - and many of these households also have no housing wealth and rely almost entirely on Social Security benefits for support. In addition this group is disproportionately in poor health. Based on a replacement rate comparison, many of these households may be deemed to have been well-prepared for retirement, in the sense that their income in their final years was not substantially lower than their income in their late 50s or early 60s. Yet with such low asset levels, they would have little capacity to pay for unanticipated needs such as health expenses or other financial shocks or to pay for entertainment, travel, or other activities. This raises a question of whether the replacement ratio is a sufficient statistic for the "adequacy" of retirement preparation.
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Can Improved Options for Private Saving Offer a Plausible Substitute for Public Pensions?
Gary Burtless
Politics & Society, March 2012, Pages 81-105
Abstract:
Old-age income protection is provided in wealthy democracies by publicly funded defined-benefit pensions. Budgetary challenges have forced policy makers to consider private alternatives to these traditional systems. I consider the shortcomings of private saving arrangements in duplicating the advantages of public pensions. Some shortcomings can be overcome by introducing compulsory elements into private saving plans. Worker contributions into such plans could be mandatory; some or all worker accumulations in the plans could be converted to annuities at retirement; and workers' investment choices could be narrowly circumscribed. These restrictions do not eliminate the biggest weakness of private saving plans. Fluctuations in asset prices make it hard even for well-informed savers to select an affordable saving rate and an investment strategy that will assure decent income in old age. Public pension systems partly insulate workers against economic and financial market risks by sharing those risks broadly across workers, retirees, and taxpayers in multiple generations.
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Financial Sophistication in the Older Population
Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia Mitchell & Vilsa Curto
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
This paper examines data on financial sophistication among the U.S. older population, using a special-purpose module implemented in the Health and Retirement Study. We show that financial sophistication is deficient for older respondents (aged 55+). Specifically, many in this group lack a basic grasp of asset pricing, risk diversification, portfolio choice, and investment fees. Subpopulations with particular deficits include women, the least educated, persons over the age of 75, and non-Whites. In view of the fact that people are increasingly being asked to take on responsibility for their own retirement security, such lack of knowledge can have serious implications.
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The effect of question wording on consumers' reported inflation expectations
Wändi Bruine de Bruin et al.
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economists and policy makers increasingly consult national household surveys asking individuals about their economic circumstances, financial decisions, and expectations for the future. For decades, the Reuters/Michigan Survey of Consumers and other national surveys have asked about expectations for "prices in general," with responses being used by academic economists, policy makers, and central bankers. Although median responses track official inflation estimates, respondents exhibit considerable disagreement, with some reporting seemingly large overestimations. Here, we demonstrate that changes in the wording of survey questions about inflation expectations affect the central tendency of responses as well as their dispersion. We randomly assigned respondents to questions asking about "prices in general," "inflation," or "prices you pay." Respondents' expectations and perceptions were lower and less dispersed when questions asked about "inflation" instead of "prices in general" or "prices you pay," with the latter two formulations eliciting similar response patterns. These question-wording effects were mediated by how much respondents thought of (extreme) personal price experiences when receiving questions about "prices in general" or "prices you pay." Compared to questions about "inflation," questions about "prices in general" and "prices you pay" elicited expectations that were more strongly correlated to expected increases in gas prices, which were relatively large and likely salient at that time.
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On Assets and Debt in the Psychology of Perceived Wealth
Abigail Sussman & Eldar Shafir
Psychological Science, January 2012, Pages 101-108
Abstract:
We studied the perception of wealth as a function of varying levels of assets and debt. We found that with total wealth held constant, people with positive net worth feel and are seen as wealthier when they have lower debt (despite having fewer assets). In contrast, people with equal but negative net worth feel and are considered wealthier when they have greater assets (despite having larger debt). This pattern persists in the perception of both the self and others. We explore consequences for the willingness to borrow and lend and briefly discuss the policy implications of these findings.
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Liquidity Constraints and Consumer Bankruptcy: Evidence from Tax Rebates
Tal Gross, Matthew Notowidigdo & Jialan Wang
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
This paper estimates the extent to which legal fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, it studies how the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates affected consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized timing of the rebate checks and estimate that the rebates caused a significant, short-run increase in consumer bankruptcies in both years, with larger effects in 2008 when the rebates were more generous and more widely distributed. Using hand-collected data from individual bankruptcy petitions, we document that the rebates caused an increase in the average liabilities and the liabilities-to-income ratios of filers.
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Barak Ariel
Criminology, February 2012, Pages 27-69
Abstract:
Previous studies on tax compliance have focused primarily on the tax-reporting behavior of individuals. This study reports results from a randomized field test of the effects of deterrence and moral persuasion on the tax-reporting behavior of 4,395 corporations in Israel. Two experimental groups received tax letters, one conveying a deterrent message and the other a moral persuasion message. Three types of measures are used to evaluate compliance based on the magnitude of the difference-in-differences of means in 1) gross sales values reported to the authority, 2) tax dollars paid to the authority, and 3) tax deductions. Overall, both deterrence and moral persuasion approaches do not produce statistically significant greater compliance compared with control conditions. These results do not support the ability of a policy of sending tax letters to increase substantively the reporting of true tax liability or tax payments by corporations. However, these results also show that moral persuasion can be counterproductive: Corporations in this experimental group show an increase rather than a decrease in tax deductions, which translates into loss of state revenues. The implications for theory, research, and tax policy are discussed.
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The Decision to Delay Social Security Benefits: Theory and Evidence
John Shoven & Sita Nataraj Slavov
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
Social Security benefits may be commenced at any time between age 62 and age 70. As individuals who claim later can, on average, expect to receive benefits for a shorter period, an actuarial adjustment is made to the monthly benefit amount to reflect the age at which benefits are claimed. We investigate the actuarial fairness of this adjustment. Our simulations suggest that delaying is actuarially advantageous for a large subset of people, particularly for real interest rates of 3.5 percent or below. The gains from delaying are greater at lower interest rates, for married couples relative to singles, for single women relative to single men, and for two-earner couples relative to one-earner couples. In a two-earner couple, the gains from deferring the primary earner's benefit are greater than the gains from deferring the secondary earner's benefit. We then use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate whether individuals' actual claiming behavior appears to be influenced by the degree of actuarial advantage to delaying. We find no evidence of a consistent relationship between claiming behavior and factors that influence the actuarial advantage of delay, including gender and marital status, interest rates, subjective discount rates, or subjective assessments of life expectancy.
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The Cost of Not Knowing the Score: Self-Estimated Credit Scores and Financial Outcomes
Benjamin Levinger, Marques Benton & Stephan Meier
Journal of Family and Economic Issues, December 2011, Pages 566-585
Abstract:
This study analyzes consumers' knowledge of their own credit situation and tests whether a lack of knowledge affects financial outcomes. The unique dataset from survey and credit report data includes self-estimates of credit scores and actual scores from a low-to-moderate income sample. We argue and show empirically that many respondents don't know their credit score and generally underestimate their creditworthiness. Furthermore, our evidence suggests that this biased self-assessment may explain differences in perceived credit constraints and credit contracts, specifically credit card interest rates. Our research suggests that an important aspect of financial literacy is self-assessment, and that it is important to encourage consumers to regularly check their credit reports and scores so as to better understand their actual creditworthiness.
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Small Cues Change Savings Choices
James Choi et al.
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
In randomized field experiments, we embedded one- to two-sentence anchoring, goal-setting, or savings threshold cues in emails to employees about their 401(k) savings plan. We find that anchors increase or decrease 401(k) contribution rates by up to 1.4% of income. A high savings goal example raises contribution rates by up to 2.2% of income. Highlighting a higher savings threshold in the match incentive structure raises contributions by up to 1.5% of income relative to highlighting the lower threshold. Highlighting the maximum possible contribution rate raises contribution rates by up to 2.9% of income among low savers.
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Workers' Compensation and Consumption Smoothing
Erin Todd Bronchetti
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the consumption-smoothing benefits of state workers' compensation (WC) programs. These programs are among the largest and most controversial forms of social insurance, with the putative purpose of supporting families affected by unexpected income shocks due to workplace injuries and illnesses. Using Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data for a sample of workers who have experienced a work-related, work-limiting disability, I find that a 10 percent increase in WC benefit generosity offsets the drop in household consumption upon injury by 3 to 5 percent. Moreover, my estimates imply that if benefits were very low, the drop in consumption upon injury would be in the range of 30 percent. A model adapted from the literature on optimal social insurance yields a formula for the optimal level of WC benefits, which depends on empirical estimates of the consumption-smoothing parameter. My calculations suggest that current WC benefit levels are somewhat higher than optimal.
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How Do Laffer Curves Differ Across Countries?
Mathias Trabandt & Harald Uhlig
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
We seek to understand how Laffer curves differ across countries in the US and the EU-14, thereby providing insights into fiscal limits for government spending and the service of sovereign debt. As an application, we analyze the consequences for the permanent sustainability of current debt levels, when interest rates are permanently increased e.g. due to default fears. We build on the analysis in Trabandt-Uhlig (2011) and extend it in several ways. To obtain a better fit to the data, we allow for monopolistic competition as well as partial taxation of pure profit income. We update the sample to 2010, thereby including recent increases in government spending and their fiscal consequences. We provide new tax rate data. We conduct an analysis for the pessimistic case that the recent fiscal shifts are permanent. We include a cross-country analysis on consumption taxes as well as a more detailed investigation of the inclusion of human capital considerations for labor taxation.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Prognosis
Health effects on children's willingness to compete
Björn Bartling, Ernst Fehr & Daniel Schunk
Experimental Economics, March 2012, Pages 58-70
Abstract:
The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children's human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from economic experiments with preschoolers and their mothers to investigate whether child health can explain developmental gaps in children's non-cognitive skills. Our measure for children's non-cognitive skills is their willingness to compete with others. Our findings suggest that health problems are negatively related to children's willingness to compete and that the effect of health on competitiveness differs with socio-economic background. Health has a strongly negative effect in our sub-sample with low socio-economic background, whereas there is no effect in our sub-sample with high socio-economic background.
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Mortality and Morbidity Risks and Economic Behavior
Avraham Stoler & David Meltzer
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
There are theoretical reasons to expect that high risk of mortality or morbidity during young adulthood decreases investment in human capital. However, investigation of this hypothesis is complicated by a variety of empirical challenges, including difficulties in inferring causation due to omitted variables and reverse causation. For example, to compare two groups with substantially different mortality rates, one typically has to use samples from different countries or periods, making it difficult to control for other relevant variables. Reverse causation is important because human capital investment can affect mortality and morbidity. To counter these problems, we collected data on human capital investments, fertility decisions, and other economic choices of people at risk for Huntington's disease. Huntington's disease is a fatal genetic disorder that introduces a large and exogenous risk of early mortality and morbidity. We find a strong negative relation between mortality and morbidity risks and human capital investment.
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Life Course Outcomes on Mental and Physical Health: The Impact of Foster Care on Adulthood
Cheryl Zlotnick, Tammy Tam & Laurie Soman
American Journal of Public Health, March 2012, Pages 534-540
Objective: We compared the prevalence rates of mental health and physical health problems between adults with histories of childhood foster care and those without.
Methods: We used 2003-2005 California Health Interview Survey data (n = 70 456) to test our hypothesis that adults with childhood histories of foster care will report higher rates of mental and physical health concerns, including those that affect the ability to work, than will those without.
Results: Adults with a history of childhood foster care had more than twice the odds of receiving Social Security Disability Insurance because they were unable to work owing to mental or physical health problems for the past year, even after stratifying by age and adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
Conclusions: Childhood foster care may be a sentinel event, signaling the increased risk of adulthood mental and physical health problems. A mental and physical health care delivery program that includes screening and treatment and ensures follow-up for children and youths who have had contact with the foster care system may decrease these individuals' disproportionately high prevalence of poor outcomes throughout their adulthood.
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Jason Fletcher
Journal of Labor Research, March 2012, Pages 49-75
Abstract:
In this paper, we use a longitudinal survey that has collected information for 50 years on a large cohort of Wisconsin high school graduates and their siblings to examine the long term impact of early occupational choice on health status. We find evidence that beginning a career in a blue collar occupation is correlated with several measures of poor health outcomes at ages 50-65. Since our dataset includes usually unobserved pre-labor market characteristics, including IQ and childhood health status, we can show that controlling for these variables is important for many results and suggests a high level of selection into occupation based on health and ability. We also provide evidence of gender differentials in the association between first occupation and later health. Then, we replace our basic measure of occupational categories with summary measures of job characteristics and find that employment at "bad jobs" at the beginning of an individual's career predicts later health outcomes. Finally, we use sibling information in the dataset to show that unmeasured family background factors explain a large share of the effects of occupation on later health. Overall, the evidence points to limited, though heterogeneous, long term effects of health from blue collar employment.
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Timothy Classen & Richard Dunn
Health Economics, March 2012, Pages 338-350
Abstract:
We examine the link between employment status and suicide risk using a panel of US states from 1996 to 2005 with monthly data on suicides, the duration of unemployment spells and the number of job losses associated with mass-layoff events. The use of aggregate data at the monthly level along with the distribution of unemployment duration allows us to separate the effect of job loss from the effect of unemployment duration, an important distinction for policy purposes, especially for the timing of potential interventions. Our results are consistent with unemployment duration being the dominant force in the relationship between job loss and suicide. Nevertheless, mass-layoffs may be powerful localized events where suicide risk increases shortly afterward. Implications for the design of unemployment insurance are discussed.
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Adolescent Health and Harassment Based on Discriminatory Bias
Stephen Russell et al.
American Journal of Public Health, March 2012, Pages 493-495
Abstract:
Is harassment based on personal characteristics such as race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or disability more detrimental than general harassment? In 2 large population-based studies of adolescents, more than one third of those harassed reported bias-based school harassment. Both studies show that bias-based harassment is more strongly associated with compromised health than general harassment. Research on harassment among youths rarely examines the underlying cause. Attention to bias or prejudice in harassment and bullying should be incorporated into programs and policies for young people.
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Differential epidemiology: IQ, neuroticism, and chronic disease by the 50 U.S. states
Bryan Pesta et al.
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Current research shows that geo-political units (e.g., the 50 U.S. states) vary meaningfully on psychological dimensions like intelligence (IQ) and neuroticism (N). A new scientific discipline has also emerged, differential epidemiology, focused on how psychological variables affect health. We integrate these areas by reporting large correlations between aggregate-level IQ and N (measured for the 50 U.S. states) and state differences in rates of chronic disease (e.g., stroke, heart disease). Controlling for health-related behaviors (e.g., smoking, exercise) reduced but did not eliminate these effects. Strong relationships also existed between IQ, N, disease, and a host of other state-level variables (e.g., income, crime, education). The nexus of inter-correlated state variables could reflect a general fitness factor hypothesized by cognitive epidemiologists, although valid inferences about causality will require more research.
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Rucker Johnson, Robert Schoeni & Jeannette Rogowski
Social Science & Medicine, February 2012, Pages 625-636
Abstract:
The relationship between neighborhoods of residence in young adulthood and health in mid-to-late life in the United States are examined using the 1968-2005 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The sample consists of persons who were aged 20-30 in 1968 and are followed for a period of 38 years (N = 2730). Four-level hierarchical random effects models of self-assessed general health status as a function of individual, family, and neighborhood factors are estimated. Using the original sampling design of the PSID, we analyze adult health trajectories of married couples and neighbors followed from young adulthood through elderly ages to assess the magnitudes of the possible causal effects of family and neighborhood characteristics in young adulthood on health in mid-to-late life. Estimates suggest disparities in neighborhood conditions in young adulthood account for one-quarter of the variation in mid-to-late life health. Living in poor neighborhoods during young adulthood is strongly associated with negative health outcomes in later-life. This result is robust even in the presence of a reasonably large amount of potential unobservable individual and family factors that may significantly affect both neighborhood of residence and subsequent health status. Racial differences in health status in mid-to-late life are also associated with family and neighborhood socioeconomic conditions earlier in life. Three quarters of the black-white gap in health status at ages over 55 can be accounted for by differences in childhood socioeconomic status and neighborhood and family factors in young adulthood.
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Socio-economic status is associated with epigenetic differences in the pSoBid cohort
Dagmara McGuinness et al.
International Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Background: Epigenetic programming and epigenetic mechanisms driven by environmental factors are thought to play an important role in human health and ageing. Global DNA methylation has been postulated as an epigenetic marker for epidemiological studies as it is reflective of changes in gene expression linked to disease. How epigenetic mechanisms are affected by psychological, sociological and biological determinants of health still remains unclear. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between socio-economic and lifestyle factors and epigenetic status, as measured by global DNA methylation content, in the pSoBid cohort, which is characterized by an extreme socio-economic and health gradient.
Methods: DNA was extracted from peripheral blood leukocytes using the Maxwell® 16 System and Maxwell® 16 Blood DNA Purification kit (Promega, UK). Global DNA methylation was assessed using MethylampTM Global DNA Methylation Quantification Ultra kit (Epigentek, USA). Associations between global DNA methylation and socio-economic and lifestyle factors were investigated in linear regression models.
Results: Global DNA hypomethylation was observed in the most socio-economically deprived subjects. Job status demonstrated a similar relationship, with manual workers having 24% lower DNA methylation content than non-manual. Additionally, associations were found between global DNA methylation content and biomarkers of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and inflammation, including fibrinogen and interleukin-6 (IL-6), after adjustment for socio-economic factors.
Conclusions: This study has indicated an association between epigenetic status and socio-economic status (SES). This relationship has direct implications for population health and is reflected in further associations between global DNA methylation content and emerging biomarkers of CVD.
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Is Childhood Asthma Associated With Educational Level and Longest-Held Occupation?
Jacek Mazurek, Patricia Schleiff & Paul Henneberger
American Journal of Epidemiology, 15 February 2012, Pages 279-288
Abstract:
Children with asthma can experience chronic morbidity that may interfere with education and career progression. The authors investigated retrospectively whether a history of childhood asthma is associated with educational level and longest-held occupation, by gender. Cross-sectional analysis included a nationally representative sample of 10,452 adults aged ≥20 years who participated in the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2001-2004). Logistic regression was used to assess associations between a childhood-asthma history and educational level, employment, and longest-held occupation. An estimated 6.9% of men and 5.8% of women had a childhood-asthma history. Persons with a childhood-asthma history tended to have a higher educational level than those with no asthma history. Among those who ever worked, and after adjustment for age and race/ethnicity, men with a childhood-asthma history were more likely to work in health-diagnosing occupations, other professional occupations, and as cooks; women with a childhood-asthma history were more likely to work in management-related, entertainment-related, and health service occupations. Compared with those with no asthma history, persons with a childhood-asthma history tended to achieve a higher educational level and, if they worked, were more likely to work in particular occupations.
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Discrimination makes me Sick! An Examination of the Discrimination-Health Relationship
David Johnston & Grace Lordan
Journal of Health Economics, January 2012, Pages 99-111
Abstract:
The attitudes of the general British population towards Muslims changed post 2001, and this change led to a significant increase in Anti-Muslim discrimination. We use this exogenous attitude change to estimate the causal impact of increased discrimination on a range of objective and subjective health outcomes. The difference-in-differences estimates indicate that discrimination worsens blood pressure, cholesterol, BMI and self-assessed general health. Thus, discrimination is a potentially important determinant of the large racial and ethnic health gaps observed in many countries. We also investigate the pathways through which discrimination impacts upon health, and find that discrimination has a negative effect on employment, perceived social support, and health-producing behaviours. Crucially, our results hold for different control groups and model specifications.
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Ethnic Inequalities in Mortality: The Case of Arab-Americans
Abdulrahman El-Sayed et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2011, e29185
Background: Although nearly 112 million residents of the United States belong to a non-white ethnic group, the literature about differences in health indicators across ethnic groups is limited almost exclusively to Hispanics. Features of the social experience of many ethnic groups including immigration, discrimination, and acculturation may plausibly influence mortality risk. We explored life expectancy and age-adjusted mortality risk of Arab-Americans (AAs), relative to non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites in Michigan, the state with the largest per capita population of AAs in the US.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Data were collected about all deaths to AAs and non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites in Michigan between 1990 and 2007, and year 2000 census data were collected for population denominators. We calculated life expectancy, age-adjusted all-cause, cause-specific, and age-specific mortality rates stratified by ethnicity and gender among AAs and non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites. Among AAs, life expectancies among men and women were 2.0 and 1.4 years lower than among non-Arab and non-Hispanic White men and women, respectively. AA men had higher mortality than non-Arab and non-Hispanic White men due to infectious diseases, chronic diseases, and homicide. AA women had higher mortality than non-Arab and non-Hispanic White women due to chronic diseases.
Conclusions/Significance: Despite better education and higher income, AAs have higher age-adjusted mortality risk than non-Arab and non-Hispanic Whites, particularly due to chronic diseases. Features specific to AA culture may explain some of these findings.
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Katharine Zeiders, Leah Doane & Mark Roosa
Hormones and Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perceived discrimination remains a salient and significant environmental stressor for ethnic and racial minority youth. Although many studies have examined the impact of racial/ethnic discrimination on mental health symptomatology and physical health, little is known of the potential physiological processes underlying such experiences, especially during adolescence. In an attempt to understand how varying perceptions of discrimination relate to functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis), the current study examined the relation between Mexican American adolescents' (N = 100, Mage = 15.3 years old) perceptions of discrimination and aspects of their diurnal cortisol profiles. Three salivary samples (wakeup, + 30 waking, bedtime) were collected across three days (total of 9 samples). Utilizing multi-level modeling, results revealed that adolescents' perceived discrimination related to greater overall cortisol output (area under the curve; AUC) after controlling for other life stressors, depressive symptoms, family income, acculturation level, daily stress levels and daily behaviors. Findings also revealed that perceived discrimination was marginally related to a steeper cortisol awakening response (CAR). Together, these findings suggest that perceived discrimination is a salient and impactful stressor for Mexican American adolescents. Understanding the physiological correlates of discrimination can provide insight into larger health disparities among ethnic and racial minority individuals.
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Traffic safety and vehicle choice: Quantifying the effects of the ‘arms race' on American roads
Shanjun Li
Journal of Applied Econometrics, January/February 2012, Pages 34-62
Abstract:
The increasing share of light trucks in the USA has been characterized as an ‘arms race' where individual purchases of light trucks for better self-protection nevertheless worsen traffic safety for society. This paper investigates the interrelation between traffic safety and vehicle choice by quantifying the effects of the arms race on vehicle demand, producer performance, and traffic safety. The analysis suggests that the accident externality of a light truck amounts to $2444 during vehicle lifetime and that 12% of new light trucks sold in 2006 and 204 traffic fatalities could have been attributed to the arms race.
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Does retirement trigger ill health?
Stefanie Behncke
Health Economics, March 2012, Pages 282-300
Abstract:
This paper investigates the effects of retirement on various health outcomes. Data stem from the first three waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). With these informative data, non-parametric matching and instrumental variable (IV) methods are applied to identify causal effects. It is found that retirement significantly increases the risk of being diagnosed with a chronic condition. In particular, it raises the risk of a severe cardiovascular disease and cancer. This is also reflected in increased risk factors (e.g. BMI, cholesterol, blood pressure) and increased problems in physical activities. Furthermore, retirement worsens self-assessed health and an underlying health stock.
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Phuong Do et al.
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
While a growing literature has documented a link between neighborhood context and health outcomes, little is known about the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and height. Using individual data from the 1999-2004 U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey merged with tract-level data from the U.S. Census, we investigate several neighborhood characteristics, including neighborhood socioeconomic status (NSES), education index of concentration at the extremes (ICE), and population density, as potential predictors of height. Employing a series of two-level random intercept models, we find a one standard deviation increase in NSES to be associated with a 0.6 to 1.4 cm height advantage for white and foreign-born Mexican-American females and for U.S. born Mexican-American males, net of individual-level controls. Similarly, a 10 point increase in neighborhood education ICE was associated with 0.23 to 0.32 cm greater height for white and foreign-born Mexican-American females and U.S. born Mexican-American males. Population density was nominally negatively associated with height for foreign-born Mexican-American females. Our findings reveal that lower physical stature for some ethnic and gender groups is clustered within neighborhoods of low SES and education, suggesting that contextual factors may play a role in influencing height above individual-level attributes.
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Early Life Financial Adversity and Respiratory Function in Midlife: A Prospective Birth Cohort Study
Mel Bartley, Yvonne Kelly & Amanda Sacker
American Journal of Epidemiology, 1 January 2012, Pages 33-42
Abstract:
Data from the 1958 National Child Development Study (1958-2004) were used in a prospective study of the relation of financial adversity in childhood to lung function in midlife. It was hypothesized that such a relation would be found and would be mediated partly by early housing deprivation, partly by continuities in social disadvantage, and partly by smoking. These hypotheses were confirmed. The mediating variables explained nearly two-thirds of the observed relation. The strongest individual pathway from early financial hardship to adult lung function was through poor housing in childhood. Poor housing increased the risk of educational failure, which in turn was strongly related to less-advantaged social class. Lack of educational qualifications and less-advantaged social class independently increased the risk of higher levels of smoking. Mediating variables therefore acted in part as indicators of environmental exposures and in part through their links to adult smoking. Early financial adversity is associated with adult lung function partly through poor housing and partly through pathways involving continuities in social disadvantage and the associated environmental exposures and behaviors.
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The Effects of Automobile Recalls on the Severity of Accidents
Yong-Kyun Bae & Hugo Benítez-Silva
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
The number of automobile recalls in the United States has substantially increased over the last two decades, and after a record of over 30 million cars recalled in 2004, in the last few years it has consistently reached between 15 and 17 million, and in 2010 alone 20 million cars were recalled. Toyota's recall crisis in 2010 illustrates how recalls can affect a large number of American drivers and the defects connected to them can result in loss of life and serious accidents. However, in spite of the increase in public concern over recalls and the loss of property and life attached to them, there is no empirical evidence of the effect of vehicle recalls on safety. This paper investigates whether vehicle recalls reduce accidental harm measured by the severity of injuries in vehicle accidents. The results of our analysis show that if a recall for a new-year model is issued, then the severity of injuries of accidents continuously diminishes during the first year after the recall, something we do not find among cars not subject to recalls. This is because defects are repaired over time but also because drivers react by driving more carefully until the defects are fixed. To minimize the losses attached to having dangerously defective cars on our roads, both quick and timely recall issuance are needed and more detailed information on defects should be delivered to owners of defective vehicles. The latter can be made possible through simple but important policy changes by the U.S. government regarding recall information sharing with drivers and insurance companies.
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The mystery of missing heritability: Genetic interactions create phantom heritability
Or Zuk et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 January 2012, Pages 1193-1198
Abstract:
Human genetics has been haunted by the mystery of "missing heritability" of common traits. Although studies have discovered >1,200 variants associated with common diseases and traits, these variants typically appear to explain only a minority of the heritability. The proportion of heritability explained by a set of variants is the ratio of (i) the heritability due to these variants (numerator), estimated directly from their observed effects, to (ii) the total heritability (denominator), inferred indirectly from population data. The prevailing view has been that the explanation for missing heritability lies in the numerator - that is, in as-yet undiscovered variants. While many variants surely remain to be found, we show here that a substantial portion of missing heritability could arise from overestimation of the denominator, creating "phantom heritability." Specifically, (i) estimates of total heritability implicitly assume the trait involves no genetic interactions (epistasis) among loci; (ii) this assumption is not justified, because models with interactions are also consistent with observable data; and (iii) under such models, the total heritability may be much smaller and thus the proportion of heritability explained much larger. For example, 80% of the currently missing heritability for Crohn's disease could be due to genetic interactions, if the disease involves interaction among three pathways. In short, missing heritability need not directly correspond to missing variants, because current estimates of total heritability may be significantly inflated by genetic interactions. Finally, we describe a method for estimating heritability from isolated populations that is not inflated by genetic interactions.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
War and Peace
Securitization, Social Identity, and Democratic Security: Nixon, India, and the Ties That Bind
Jarrod Hayes
International Organization, January 2012, Pages 63-93
Abstract:
The Democratic Peace stands as one of the most coherent and recognizable programs of study in international relations. Yet despite the pages of research devoted to the subject and claims about its law-like nature, the democratic peace remains a highly contested finding. In large part, this contestation arises out of an enduring question: What exactly keeps democracies from fighting? Drawing on the securitization theory of the Copenhagen School as well as social psychology, this article claims that a critical mechanism of the democratic peace lies at the political junction between policymakers and the public. I argue that the democratic identity of the public, grounded in basic democratic norms essential for the function of any democracy at any time, plays an independent role in the construction of security and foreign policy in the United States. To test the argument, I examine the difficult case of the 1971 Bangladesh War, when President Richard Nixon sent the USS Enterprise carrier group to the Bay of Bengal. Analysis of public statements as well as administration documentation reveals that, while Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger actively saw India as a threat to U.S. interests, they were constrained by their belief that the public would not accept a security argument with respect to a fellow democracy.
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Aiding Conflict: The Impact of U.S. Food Aid on Civil War
Nathan Nunn & Nancy Qian
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, we exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuations in U.S. wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any food aid from the United States. Our estimates show that an increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. Our results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts. No effect is found on interstate warfare.
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Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945-2001
David Sobek, Dennis Foster & Samuel Robison
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
The possession of nuclear weapons confers many benefits on a state. The path to proliferation, however, is often violent. When a state initiates a nuclear weapons program, it signals its intent to fundamentally alter its bargaining environment. States that once had an advantage will now be disadvantaged. This change in the environment is not instantaneous, but evolves slowly over time. This gives states both opportunities and incentives to resolve underlying grievances, by force if necessary, before a nuclear weapons program is completed. Our cross-national analyses of nuclear weapons program and the onset of militarized conflict confirm this expectation. In particular, the closer a state gets to acquiring nuclear weapons, the greater the risk it will be attacked (especially over territorial issues). Once nuclear weapons are acquired, however, the risk of being attacked dramatically drops, though not below the risk of attack for non-proliferators.
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The Political Effectiveness of Terrorism Revisited
Max Abrahms
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Terrorists attack civilians to coerce their governments into making political concessions. Does this strategy work? To empirically assess the effectiveness of terrorism, the author exploits variation in the target selection of 125 violent substate campaigns. The results show that terrorist campaigns against civilian targets are significantly less effective than guerrilla campaigns against military targets at inducing government concessions. The negative political effect of terrorism is evident across logit model specifications after carefully controlling for tactical confounds. Drawing on political psychology, the author concludes with a theory to account for why governments resist compliance when their civilians are targeted.
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Wade Cole
American Journal of Sociology, January 2012, Pages 1131-1171
Abstract:
Much research has shown human rights treaties to be ineffective or even counterproductive, often contributing to greater levels of abuse among countries that ratify them. This article reevaluates the effect of four core human rights treaties on a variety of human rights outcomes. Unlike previous studies, it disaggregates treaty membership to examine the effect of relatively "stronger" and "weaker" commitments. Two-stage regression analyses that control for the endogeneity of treaty membership show that stronger commitments in the form of optional provisions that allow states and individuals to complain about human rights abuses are often associated with improved practices. The article discusses the scholarly and practical implications of these findings.
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A Blessing or a Curse? State Support for Terrorist Groups
David Carter
International Organization, January 2012, Pages 129-151
Abstract:
Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a group's ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group has a sponsor that provides it with safe haven, the risk of the group being forcefully eliminated by the target increases. I argue that sponsors that provide safe haven can have incentives to provide information to the target about the groups to avoid potential costs from target military operations within their territory. The key empirical findings suggest that state sponsorship is a less serious problem for target states than many previously thought.
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This Time It's Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana
Christopher Layne
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Before the Great Recession's foreshocks in fall 2007, most American security studies scholars believed that unipolarity - and perforce American hegemony - would be enduring features of international politics far into the future. However, in the Great Recession's aftermath, it is apparent that much has changed since 2007. Predictions of continuing unipolarity have been superseded by premonitions of American decline and geopolitical transformation. The Great Recession has had a two-fold impact. First, it highlighted the shift of global wealth - and power - from West to East, a trend illustrated by China's breathtakingly rapid rise to great power status. Second, it has raised doubts about the robustness of US primacy's economic and financial underpinnings. This article argues that the unipolar moment is over, and the Pax Americana - the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 - is fast winding down. This article challenges the conventional wisdom among International Relations/Security Studies scholars on three counts. First, it shows that contrary to the claims of unipolar stability theorists, the distribution of power in the international system no longer is unipolar. Second, this article revisits the 1980s' debate about American decline and demonstrates that the Great Recession has vindicated the so-called declinists of that decade. Finally, this article takes on the institutional lock-in argument, which holds that by strengthening the Pax Americana's legacy institutions, the United States can perpetuate the essential elements of the international order it constructed following World War II even as the material foundations of American primacy erode.
