Research

Associations of family and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics with longitudinal adiposity patterns in a biracial cohort of adolescent girls

Although many studies have examined the relationship of adiposity with neighborhood socioeconomic context in adults, few studies have investigated this relationship during adolescence.

Prospective Versus Retrospective Approaches to the Study of Intergenerational Social Mobility

Most intergenerational social mobility studies are based upon retrospective data, in which samples of individuals report socioeconomic information about their parents, an approach that provides representative data for offspring but not the parental generation. When available, prospective data on intergenerational mobility, which are based on a sample of respondents who report on their progeny, have conceptual and practical advantages.

Educational Homogamy in Two Gilded Ages: Evidence from Intergenerational Social Mobility Data.

Patterns of intermarriage between persons who have varying levels of educational attainment are indicators of socioeconomic closure and affect the family backgrounds of children. This article documents trends in educational assortative mating throughout the twentieth century in the United States, using socioeconomic data on adults observed in several large cross section surveys collected between 1972 and 2010 and on their parents who married a generation earlier.

"If you want to understand something, try to change it": Social-psychological interventions to cultivate resilience

We argue that social psychology has unique potential for advancing understanding of resilience. An exciting development that illustrates this is the emergence of social-psychological interventions - brief, stealthy, and psychologically precise interventions - that can yield broad and lasting benefits by targeting key resilience mechanisms. Such interventions provide a causal test of resilience mechanisms and bring about positive change in people's lives.

A Vicious Cycle: A Social–Psychological Account of Extreme Racial Disparities in School Discipline

Can social–psychological theory provide insight into the extreme racial disparities in school disciplinary action in the United States? Disciplinary problems carry enormous consequences for the quality of students’ experience in school, opportunities to learn, and ultimate life outcomes. This burden falls disproportionately on students of color.

Brief intervention to encourage empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents

Growing suspension rates predict major negative life outcomes, including adult incarceration and unemployment. Experiment 1 tested whether teachers (n = 39) could be encouraged to adopt an empathic rather than punitive mindset about discipline—to value students’ perspectives and sustain positive relationships while encouraging better behavior.

Does Widowhood Explain Gender Differences in Out-of-Pocket Medical Spending Among the Elderly?

Despite the presence of Medicare, out-of-pocket medical spending is a large expenditure risk facing the elderly. While women live longer than men, elderly women incur higher out-of-pocket medical spending than men at each age. In this paper, we examine whether differences in marital status and living arrangements can explain this difference. We find that out-of-pocket medical spending is approximately 29 percent higher when an individual becomes widowed, a large portion of which is spending on nursing homes.

What Will My Account Really Be Worth? An Experiment on Exponential Growth Bias and Retirement Saving

Recent findings on limited financial literacy and exponential growth bias suggest saving decisions may not be optimal because such decisions require an accurate understanding of how current contributions can translate into income in retirement. This study uses a large-scale field experiment to measure how a low-cost, direct-mail intervention designed to inform subjects about this relationship affects their saving behavior.

Heterogeneity in State-Dependent Utility: Evidence from Strategic Surveys

A standard result of life‐cycle models under uncertainty is that optimizing individuals equate the expected marginal utility of consumption across states of the world if insurance is available at actuarially fair rates. A small empirical literature has suggested that the marginal utility of consumption is lower in less healthy states. We use a novel survey‐based measure to document significant heterogeneity in health‐state dependence across individuals largely orthogonal to standard controls.

What Are We Weighting For?

The purpose of this paper is to help empirical economists think through when and how to weight the data used in estimation. We start by distinguishing two purposes of estimation: to estimate population descriptive statistics and to estimate causal effects. In the former type of research, weighting is called for when it is needed to make the analysis sample representative of the target population. In the latter type, the weighting issue is more nuanced.

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