A POSITIVE THEORY OF INFLATION AND INFLATION VARIANCE

Empirically, inflation and the variance of inflation are positively associated. This paper develops a model that provides a potential explanation for this relationship in tern of the incentives facing the policymaker in a "discretionary equilibrium." The model can also account for an empirical association between inflation and measures of real output instability. There is, however, no direct causal link whatever from the average rate of inflation to either the variance of inflation or that of real output.     

English‐Language Proficiency among Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the United States, 1980–2000

This study assesses the determinants of English‐language proficiency among three subgroups of Israeli immigrants in the United States, namely native‐born Israeli Jews, foreign‐born Israeli Jews, and Palestinian Arabs, and how these determinants have changed over time. Multivariate analyses of decennial censuses from 1980, 1990, and 2000 reveal substantial differences in the directions and significance of the relationships between the independent variables and English proficiency of the subgroups under investigation. Ethnoreligious affiliation per se is seen to be an important factor that consistently explains intra‐group variation in English proficiency. This lends support to the split approach over the lump approach in attempting to understand immigrants’ linguistic dynamics in the new country. The findings are discussed in reference to three working hypotheses – “exposure,” “efficiency,” and “economic incentives” – and in the specific sociopolitical conditions of Jews and Arabs at both origin and destination.     

Adolescent Alcohol Use and Intergenerational Transfers: Evidence from Micro Data

Using the first seven waves (1997–2003) of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), this paper investigates the effect of adolescent alcohol use on the amount of transfers they receive from their parents. Exploiting cross state and time variation in the price of alcohol, the main finding is that greater binge drinking among youths is associated with receiving significantly lower parental transfers. From a theoretical standpoint, one way to interpret this finding is to imagine an altruistic parent using pecuniary incentives to influence child behavior. Given that for many teenagers parental allowance is an important component of their income, limiting and monitoring such transfers may help reducing the chances of excessive drinking by youth.     

The hidden cost of humanization: Individuating information reduces prosocial behavior toward in-group members

This paper reports robust experimental evidence that humanization—in the form of individuating information about another’s personal preferences—leads to decreased prosocial behavior toward in-group members. Previous research shows that individuating information increases prosocial behavior toward dehumanized out-group members. Its consequences for in-group members, however, are less well understood. Using methods from social psychology and behavioral economics, four experiments show that individuating information decreases pro-social behavior toward in-group members in a variety of settings (charitable giving, altruistic punishment, and trust games). Moreover, this effect results from decreased reliance on group membership labels, and not from other potential explanations like the induction of new group identities. Understanding these effects sheds light on the motives behind intergroup conflict, which may not result from a difference in social perception (i.e., humanized in-groups and dehumanized out-groups), but rather from biases associated with group membership (i.e., in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination) that are eliminated by individuating information. Together, these results indicate that humanization carries a hidden cost for in-group members by disrupting group identities that would otherwise make them targets of altruistic actions.     

Altruistische Reziprozität. Theoretische Überlegungen und experimentelle Evidenz

Altruistic reciprocity means the unconditional tendency of ego to return any experienced action, no matter if the receiver is the same person ego has received the action from or not. Altruistic reciprocity is one candidate for the explanation of cooperation in anonymous, complex societies. In order to fulfill this function, altruistic reciprocity must work also with costly actions that are not socially controlled and directed to an anonymous third party. However, the experimental evidence shows no altruistic reciprocity if it is costly and directed to a third party. It remains unclear if there is costly and directed altruistic reciprocity. Reciprocity as a catalyzer of cooperation seems to be restricted to two situations: 1) Situations with social control where reciprocity is operative by social norms and/or strategic considerations. 2) Anonymous situations where reciprocity is cost-free and directed to the donor. Therefore, reciprocity seems not suitable as a motivator for cooperation in real anonymous situations, e.g. in a second-order free-rider problem.     

Older Adults’ Receipt of Financial Help: Does Personality Matter?

