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The Board of Trade and the regulatory state in the long 19th century, 1815–1914
No full textHow does regulatory statehood develop from the regulatory work which governments have always done? This article challenges conventional views that regulatory statehood is achieved by transition to arm's length agencies and that it replaces court-based enforcement or displaces legislatures in favor of less accountable executive power. To do so, we examine the major 19th-century surge in development of micro-economic regulatory statehood in Britain, which had followed more gradual development in early modern times. We show that when the transformation of the Board of Trade is understood properly, a richer appreciation emerges of how regulatory statehood is institutionalized generally and of British state-making in particular. To demonstrate this, we introduce a novel conceptual framework for analyzing and assessing change on multiple dimensions of regulatory statehood, distinguishing depth of regulatory capacity and regulatory capability along six dimensions
The different roads not taken: considering diverse foregone alternatives motivates future goal persistence
No full textDecisions are rarely made in isolation. Instead, deliberation often occurs in the context of prior related choices. This article finds that goal-inconsistent foregone alternatives, options that were previously considered but not chosen, shape how consumers subsequently pursue their goals. Going beyond previous research on foregone alternatives and consumer satisfaction, the current research suggests that how consumers mentally construe foregone goal-inconsistent alternatives impacts how they evaluate their prior goal-consistent choices, which will, in turn, impact their motivation to continue making goal-consistent choices. Specifically, we find the foregone alternative diversity effect: consumers who consider having previously foregone diverse (vs. similar) goal-inconsistent alternatives in favor of a goal-consistent action then believe that they have made a greater sacrifice, which had more of an impact on their focal goal. As a result, they are then more likely to subsequently make goal-consistent choices. Our findings hold across different types of goals (exercise: Study 1, healthy eating: Studies 2, 3, and 5, weight loss: Study 4), and both real and hypothetical choices. We also identify theoretically motivated boundary conditions for the observed effect of considering foregone alternatives
Clean identification? The effects of the clean air act on air pollution, exposure disparities and house prices
No full textWe assess the US Clean Air Act standards for fine particulate matter (PM 2.5). Using high-resolution data, we find that the 2005 regulation reduced PM 2.5 levels by 0.4 μg/ m 3 over five years, with larger effects in more polluted areas. Standard difference-in-differences overstates these effects by a factor of three because time trends differ by baseline pollution, a bias we overcome with three alternative approaches. We show that the regulation contributed to narrowing Urban-Rural and Black-White PM 2.5 exposure disparities, but less than difference-in-differences suggest. Pollution damages capitalized into house prices, however, appear larger than previously thought when leveraging regulatory variation. (JEL D63, K32, Q52, Q53, Q58, R31)
Beyond Newton: why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them
No full textCognitive science is a study of human universals. This assumption, which we will refer to as the Newtonian principle (NP), explicitly or implicitly pervades the theory, methods, and prose of most cognitive research. This is despite at least half a century of sustained critique by cross-cultural and anthropologically oriented researchers and glaring counterexamples such as the study of literacy. We argue that a key reason for this intransigence is that the NP solves the boundary problem of cognitive science. Since studying the idiosyncratic cognitive features of an individual is not a generalizable scientific enterprise, what scale of generalization in cognitive science is legitimate and interesting? The NP solution is a priori—only findings generalizing to all humans are legitimate. This approach is clearly flawed; however, critiques of the NP fail to provide any alternative solution. In fact, some anti-NP branches of research have abandoned generalizability altogether. Sailing between the scylla and charybdis of NP and hermeneutics, we propose an explicit, alternative solution to the boundary problem. Namely, building on many previous efforts, we combine cultural-evolutionary theory with a newly defined principle of articulation. This framework requires work on any given cognitive feature to explicitly hypothesize the universal or group-specific environments in which it emerges. Doing so shifts the question of legitimate generalizability from flawed, a priori assumptions to being a target of explicit claims and theorizing. Moreover, the articulation framework allows us to integrate existing findings across research traditions and motivates a range of future directions
Balbi, G. (2023). The digital revolution: a short history of an ideology (B. McClellan-Broussard, Trans.). Oxford University Press, 159 pp
No full textParental time investments and instantaneous well-being in the United States
No full textThis study investigates the relationship between maternal education, child‐care time, and well‐being in the United States, with a particular focus on the role of societal norms. Highly educated mothers spend more time on childcare compared to their less educated counterparts. Drawing on data from the American Time Use Survey's Well‐Being Modules (2012, 2013, 2021), this research provides a comprehensive examination of maternal activities and well‐being. Notably, educated mothers consistently experience reduced instantaneous happiness during childcare, across various caregiving tasks, despite investing greater time in them. To better understand this pattern, we introduce an identity economics model whose predictions are consonant with the empirical findings. Our model illustrates how societal gender roles differentially influence patterns of time allocation by mothers' education and impact their instantaneous and overall well‐being
Are domestic war crimes trials biased?
