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Social and Behavioral Sciences

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William & Mary

Arts & Sciences Articles

2022

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Black Lives, White Kids: White Parenting Practices Following Black-Led Protests, Allison P. Anoll, Andrew M. Engelhardt, Mackenzie Israel-Trummel Dec 2022

Black Lives, White Kids: White Parenting Practices Following Black-Led Protests, Allison P. Anoll, Andrew M. Engelhardt, Mackenzie Israel-Trummel

Arts & Sciences Articles

Summer 2020 saw widespread protests under the banner Black Lives Matter. Coupled with the global pandemic that kept America’s children in the predominant care of their parents, we argue that the latter half of 2020 offers a unique moment to consider whites’ race-focused parenting practices. We use Google Trends data and posts on public parenting Facebook pages to show that the remarkable levels of protest activity in summer 2020 served as a focusing event that not only directed Americans’ attention to racial concepts but connected those concepts to parenting. Using a national survey of non-Hispanic white parents with white school-age …


Quality Of Communications Infrastructure, Local Structural Transformation, And Inequality, Camilo Acosta, Luis Baldomero-Quintana Nov 2022

Quality Of Communications Infrastructure, Local Structural Transformation, And Inequality, Camilo Acosta, Luis Baldomero-Quintana

Arts & Sciences Articles

We analyze the causal impact of improvements in the quality of communication infrastructure on the structural transformation of US counties. Our treatment is the quality of communication infrastructure in a county, measured by the average Internet speed offered to businesses. We use as an instrumental variable the spatial structure of ARPANET, a network funded by the Department of Defense that is considered the precursor of the Internet, and whose location we determine using historical government documents. We show that faster Internet stimulates short-run growth and increases the shares of employment and GDP in high-skilled services, while negatively affecting sectors such …


Contact And Context: How Municipal Traffic Stops Shape Citizen Character, Allison P. Anoll, Derek A. Epp, Mackenzie Israel-Trummel Oct 2022

Contact And Context: How Municipal Traffic Stops Shape Citizen Character, Allison P. Anoll, Derek A. Epp, Mackenzie Israel-Trummel

Arts & Sciences Articles

Previous research shows that how the state conducts itself influences citizen attitudes and behaviors through direct and proximal contact; we show the actions of state agents ripple out even further. Joining bureaucratic data on a publicly observable state behavior—racial disparities in investigatory traffic stops—with survey data, this article shows that residing in a place with extreme racial disparities in traffic stops is associated with depressed confidence in the police even in the absence of more direct forms of contact. This relationship does not extend to participatory behaviors, however, in which only personal stop history and proximal contact are predictors. Racially …


Meat Substitutes: Current Status, Potential Benefits, And Remaining Challenges, Catherine A. Forestell, John B. Nezlek Oct 2022

Meat Substitutes: Current Status, Potential Benefits, And Remaining Challenges, Catherine A. Forestell, John B. Nezlek

Arts & Sciences Articles

Replacing traditional meat with meat substitutes may reduce environmental degradation and improve people’s health. We discuss two categories of meat substitutes: plant-based meat alternatives (PBMA) and cultured meat (CM). Despite their benefits, some people may not accept these foods. Neither PBMA nor CM take the form of a solid piece of meat (e.g. a steak), and such cuts are popular. PBMA and CM are novel, and some people may avoid or be uninterested in trying these unfamiliar foods. People may be threatened by PBMA and CM because they have strong attachments to traditional meat or it threatens their social values …


The Economic Efficiency Of Aid Targeting, Ariel Benyishay, Matthew Dilorenzo, Carrie B. Dolan Jul 2022

The Economic Efficiency Of Aid Targeting, Ariel Benyishay, Matthew Dilorenzo, Carrie B. Dolan