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Jomana Amara
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The United States used a combination of economic, political, and military means to effect change in Iraq. Most notably, the United States used a buildup of security forces, the "surge", as an intervention to stabilize Iraq. This article uses structural change tests to determine the effect of the intervention on security and economic metrics of success. There appears to be compelling evidence that several events may have had a direct influence on security variables with the surge being one of the events. There is little to suggest that the surge was the primary intervention that enhanced economic development and political order.
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Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism
Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi & Esteban Klor
Journal of Politics, January 2012, Pages 113-128
Abstract:
This article analyzes the link between economic conditions and the quality of suicide terrorism. While the existing empirical literature shows that poverty and economic conditions are not correlated with the quantity of terror, theory predicts that poverty and poor economic conditions may affect the quality of terror. Poor economic conditions may lead more able and better-educated individuals to participate in terror attacks, allowing terror organizations to send better-qualified terrorists to more complex, higher-impact terror missions. Using the universe of Palestinian suicide terrorists who acted against Israeli targets in 2000-06, we provide evidence of the correlation between economic conditions, the characteristics of suicide terrorists, and the targets they attack. High levels of unemployment enable terror organizations to recruit better educated, more mature, and more experienced suicide terrorists, who in turn attack more important Israeli targets.
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Reputation for Resolve, Interests, and Conflict
Joe Clare & Vesna Danilovic
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2012, Pages 3-27
Abstract:
Schelling's work laid the foundation for a reputational theory of conflict behavior, claiming that a state's reputation for resolve, as established through its past behavior, should provide it with bargaining leverage in future conflicts. This argument is scrutinized both theoretically and empirically in this study and also juxtaposed to an alternative framework that modifies the impact of "face-saving" stakes with those of a more inherent nature, such as the interests in a dispute. We advance an argument about the interplay between a state's reputation from past behavior and its current interests in order to predict its crisis behavior. Our empirical expectations are subsequently tested in a quantitative analysis of deterrence crises for the period 1895-1985. The findings indicate that, while reputation matters, its impact is indirect at best and contingent on a state's interests. Given the strong empirical support, we expect the interaction between reputation and interests as specified in our analysis to further contribute to a better understanding of conflict behavior.
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Total Decontamination Cost of the Anthrax Letter Attacks
Ketra Schmitt & Nicholas Zacchia
Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, forthcoming
Abstract:
All of the costs associated with decontamination following the 2001 anthrax letter attacks were summarized, estimated, and aggregated based on existing literature and news media reports. A comprehensive list of all affected structures was compiled. Costs were analyzed by building class and decontamination type. Sampling costs and costs of worker relocation were also included. Our analysis indicates that the total cost associated with decontamination was about $320 million.
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Cultures of Violence and Acts of Terror: Applying a Legitimation-Habituation Model to Terrorism
Christopher Mullins & Joseph Young
Crime & Delinquency, January 2012, Pages 28-56
Abstract:
Although uniquely positioned to provide insight into the nature and dynamics of terrorism, overall the field of criminology has seen few empirically focused analyses of this form of political violence. This article seeks to add to the understanding of terror through an exploration of how general levels of violence within a given society influence the probability of political dissidents within that society resorting to terror as a form of political action. Drawing on the legitimation-habituation thesis, the authors explore whether general levels of legitimate and illegitimate violence within a society predict terrorist violence (both internal and external in direction) within that society. To do so, the authors use zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to perform time series cross-sectional analysis on predictors of terrorist events from the Global Terrorism Database. The authors find support for their core hypothesis and provide a discussion of the implications for the findings within their data and for future criminological research on terrorism.
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Explaining the Development-Civil War Relationship
Helge Holtermann
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2012, Pages 56-78
Abstract:
The vast majority of civil wars occur in economically less developed countries, as measured by GDP per capita. Two suggested explanations for this are prominent: one emphasizing that poverty facilitates rebel recruitment due to lowered economic opportunity cost of rebelling, and the other highlighting that low state reach and capacity give political and military opportunity for organizing insurgency. I argue that the latter account is more powerful. Low state reach is vital not only to rebel survival; it also enables rebels to obtain control over remote settlements, which facilitates the effective use of persuasion, coercion, organization, and economic rewards for mobilizing recruits and other resources. Although low economic opportunity costs can ease recruitment, it may not be essential if such tools are available. The argument is supported by a quantitative analysis covering 133 countries from 1989 to 2006. Countries experiencing civil war were distinguished more by low state reach (measured by road density, telephone density, and % urban of the population) than by depth of poverty (measured by the mean income of the poorest decile). Moreover, the negative association between GDP per capita and civil war risk disappeared when controlling for state reach, but remained strong controlling for poverty.
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A Dynamic Theory of Resource Wars
Daron Acemoglu et al.
Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2012, Pages 283-331
Abstract:
We develop a dynamic theory of resource wars and study the conditions under which such wars can be prevented. Our focus is on the interaction between the scarcity of resources and the incentives for war in the presence of limited commitment. We show that a key parameter determining the incentives for war is the elasticity of demand. Our first result identifies a novel externality that can precipitate war: price-taking firms fail to internalize the impact of their extraction on military action. In the case of inelastic resource demand, war incentives increase over time and war may become inevitable. Our second result shows that in some situations, regulation of prices and quantities by the resource-rich country can prevent war, and when this is the case, there will also be slower resource extraction than the Hotelling benchmark (with inelastic demand). Our third result is that because of limited commitment and its implications for armament incentives, regulation of prices and quantities might actually precipitate war even in some circumstances where wars would not have arisen under competitive markets.
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Why the U.S. Military Budget is Foolish and Sustainable
Benjamin Friedman & Justin Logan
Orbis, forthcoming
Abstract:
What defense budget the United States should have and what defense budget it can afford are separate questions. The debate raging in Washington about Pentagon spending ignores the distinction. Doves insist that we need a more modest military strategy because the current one is wasteful and economically unsustainable. Hawks say that the current approach is sensible and affordable. This article takes a third path, arguing that U.S. military policy is likely to remain extravagant because it is sustainable. We adopted our current strategy - which amounts to trying to run the world with the American military - because we could, not because it was wisest. Wealth and safety make the consequences of bad defense policy abstract for most U.S. taxpayers. So we buy defenses like rich people shop, ignoring the balance of costs and benefits. We conflate ideological ambition with what is required for our safety. Unfortunately, the current political demand for austerity and fewer wars will only temporarily restrain our military spending and the ambitions it underwrites.
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Convoys to combat Somali piracy
Benjamin Hughes & Simon Jones
Small Wars & Insurgencies, Winter 2012, Pages 74-92
Abstract:
As the world becomes increasingly globalized, interruptions to international trade cannot be permitted. Piracy off the coast of Somalia has hampered international trade in the region and poses significant risks to the sailors required to navigate those waters. Over the past three years the global community has attempted, through a number of different naval tactics, to stop these acts of piracy; however, these tactics have proven ineffective. This article looks at historical precedence and military theory to support the concept of using convoys to protect the thousands of cargo vessels traveling round the Horn of Africa every year. This tactic will greatly decrease the number of successful pirate attacks and save countless lives in the process.
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Industry-Level Supply-Side Market Concentration and the Price of Military Conflict
Jaya Wen
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2012, Pages 79-92
Abstract:
In economics, supply-side market concentration profoundly impacts firm behavior. This dimension of economic interaction can be used to predict the conflict initiation of countries in the context of international relations. The following investigation uses industry-level trade data to define four new market concentration variables, which are incorporated into the traditional model of military conflict. The article finds that high dyadic market concentration significantly decreases the likelihood that a state initiated military conflict in the period 1962-2001, and argues that market concentration is an important factor in the trade-conflict relationship.
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Paul Staniland
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ethnic insurgents sometimes defect to join forces with the state during civil wars. Ethnic defection can have important effects on conflict outcomes, but its causes have been understudied. Using Sunni defection in Iraq as a theory-developing case, this article offers a theory of "fratricidal flipping" that identifies lethal competition between insurgent factions as an important cause of defection. It examines the power of the fratricidal-flipping mechanism against competing theories in the cases of Kashmir and Sri Lanka. These wars involve within-conflict variation in defection across groups and over time. A detailed study of the empirical record, including significant fieldwork, suggests that fratricide was the dominant trigger for defection, while government policy played a secondary role in facilitating pro-state paramilitarism. Deep ideological disagreements were surprisingly unimportant in driving defection. The argument is probed in other wars in Asia. The complex internal politics of insurgent movements deserve careful attention.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Thoughtful
Solving the "human problem": The frontal feedback model
Raymond Noack
Consciousness and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper argues that humans possess unique cognitive abilities due to the presence of a functional system that exists in the human brain that is absent in the non-human brain. This system, the frontal feedback system, was born in the hominin brain when the great phylogenetic expansion of the prefrontal cortex relative to posterior sensory regions surpassed a critical threshold. Surpassing that threshold effectively reversed the preferred direction of information flow in the highest association regions of the neocortex, producing the frontal feedback system. This reversal was from the caudo-rostral bias characteristic of non-human, or pre-human, brain dynamics to a rostro-caudal bias characteristic of modern human brain dynamics. The frontal feedback system works through frontal motor routines, or action schemes, manipulating the release and reconstruction of stored sensory memories in posterior sensory areas. As an obligatory feature of frontal feedback, a central character, or self, emerges within this cortical network that manifests itself as agent in these reconstructions as well as in the experience of sensory perceptions. Dynamical-systems modeling of cortical interactions is combined in the paper with recent neuroimaging studies of "resting-state" brain activity to bridge the gap between microscopic and macroscopic levels of cortical behavior. This synthesis is used to support the proposal of an information flow reversal occurring in the hominin brain and also to explain how such a reversal generates the wide variety of cognitive and experiential phenomena that many consider to be uniquely human.
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Hajo Adam & Adam Galinsky
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We introduce the term "enclothed cognition" to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes. Providing a potentially unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer, we propose that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors - the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them. As a first test of our enclothed cognition perspective, the current research explored the effects of wearing a lab coat. A pretest found that a lab coat is generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness. We therefore predicted that wearing a lab coat would increase performance on attention-related tasks. In Experiment 1, physically wearing a lab coat increased selective attention compared to not wearing a lab coat. In Experiments 2 and 3, wearing a lab coat described as a doctor's coat increased sustained attention compared to wearing a lab coat described as a painter's coat, and compared to simply seeing or even identifying with a lab coat described as a doctor's coat. Thus, the current research suggests a basic principle of enclothed cognition - it depends on both the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes.
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Joseph Simmons & Cade Massey
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Is optimism real, or are optimistic forecasts just cheap talk? To help answer this question, we investigated whether optimistic predictions persist in the face of large incentives to be accurate. We asked National Football League football fans to predict the winner of a single game. Roughly half (the partisans) predicted a game involving their favorite team, and the other half (the neutrals) predicted a game involving 2 teams they were neutral about. Participants were promised either a small incentive ($5) or a large incentive ($50) for correctly predicting the game's winner. Optimism emerged even when incentives were large, as partisans were much more likely than neutrals to predict partisans' favorite teams to win. Strong optimism also emerged among participants whose responses to follow-up questions strongly suggested that they believed the predictions they made. This research supports the claim that optimism is real.
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Stirring images: Fear, not happiness or arousal, makes art more sublime
Kendall Eskine, Natalie Kacinik & Jesse Prinz
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Which emotions underlie our positive experiences of art? Although recent evidence from neuroscience suggests that emotions play a critical role in art perception, no research to date has explored the extent to which specific emotional states affect aesthetic experiences or whether general physiological arousal is sufficient. Participants were assigned to one of five conditions - sitting normally, engaging in 15 or 30 jumping jacks, or viewing a happy or scary video - prior to rating abstract works of art. Only the fear condition resulted in significantly more positive judgments about the art. These striking findings provide the first evidence that fear uniquely inspires positively valenced aesthetic judgments. The results are discussed in the context of embodied cognition.
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Food for Thought? Trust Your Unconscious When Energy Is Low
Maarten Bos, Ap Dijksterhuis & Rick van Baaren
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies showed that a period of unconscious thought can help when making complex decisions. Under some circumstances, unconscious thought improves decisions even more than conscious thought. Executive functioning depends on energy provided by glucose, and we know from previous research that the performance of various conscious processes deteriorates when energy is low. Unconscious processes require less energy and may operate unhampered when energy is low. Therefore, we propose that whereas low blood glucose levels impair conscious thought, this is not the same for unconscious thought. An experiment, where we manipulated blood glucose levels, indicated that indeed, when making decisions, the unconscious can best be trusted when blood glucose levels are low, whereas conscious deliberation yields the best results when blood glucose levels are elevated.
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Individual and group IQ predict inmate violence
Brie Diamond, Robert Morris & J.C. Barnes
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a long tradition of theoretical and empirical research linking intelligence to criminal activity. At the same time, the extant literature has been slow to examine this relationship in other settings. One such setting in which this relationship may also manifest is the prison environment, where knowledge on the determinants of prison misconduct has important implications for prison management and security. Drawing from a representative sample of inmates from a large Southern state in the US, the current study presents the first assessment of the relationship between intelligence and prison misconduct. The effect of intelligence, measured via the WAIS-R, on violent prison misconduct is analyzed controlling for inmate and prison-level factors. Results indicated that the individual's IQ, as well as the average IQ of the prison unit, was significantly and negatively related to violent prison misconduct. Implications and directions for future research are highlighted.
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The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision Making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information
Julia Minson & Jennifer Mueller
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior investigators have asserted that certain group characteristics cause group members to disregard outside information and that this behavior leads to diminished performance. We demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually also contributes to such myopic underweighting of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to numerical judgments made by peers gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals working alone. This difference in willingness to use peer input was mediated by the greater confidence that the dyad members reported in the accuracy of their own estimates. Furthermore, dyads were no better at judging the relative accuracy of their own estimates and the advisor's estimates than individuals were. Our analyses demonstrate that, relative to individuals, dyads suffered an accuracy cost. Specifically, if dyad members had given as much weight to peer input as individuals working alone did, then their revised estimates would have been significantly more accurate.
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Michael Slepian & Nalini Ambady
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation, cognitive flexibility, and remote associations. Alternative mechanisms such as enhanced mood and motivation were also examined. These results suggest that creativity can be influenced by certain types of physical movement.
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Something Smells Fishy: On the Bidirectional Nature and Cognitive Mediation of Metaphoric Influence
Spike Lee & Norbert Schwarz
University of Michigan Working Paper, September 2011
Abstract:
In many languages, social suspicion is expressed metaphorically as something that has a smell; in English the smell is "fishy." If metaphors reflect conceptual knowledge grounded in perceptual experience, then processing perceptual information may activate its metaphorically associated conceptual information and vice versa, resulting in bidirectional effects. In seven experiments we tested for the behavioral effects of fishy smells on social suspicion among English speakers, the reversed effects of suspicion on smell identification and detection, and the mediation process. Incidental exposure to fishy smells induced suspicion and undermined cooperation in trust-based economic exchanges in a trust game (Study 1) and a public goods game (Study 2). Socially induced suspicion enhanced the identification of fishy smells, but not other smells (Study 3), an effect that was mediated by the activation and application of metaphorically associated concepts (Studies 4-6). Suspicion also heightened detection sensitivity to low concentrations of fishy smells (Study 7). The bidirectional nature of metaphoric influence challenges conceptual metaphor theory and supports the grounded cognition perspective. These findings also have implications for testing cognitive and other mechanisms underlying metaphoric influence and for exploring the cultural variation and origin of metaphoric knowledge.
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Fair or Not Fair? The Effects of Numerical Framing on the Perceived Justice of Outcomes
Jessica Kwong & Kin Fai Ellick Wong
Journal of Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors draw on prospect theory and demonstrate that the perceived justice of an outcome is affected by the way numerical information is presented. Three experimental studies were conducted using five different samples, representing teachers, general employees, and future employees. People generally tend to see a bigger difference in the performance between the self versus another person when their performance components are presented in frames associated with small numbers (e.g., absence rate of 3% vs. 9%) than when they are presented in frames associated with large numbers (e.g., attendance rate of 97% vs. 91%). Despite the same objective performance difference (e.g., 6% in the above example), people expected different fair shares of rewards and evaluated justice of a given outcome differently across the two frames.