No full textFairness of domestic war crimes trials matters for promoting justice and peace. Scholars have studied public perceptions of war crimes trials to assess their fairness, but little is known about whether post-conflict states conduct them fairly. Bias, as a matter of procedural fairness, can manifest as a tendency to favour certain groups over others. Leveraging the theories of judicial decisionmaking, this article investigates two types of bias. The first is in-group bias, which is associated with protection of in-group members and punishment of out-group members. The second is conflict actor bias, which is associated with deflecting responsibility for wrongdoing from state agents to non-state agents of violence. We test for bias in domestic war crimes trials in Serbia with statistical modelling and quantitative text analysis of judicial decisions delivered to Serb and non-Serb defendants (1999–2019). While we do not find evidence of ethnic bias, our results indicate conflict actor bias. Serb paramilitaries received harsher sentences than Serb state agents of violence. Furthermore, we observe bias in the textual content of judgements. Judges depict violence committed by paramilitaries more extensively and graphically than violence by state actors. By revealing these judicial strategies, we demonstrate how a state can use domestic war crimes trials to diminish state wrongdoing and attribute the responsibility for violence to paramilitaries. The conflict actor bias we identify shows how deniability of accountability operates after conflict, complementing existing explanations of states’ collusion with paramilitaries before and during conflict
Matchmakers: placement agencies and digital platforms in the UK childcare market
No full textHouseholds seeking childcare often turn to labour market intermediaries such as placement agencies and digital platforms to facilitate their search. This article draws on a qualitative research project to examine the respective roles played by agencies and platforms, comparing the structural power dynamics they engender between workers, clients, and intermediaries. First, it argues that digital platforms stand in an ambiguous position in relation to the formalisation of childcare. While they have contributed to reducing transaction costs and standardising processes, this has often been through the creation of more flexible and insecure forms of work compared with agencies. Second, in contrast with literature emphasising the disciplinary effects of platforms, we claim that they institute new forms of ‘constrained flexibility’, which have increased workers’ access to jobs, control over their schedule and communication with clients, while simultaneously subjecting them to increased market pressures and requiring higher levels of digital and entrepreneurial skills
On the correlation gap of matroids
No full textA set function can be extended to the unit cube in various ways; the correlation gap measures the ratio between two natural extensions. This quantity has been identified as the performance guarantee in a range of approximation algorithms and mechanism design settings. It is known that the correlation gap of a monotone submodular function is at least 1-1/e, and this is tight for simple matroid rank functions. We initiate a fine-grained study of the correlation gap of matroid rank functions. In particular, we present an improved lower bound on the correlation gap as parametrized by the rank and girth of the matroid. We also show that for any matroid, the correlation gap of its weighted rank function is minimized under uniform weights. Such improved lower bounds have direct applications for submodular maximization under matroid constraints, mechanism design, and contention resolution schemes
