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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Unhappy Cities, Edward L. Glaeser, Joshua D. Gottlieb, Oren Ziv
Unhappy Cities, Edward L. Glaeser, Joshua D. Gottlieb, Oren Ziv
Dartmouth Scholarship
There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across US metropolitan areas, and residents of declining cities appear less happy than others. Yet some people continue to move to these areas, and newer residents appear to be as unhappy as longer-term residents. While historical data on happiness are limited, the available facts suggest that cities that are now declining were also unhappy in their more prosperous past. These facts support the view that individuals do not maximize happiness alone but include it in the utility function along with other arguments. People may trade off happiness against other competing objectives.
Informal Employment In A Growing And Globalizing Low-Income Country, Brian Mccaig, Nina Pavcnik
Informal Employment In A Growing And Globalizing Low-Income Country, Brian Mccaig, Nina Pavcnik
Dartmouth Scholarship
We document several facts about workforce transitions from the informal to the formal sector in Vietnam, a fast growing, industrializing, and low-income country. First, younger workers, particularly migrants, are more likely to work in the formal sector and stay there permanently. Second, the decline in the aggregate share of informal employment occurs through changes between and within birth cohorts. Third, younger, educated, male, and urban workers are more likely to switch to the formal sector than other workers initially in the informal sector. Poorly educated, older, female, rural workers face little prospect of formalization. Fourth, formalization coincides with occupational upgrading.
Social Support Substitution And The Earnings Rebound: Evidence From A Regression Discontinuity In Disability Insurance Reform, Lex Borghans, Anne C. Gielen, Erzo F. P. Luttmer
Social Support Substitution And The Earnings Rebound: Evidence From A Regression Discontinuity In Disability Insurance Reform, Lex Borghans, Anne C. Gielen, Erzo F. P. Luttmer
Dartmouth Scholarship
We exploit a cohort discontinuity in the stringency of Dutch disability reforms to estimate the effects of decreased DI (disability insurance) generosity on behavior of existing recipients. We find evidence of social support substitution: individuals on average offset €1.00 of lost DI benefits by collecting €0.30 more from other social assistance programs, but this benefit-substitution effect declines over time. Individuals also exhibit a rebound in earnings: earnings increase by €0.62 on average per euro of lost DI benefits and this effect remains roughly constant over time. This is strong evidence of substantial remaining earnings capacity among long-term claimants of DI.
Do Male-Female Wage Differentials Reflect Differences In The Return To Skill? Cross-City Evidence From 1980–2000, Paul Beaudry, Ethan Lewis
Do Male-Female Wage Differentials Reflect Differences In The Return To Skill? Cross-City Evidence From 1980–2000, Paul Beaudry, Ethan Lewis
Dartmouth Scholarship
Male-female wage gaps declined significantly over the 1980s and 1990s, while returns to education increased. In this paper, we use cross-city data to explore whether, like the return to education, the change in the gender wage gap may reflect changes in skill prices induced by the diffusion of information technology. We show that male-female and education-wage differentials moved in opposite directions in response to the adoption of PCs. Our most credible estimates simply that changes in skill prices driven by PC adoption can explain most of the decline in the US male-female wage gap since 1980.
Informality And Development, Rafael La Porta, Andrei Shleifer
Informality And Development, Rafael La Porta, Andrei Shleifer
Dartmouth Scholarship
In developing countries, informal firms account for up to half of economic activity. They provide livelihood for billions of people. Yet their role in economic development remains controversial with some viewing informality as pent-up potential and others viewing informality as a parasitic organizational form that hinders economic growth. In this paper, we assess these perspectives. We argue that the evidence is most consistent with dual models, in which informality arises out of poverty and the informal and formal sectors are very different. It seems that informal firms have low productivity and produce low- quality products; and, consequently, they do not …
Testing For Factor Price Equality With Unobserved Differences In Factor Quality Or Productivity, Andrew B. Bernard, Stephen J. Redding, Peter K. Schott
Testing For Factor Price Equality With Unobserved Differences In Factor Quality Or Productivity, Andrew B. Bernard, Stephen J. Redding, Peter K. Schott
Dartmouth Scholarship
We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality that is robust to unobserved variation in factor productivity. We implement this method using data on the relative wage bills of nonproduction and production workers across 170 local labor markets comprising the continental United States for 1972, 1992, and 2007. We find evidence of statistically significant differences in relative wages in all three years. These differences increase in magnitude over time and are related to industry structure in a manner that is consistent with neoclassical models of production. (JEL J31, J61, R23)
Effects Of Terms Of Trade Gains And Tariff Changes On The Measurement Of Us Productivity Growth, Robert C. Feenstra, Benjamin R. Mandel, Marshall B. Reinsdorf, Matthew J. Slaughter
Effects Of Terms Of Trade Gains And Tariff Changes On The Measurement Of Us Productivity Growth, Robert C. Feenstra, Benjamin R. Mandel, Marshall B. Reinsdorf, Matthew J. Slaughter
Dartmouth Scholarship
The acceleration in US productivity growth since 1995 is often attributed to declining prices for information technology (IT ) goods, and therefore enhanced productivity growth in that sector. We investigate an alternative explanation for these IT price movements: gains in the US terms of trade and tariff reductions, especially for IT products, which led to greater gains than shown by official indexes. We do not, however, investigate the indexes used to deflate the domestic absorption components of GDP, and if upward biases are present in those indexes that could offset some of the effects of mismeasured export and import indexes. …
Information And Employee Evaluation: Evidence From A Randomized Intervention In Public Schools, Jonah E. Rockoff, Douglas O. Staiger, Thomas J. Kane, Eric S. Taylor
Information And Employee Evaluation: Evidence From A Randomized Intervention In Public Schools, Jonah E. Rockoff, Douglas O. Staiger, Thomas J. Kane, Eric S. Taylor