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Diversifying Experiences Enhance Cognitive Flexibility
Simone Ritter et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past research has linked creativity to unusual and unexpected experiences, such as early parental loss or living abroad. However, few studies have investigated the underlying cognitive processes. We propose that some experiences have in common a "diversifying" aspect and an active involvement, which together enhance cognitive flexibility (i.e., creative cognitive processing). In the first experiment, participants experienced complex unusual and unexpected events happening in a virtual reality. In the second experiment, participants were confronted with schema-violations. In both experiments, comparisons with various control groups showed that a diversifying experience - defined as the active (but not vicarious) involvement in an unusual event - increased cognitive flexibility more than active (or vicarious) involvement in normal experiences. Our findings bridge several lines of research and shed light on a basic cognitive mechanism responsible for creativity.
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The Challenge of Staying Happier: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model
Kennon Sheldon & Sonja Lyubomirsky
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The happiness that comes from a particular success or change in fortune abates with time. The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention (HAP) model specifies two routes by which the well-being gains derived from a positive life change are eroded - the first involving bottom-up processes (i.e., declining positive emotions generated by the positive change) and the second involving top-down processes (i.e., increased aspirations for even more positivity). The model also specifies two moderators that can forestall these processes - continued appreciation of the original life change and continued variety in change-related experiences. The authors formally tested the predictions of the HAP model in a 3-month three-wave longitudinal study of 481 students. Temporal path analyses and moderated regression analyses provided good support for the model. Implications for the stability of well-being, the feasibility of "the pursuit of happiness," and the appeal of overconsumption are discussed.
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Self-Generated Persuasion: Effects of the Target and Direction of Arguments
Pablo Briñol, Michael McCaslin & Richard Petty
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has revealed that self-persuasion can occur either through role-playing (i.e., when arguments are generated to convince another person) or, more directly, through trying to convince oneself (i.e., when arguments are generated with oneself as the target). Combining these 2 traditions in the domain of attitude change, the present research investigated the impact on self-persuasion of the specific target of one's own persuasive attempt (i.e., others vs. oneself). We found that the efficacy of self-persuasion depended on whether people believed that they would have to put more or less effort in convincing the self or others. Specifically, we found opposite effects for self-generated arguments depending on whether the topic of persuasion was proattitudinal or counterattitudinal. Across 4 studies, it was shown that when the topic of the message was counterattitudinal, people were more effective in convincing themselves when the intended target of the arguments was themselves versus another person. However, the opposite was the case when the topic was proattitudinal. These effects were shown to stem from the differential effort perceived as necessary and actually exerted in trying to produce persuasion under these conditions.
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Creativity: Genius, madness, or a combination of both?
Andreas Fink et al.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, February 2012, Pages 11-18
Abstract:
We investigated the relationship between creativity, personality, latent inhibition (LI), and psychopathology. For this purpose, a sample of actors, 2 clinical samples (alcohol and polydrug dependents), and a group of university students were compared with respect to psychometrically determined creativity, personality, and LI. The results suggest that actors and polydrug dependents can be characterized by (a) high scores in the personality dimension psychoticism, (b) high originality during creative idea generation, and (c) decreased LI as compared with the other groups. Correlational analyses moreover revealed significant associations between LI, originality, and psychoticism. According to our findings, creative people and people suffering from mental disorders appear to share some common personality and cognitive traits.
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Alexandra Langmeyer, Angelika Guglhör-Rudan & Christian Tarnai
Journal of Individual Differences, Spring 2012, Pages 119-130
Abstract:
The present study is the first to examine the relationship between music preferences and personality among a sample of young Germans (N = 422, age range 21-26 years). We replicated the factor structure of the Short Test of Music Preferences (STOMP, Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003) by means of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The validity of the STOMP was also confirmed for the first time by rating soundclips. The relationship between the dimensions of personality (Big Five Inventory) and music preferences (STOMP and soundclips) was analyzed with a structural equation model (SEM). Gender differences were examined with multigroup analyses (MGA). Our findings corroborate earlier findings on the relationship between music preferences and personality: Individuals open to experience prefer reflective and complex music (e.g., classical) and intense and rebellious music (e.g., rock), whereas they dislike upbeat and conventional types of music (e.g., pop music). Extraverts, on the other hand, prefer upbeat and conventional and energetic and rhythmic types of music (e.g., rap/hip-hop). The results reveal some gender differences.
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The Impact of Personal Experience on Behavior: Evidence from Video-Rental Fines
Michael Haselhuhn et al.
Management Science, January 2012, Pages 52-61
Abstract:
Personal experience matters. In a field setting with longitudinal data, we disentangle the effects of learning new information from the effects of personal experience. We demonstrate that experience with a fine, controlling for the effect of learning new information, significantly boosts future compliance. We also show that experience with a large fine boosts compliance more than experience with a small fine, but that the influence of experience with both large and small fines decays sharply over time.
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Innovation Relies on the Obscure: A Key to Overcoming the Classic Problem of Functional Fixedness
Tony McCaffrey
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A recent analysis of real-world problems that led to historic inventions and insight problems that are used in psychology experiments suggests that during innovative problem solving, individuals discover at least one infrequently noticed or new (i.e., obscure) feature of the problem that can be used to reach a solution. This observation suggests that research uncovering aspects of the human semantic, perceptual, and motor systems that inhibit the noticing of obscure features would enable researchers to identify effective techniques to overcome those obstacles. As a critical step in this research program, this study showed that the generic-parts technique can help people unearth the types of obscure features that can be used to overcome functional fixedness, which is a classic inhibitor to problem solving. Subjects trained on this technique solved on average 67% more problems than a control group did. By devising techniques that facilitate the noticing of obscure features in order to overcome impediments to problem solving (e.g., design fixation), researchers can systematically create a tool kit of innovation-enhancing techniques.
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Patricia Kanngiesser et al.
Journal of Comparative Psychology, November 2011, Pages 436-445
Abstract:
The endowment effect describes the bias that people often value things that they possess more than things they do not possess. Thus, they are often reluctant to trade items in their possession for items of equivalent value. Some nonhuman primates appear to share this bias with humans, but it remains an open question whether they show endowment effects to the same extent as humans do. We investigated endowment effects in all four great ape species (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, Pongo pygmaeus) by varying whether apes were endowed with food items (Experiment 1, N = 22) or tools that were instrumental in retrieving food (Experiment 2, N = 23). We first assessed apes' preferences for items of a pair and their willingness to trade items in their possession. We then endowed apes with one item of a pair and offered them to trade for the other item. Apes showed endowment effects for food, but not for tools. In Experiment 3, we endowed bonobos (N = 4) and orangutans (N = 5) with either one or 12 food items. Endowment effects did not differ between species and were not influenced by the number of endowed food items. Our findings suggest that endowment effects in great apes are restricted to immediate food gratification and remain unaffected by the quantity of food rewards. However, endowment effects do not seem to extend to other, nonconsumable possessions even when they are instrumental in retrieving food. In general, apes do not show endowment effects across a range of different commodities as humans typically do.
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Katherine Vytal et al.
Psychophysiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Anxiety impairs the ability to think and concentrate, suggesting that the interaction between emotion and cognition may elucidate the debilitating nature of pathological anxiety. Using a verbal n-back task that parametrically modulated cognitive load, we explored the effect of experimentally induced anxiety on task performance and the startle reflex. Findings suggest there is a crucial inflection point between moderate and high cognitive load, where resources shift from anxious apprehension to focus on task demands. Specifically, we demonstrate that anxiety impairs performance under low load, but is reduced when subjects engage in a difficult task that occupies executive resources. We propose a two-component model of anxiety that describes a cognitive mechanism behind performance impairment and an automatic response that supports sustained anxiety-potentiated startle. Implications for therapeutic interventions and emotional pathology are discussed.
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Emotion Regulation Reduces Loss Aversion and Decreases Amygdala Responses to Losses
Peter Sokol-Hessner, Colin Camerer & Elizabeth Phelps
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Emotion regulation strategies can alter behavioral and physiological responses to emotional stimuli and the neural correlates of those responses in regions such as the amygdala or striatum. The current study investigates the brain systems engaged when using an emotion regulation technique during financial decisions. In decision-making, regulating emotion with reappraisal-focused strategies that encourage taking a different perspective has been shown to reduce loss aversion as observed both in choices and in the relative arousal responses to actual loss and gain outcomes. In the current study, we find using fMRI that behavioral loss aversion correlates with amygdala activity in response to losses relative to gains. Success in regulating loss aversion also correlates with the reduction in amygdala responses to losses, but not to gains. Furthermore, across both decisions and outcomes, we find the reappraisal strategy increases baseline activity in dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the striatum. The similarity of the neural circuitry observed to that seen in emotion regulation, despite divergent tasks, serves as further evidence for a role of emotion in decision-making, and for the power of reappraisal to change assessments of value and thereby choices.
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Hidden conflicts: Explanations make inconsistencies harder to detect
Sangeet Khemlani & P.N. Johnson-Laird
Acta Psychologica, March 2012, Pages 486-491
Abstract:
A rational response to an inconsistent set of propositions is to revise it in a minimal way to restore consistency. A more important psychological goal is usually to create an explanation that resolves the inconsistency. We report five studies showing that once individuals have done so, they find inconsistencies harder to detect. Experiment 1 established the effect when participants explained inconsistencies, and Experiment 2 eliminated the possibility that the effect was a result of demand characteristics. Experiments 3a and 3b replicated the result, and showed that it did not occur in control groups that evaluated (or justified) which events in the pairs of assertions were more surprising. Experiment 4 replicated the previous findings, but the participants carried out all the conditions acting as their own controls. In all five studies, control conditions established that participants were able to detect comparable inconsistencies. Their explanations led them to re-interpret the generalizations as holding by default, and so they were less likely to treat the pairs of assertions as inconsistent. Explanations can accordingly undo the devastating consequences of logical inconsistencies, but at the cost of a subsequent failure to detect them.
Friday, February 24, 2012
In the course of human events
The Political Economy of Mass Printing: Legitimacy and Technological Change in the Ottoman Empire
Metin Coşgel, Thomas Miceli & Jared Rubin
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
New technologies have not always been greeted with full enthusiasm. Although the Ottomans were quick to adopt advancements in military technology, they waited almost three centuries to sanction printing in Ottoman Turkish (in Arabic characters). Printing spread relatively rapidly throughout Europe following the invention of the printing press in 1450 despite resistance by interest groups and temporary restrictions in some countries. We explain differential reaction to technology through a political economy approach centered on the legitimizing relationships between rulers and their agents (e.g., military, religious, or secular authorities). The Ottomans regulated the printing press heavily to prevent the loss it would have caused to the ruler's net revenue by undermining the legitimacy provided by religious authorities. On the other hand, the legitimizing relationship between European religious and political authorities was undermined over a century prior to the invention of the press. European rulers thus had little reason to stop the spread of printing as public policy, nor could the Church have stopped it had it wanted to. The Ottomans eventually sanctioned printing in Arabic script in the eighteenth century after alternative sources of legitimacy emerged.
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The naturalness of (many) social institutions: Evolved cognition as their foundation
Pascal Boyer & Michael Bang Petersen
Journal of Institutional Economics, March 2012, Pages 1-25
Abstract:
Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations of institutional design, i.e. why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become ‘natural', compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What are required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition.
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The Arabian Cradle: Mitochondrial Relicts of the First Steps along the Southern Route out of Africa
Verónica Fernandes et al.
American Journal of Human Genetics, 10 February 2012, Pages 347-355
Abstract:
A major unanswered question regarding the dispersal of modern humans around the world concerns the geographical site of the first human steps outside of Africa. The "southern coastal route" model predicts that the early stages of the dispersal took place when people crossed the Red Sea to southern Arabia, but genetic evidence has hitherto been tenuous. We have addressed this question by analyzing the three minor west-Eurasian haplogroups, N1, N2, and X. These lineages branch directly from the first non-African founder node, the root of haplogroup N, and coalesce to the time of the first successful movement of modern humans out of Africa, ∼60 thousand years (ka) ago. We sequenced complete mtDNA genomes from 85 Southwest Asian samples carrying these haplogroups and compared them with a database of 300 European examples. The results show that these minor haplogroups have a relict distribution that suggests an ancient ancestry within the Arabian Peninsula, and they most likely spread from the Gulf Oasis region toward the Near East and Europe during the pluvial period 55-24 ka ago. This pattern suggests that Arabia was indeed the first staging post in the spread of modern humans around the world.
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Benoît Testé et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, March 2012, Pages 263-268
Abstract:
The acceptance of migrant populations and the definition of an "appropriate" migrant are controversial issues in many countries. The present research focuses on the ideological determinants of how newcomers are evaluated by a host population in a Western country with a strongly rooted meritocratic ideology. We carried out two studies to examine how the expression of meritocratic beliefs by a male potential migrant affects the way he is evaluated by the host population. We measured the host population's perception of the potential migrant's ability to integrate into society, his tendency to adopt the host country's culture, and the general desirability of his world vision for all newcomers. We also noted the host population's judgments of the target's agency and communality. The results showed that a potential newcomer who expresses a strong (vs. weak) belief in a just world (Study 1) or an internal (vs. external) locus of control (Study 2) is evaluated more favorably by the host population. In addition, judgments of the target's integration capacity were only mediated by his perceived agency. We discuss these results in the light of work on the meritocratic ideology and intercultural relations.
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Political orientation and images of the United States in Italy
Elena Trifiletti et al.
Social Behavior and Personality, February 2012, Pages 85-91
Abstract:
Image theory was used in this study to assess the images that Italian adults with different political ideologies have of the United States. In addition to the ally, barbarian, enemy, and imperialist images, a new image, that of the father, was introduced. It was found that right-wing respondents endorsed the father and ally images of Americans, while left-wing respondents perceived Americans as barbarians. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
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Plaintiffs v. Privateers: Litigation and Foreign Affairs in the Federal Courts, 1816-1822
Kevin Arlyck
Law and History Review, February 2012, Pages 245-278
Abstract:
On January 24, 1817, Don Juan Stoughton, the Spanish consul in Boston, wrote to his colleague in Baltimore, Don Pablo Chacon, to thank him for his recent efforts in supplying Stoughton with information about the Mangore, a private armed vessel recently arrived in the Chesapeake. Stoughton believed that the privateer was responsible for the capture of a Spanish-owned merchant ship that had recently turned up in Massachusetts. Stoughton had recently filed suit in federal district court to recover the vessel and its cargo on behalf of the rightful owners, but to do so he had to establish that, in the course of its recent expedition, the Mangore had violated federal law prescribing American neutrality. In addition to providing intelligence in this matter, Chacon had secured local counsel to represent Stoughton at depositions of privateer crew members being taken in Baltimore.
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Democracy and Human Development
John Gerring, Strom Thacker & Rodrigo Alfaro
Journal of Politics, January 2012, Pages 1-17
Abstract:
Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This article reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: (a) that a country's level of democracy in a given year affects its level of human development and (b) that its stock of democracy over the past century affects its level of human development. Using infant mortality rates as a core measure of human development, we conduct a series of time-series-cross-national statistical tests of these two hypotheses. We find only slight evidence for the first proposition, but substantial support for the second. Thus, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between democracy and development is as a time-dependent, historical phenomenon.
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The paradox of nationalism: The common denominator of radical right and radical left euroscepticism
Daphne Halikiopoulou, Kyriaki Nanou & Sofia Vasilopoulou
European Journal of Political Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
What can explain the strong euroscepticism of radical parties of both the right and the left? This article argues that the answer lies in the paradoxical role of nationalism as a central element in both party families, motivating opposition towards European integration. Conventionally, the link between nationalism and euroscepticism is understood solely as a prerogative of radical right-wing parties, whereas radical left-wing euroscepticism is associated with opposition to the neoliberal character of the European Union. This article contests this view. It argues that nationalism cuts across party lines and constitutes the common denominator of both radical right-wing and radical left-wing euroscepticism. It adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining intensive case study analysis with quantitative analysis of party manifestos. First, it traces the link between nationalism and euroscepticism in Greece and France in order to demonstrate the internal validity of the argument. It then undertakes a cross-country statistical estimation to assess the external validity of the argument and its generalisability across Europe.