Arts & Sciences Articles

How efficient is the targeting of foreign aid to populations in need? A long literature has focused on the impacts of foreign aid, but much rarer are studies that examine how such aid is allocated within countries. We examine the extent to which donors efficiently respond to exogenous budget shocks by shifting resources toward needier districts within a given country, as predicted by theory. We use recently geocoded data on the World Bank’s aid in 23 countries that crossed the lower-middle income threshold between 1995 and 2010 and thus experienced sharp aid reductions. We measure locations’ need along a number …


Trade Competition And Migration: Evidence From The Quartz Crisis, Tate Twinam Jul 2022

Trade Competition And Migration: Evidence From The Quartz Crisis, Tate Twinam

Arts & Sciences Articles

Foreign competition and technological change can both present threats to domestic industries, potentially resulting in out-migration from cities and regions where these industries are spatially agglomerated. In this paper, I study the migration effects of one such trade shock: The quartz crisis, which devastated the globally dominant Swiss watch industry in the 1970s. Using a differences-in-differences strategy, I show that this trade shock led to a rapid loss of population in affected areas, and a long-run change in growth patterns. This contrasts with many other studies of large trade shocks, which find little migration response. I highlight three key factors …


The Cash Crop Revolution, Colonialism And Economic Reorganization In Africa, Philip Roessler, Yannick I. Pengl, Robert Marty, Kyle Sorlie Titlow, Nicholas Van De Walle Jun 2022

The Cash Crop Revolution, Colonialism And Economic Reorganization In Africa, Philip Roessler, Yannick I. Pengl, Robert Marty, Kyle Sorlie Titlow, Nicholas Van De Walle

Arts & Sciences Articles

In the 19th and 20th centuries, African economies experienced a significant structural transformation from the slave trades to commercial agriculture. We analyze the long-run impact of this economic transition focusing on the dynamic effects of: shifting geographic fundamentals to favor agroclimatic suitability for cash crops; infrastructural investments to reduce trade costs; and external forward production linkages. Using agro-climatic suitability scores and historical data on the source location of more than 95 percent of all exports across 38 African states, we assess the consequences of these changes on economic reorganization across the continent. We find that colonial cash crop production had …


Locational Error In The Estimation Of Regional Discrete Choice Models Using Distance As A Regressor, Giuseppe Arbia, Paolo Berta, Carrie B. Dolan Mar 2022

Locational Error In The Estimation Of Regional Discrete Choice Models Using Distance As A Regressor, Giuseppe Arbia, Paolo Berta, Carrie B. Dolan

Arts & Sciences Articles

In many microeconometric studies distance from a relevant point of interest (such as a hospital) is often used as a predictor in a regression framework. Confidentiality rules, often, require to geo-mask spatial micro-data, reducing the quality of such relevant information and distorting inference on models’ parameters. This paper extends previous literature, extending the classical results on the measurement error in a linear regression model to the case of hospital choice, showing that in a discrete choice model the higher is the distortion produced by the geo-masking, the higher will be the downward bias in absolute value toward zero of the …


“One Does Not Simply Categorize A Meme”: A Dual Classification System For Visual-Textual Internet Memes, Leslie Cochrane, Alexandra Johnson, Aubrey Lay, Ginny Helmandollar Jan 2022

“One Does Not Simply Categorize A Meme”: A Dual Classification System For Visual-Textual Internet Memes, Leslie Cochrane, Alexandra Johnson, Aubrey Lay, Ginny Helmandollar

Arts & Sciences Articles

Internet memes are a popular and long-standing genre of discourse on social media platforms, used to express everything from emotional states to political opinions. Dancygier and Vandelanotte (2017) define internet memes as intertextual, multimodal discourses that combine text with images. In order to capture and compare these rapidly-changing discourses, we propose a descriptive dual classification system for memes with two components: meme composition and multimodal quality. Meme composition categorizes memes by their structure—beyond the individual images they employ—and thus explains how memes recontextualize images and text to create new meanings. Multimodal quality serves to describe the way(s) that the text …