1,721,041 research outputs found
The Empirical Implications of Models with Multiple Equilibria in Models with Social Interactions
No full textNeighborhood Effects: Accomplishments and Looking Beyond Them
Full text linkThe paper addresses the empirical significance of the social context in economic decisions. Decisions of individuals who share spatial and social milieus are likely to be interdependent, and econometric identification of social effects poses intricate data and methodological problems, including dealing with self-selection in spatial and socail groups. It uses a simple empirical framework to introduce social interactions effects at different levels of aggregation, and examines estimation problems into linear models, the impact of self-selection and of non linearities. It also examines neighborhood effects in job matching and proposes a research agenda that offers new techniques and data sources.Neighborhood effects, social interactions, social networks, social effects, self-selection, neighborhood choice, social multiplier, spatial effects
Improving survey measures of household inflation expectations
Full text linkExpectations about future inflation are generally thought to play an important role in households’ decisions about spending and saving. They are also of great interest to central bankers, who take them into account when determining policy or assessing the effectiveness of communications with the public. To help improve existing survey measures of inflation expectations, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently joined with other institutions and academic consultants to develop a set of survey questions that will yield more reliable information on households’ inflation expectations, inflation uncertainty, and expectations about future wage changes.Inflation (Finance) ; Households - Economic aspects ; Economic surveys ; Federal Reserve Bank of New York ; Economic forecasting
Social Capital as Good Culture
Full text linkTo explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors. As a result, societies can be trapped in a low-trust equilibrium. In this context, a temporary shock to the return to trusting can have a permanent effect on the level of trust. We validate the model by testing its predictions on the World Values Survey data and the German Socio Economic Panel. We also present some anecdotal evidence that differences in priors across regions are reflected in the spirit of the novels that originate from those regions.
There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values From Megan's Laws
Full text linkWe combine data from the housing market with data from the North Carolina Sex Offender Registry to estimate how individuals value living in close proximity to a convicted criminal. We use the exact location of sex offenders to exploit variation in the threat of crime within small homogenous groupings of homes, and we use the timing of sex offenders' arrivals to control for baseline property values in the area. We find statistically and economically significant negative effects of sex offenders' locations that are extremely localized. Houses within a one-tenth mile area around the home of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average (about 1 million per victim -- far in excess of estimates taken from the criminal justice literature. However, we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate the risk posed by offenders or view living near an offender as having costs exclusive of crime risk.
Place of Work and Place of Residence: Informal Hiring Networks and Labor Market Outcomes
Full text linkWe use a novel dataset and research design to empirically detect the effect of social interactions among neighbors on labor market outcomes. Specifically, using Census data that characterize residential and employment locations down to the city block, we examine whether individuals residing in the same block are more likely to work together than those in nearby blocks. We find evidence of significant social interactions operating at the block level: residing on the same versus nearby blocks increases the probability of working together by over 33 percent. The results also indicate that this referral effect is stronger when individuals are similar in sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., both have children of similar ages) and when at least one individual is well attached to the labor market. These findings are robust across various specifications intended to address concerns related to sorting and reverse causation. Further, having determined the characteristics of a pair of individuals that lead to an especially strong referral effect, we provide evidence that the increased availability of neighborhood referrals has a significant impact on a wide range of labor market outcomes including employment and wages.Neighborhood Effects, Job Referrals, Social Interactions, Social Interactions, Social Networks, Labor Supply
Theory of Values
Full text linkEconomists have a well-developed theory of value but the theory of why people hold the values they do is rudimentary at best. In spite of the fact that it is common to argue that values are important, most work on values is normative and the positive theory of values is relatively under- developed. In this paper we propose a simple yet general way to think about values - they are about how one trades-off one own's utility against that of others - and argue that we can draw on the large literature on pro-social behavior for hypotheses on how people will choose values. Then, using data from the UK's Citizenship Survey we show how models of self-interest, fairness, reciprocity and identity, can explain many of the patterns that we observe in the data across a wide variety of values.Values, Pro-Social Behaviour
Social-Family Network and Self-Employment: Evidence from Temporary Rural-Urban Migrants in China
Full text linkWe hypothesize that individuals with a larger social-family network are more likely to choose self-employment. We test this hypothesis using data on temporary rural-urban migrants in China. The size of a migrant’s social-family network is measured by the number of relatives and friends this migrant greeted during the past Spring Festival. Our empirical analysis faces two challenges. First, there is an endogeneity problem in that a migrant may want to develop and maintain a large social-family network exactly because he is self-employed. For this reason, a simple correlation between the probability of being self-employed and the size of the migrant’s social-family network cannot be interpreted as causal. Second, the size of the social-family network is measured using survey data, which is subject to measurement error. To overcome these problems, we take an instrumental variable (IV) approach. More specifically, we examine the distance an individual migrated when he first moved to a city and use this variable to instrument for the current size of the social-family network. We establish the credibility of the IV by emphasizing the unique institutional context of rural-urban migration in China and focusing on the sample of migrants who originally started as wage workers in urban areas and currently are not in their first jobs. Our IV results indeed show that a rural-urban migrant with a larger social-family network is more likely to be self-employed in the city. This finding is robust to alternative model specifications and various restrictions on the sample used in estimation.social-family network, self-employment, rural-urban migrants
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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