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Income and democracy: Evidence from system GMM estimates
Benedikt Heid, Julian Langer & Mario Larch
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does higher income cause democracy? Accounting for the dynamic nature and high persistence of income and democracy, we find a statistically significant positive relation between income and democracy for a postwar period sample of up to 150 countries. Our results are robust across different measures of democracy and instrumentation strategies.
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Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers
Coren Apicella et al.
Nature, 26 January 2012, Pages 497-501
Abstract:
Social networks show striking structural regularities, and both theory and evidence suggest that networks may have facilitated the development of large-scale cooperation in humans. Here, we characterize the social networks of the Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. We show that Hadza networks have important properties also seen in modernized social networks, including a skewed degree distribution, degree assortativity, transitivity, reciprocity, geographic decay and homophily. We demonstrate that Hadza camps exhibit high between-group and low within-group variation in public goods game donations. Network ties are also more likely between people who give the same amount, and the similarity in cooperative behaviour extends up to two degrees of separation. Social distance appears to be as important as genetic relatedness and physical proximity in explaining assortativity in cooperation. Our results suggest that certain elements of social network structure may have been present at an early point in human history. Also, early humans may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin, based in part on their tendency to cooperate. Social networks may thus have contributed to the emergence of cooperation.
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The establishment of communication systems depends on the scale of competition
Miguel dos Santos et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
How communication systems emerge and remain stable is an important question in both cognitive science and evolutionary biology. For communication to arise, not only must individuals cooperate by signaling reliable information, but they must also coordinate and perpetuate signals. Most studies on the emergence of communication in humans typically consider scenarios where individuals implicitly share the same interests. Likewise, most studies on human cooperation consider scenarios where shared conventions of signals and meanings cannot be developed de novo. Here, we combined both approaches with an economic experiment where participants could develop a common language, but under different conditions fostering or hindering cooperation. Participants endeavored to acquire a resource through a learning task in a computer-based environment. After this task, participants had the option to transmit a signal (a color) to a fellow group member, who would subsequently play the same learning task. We varied the way participants competed with each other (either global scale or local scale) and the cost of transmitting a signal (either costly or noncostly) and tracked the way in which signals were used as communication among players. Under global competition, players signaled more often and more consistently, scored higher individual payoffs, and established shared associations of signals and meanings. In addition, costly signals were also more likely to be used under global competition; whereas under local competition, fewer signals were sent and no effective communication system was developed. Our results demonstrate that communication involves both a coordination and a cooperative dilemma and show the importance of studying language evolution under different conditions influencing human cooperation.
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Evolution of human-driven fire regimes in Africa
Sally Archibald, Carla Staver & Simon Levin
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human ability to manipulate fire and the landscape has increased over evolutionary time, but the impact of this on fire regimes and consequences for biodiversity and biogeochemistry are hotly debated. Reconstructing historical changes in human-derived fire regimes empirically is challenging, but information is available on the timing of key human innovations and on current human impacts on fire; here we incorporate this knowledge into a spatially explicit fire propagation model. We explore how changes in population density, the ability to create fire, and the expansion of agropastoralism altered the extent and seasonal distribution of fire as modern humans arose and spread through Africa. Much emphasis has been placed on the positive effect of population density on ignition frequency, but our model suggests this is less important than changes in fire spread and connectivity that would have occurred as humans learned to light fires in the dry season and to transform the landscape through grazing and cultivation. Different landscapes show different limitations; we show that substantial human impacts on burned area would only have started ∼4,000 B.P. in open landscapes, whereas they could have altered fire regimes in closed/dissected landscapes by ∼40,000 B.P. Dry season fires have been the norm for the past 200-300 ky across all landscapes. The annual area burned in Africa probably peaked between 4 and 40 kya. These results agree with recent paleocarbon studies that suggest that the biomass burned today is less than in the recent past in subtropical countries.
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Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers' locomotor performance
Graham Askew, Federico Formenti & Alberto Minetti
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 February 2012, Pages 640-644
Abstract:
In Medieval Europe, soldiers wore steel plate armour for protection during warfare. Armour design reflected a trade-off between protection and mobility it offered the wearer. By the fifteenth century, a typical suit of field armour weighed between 30 and 50 kg and was distributed over the entire body. How much wearing armour affected Medieval soldiers' locomotor energetics and biomechanics is unknown. We investigated the mechanics and the energetic cost of locomotion in armour, and determined the effects on physical performance. We found that the net cost of locomotion (Cmet) during armoured walking and running is much more energetically expensive than unloaded locomotion. Cmet for locomotion in armour was 2.1-2.3 times higher for walking, and 1.9 times higher for running when compared with Cmet for unloaded locomotion at the same speed. An important component of the increased energy use results from the extra force that must be generated to support the additional mass. However, the energetic cost of locomotion in armour was also much higher than equivalent trunk loading. This additional cost is mostly explained by the increased energy required to swing the limbs and impaired breathing. Our findings can predict age-associated decline in Medieval soldiers' physical performance, and have potential implications in understanding the outcomes of past European military battles.
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The advantage of multiple cultural parents in the cultural transmission of stories
Kimmo Eriksson & Julie Coultas
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent mathematical modeling of repeated cultural transmission has shown that the rate at which culture is lost (due to imperfect transmission) will crucially depend on whether individuals receive transmissions from many cultural parents or only from one. However, the modeling assumptions leading up to this conclusion have so far not been empirically assessed. Here we do this for the special case of transmission chains where each individual either receives the same story twice from one cultural parent (and retransmits twice to a cultural child) or receives possibly different versions of the story from two cultural parents (and then retransmits to two cultural children). For this case, we first developed a more general mathematical model of cultural retention that takes into account the possibility of dependence of error rates between transmissions. In this model, under quite plausible assumptions, chains with two cultural parents will have superior retention of culture. This prediction was then tested in two experiments using both written and oral modes of transmission. In both cases, superior retention of culture was found in chains with two cultural parents. Estimation of model parameters indicated that error rates were not identical and independent between transmissions; instead, a primacy effect was suggested, such that the first transmission tends to have higher fidelity than the second transmission.
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Steffen Wischmann, Dario Floreano & Laurent Keller
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
One of the key innovations during the evolution of life on earth has been the emergence of efficient communication systems, yet little is known about the causes and consequences of the great diversity within and between species. By conducting experimental evolution in 20 independently evolving populations of cooperatively foraging simulated robots, we found that historical contingency in the occurrence order of novel phenotypic traits resulted in the emergence of two distinct communication strategies. The more complex foraging strategy was less efficient than the simpler strategy. However, when the 20 populations were placed in competition with each other, the populations with the more complex strategy outperformed the populations with the less complex strategy. These results demonstrate a tradeoff between communication efficiency and robustness and suggest that stochastic events have important effects on signal evolution and the outcome of competition between distinct populations.
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John Gibson & David McKenzie
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents results of innovative surveys that tracked academic high-achievers from five countries to wherever they moved in the world to directly measure at the micro level the channels through which high-skilled emigration affects sending countries. There are high levels of emigration and of return and the income gains to the best and brightest from migrating are an order of magnitude greater than any other effect. Most high-skilled migrants from poorer countries remit but involvement in trade and foreign direct investment is rare. Fiscal costs vary widely but are much less than the benefits to the migrants themselves.
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Development and the Urban and Rural Geography of Mexican Emigration to the United States
Erin Hamilton & Andrés Villarreal
Social Forces, December 2011, Pages 661-683
Abstract:
Past research on international migration from Mexico to the United States uses geographically-limited data and analyzes emigrant-sending communities in isolation. Theories supported by this research may not explain urban emigration, and this research does not consider connections between rural and urban Mexico. In this study we use national data from Mexico to investigate rural and urban emigration. We find that a central motivation for emigration - self-insurance through labor market diversification - is most relevant to less rural, non-metropolitan places. Paradoxically, while Mexican cities have the lowest rates of emigration, the rural places that are spatially proximate to cities have the highest rates. These findings suggest that while urban development retains emigrants within city borders, it may generate emigration out of neighboring rural places.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Operations
'The best defence.' or optimal offence/defence spending ratios in the NFL
Kevin McGee, Lee Van Scyoc & Nancy Burnett
Applied Economics Letters, Spring 2012, Pages 717-720
Abstract:
An original data set built from all 32 National Football League (NFL) teams, covering 2000-2009, is used to produce a production function for professional football. We use spending on salaries, divided between offensive and defensive players, as inputs to produce season wins. Our data suggest that the optimal strategy is simply to have a strategy, meaning teams with balanced spending tend to do worse than those with a more strategic allocation towards either offence or defence.
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Long-Run Impacts of Unions on Firms: New Evidence from Financial Markets, 1961-1999
David Lee & Alexandre Mas
Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2012, Pages 333-378
Abstract:
We estimate the effect of new private-sector unionization on publicly traded firms' equity value in the United States over the 1961-1999 period using a newly assembled sample of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections matched to stock market data. Event-study estimates show an average union effect on the equity value of the firm equivalent to $40,500 per unionized worker, an effect that takes 15 to 18 months after unionization to fully materialize, and one that could not be detected by a short-run event study. At the same time, point estimates from a regression discontinuity design - comparing the stock market impact of close union election wins to close losses - are considerably smaller and close to zero. We find a negative relationship between the cumulative abnormal returns and the vote share in support of the union, allowing us to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings.
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Does Linking Worker Pay to Firm Performance Help the Best Firms Do Even Better?
Douglas Kruse, Joseph Blasi & Richard Freeman
NBER Working Paper, January 2012
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the linkages among group incentive methods of compensation, labor practices, worker assessments of workplace culture, turnover, and firm performance in a non-representative sample of companies: firms that applied to the "100 Best Companies to Work For in America" competition from 2005 to 2007. Although employers with good labor practices self- select into the 100 Best Companies firms sample, which should bias the analysis against finding strong associations among modes of compensation, labor policies, and outcomes, we find that in the firms that make more extensive use of group incentive pay employees participate more in decisions, have greater information sharing, trust supervisors more, and report a more positive workplace culture than in other companies. The combination of group incentive pay with policies that empower employees and create a positive workplace culture reduces voluntary turnover and increases employee intent to stay and raises return on equity. Finding these effects in the non-representative "100 Best Companies" sample strengthens the likelihood that the policies have a causal impact on employee well-being and firm performance.
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Willis Jones
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been increased research exploring the relationship between college/university intercollegiate athletic expenditures and team on-field success. Scope and methodological limitations of this previous research, however, suggest the need for further empirical research in this area. This study uses regression analyses with time and institutional fixed effects and several control variables to investigate the relationship between college/university athletic department expenditures and overall athletic department on-field success. The findings indicate that institutional athletic expenditures are strongly correlated with team on-field performance among Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) institutions but not among non-FBS institutions.
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Value Destruction in the New Era of Chapter 11
Barry Adler, Vedran Capkun & Lawrence Weiss
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Over the past two decades, control over the US bankruptcy reorganization process has shifted from a debtor's pre-bankruptcy managers to holders of secured claims. The result has been increased adherence to absolute priority and a harder landing for the debtor's managers and shareholders. Because managers still make or can influence the decision whether or when to file a bankruptcy petition, we hypothesize that anticipation of bankruptcy under these new conditions will result in a delay in filing, increased leverage, increased secured debt, and a reduction of asset value for firms at the time they file. We present empirical evidence consistent with our hypotheses.
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Dedicate Your Life to the Company! A Terror Management Perspective on Organizations
Eva Jonas et al.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, December 2011, Pages 2858-2882
Abstract:
Terror management research has examined many institutions and beliefs, which provide people with a sense of psychological security against death awareness. However, one important area has yet to receive attention: the workplace. For many employees, corporate culture is not only connected to earning a salary, but also to a sense of security and even personal transcendence. We present evidence that pro-company judgments can serve as psychological defenses under existential threat. In Study 1, following mortality salience, employees gave a more favorable evaluation of the company-praising essay and a more negative evaluation of the critical one. In Study 2, employees and students at a German university were more likely to endorse aspects of organizational culture under mortality salience.
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Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising?
Jonathan Zinman & Eric Zitzewitz
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising about product quality is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore its causes and consequences. We provide some unusually sharp empirical evidence on the extent, mechanics, and dynamics of deceptive advertising. Ski resorts self-report substantially more natural snowfall on weekends. Resorts that plausibly reap greater benefits from exaggerating do it more. Data on website visits suggests that consumers are appropriately skeptical of weekend reports. We find little evidence that competition restrains or encourages exaggeration. Near the end of our sample period, a new iPhone application feature makes it easier for skiers share information on ski conditions in real time. Exaggeration falls sharply, especially at resorts with better iPhone reception.
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Xavier Giroud et al.
Review of Financial Studies, March 2012, Pages 680-710
Abstract:
Based on a sample of highly leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance. Changes in leverage in the debt restructurings are instrumented with Unexpected Snow, which captures the extent to which a ski hotel experienced unusually good or bad snow conditions prior to the debt restructuring. Unexpected Snow provides lending banks with the counterfactual of what would have been the ski hotel's operating performance in the absence of strategic default, allowing them to distinguish between ski hotels that are in distress due to negative demand shocks ("liquidity defaulters") and those that are in distress due to debt overhang ("strategic defaulters").
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Daniel Deli
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since the publication of Michael Lewis's book, Moneyball, there has been a commonly held belief that getting on-base percentage (OBP) is more important in run production than hitting for power slugging percentage (SLG). Implicit in that conclusion is an assumption that OBP and SLG are drawn from similar distributions. The author finds, however, that they are drawn from meaningfully different distributions. Controlling for those differences, the author finds no evidence that OBP is more important in run production than SLG. In fact, the author finds that from 1980 to 2007 SLG was more important in run production than OBP.
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Who Lives in the C-Suite? Organizational Structure and the Division of Labor in Top Management
Maria Guadalupe, Hongyi Li & Julie Wulf
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
This paper shows that top management structures in large US firms radically changed since the mid-1980s. While the number of managers reporting directly to the CEO doubled, the growth was driven primarily by functional managers rather than general managers. Using panel data on senior management positions, we explore the relationship between changes in executive team composition, firm diversification, and IT investments - which arguably alter returns to exploiting synergies through corporate-wide coordination by functional managers in headquarters. We find that the number of functional managers closer to the product ("product" functions i.e., marketing, R&D) increase as firms focus their businesses, while the number of functional managers farther from the product ("administrative" functions i.e., finance, law, HR) increase with IT investments. Finally, we show that general manager pay decreases as functional managers join the executive team suggesting a shift in activities from general to functional managers - a phenomenon we term "functional centralization."
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Piece rates and workplace injury: Does survey evidence support Adam Smith?
Keith Bender, Colin Green & John Heywood
Journal of Population Economics, January 2012, Pages 569-590
Abstract:
While piece rates are routinely associated with higher productivity and wages, they can also generate unanticipated effects. Using cross-country European data, we provide among the first general survey evidence of a strong link between piece rates and workplace injury. Despite controls for workplace hazards, job characteristics and worker effort, piece rates workers suffer a 5 percentage point greater likelihood of injury. This remains despite attempts to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity. As piece rate wage premium estimates rarely control for injury likelihood, this raises the specter that part of that premium reflects a compensating wage differential for risk of injury.
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The Fundamental Role of Workplace Fun in Applicant Attraction
Michael Tews, John Michel & Albert Bartlett
Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, February 2012, Pages 105-114
Abstract:
The present study extended previous research on fun in the workplace by examining the influence of workplace fun in the context of applicant attraction. Specifically, this research examined the impact of workplace fun relative to other key predictors of applicant attraction. Furthermore, this research examined the impact of different sources of workplace fun - fun coworker interactions, fun job responsibilities, and formal fun activities. With a sample of collegiate job seekers, the results demonstrated that workplace fun was a stronger predictor of applicant attraction than compensation and opportunities for advancement. Moreover, the results demonstrated that fun coworker interactions and fun job responsibilities were stronger predictors of applicant attraction than formal fun activities.
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CEO Pay Cuts and Forced Turnover: Their Causes and Consequences
Huasheng Gao, Jarrad Harford & Kai Li
Journal of Corporate Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study large discrete decreases in CEO pay and compare them to CEO forced turnover. The determinants are similar, as are the performance improvements after the action. After the pay cut, the CEO pay-for-performance sensitivity is abnormally high, such that the CEO can restore his pay level by reversing the poor performance. After either a pay cut or forced turnover, CEOs reduce investment and leverage, and improve performance, on average. Together, our results show that the possibility of these large compensation cuts provides ex ante incentives for CEOs to exert effort to avoid poor performance and that CEOs take actions to improve poor performance once pay is cut. The similarity of the causes and outcomes of large pay cuts compared to forced turnover suggests that large pay cuts are used as a substitute for forced turnover, helping to explain why forced turnover is rare.