This study examined the role of personality traits in the receipt of financial help at older ages using the 2006 and 2008 waves of Health and Retirement Study data. An investigation of (1) how the five domains of personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) are associated with the receipt of financial help among older adults and (2) the relationship between personality traits and the source of financial help received was examined. Three sets of probit analyses were conducted. The results indicated that personality can predict financial help and the source of financial help. Specifically, older adults who exhibited relatively higher levels of neuroticism and agreeableness were more likely to receive financial help, whereas those who exhibited relatively higher levels of conscientiousness were less likely to receive financial help regardless of the source. Furthermore, older adults who had relatively higher levels of neuroticism were more likely to help themselves with individual sources such as credit cards whereas agreeable older adults were more likely to receive financial help from family members. These findings have implications for financial counseling, planning and education professionals, public assistance program directors, and policy makers. Understanding the effect of personality on financial decision-making can help with financial planning throughout life and inform outreach efforts for those in need of financial help.     

On the relational motive for volunteer work

While economists have mainly focused on investment or altruistic motives to explain why people undertake volunteer activities, we rely instead in this paper on the relational motive previously emphasized by social psychologists. Volunteering is seen as a way to build friendly relationships. Drawing on the French survey Vie Associative conducted by INSEE in 2002 on volunteer work and association membership, we shed light on the relevance of this relational motive using two samples of, respectively, 1578 volunteers and 2631 participants in associations. According to their own statements, many volunteers seek to make friends and to meet other people through these activities. Econometric results show that working as a volunteer in an association has a causal impact on the probability of making friends in that association, which also supports the relational motive.     

Financial Altruism or Unilateral Resource Exchanges? Toward a Pure Sociology of Welfare

Questions concerning the essential nature of altruism, the existence of an altruistic personality, and the genetic, biosocial, and social psychological bases of altruistic behavior have dominated theory and research on the topic. The current paper reconceptualizes financial altruism sociologically as a form of unilateral resource exchanges, or welfare. The alternative definition employs Donald Black's (1979, 2000) analytic approach to describe and explain the behavior of welfare with its location and direction in social space. The paper offers several propositions that purport to explain variations in welfare by drawing upon cross‐cultural research. In general, welfare flows in the direction of those who are less integrated and who have lower social status. In addition, welfare varies directly with intimacy, conventionality, and respectability. Finally, welfare varies inversely with relational distance, cultural distance, and group size. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of strengths and limitations of the general propositions advanced.     

Male routes to a teaching career: motivations,market constraints and gender inequalities

The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the gender influence on teaching choice. We analyze a large-scale national representative sample of Italian teachers. The choice to teach seems to be more a long-term pathway for women, following their personal values and interest in the intrinsic and altruistic values of teaching. Men, instead, show a more adaptable pattern of choice: chance and switching career played a relevant role in determining their ending up in teaching. ‘Males in a feminized environment’ present an intermediate profile, characterized by stronger constraints due to previous studies and consequent weak labor market opportunities. Our analyses support the idea that men found their pathways to gaining satisfaction from the occupation of teaching, thanks to its flexibility. This is an ambiguous result from a gender perspective: reassuring but also worrying, considering that the adaptation could contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities within the teaching profession.     

Targeting the young,the poor,the less educated: thinking beyond traditional media

The research presented in this article focuses on ways to communicate pro-social messages to often overlooked and underserved societal subgroups. Specifically, the research focuses on methods of disseminating information to low-income persons lacking reading skills or a high school education (or its equivalent) to encourage them to enroll in classes provided by a state’s adult education (AE) programs.The results of the research suggest that traditional mass media may not be the most appropriate or efficient information channels for public relations and other communicators wishing to convey such pro-social messages to similar audiences. If mass media are employed, it may be necessary to rethink both the content and the intended receivers of such messages.     

Language Acquisition,Employment Status,and the Earnings of Jewish and Non-Jewish Immigrants in Israel

This article analyses the Hebrew language proficiency, probability of employment, and labour market earnings of immigrants in Israel. It uses the 2010/11 Immigrant Absorption Survey conducted by the Israeli CBS. In addition to standard immigration, demographic, and human capital variables, the analysis includes unique features: the study of long-duration immigrants, analyses of males’ and females’ primary reasons for immigration, the subsidized intensive Hebrew language training programme, Ethiopian Jews, and Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union. Results from multivariate analyses largely accord with the “standard theoretical model” of language proficiency regarding the mechanisms of “exposure”, “efficiency”, and “economic incentives”. Acquaintance with the local language increases the likelihood of being employed and has positive earnings outcomes. We discuss implications of the findings for public policy which can improve the adjustment of these new immigrants to their new society, hence also moderate inter-group tensions.     

