1,721,101 research outputs found
Contagious animosity in the field: Evidence from the Federal Criminal Justice System
No full textA vast literature uses ingroup biases to explain animus towards others. The notion can be extended to multi-identity societies, where social preferences are defined over one ingroup and multiple outgroups. We use a novel research design to recover the structure of social preferences across outgroups in a high stakes setting. We investigate whether increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 had spillover effects on Black and Hispanic individuals in the federal criminal justice system. Using linked administrative data tracking defendants from arrest through to sentencing, our core finding is that as 9-11 increased animosity towards Muslims, sentence and pre-sentence outcomes for Hispanic defendants significantly worsened. Outcomes for Black defendants were unchanged. We underpin a causal interpretation of our findings by providing evidence in favor of the identifying assumptions underlying the research design. The findings are consistent with judges and prosecutors displaying social preferences characterized by contagious animosity from Muslims to Hispanics. To understand why increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 could spillover onto Hispanics, we draw on work in sociology to detail how Islamophobia and immigration have become intertwined in American consciousness since the mid 1990s, but were forcefully framed together in the aftermath of 9-11. We narrow the interpretation of the results as being driven by social preference structures using decomposition analysis, and correlating sentencing differentials to judge characteristics, including their race/ethnicity. Our findings provide among the first field evidence of contagious animosity, that social preferences across outgroups are interlinked and malleable
Contagious animosity in the field: Evidence from the Federal Criminal Justice System
No full textA vast literature uses ingroup biases to explain animus towards others. The notion can be extended to multi-identity societies, where social preferences are defined over one ingroup and multiple outgroups. We use a novel research design to recover the structure of social preferences across outgroups in a high stakes setting. We investigate whether increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 had spillover effects on Black and Hispanic individuals in the federal criminal justice system. Using linked administrative data tracking defendants from arrest through to sentencing, we find that as 9-11 increased animosity towards Muslims, sentence and pre-sentence outcomes for Hispanic defendants significantly worsened. Outcomes for Black defendants were unchanged. We underpin a causal interpretation of our findings by providing evidence to support the identifying assumptions underlying the research design. The findings are consistent with judges and prosecutors displaying social preferences characterized by contagious animosity from Muslims to Hispanics. To understand why increased animosity towards Muslims post 9-11 could spillover onto Hispanics, we draw on work in sociology to detail how Islamophobia and immigration have become intertwined in American consciousness since the mid 1990s, but were forcefully framed together in the aftermath of 9-11. We narrow the interpretation of the results as being driven by social preference structures using decomposition analysis, and correlating sentencing differentials to judge characteristics, including their race/ethnicity. Our findings provide among the first field evidence of contagious animosity, so that social preferences across outgroups are interlinked and malleable.<br/
Crime and the Depenalization of Cannabis Possession: Evidence from a Policing Experiment
Full text linkWe evaluate the impact on crime of a localized policing experiment that depenalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis in the London borough of Lambeth. We find that depenalization policy caused the police to reallocate effort towards non-drug crime. Despite the overall fall in crime attributable to the policy, we find the total welfare of local residents likely fell, as measured by house prices. We shed light on what would be the impacts on crime of a citywide depenalization policy, by developing and calibrating a structural model of the market for cannabis and crime
Women's empowerment in action: evidence from a randomized control trial in Africa
Full text linkWomen in developing countries are disempowered: high youth unemployment, early marriage and childbearing interact to limit their investments into human capital and enforce dependence on men. We evaluate a multifaceted policy intervention attempting to jump-start adolescent women’s empowerment in Uganda, a context in which 60% of the population are aged below twenty. The intervention aims to relax human capital constraints that adolescent girls face by simultaneously providing them vocational training and information on sex, reproduction and marriage. We find that four years post-intervention, adolescent girls in treated communities are 4-9 percentage points more likely to engage in income generating activities, corresponding to a 48% increase over baseline levels, and an impact almost entirely driven by their greater engagement in self-employment. Teen pregnancy falls by a third, and early entry into marriage/cohabitation also falls rapidly. Strikingly, the share of girls reporting sex against their will drops by close to a third and aspired ages at which to marry and start childbearing move forward. The results highlight the potential of a multifaceted program that provides skills transfers as a viable and cost effective policy intervention to improve the economic and social empowerment of adolescent girls over a four year horizon
Social incentives, delivery agents, and the effectiveness of development interventions
Full text linkThere has been a dramatic rise in the use of the local delivery model for development
interventions, where local agents are hired as intermediaries to target benefits to potential
beneficiaries. We study this model in the context of a standard agricultural extension intervention
in Uganda using a two-stage experimental design. In the first stage, we randomize
the delivery of the intervention across communities. In the second, in each community we
identify two potential delivery agents and then randomly select one of them. This yields
exogenous variation in social ties to the actual delivery agent as well as to their counterfactual.
We use this to identify how social incentives shape the behavior of delivery agents
through them having social ties to farmers in communities from which they are recruited and
serve. We document a trade-off between coverage and targeting: delivery agents treat more
farmers when they have a greater number of social ties, but they are significantly more likely
to target their non-poor ties – counter to the pro-poor intent of the intervention. We explore
reasons why delivery agents target their non-poor ties – finding that the social incentives of
delivery agents are critical for their behavior. We conclude by discussing the implications of
our findings for the design of the local delivery model for anti-poverty interventions
Microfinance and Diversification
No full textThe bulk of the world's extreme poor work in subsistence agriculture. Diversification out of this activity is often seen as the sine qua non of economic development. We evaluate whether the roll-out of a mainstay development intervention—microfinance—into poor, agricultural and largely unbanked populations in rural Uganda helps borrowers to diversify into non-agricultural labour activities. The new microfinance product is targeted to women, and differs from existing sources of formal and informal credit in that it allows them to borrow larger amounts but has inflexible repayment dates and the use of funds is monitored. We find that the arrival of microfinance enables women to diversify out of agriculture and into service-based activities such as small-scale trading. This low-level structural change, however, is not transformative in that it does not lead—at least after two years—to significant uplifts in earnings, consumption, savings, investment and overall wealth
Labor Markets and Poverty in Village Economies
Full text linkWe study how women's choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty. To do this we conduct a large-scale randomized control trial, covering over 21,000 households in 1,309 villages surveyed four times over a seven-year period, to evaluate a nationwide program in Bangladesh that transfers livestock assets and skills to the poorest women. At baseline, the poorest women mostly engage in low return and seasonal casual wage labor while wealthier women solely engage in livestock rearing. The program enables poor women to start engaging in livestock rearing, increasing their aggregate labor supply and earnings. This leads to asset accumulation (livestock, land, and business assets) and poverty reduction, both sustained after four and seven years. These gains do not crowd out the livestock businesses of noneligible households while the wages these receive for casual jobs increase as the poor reduce their labor supply. Our results show that (i) the poor are able to take on the work activities of the nonpoor but face barriers to doing so, and, (ii) one-off interventions that remove these barriers lead to sustainable poverty reduction
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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