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Competition Between Organizational Groups: Its Impact on Altruistic and Antisocial Motivations
Lorenz Goette et al.
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Firms are often organized into groups. Group membership has been shown empirically to have positive effects, in the form of increased prosocial behavior toward in-group members. This includes an enhanced willingness to engage in altruistic punishment of inefficient defection. Our paper provides evidence of a dark side of group membership. In the presence of cues of competition between groups, a taste for harming the out-group emerges: punishment ceases to serve a norm enforcement function, and instead, out-group members are punished harder and regardless of whether they cooperate or defect. Our results point to a mechanism that might help explain previous mixed results on the social value of punishment, and they contribute to understanding the sources of conflict between groups. They also point to an important trade-off for firms: introducing competition enhances within-group efficiency but also generates costly between-group conflict.
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Anastasiya Zavyalova et al.
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We contribute to research on the management of social perceptions by considering the relative effectiveness of a firm's technical and ceremonial actions in managing media coverage after its own or its competitors' wrongdoing. We examine these relationships in the context of product recalls by U.S. toy companies over a ten-year period, 1998-2007. Consistent with our hypotheses, firms with higher levels of wrongdoing experience less positive media coverage; however, this decline is mitigated during periods of higher industry wrongdoing. Additionally, we find support for a negative spillover effect: the tenor of media coverage about a focal firm is less positive if others in the industry recall products. Further, technical actions help firms attenuate the negative effect of their own wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage, whereas ceremonial actions amplify this effect. In contrast, ceremonial actions are more effective in attenuating the negative effect of industry wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage about the focal firm.
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Incentive Schemes, Sorting and Behavioral Biases of Employees: Experimental Evidence
Ian Larkin & Stephen Leider
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate how the convexity of a firm's incentives interacts with worker overconfidence to affect sorting decisions and performance. We demonstrate experimentally that overconfident employees are more likely to sort into a non-linear incentive scheme over a linear one, even though this reduces pay for many subjects and despite the presence of clear feedback. Additionally, the linear scheme attracts demotivated, underconfident workers who perform below their ability. Our findings suggest that firms may design incentive schemes that adapt to the behavioral biases of employees to "sort in" ("sort away") attractive (unattractive) employees; such schemes may also reduce a firm's wage bill.
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The Effect of Home Advantage, Momentum, and Fighting on Winning in the National Hockey League
Benjamin Leard & Joanne Doyle
Journal of Sports Economics, October 2011, Pages 538-560
Abstract:
Using game-level data, the authors estimate models of team success and test for the effect of three specific factors on game outcomes in professional ice hockey. First, they estimate the home ice advantage and find that much of it can be attributed to rules advantages for the home team. Second, contrary to previous studies on momentum, the authors find some evidence that game-to-game momentum has a positive effect on winning. Finally, the authors test the impact of fighting on the likelihood of winning and find that winning fights does not lead to winning games.
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Measuring the Welfare Gain from Personal Computers
Jeremy Greenwood & Karen Kopecky
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
The welfare gain to consumers from the introduction of personal computers (PCs) is estimated. A simple model of consumer demand is formulated that uses a slightly modified version of standard preferences. The modification permits marginal utility, and hence total utility, to be finite when the consumption of computers is zero. This implies that the good will not be consumed at a high enough price. It also bounds the consumer surplus derived from the product. The model is calibrated/estimated using standard national income and product account data. The welfare gain from the introduction of PCs is 2%-3% of consumption expenditure.
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Avi Goldfarb & Mo Xiao
American Economic Review, December 2011, Pages 3130-3161
Abstract:
We examine US local telephone markets shortly after the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The data suggest that more experienced, better-educated managers tend to enter markets with fewer competitors. This motivates a structural econometric model based on behavioral game theory that allows heterogeneity in managers' ability to conjecture competitor behavior. We find that manager characteristics are key determinants in managerial ability. This estimate of ability predicts out-of-sample success. Also, the measured level of ability rises following a shakeout, suggesting that our behavioral assumptions may be most relevant early in the industry's life cycle.
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Does Ownership Type Matter for Corporate Social Responsibility?
Lammertjan Dam & Bert Scholtens
Corporate Governance, forthcoming
Research Question/Issue: This study examines how different types of owners relate to corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Research Findings/Insights: We use firm-level data for more than 600 European firms from 16 countries and 35 industries for 2005. We find that ownership by employees, individuals, and firms is associated with relatively poor corporate social policies of the firms they invest in. In contrast, the holdings by banks and institutional investors as well as those by the state appear to be neutral in this respect.
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John Dencker
Industrial Relations, January 2012, Pages 152-169
Abstract:
I develop and test a structural-historical account of corporate reductions in force (RIF) to assess whether this widespread process was redistributive or efficient. I argue that changes in the context of restructuring in recent decades, coupled with substantial changes in organizational compensation systems, lead to temporal variation in the likelihood of "broken-contract" RIF, in which firms terminate highly paid managers, and "trimming the fat" RIF, in which firms terminate low-performing managers. Analyses of personnel records from a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm indicate that low performance leads to increased risk of separation in each of the two RIF undertaken by the firm, with the effect becoming stronger over time in part because of changes in the firm's performance management system. By contrast, high wages were a more important factor explaining departure during the firm's RIF in the 1980s - when competitive pressures to default on bonded contracts were strong - than during its RIF in the 1990s.
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The Signaling Role of Promotions: Further Theory and Empirical Evidence
Jed DeVaro & Michael Waldman
Journal of Labor Economics, January 2012, Pages 91-147
Abstract:
An extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability. We extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with education and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concerning the internal-labor-market history of a medium-sized firm in the financial services industry. Our results support signaling being important for understanding the differences between promotion practices concerning bachelor's and master's degree holders, while the evidence concerning the importance of signaling for high school graduates and PhDs is mixed.
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More than just the mean: Moving to a dynamic view of performance-based compensation
Christopher Barnes, Jochen Reb & Dionysius Ang
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Compensation decisions have important consequences for employees and organizations and affect factors such as retention, motivation, and recruitment. Past research has primarily focused on mean performance as a predictor of compensation, promoting the implicit assumption that alternative aspects of dynamic performance are not relevant. To address this gap in the literature, we examined the influence of dynamic performance characteristics on compensation decisions in the National Basketball Association (NBA). We predicted that, in addition to performance mean, performance trend and variability would also affect compensation decisions. Results revealed that performance mean and trend, but not variability, were significantly and positively related to changes in compensation levels of NBA players. Moreover, trend (but not mean or variability) predicted compensation when controlling for future performance, suggesting that organizations overweighted trend in their compensation decisions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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Andrew Nutting
Journal of Sports Economics., forthcoming
Abstract:
National Basketball Association home teams produce more defense and more wins the more consecutive games they play at home, suggesting home games serve as on-the-job training for future games during the same homestand. Home teams produce less defense and fewer wins the more days off during a homestand, suggesting training intensity increases productivity. A possible explanation is that teams develop communication skills specific to their home environments and/or adapt to referee bias toward home teams as homestands progress. Homestand training significantly weakens as the season progresses. Visiting teams show similar, but weaker, training effects with respect to roadtrip length and productivity.
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Stanislav Dobrev
Journal of Management Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although it is often acknowledged that organizational structure and career outcomes are related, developed theory on how formal features of the design affect inter-firm job mobility is incomplete. I focus on organizational size and structural differentiation and relate them to ideas about internal labor markets, organizational senescence, bureaucratic complexity, and resource endowments. Analyzing data on the early career histories of professional managers, I find that the negative effect of organizational size on quits weakens with organizational age while a firm's elaborate hierarchy monotonically increases quits in all but very large firms. I interpret these effects as potential mechanisms for linking demographic processes between and within organizations and as a basis for integrating research in corporate demography and career mobility.
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Stephen Burks & Erin Krupka
Management Science, January 2012, Pages 203-217
Abstract:
We use an incentive-compatible economic experiment and surveys in the field at a large financial services firm to identify the norms for on-the-job behavior among financial advisers and their leaders, and the normative expectations each group has of the other. We examine whistle-blowing on a peer, an incentive clash between serving the client and earning commissions, and a dilemma about fiduciary responsibility to a client. We find patterns of agreement among advisers, among leaders, and between the two groups, that are consistent with company guidelines identified ex ante. However, we also find measurable differences between what leaders expect and the actual norms of advisers. When there is such a mismatch we are able to distinguish miscommunication from ethical disagreement between leaders and advisers. Finally, we show that when advisers' personal ethical opinions do not match group norms, this mismatch is correlated with job dissatisfaction and lying for money in a second experiment.
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Sociometric badges: Using sensor technology to capture new forms of collaboration
Taemie Kim et al.
Journal of Organizational Behavior, April 2012, Pages 412-427
Abstract:
This article introduces sociometric badges as a research tool that captures with great accuracy fine-scale speech patterns and body movements among a group of individuals at a scale that heretofore has been impossible in groups and teams studies. Such a tool offers great potential for studying the changing ecology of team structures and new modes of collaboration. Team boundaries are blurring as members disperse across multiple cultures, convene through various media, and operate in new configurations. As the how and why of collaboration evolves, an opportunity emerges to reassess the methods used to capture these interactions and to identify new tools that might help us create synergies across existing approaches to teams research. We offer sociometric badges as a complement to existing data collection methods - one that is well-positioned to capture real-time collaboration in new forms of teams. Used as one component in a multi-method approach, sociometric badges can capture what an observer or cross-sectional survey might miss, contributing to a more accurate understanding of group dynamics in new teams. We also revisit traditional teams research to suggest how we might use these badges to tackle long-standing challenges. We conclude with three case studies demonstrating potential applications of these sociometric badges.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Nature of the Problem
Anna Rabinovich & Thomas Morton
Risk Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two experimental studies we investigated the effect of beliefs about the nature and purpose of science (classical vs. Kuhnian models of science) on responses to uncertainty in scientific messages about climate change risk. The results revealed a significant interaction between both measured (Study 1) and manipulated (Study 2) beliefs about science and the level of communicated uncertainty on willingness to act in line with the message. Specifically, messages that communicated high uncertainty were more persuasive for participants who shared an understanding of science as debate than for those who believed that science is a search for absolute truth. In addition, participants who had a concept of science as debate were more motivated by higher (rather than lower) uncertainty in climate change messages. The results suggest that achieving alignment between the general public's beliefs about science and the style of the scientific messages is crucial for successful risk communication in science. Accordingly, rather than uncertainty always undermining the effectiveness of science communication, uncertainty can enhance message effects when it fits the audience's understanding of what science is.
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The water footprint of humanity
Arjen Hoekstra & Mesfin Mekonnen
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study quantifies and maps the water footprint (WF) of humanity at a high spatial resolution. It reports on consumptive use of rainwater (green WF) and ground and surface water (blue WF) and volumes of water polluted (gray WF). Water footprints are estimated per nation from both a production and consumption perspective. International virtual water flows are estimated based on trade in agricultural and industrial commodities. The global annual average WF in the period 1996-2005 was 9,087 Gm3/y (74% green, 11% blue, 15% gray). Agricultural production contributes 92%. About one-fifth of the global WF relates to production for export. The total volume of international virtual water flows related to trade in agricultural and industrial products was 2,320 Gm3/y (68% green, 13% blue, 19% gray). The WF of the global average consumer was 1,385 m3/y. The average consumer in the United States has a WF of 2,842 m3/y, whereas the average citizens in China and India have WFs of 1,071 and 1,089 m3/y, respectively. Consumption of cereal products gives the largest contribution to the WF of the average consumer (27%), followed by meat (22%) and milk products (7%). The volume and pattern of consumption and the WF per ton of product of the products consumed are the main factors determining the WF of a consumer. The study illustrates the global dimension of water consumption and pollution by showing that several countries heavily rely on foreign water resources and that many countries have significant impacts on water consumption and pollution elsewhere.
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Gabriel Chan et al.
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
The introduction of the U.S. SO2 allowance-trading program to address the threat of acid rain as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 is a landmark event in the history of environmental regulation. The program was a great success by almost all measures. This paper, which draws upon a research workshop and a policy roundtable held at Harvard in May 2011, investigates critically the design, enactment, implementation, performance, and implications of this path-breaking application of economic thinking to environmental regulation. Ironically, cap and trade seems especially well suited to addressing the problem of climate change, in that emitted greenhouse gases are evenly distributed throughout the world's atmosphere. Recent hostility toward cap and trade in debates about U.S. climate legislation may reflect the broader political environment of the climate debate more than the substantive merits of market-based regulation.
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World natural gas endowment as a bridge towards zero carbon emissions
Roberto Aguilera & Roberto Aguilera
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, March 2012, Pages 579-586
Abstract:
We use a global energy market (GEM) model to show that natural gas has the potential to help stabilize global carbon emissions in a span of about 50-100 years and pave the way towards low and zero carbon energy. The GEM provides a close fit of the global energy mix between 1850 and 2005. It also matches historical carbon and CO2 emissions generated by the combustion of fossil fuels. The model is used then to forecast the future energy mix, as well as the carbon and CO2 emissions, up to the year 2150. Historical data show relative decarbonization and an increase in the amount of hydrogen burned as a percent of fossil fuel use between 1850 and 1970. The GEM indicates that with a larger contribution of natural gas to the future energy market, the burned hydrogen percentage will increase. This decarbonization will help to advance economic and environmental sustainability.
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Recent contributions of glaciers and ice caps to sea level rise
Thomas Jacob et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Glaciers and ice caps (GICs) are important contributors to present-day global mean sea level rise. Most previous global mass balance estimates for GICs rely on extrapolation of sparse mass balance measurements representing only a small fraction of the GIC area, leaving their overall contribution to sea level rise unclear. Here we show that GICs, excluding the Greenland and Antarctic peripheral GICs, lost mass at a rate of 148 ± 30 Gt yr-1 from January 2003 to December 2010, contributing 0.41 ± 0.08 mm yr-1 to sea level rise. Our results are based on a global, simultaneous inversion of monthly GRACE-derived satellite gravity fields, from which we calculate the mass change over all ice-covered regions greater in area than 100 km2. The GIC rate for 2003-2010 is about 30 per cent smaller than the previous mass balance estimate that most closely matches our study period. The high mountains of Asia, in particular, show a mass loss of only 4 ± 20 Gt yr-1 for 2003-2010, compared with 47-55 Gt yr-1 in previously published estimates. For completeness, we also estimate that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, including their peripheral GICs, contributed 1.06 ± 0.19 mm yr-1 to sea level rise over the same time period. The total contribution to sea level rise from all ice-covered regions is thus 1.48 ± 0.26 mm -1, which agrees well with independent estimates of sea level rise originating from land ice loss and other terrestrial sources.
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The publics' concern for global warming: A cross-national study of 47 countries
Berit Kvaløy, Henning Finseraas & Ola Listhaug
Journal of Peace Research, January 2012, Pages 11-22
Abstract:
This article relies on data from the 2005-09 World Values Survey to examine individual and cross-national variation in perception of the seriousness of global warming. The data show that a large majority of the public in all countries are concerned about the problem of global warming and that this assessment is part of a broader concern for global environmental issues. The widespread concern implies that global warming has the potential to generate mass political participation and demand for political action. Motivated by a value-based approach to the study of public opinion, the article shows that perception of the seriousness of the problem is positively correlated with high education, post-materialism, and a leftist position on the left-right scale. In addition, religious beliefs are important, suggesting that there is some diversity in the value basis for the issue and that it is not only linked to the ‘new-politics' perspective. Variation across nations in wealth and CO2 emissions is not significantly related to the publics' assessments of the problem, and, somewhat counterintuitively, people from countries relatively more exposed to climate-related natural disasters are less concerned about global warming. We suggest possible explanations for the latter finding and discuss our results in relation to the broader literature on environmental change, insecurity, and the potential for conflict.