Dartmouth Scholarship
We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with imperfect information. First, the correlation between performance estimates and prior beliefs rises with more precise objective estimates and more precise subjective priors. Second, new information exerts greater influence on posterior beliefs when it is more precise and when priors are less precise. Employer learning affects job separation and productivity in schools, increasing turnover for teachers with low performance estimates and producing small test score improvements. …
Globalization And U.S. Wages: Modifying Classic Theory To Explain Recent Facts, Jonathan Haskel, Robert Z. Lawrence, Edward E. Leamer, Matthew J. Slaughter
Globalization And U.S. Wages: Modifying Classic Theory To Explain Recent Facts, Jonathan Haskel, Robert Z. Lawrence, Edward E. Leamer, Matthew J. Slaughter
Dartmouth Scholarship
This paper seeks to review how globalization might explain the recent trends in real and relative wages in the United States. We begin with an overview of what is new during the last 10-15 years in globalization, productivity, and patterns of U.S. earnings. To preview our results, we then work through four main findings: First, there is only mixed evidence that trade in goods, intermediates, and services has been raising inequality between more- and less-skilled workers. Second, it is more possible, although far from proven, that globalization has been boosting the real and relative earnings of superstars. The usual trade-in-goods …
Is There Monopsony In The Labor Market? Evidence From A Natural Experiment, Douglas O. Staiger, Joanne Spetz, Ciaran S. Phibbs
Is There Monopsony In The Labor Market? Evidence From A Natural Experiment, Douglas O. Staiger, Joanne Spetz, Ciaran S. Phibbs
Dartmouth Scholarship
Recent theoretical and empirical advances have renewed interest in monopsonistic models of the labor market. However, there is little direct empirical support for these models. We use an exogenous change in wages at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals as a natural experiment to investigate the extent of monopsony in the nurse labor market. We estimate that labor supply to individual hospitals is quite inelastic, with short-run elasticity around 0.1. We also find that non-VA hospitals responded to the VA wage change by changing their own wages.
Education And The Age Profile Of Literacy Into Adulthood, Elizabeth Cascio, Damon Clark, Nora Gordon
Education And The Age Profile Of Literacy Into Adulthood, Elizabeth Cascio, Damon Clark, Nora Gordon
Dartmouth Scholarship
American teenagers perform considerably worse on international assessments of achievement than do teenagers in other high-income countries. This observation has been a source of great concern since the first international tests were administered in the 1960s. But does this skill gap persist into adulthood? We examine this question using the first international assessment of adult literacy, conducted in the 1990s. We find that, consistent with other assessments of the school-age population, U.S. teenagers perform relatively poorly, ranking behind teenagers in the twelve other rich countries surveyed. However, by their late twenties, Americans compare much more favorably to their counterparts abroad: …
Will The Stork Return To Europe And Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations, James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, Ariel Dora Stern
Will The Stork Return To Europe And Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations, James Feyrer, Bruce Sacerdote, Ariel Dora Stern
Dartmouth Scholarship
We seek to explain the differences in fertility rates across high-income countries by focusing on the interaction between the increasing status of women in the workforce and their status in the household, particularly with regards to child care and home production. We observe three distinct phases in women's status generated by the gradual increase in women's workforce opportunities. In the earliest phase, characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, women earn low wages relative to men and are expected to shoulder all of the child care at home. As a result, most women specialize in home production …
Iatrogenic Specification Error: A Cautionary Tale Of Cleaning Data, Christopher R. Bollinger, Amitabh Chandra
Iatrogenic Specification Error: A Cautionary Tale Of Cleaning Data, Christopher R. Bollinger, Amitabh Chandra
Dartmouth Scholarship
In empirical research it is common practice to use sensible rules of thumb for cleaning data. Measurement error is often the justification for removing (trimming) or recoding (winsorizing) observations whose values lie outside a specified range. We consider a general measurement error process that nests many pl ausible models. Analytic results demonstrate that winsorizing and trimming are only solutions for a narrow class of measurement error processes. Indeed, for the measurement error processes found in most social-science data, such procedures can induce or exacerbate bias, and even inflate the variance estimates. We term this source of bias “Iatrogenic” (or econometrician …
The Nature And Nurture Of Economic Outcomes, Bruce Sacerdote
The Nature And Nurture Of Economic Outcomes, Bruce Sacerdote
Dartmouth Scholarship
The relative importance of biology and envi- ronment is one of the oldest and most prominent areas of scientific inquiry and has been exam- ined by researchers as diverse as David Hume (1748), Charles Darwin (1859), and Sigmund Freud (1930). Social scientists are particularly interested in the degree to which family and neighborhood environmental factors influence a child’s educational attainment and earnings. The stakes in this debate are quite high and far-reaching. As Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) point out, the effectiveness of anti- poverty and pro-education policies is largely de- pendent on the degree to which environment matters. …
What Makes An Entrepreneur?, David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald
What Makes An Entrepreneur?, David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald
Dartmouth Scholarship
This article uses various micro data sets to study entrepreneurship. Consistent with the existence of capital constraints on potential entrepreneurs, the estimates imply that the probability of self‐employment depends positively upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift. When directly questioned in interview surveys, potential entrepreneurs say that raising capital is their principal problem. Consistent with our theoretical model's predictions, the self‐employed report higher levels of job and life satisfaction than employees. Childhood psychological test scores, however, are not strongly correlated with later self‐employment.