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Climate change, rainfall, and social conflict in Africa
Cullen Hendrix & Idean Salehyan
Journal of Peace Research, January 2012, Pages 35-50
Abstract:
Much of the debate over the security implications of climate change revolves around whether changing weather patterns will lead to future conflict. This article addresses whether deviations from normal rainfall patterns affect the propensity for individuals and groups to engage in disruptive activities such as demonstrations, riots, strikes, communal conflict, and anti-government violence. In contrast to much of the environmental security literature, it uses a much broader definition of conflict that includes, but is not limited to, organized rebellion. Using a new database of over 6,000 instances of social conflict over 20 years - the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) - it examines the effect of deviations from normal rainfall patterns on various types of conflict. The results indicate that rainfall variability has a significant effect on both large-scale and smaller-scale instances of political conflict. Rainfall correlates with civil war and insurgency, although wetter years are more likely to suffer from violent events. Extreme deviations in rainfall - particularly dry and wet years - are associated positively with all types of political conflict, though the relationship is strongest with respect to violent events, which are more responsive to abundant than scarce rainfall. By looking at a broader spectrum of social conflict, rather than limiting the analysis to civil war, we demonstrate a robust relationship between environmental shocks and unrest.
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Come rain or shine: An analysis of conflict and climate variability in East Africa
Clionadh Raleigh & Dominic Kniveton
Journal of Peace Research, January 2012, Pages 51-64
Abstract:
Previous research on environment and security has contested the existence, nature and significance of a climate driver of conflict. In this study, we have focused on small-scale conflict over East Africa where the link between resource availability and conflict is assumed to be more immediate and direct. Using the parameter of rainfall variability to explore the marginal influence of the climate on conflict, the article shows that in locations that experience rebel or communal conflict events, the frequency of these events increases in periods of extreme rainfall variation, irrespective of the sign of the rainfall change. Further, these results lend support to both a ‘zero-sum' narrative, where conflicting groups use force and violence to compete for ever-scarcer resources, and an ‘abundance' narrative, where resources spur rent-seeking/wealth-seeking and recruitment of people to participate in violence. Within the context of current uncertainty regarding the future direction of rainfall change over much of Africa, these results imply that small-scale conflict is likely to be exacerbated with increases in rainfall variability if the mean climate remains largely unchanged; preferentially higher rates of rebel conflict will be exhibited in anomalously dry conditions, while higher rates of communal conflict are expected in increasingly anomalous wet conditions.
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Civil war, climate change, and development: A scenario study for sub-Saharan Africa
Conor Devitt & Richard SJ Tol
Journal of Peace Research, January 2012, Pages 129-145
Abstract:
This article presents a model of development, civil war and climate change. There are multiple interactions. Economic growth reduces the probability of civil war and the vulnerability to climate change. Climate change increases the probability of civil war. The impacts of climate change, civil war and civil war in the neighbouring countries reduce economic growth. The model has two potential poverty traps - one is climate-change-induced and one is civil-war-induced - and the two poverty traps may reinforce one another. The model is calibrated to sub-Saharan Africa and a double Monte Carlo analysis is conducted in order to account for both parameter uncertainty and stochasticity. Although the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES) is used as the baseline, thus assuming rapid economic growth in Africa and convergence of African living standards to the rest of the world, the impacts of civil war and climate change (ignored in SRES) are sufficiently strong to keep a number of countries in Africa in deep poverty with a high probability.
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Climate-related natural disasters, economic growth, and armed civil conflict
Drago Bergholt & Päivi Lujala
Journal of Peace Research, January 2012, Pages 147-162
Abstract:
Global warming is expected to make the climate warmer, wetter, and wilder. It is predicted that such climate change will increase the severity and frequency of climate-related disasters like flash floods, surges, cyclones, and severe storms. This article uses econometric methods to study the consequences of climate-induced natural disasters on economic growth, and how these disasters are linked to the onset of armed civil conflict either directly or via their impact on economic growth. The results show that climate-related natural disasters have a negative effect on growth and that the impact is considerable. The analysis of conflict onset shows that climate-related natural disasters do not increase the risk of armed conflict. This is also true when we instrument the change in GDP growth by climatic disasters. The result is robust to inclusion of country and time fixed effects, different estimation techniques, and various operationalization of the disasters measure, as well as for conflict incidence and war onset. These findings have two major implications: if climate change increases the frequency or makes weather-related natural disasters more severe, it is an economic concern for countries susceptible to these types of hazards. However, our results suggest - based on historical data - that more frequent and severe climate-related disasters will not lead to more armed conflicts through their effects on GDP growth.
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Don't blame the weather! Climate-related natural disasters and civil conflict
Rune Slettebak
Journal of Peace Research, January 2012, Pages 163-176
Abstract:
The issue of climate change and security has received much attention in recent years. Still, the results from research on this topic are mixed and the academic community appears to be far from a consensus on how climate change is likely to affect stability and conflict risk in affected countries. This study focuses on how climate-related natural disasters such as storms, floods, and droughts have affected the risk of civil war in the past. The frequency of such disasters has risen sharply over the last decades, and the increase is expected to continue due to both climate change and demographic changes. Using multivariate methods, this study employs a global sample covering 1950 to the present in order to test whether adding climate-related natural disasters to a well-specified model on civil conflict can increase its explanatory power. The results indicate that this is the case, but that the relation is opposite to common perceptions: Countries that are affected by climate-related natural disasters face a lower risk of civil war. One worrying facet of the claims that environmental factors cause conflict is that they may contribute to directing attention away from more important conflict-promoting factors, such as poor governance and poverty. There is a serious risk of misguided policy to prevent civil conflict if the assumption that disasters have a significant effect on war is allowed to overshadow more important causes.
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Pathways of human development and carbon emissions embodied in trade
Julia Steinberger et al.
Nature Climate Change, February 2012, Pages 81-85
Abstract:
It has long been assumed that human development depends on economic growth, that national economic expansion in turn requires greater energy use and, therefore, increased greenhouse-gas emissions. These interdependences are the topic of current research. Scarcely explored, however, is the impact of international trade: although some nations develop socio-economically and import high-embodied-carbon products, it is likely that carbon-exporting countries gain significantly fewer benefits. Here, we use new consumption-based measures of national carbon emissions1 to explore how the relationship between human development and carbon changes when we adjust national emission rates for trade. Without such adjustment of emissions, some nations seem to be getting far better development ‘bang' for the carbon ‘buck' than others, who are showing scant gains for disproportionate shares of global emissions. Adjusting for the transfer of emissions through trade explains many of these outliers, but shows that further socio-economic benefits are accruing to carbon-importing rather than carbon-exporting countries. We also find that high life expectancies are compatible with low carbon emissions but high incomes are not. Finally, we see that, despite strong international trends, there is no deterministic industrial development trajectory: there is great diversity in pathways, and national histories do not necessarily follow the global trends.
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Quantifying the hurricane risk to offshore wind turbines
Stephen Rose et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that if the United States is to generate 20% of its electricity from wind, over 50 GW will be required from shallow offshore turbines. Hurricanes are a potential risk to these turbines. Turbine tower buckling has been observed in typhoons, but no offshore wind turbines have yet been built in the United States. We present a probabilistic model to estimate the number of turbines that would be destroyed by hurricanes in an offshore wind farm. We apply this model to estimate the risk to offshore wind farms in four representative locations in the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal waters of the United States. In the most vulnerable areas now being actively considered by developers, nearly half the turbines in a farm are likely to be destroyed in a 20-y period. Reasonable mitigation measures - increasing the design reference wind load, ensuring that the nacelle can be turned into rapidly changing winds, and building most wind plants in the areas with lower risk - can greatly enhance the probability that offshore wind can help to meet the United States' electricity needs.
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Maksim Yemelyanau, Aliaksandr Amialchuk & Mir Ali
Journal of Labor Research, March 2012, Pages 1-20
Abstract:
The Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986 had deleterious health consequences for the population of Belarus, especially for those who were children at the time of the disaster. Using the 2003-2008 waves of the Belarusian Household Survey of Income and Expenditure (BHSIE), we estimate the effect of radiation exposure on the health, education, and labor market outcomes among cohorts and areas affected by the accident, utilizing the nuclear accident as a natural experiment. We find that young individuals who came from the most contaminated areas had worse health, were less likely to hold university degrees, were less likely to be employed, and had lower wages compared to those who were older at the time of the accident and who came from less contaminated areas.
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Global Climate Change, the Economy, and the Resurgence of Tropical Disease
Douglas Gollin & Christian Zimmermann
Mathematical Population Studies, Winter 2012, Pages 51-62
Abstract:
How will global climate change affect the prevalence of tropical diseases? In general, warmer temperatures will expand the areas in which these diseases are endemic. However, if households can take actions to protect themselves from disease - such as purchasing bednets or insecticidal sprays - then economic factors may greatly mitigate the effects of climate change. These actions are costly, however, and particularly in poor countries, many households face borrowing constraints. A model of disease transmission combining the household's objectives and constraints shows that a temperature increase of 3°C will induce modest changes in disease prevalence and output. These effects can be mitigated by improvements in the efficacy of disease prevention.
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The Consequences of Industrialization: Evidence from Water Pollution and Digestive Cancers in China
Avraham Ebenstein
Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2012, Pages 186-201
Abstract:
China's rapid industrialization has led to a severe deterioration in water quality in the country's lakes and rivers. By exploiting variation in pollution across China's river basins, I estimate that a deterioration of water quality by a single grade (on a six-grade scale) increases the digestive cancer death rate by 9.7%. The analysis rules out other potential explanations such as smoking rates, dietary patterns, and air pollution. I estimate that doubling China's levy rates for wastewater dumping would save roughly 17,000 lives per year but require an additional $500 million in annual spending on wastewater treatment.
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The sociology of ecologically unequal exchange and carbon dioxide emissions, 1960-2005
Andrew Jorgenson
Social Science Research, March 2012, Pages 242-252
Abstract:
The author engages the sociological theory of ecologically unequal exchange to assess the extent to which levels of per capita anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are a function of the "vertical flow" of exports to high-income nations. Results of cross-national fixed effects panel model estimates indicate that levels of such emissions are positively associated with the vertical flow of exports, and the relationship is much more pronounced for lower-income countries than for high-income countries. Additional findings suggest that the observed relationship for lower-income nations has grown in magnitude through time, indicating that structural associations between high-income and lower-income countries have become increasingly ecologically unequal, at least in the context of greenhouse gas emissions. These results hold, net of various important controls.
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Crop yields in a geoengineered climate
J. Pongratz et al.
Nature Climate Change, February 2012, Pages 101-105
Abstract:
Crop models predict that recent and future climate change may have adverse effects on crop yields. Intentional deflection of sunlight away from the Earth could diminish the amount of climate change in a high-CO2 world. However, it has been suggested that this diminution would come at the cost of threatening the food and water supply for billions of people. Here, we carry out high-CO2, geoengineering and control simulations using two climate models to predict the effects on global crop yields. We find that in our models solar-radiation geoengineering in a high-CO2 climate generally causes crop yields to increase, largely because temperature stresses are diminished while the benefits of CO2 fertilization are retained. Nevertheless, possible yield losses on the local scale as well as known and unknown side effects and risks associated with geoengineering indicate that the most certain way to reduce climate risks to global food security is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
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Framing Climate Change: A study of US and Swedish press coverage of global warming
Adam Shehata & David Nicolas Hopmann
Journalism Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This comparative study investigates news coverage of climate change in the United States and Sweden. The main research question concerns the extent to which news coverage of climate change is influenced by domestic political elite discussion or the scientific consensus surrounding the issue. While there has been a widespread consensus in Sweden that climate change is (partly) caused by human activity and that there is an unquestionable need to take countermeasures, there has been substantial debate about the causes and the necessity of political action in the United States. Based on an extensive content analysis of 1785 articles over a 10-year period, as well as an intensive analysis of news coverage of the Kyoto and Bali summits, results show that media coverage is strikingly similar in these two countries, indicating a weak influence of national political elites on how climate change is framed in news coverage.
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"Evolution Canyon," a potential microscale monitor of global warming across life
Eviatar Nevo
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Climatic change and stress is a major driving force of evolution. The effects of climate change on living organisms have been shown primarily on regional and global scales. Here I propose the "Evolution Canyon" (EC) microscale model as a potential life monitor of global warming in Israel and the rest of the world. The EC model reveals evolution in action at a microscale involving biodiversity divergence, adaptation, and incipient sympatric speciation across life from viruses and bacteria through fungi, plants, and animals. The EC consists of two abutting slopes separated, on average, by 200 m. The tropical, xeric, savannoid, "African" south-facing slope (AS = SFS) abuts the forested "European" north-facing slope (ES = NFS). The AS receives 200-800% higher solar radiation than the ES. The ES represents the south European forested maquis. The AS and ES exhibit drought and shade stress, respectively. Major adaptations on the AS are because of solar radiation, heat, and drought, whereas those on the ES relate to light stress and photosynthesis. Preliminary evidence suggests the extinction of some European species on the ES and AS. In Drosophila, a 10-fold higher migration was recorded in 2003 from the AS to ES. I advance some predictions that could be followed in diverse species in EC. The EC microclimatic model is optimal to track global warming at a microscale across life from viruses and bacteria to mammals in Israel, and in additional ECs across the planet.
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Tongwen Zhang et al.
International Journal of Climatology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, ring-width chronologies of pine trees (Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica) from one sampling site in the northern Greater Higgnan Mountains, China, were constructed. The results of growth-climate responses show that mean temperature is the limiting factor affecting radial growth of pine trees in the study area. Consequently, mean temperature from May to October from 1717 to 2008 has been reconstructed using the standard chronology. For the calibrated period (1957-2008), the explained variance of the reconstruction is 57%. The characteristics of the reconstruction expose that mean temperature has increased since the 1970s, and the decade 2000s and 1990s are also ranked as the warm decades on record. However, this period from 1970s to now is not exceptional within the past 300 years. By applying an 11-year moving average to the reconstruction, three warm periods and three cold periods are evident. The warm and cold periods of the reconstructed mean temperature correspond well with other reconstructions. Power spectral and wavelet analysis demonstrated the existence of significant ∼70- and ∼100-year cycles of variability. Furthermore, the reconstruction and North Atlantic Oscillation Index showed a significant positive correlation (r = 0.34, n = 136, p < 0.0001).
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Diversity
Neil Gross & Ethan Fosse
Theory and Society, March 2012, Pages 127-168
Abstract:
The political liberalism of professors - an important occupational group and anomaly according to traditional theories of class politics - has long puzzled sociologists. This article sheds new light on the subject by employing a two-step analytic procedure. In the first step, we assess the explanatory power of the main hypotheses proposed over the last half century to account for professors' liberal views. To do so, we examine hypothesized predictors of the political gap between professors and other Americans using General Social Survey data pooled from 1974-2008. Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas. In the second step of our article, we develop a new theory of professors' politics on the basis of these findings (though not directly testable with our data) that we think holds more explanatory promise than existing approaches and that sets an agenda for future research.
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Ryan Muldoon, Tony Smith & Michael Weisberg
Philosophy of Science, January 2012, Pages 38-62
Abstract:
This article examines a series of Schelling-like models of residential segregation, in which agents prefer to be in the minority. We demonstrate that as long as agents care about the characteristics of their wider community, they tend to end up in a segregated state. We then investigate the process that causes this and conclude that the result hinges on the similarity of informational states among agents of the same type. This is quite different from Schelling-like behavior and suggests (in his terms) that segregation is an instance of macrobehavior that can arise from a wide variety of micromotives.
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Affirmative Action Policies Promote Women and Do Not Harm Efficiency in the Laboratory
Loukas Balafoutas & Matthias Sutter
Science, 3 February 2012, Pages 579-582
Abstract:
Gender differences in choosing to enter competitions are one source of unequal labor market outcomes concerning wages and promotions. Given that studying the effects of policy interventions to support women is difficult with field data because of measurement problems and potential lack of control, we evaluated, in a set of controlled laboratory experiments, four interventions: quotas, where one of two winners of a competition must be female; two variants of preferential treatment, where a fixed increment is added to women's performance; and repetition of the competition, where a second competition takes place if no woman is among the winners. Compared with no intervention, all interventions encourage women to enter competitions more often, and performance is at least equally good, both during and after the competition.
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Brian Spisak et al.
PLoS ONE, January 2012, e30399
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of facial cues on leadership emergence. Using evolutionary social psychology, we expand upon implicit and contingent theories of leadership and propose that different types of intergroup relations elicit different implicit cognitive leadership prototypes. It is argued that a biologically based hormonal connection between behavior and corresponding facial characteristics interacts with evolutionarily consistent social dynamics to influence leadership emergence. We predict that masculine-looking leaders are selected during intergroup conflict (war) and feminine-looking leaders during intergroup cooperation (peace). Across two experiments we show that a general categorization of leader versus nonleader is an initial implicit requirement for emergence, and at a context-specific level facial cues of masculinity and femininity contingently affect war versus peace leadership emergence in the predicted direction. In addition, we replicate our findings in Experiment 1 across culture using Western and East Asian samples. In Experiment 2, we also show that masculine-feminine facial cues are better predictors of leadership than male-female cues. Collectively, our results indicate a multi-level classification of context-specific leadership based on visual cues imbedded in the human face and challenge traditional distinctions of male and female leadership.
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Being mixed: Who claims a biracial identity?
Sarah Townsend et al.
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, January 2012, Pages 91-96
Abstract:
What factors determine whether mixed-race individuals claim a biracial identity or a monoracial identity? Two studies examine how two status-related factors - race and social class - influence identity choice. While a majority of mixed-race participants identified as biracial in both studies, those who were members of groups with higher status in American society were more likely than those who were members of groups with lower status to claim a biracial identity. Specifically, (a) Asian/White individuals were more likely than Black/White or Latino/White individuals to identify as biracial and (b) mixed-race people from middle-class backgrounds were more likely than those from working-class backgrounds to identify as biracial. These results suggest that claiming a biracial identity is a choice that is more available to those with higher status.
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The Changing of the Boards: The Impact on Firm Valuation of Mandated Female Board Representation
Kenneth Ahern & Amy Dittmar
Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2012, Pages 137-197
Abstract:
In 2003, a new law required that 40% of Norwegian firms' directors be women - at the time only 9% of directors were women. We use the prequota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin's Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value. The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance.
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Preserving the Concept of Race: A Medical Expedient, a Sociological Necessity
Stephen Morris
Philosophy of Science, December 2011, Pages 1260-1271
Abstract:
In this essay I argue that there are strong reasons for preserving the concept of race in both medical and sociological contexts. While I argue that there are important reasons to conceive of race as picking out distinctions among populations that are both legitimate and important, the notion of race that I advocate in this essay differs in fundamental ways from traditional folk notions of race. As a result, I believe that the folk understanding of race needs to be either revised or eliminated altogether.
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Is She "Man Enough"? Women Candidates, Executive Political Offices, and News Coverage
Lindsey Meeks
Journal of Communication, February 2012, Pages 175-193
Abstract:
This study analyzes news coverage of 4 female political candidates - Elizabeth Dole, Claire McCaskill, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin - and their male competitors, as each competed in 2 elections between 1999 and 2008. Analysis focused on novelty labeling, and "feminine" and "masculine" political issues and character traits to determine whether the coverage of women and men differed in general, and across the offices of Senator, Governor, Vice President, or President. Overall, women received more news coverage, and the gendered gap in coverage was especially large for novelty, issue, and trait coverage when women sought the "executive" offices of Governor and in the White House. These findings provide insight into the evolving gender dynamics of women running within the masculinized domain of politics.
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Opening the Door: Women Candidates and California's Primary Elections
Pamela Fiber-Ostrow
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Winter 2012, Pages 1-24
Abstract:
This article examines how gender interacts with primary electoral institutions to affect electoral outcomes in California's Assembly primaries from 1992 to 2006. The hypothesized relationship between candidate success and election type utilizes theories of candidate gender stereotyping and voter behavior. Therefore, women are expected to become advantaged as the primary changes from closed to more open rules due to cross-over voting and independent voters. The results show that both Republican and Democratic women enjoy greater success under the more open rules. These findings have important implications for theories about gender and politics. Institutions, namely primary election structures, matter.
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Miguel Unzueta & Kevin Binning
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, January 2012, Pages 26-38
Abstract:
The reported studies suggest that concern for the in-group motivates Asian Americans and African Americans to define diversity specifically, that is, as entailing both minorities' numerical and hierarchical representation, while motivating White Americans to define diversity broadly, that is, as entailing either minorities' high numerical and/or hierarchical representation in an organization. Studies 2-4 directly assess if a concern for the in-group affects conceptions of diversity by measuring Black and White participants' racial identity centrality, an individual difference measure of the extent to which individuals define themselves according to race. These studies suggest that the tendency to conceive diversity in ways protective of the in-group is especially pronounced among individuals who identify strongly with their racial in-group.
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Neighborhood disorder and the sense of personal control: Which factors moderate the association?
Joongbaeck Kim & Meghan Conley
Journal of Community Psychology, November 2011, Pages 894-907
Abstract:
This study examines whether and how select individual characteristics moderate the relationship between neighborhood disorder and a sense of personal control. Our findings show that neighborhood disorder is associated with a decreased sense of control. However, regression analyses including interaction terms of neighborhood disorder and some individual characteristics show that the negative effect of neighborhood disorder on sense of control is greater among Whites and people with low economic hardship, compared with racial minorities and those with high economic hardship, when neighborhood disorder is high. These results imply that, for Whites and those with low economic hardship, sense of control is more vulnerable to high levels of neighborhood disorder, even though Whites and people with low economic hardship show higher levels of sense of control than their counterparts when neighborhood disorder is low. Our research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of neighborhood disorder and psychological well-being.
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Aurelia Mok & Michael Morris
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do situational cues to individuals' social identities shift the way they look at objects? Do such shifts hinge on the structure of individuals' self-concept? We hypothesized individuals with integrated identities would exhibit attentional biases congruent with identity cues (assimilative response), whereas those with nonintegrated identities would exhibit attentional biases incongruent with identity cues (contrastive response). Dual identity participants (Asian Americans, Study 1; female lawyers, Study 2) were exposed to identity primes and then asked to focus on central, focal objects in a stimulus display. Among participants with high identity integration, American (Study 1) or lawyer priming (Study 2) shifted attention toward focal objects (assimilative response). Among participants with low identity integration, Asian (Study 1) or female priming (Study 2) shifted attention toward focal objects (contrastive response). Dual identity integration moderates responses to identity cues in attentional focus. Implications for identity structure, object perception, and task performance are discussed.
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Do Women Legislators Have a Positive Effect on the Supportiveness of States Toward Older Citizens?
Jean Giles-Sims, Joanne Connor Green & Charles Lockhart
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Winter 2012, Pages 38-64
Abstract:
Increasing women in state legislatures is associated with greater legislative support for social policies serving families with children. We examine whether the family friendly impact of women legislators extends to supporting family elders. We draw on a cross-sectional data set of the American states in conjunction with regression. We find that, controlling for prominent alternative factors shaping state policies, women's legislative presence exerts a strong positive influence on state elderly friendliness. Our results are more exploratory than definitive, but they suggest that states with more extensive legislative representation of women better meet the growing challenges of an aging population.
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The Influence of Education on Attitudes toward Affirmative Action: The Role of the Policy's Strength
Klea Faniko et al.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, February 2012, Pages 387-413
Abstract:
The present research examined the influence of education on attitudes toward affirmative action. Studies 1 and 2 showed no impact of education on attitudes toward "soft" policies of affirmative action. In contrast, they showed less support of the more educated to "hard" policies of affirmative action. Neither prejudice (Study 2), nor understanding of the affirmative-action policies (Study 3) accounted for this effect. Study 4 demonstrated that the education effect is mediated by the threat posed by strong plans to meritocratic beliefs. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
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A Facial Attractiveness Account of Gender Asymmetries in Interracial Marriage
Michael Lewis
PLoS ONE, February 2012, e31703
Background: In the US and UK, more Black men are married to White women than vice versa and there are more White men married to Asian women than vice versa. Models of interracial marriage, based on the exchange of racial status for other capital, cannot explain these asymmetries. A new explanation is offered based on the relative perceived facial attractiveness of the different race-by-gender groups.
Method and Findings: This explanation was tested using a survey of perceived facial attractiveness. This found that Black males are perceived as more attractive than White or East Asian males whereas among females, it is the East Asians that are perceived as most attractive on average.
Conclusions: Incorporating these attractiveness patterns into the model of marriage decisions produces asymmetries in interracial marriage similar to those in the observed data in terms of direction and relative size. This model does not require differences in status between races nor different strategies based on gender. Predictions are also generated regarding the relative attractiveness of those engaging in interracial marriage.
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Secondary transfer effects of interracial contact: The moderating role of social status
Nicholas Bowman & Tiffany Griffin
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, January 2012, Pages 35-44
Abstract:
The contact hypothesis asserts that intergroup attitudes can be improved when groups have opportunities to interact with each other. Recent research extending the contact hypothesis suggests that contact with a primary outgroup can decrease bias toward outgroups not directly involved in the interaction, which is known as the secondary transfer effect (STE). The present study contributes to growing research on STEs by investigating effects among Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White undergraduate students (N = 3,098) attending 28 selective colleges and universities. Using hierarchical linear modeling, our results reveal numerous positive STEs among Asian, Black, and Hispanic college students. No significant STEs were observed among White students. Mediated moderation analyses support an attitude generalization mechanism, because STEs were explained by changes in attitudes toward the primary outgroup. This research speaks to equivocal findings in the extant STE literature and highlights directions for future research on social cohesion and bias reduction.
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Money, Benefits, and Power: A Test of the Glass Ceiling and Glass Escalator Hypotheses
Ryan Smith
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2012, Pages 149-172
Abstract:
This article explores the manner in which race, ethnicity, and gender intersect to produce inequality in wages and employer benefits among "workers" (employees with no job authority), "supervisors" (employees with broad supervisory responsibilities), and "managers" (employees who can hire/fire and set the pay of others). Using data uniquely suited to examine these relationships, the author finds that, contrary to the glass ceiling hypothesis, the white male advantage over women and minorities in wages and retirement benefits generally does not increase with movement up the authority hierarchy net of controls. Instead, relative inequality remains constant at higher and lower levels of authority. However, in nontraditional work settings where white men report to minority and female supervisors, there is evidence that a glass ceiling stifles women and minorities while a glass escalator helps white men. Instead of representing mutually exclusive processes and outcomes, glass ceilings and glass escalators may actually overlap in certain employment contexts. The implications of these results for future analyses of workplace inequality are discussed.
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Alexander Aguado & George Frederickson
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Winter 2012, Pages 25-37
Abstract:
This article adds to the body of knowledge about city managers and council-manager form cities by determining why so few women are found in the ranks of city managers. Using graduates of the University of Kansas master of public administration (MPA) program as our sample, we find that women interested in city management careers face a paradox: Married women have a greater probability of becoming city managers. But if they marry and have children they face issues of relocation, child rearing, and parental care - all of which make it more difficult to get a city management job, not to mention doing that job with its typically higher time demands.
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Cohort Change and Racial Differences in Educational and Income Mobility
Deirdre Bloome & Bruce Western
Social Forces, December 2011, Pages 375-395
Abstract:
Policy reforms and rising income inequality transformed educational and economic opportunities for Americans approaching midlife in the 1990s. Rising income inequality may have reduced mobility, as income gaps increased between rich and poor children. Against the effects of rising inequality, Civil Rights reforms may have increased mobility, as opportunities expanded across cohorts of black students and workers. We compare educational and income mobility for two cohorts of black and white men, the older born in the late 1940s and the younger born in the early 1960s. We find that educational mobility increased for black men, but income mobility declined for both races. Economic mobility declined despite unchanged or improved educational mobility because of increased returns to schooling and increased intergenerational income correlations, independent of schooling.
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Kathryn Pearson & Logan Dancey
Politics & Gender, December 2011, Pages 493-519
Abstract:
We ask whether women's descriptive representation in Congress enhances women's substantive representation through speechmaking on the House floor. Much of the research on women's substantive representation has focused on members' votes for and sponsorship of "women's issues" legislation. We depart from this research by systematically analyzing how members' gender and partisan identities affect gendered rhetoric in their floor speeches. In an era marked by significant increases in the number of congresswomen and partisan polarization, understanding the interactive effect of gender and partisanship on women's representation is particularly important. In an analysis of more than 30,000 speeches from 1993 to 2008, we find that when members speak about issues of their choosing during one-minute speeches, and during specific legislative debates over the most important policies considered on the House floor, congresswomen in both parties are significantly more likely than men to discuss women, enhancing women's representation.
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"Not Out to Start a Revolution": Race, Gender, and Emotional Restraint among Black University Men
Amy Wilkins
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, February 2012, Pages 34-65
Abstract:
In this article, I use in-depth interviews with black university men to investigate race, gender, and emotions. Participation in dominant institutions requires African American men to exhibit extraordinary emotional restraint. Because anger is culturally associated with men, however, black men's suppression of anger violates masculine expectations. Thus, racial subordination not only creates difficult emotional expectations but may also create emotional dilemmas in which expected emotional displays undermine other identity expectations. In this article, I examine both how a group of black university men achieve emotional restraint and how they use their emotions to craft and manage their identities as black middle-class men. I argue that black men distance themselves from the controlling image of the angry black man by developing a shared identity I call moderate blackness. Moderate blackness entails emotional restraint, a moderate approach to campus racial politics, and the ability to get along with white people. These strategies work together to produce positive, restrained emotions and to manage anger and agitation, but they require black university men to "not see" racism. Black men use defensive othering to push the stereotype of the angry black onto black women. In doing so, they shore up their masculinity but leave women responsible for combating racial inequality.
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Survival Analysis of Faculty Retention in Science and Engineering by Gender
Deborah Kaminski & Cheryl Geisler
Science, 17 February 2012, Pages 864-866
Abstract:
Individual assistant professors (a total of 2966 faculty) hired in science and engineering since 1990 at 14 United States universities were tracked from time of hire to time of departure by using publicly available catalogs and bulletins. Results of survival analysis showed that the chance that any given faculty member will be retained over time is less than 50%; the median time to departure is 10.9 years. Of all those who enter as assistant professors, 64.2% were promoted to associate professor at the same institution. Overall, men and women are retained and promoted at the same rate. In mathematics, however, faculty leave significantly earlier than other disciplines, and women leave significantly sooner than men, 4.45 years compared with 7.33 years.
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The Partisan Gap Among Women State Legislators
Laurel Elder
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Winter 2012, Pages 65-85
Abstract:
Even a decade into the twenty-first century, women remain severely underrepresented in state legislatures. Much research has focused on the factors that help or hinder women's representation as a group, a focus that has masked the striking difference in women's progress within the two parties. The representation of Democratic women in state legislatures has continued to increase, while the number of Republican women has actually decreased. This article employs state-level data to explore why women legislators have such different levels of representation within the two parties. The central argument is that, as of the twenty-first century, the parties have distinctive cultures that hold consequences for their respective abilities to produce, recruit, and support women elected officials. Processes at both the elite and mass level work together to foster the representation of Democratic women and inhibit the representation of Republican women.
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Climbing the Job Ladder: New Evidence of Gender Inequity
David Johnston & Wang-Sheng Lee
Industrial Relations, January 2012, Pages 129-151
Abstract:
An explanation for the gender wage gap is that women are less able or less willing to "climb the job ladder." However, the empirical evidence on gender differences in job mobility has been mixed. Focusing on a subsample of younger, university-educated workers from an Australian longitudinal survey, we find strong evidence that the dynamics of promotions and employer changes worsen women's labor market position.
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Katrina Walsemann, Bethany Bell & Bridget Goosby
Race and Social Problems, October 2011, Pages 131-145
Abstract:
We investigate the effect of high school racial composition, measured as percent of non-Hispanic white students, on trajectories of depressive symptoms from adolescence to early adulthood. We also explore whether the effect of school racial composition varies by respondent race/ethnicity and whether adult socioeconomic status mediates this relationship. We analyzed four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health using 3-level linear growth models. We restricted our sample to respondents enrolled in grades 9-12 in 1994/5 who were interviewed at a minimum in Waves I and IV. This resulted in 10,350 respondents enrolled in 80 high schools in 1994/5 (5,561 whites, 2,030 blacks, 1,834 Hispanics, 738 Asians, and 187 of other race). As the percentage of white students increased at the high school respondents attended in 1994/5, blacks reported more depressive symptoms. This effect did not vary by age. In comparison, Asian and Hispanic respondents who attended predominantly white high schools had lower levels of depressive symptoms than their counterparts who attended predominantly minority schools, but they also experienced a slower decline in depressive symptoms through early adulthood. Adult SES mediated the relationship between high school racial composition and depressive symptoms for black, but not for Asian or Hispanic respondents. Our results suggest that high school racial composition is associated with trajectories of depressive symptoms through early adulthood, but the effect differs by respondents' race/ethnicity. Racial/ethnic disparities in depressive symptoms during early adulthood may have their origins in adolescence.
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