Does childhood family structure help create stratification in adult education and labor market attainment?: An argument for the selectivity perspective

Stratification in opportunities for and attainment of educational credentials, stable and well‐paying jobs, wealth, and socioeconomic status causes problems for both individuals and the societies they live in. It is unclear, however, the extent to which important childhood experiences, such as family structure and transitions, shapes opportunity paths and eventual attainment later in adulthood. The intergenerational transmission literature suggests little if any role of family structure in later attainment, while family scholars and demographers find more compelling evidence that childhood family structures and transitions are influential in adulthood. We argue that both perspectives may be identifying selectivity processes that help explain potential links between families of origin and differences in opportunities to attain education, careers, and status. We then provide suggestions for future work in each of these scholarly traditions to help untangle both the degree to which family structure does or does not affect adult attainment and whether selectivity is the key explanation for any such relationships.     

Poverty persistence among the elderly in the transition from work to retirement

On the basis of matched Income Tax/Census data, the majority of the elderly poor in Belgium appear to be persistently poor. The question arises as to why this might be so. To the extent that individual characteristics such as abilities or tastes persist over time, these may also be the reason that individuals persist in poverty over time. In that case, one expects that once individual characteristics are controlled for, duration dependence in poverty becomes spurious. The alternative possibility is that the poverty experience itself has a causal impact on future poverty. This may be because of work disincentives, lack of investment in human capital and/or loss of motivation during the period of job search. The reasons for dependence in poverty are of interest for developing effective poverty-reducing policies. The estimation of a multiple-spell hazard model of transitions in and out of poverty, that allows for unobserved heterogeneity and a significant initial condition problem, supports the suggestion of true duration dependence in poverty. In Belgium the elderly unemployed are exempted from job search and lack any training or counselling from government agencies, while workers above 50 are given strong financial incentives to leave the labour market as soon as possible through different kinds of early retirement schemes.     

Informational lobbying under the shadow of political pressure

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide verifiable policy-relevant information to a political decision-maker and to exert political pressure on her. In our view information provision is a risky attempt to affect the politician’s beliefs about the desirability of the lobby’s objective. The circumstances under which political pressure can be applied specify the lobby’s valuation of different beliefs of the politician and, thus, her attitude toward risk. We identify several factors that induce risk proclivity (and thus information provision), which allows to explain the stylized fact that lobbies engage both in information provision and political pressure. Moreover, our approach gives a novel explanation for the fact that interest groups often try to provide information credibly. We finally study the extent to which this preference for credibility is robust and identify some instances in which lobbies may prefer to strategically withhold information.     

Summer Engagement for At-Risk Youth: Preliminary Outcomes from the New York State Workforce Development Study

The goal of engaging high-risk youth in pro-social activities is to reduce involvement in the criminal justice system and create experiences that increase the youth’s chance of success in education and employment in the future. However, the literature does not support this assumption. The current study looks at the Summer Youth Engagement Program in New York State (NYSYEP). NYSYEP attempts to engage youth in a variety of pro-social activities including employment; education programs; organized recreation programs; and, volunteer work or community service. The hypothesis for the study was that youth who were engaged in pro-social activities would be more likely to be rearrested than youth who were not engaged. The number of hours of youth engagement was found to reduce the odds of being rearrested, but by only 2 %.     

Does birth spacing affect personality?

This paper studies the causal effect of birth spacing (i.e., the age difference between siblings) on personality traits. We use longitudinal data from a large British cohort which has been followed from birth until age 42. Following earlier studies, we employ miscarriages between the first and second child as an instrument for birth spacing. The results show that a larger age gap between siblings negatively affects personality traits of the youngest child in two-child households. This result sheds a first light on the causal effects of birth spacing on personality traits.     

Inter-group contact and out-group altruism after violence

Altruism among humans is common. It is especially prominent among in-group members. However, we are struck by results from laboratory-in-the-field experiments with out-group members of different ethnic or religious backgrounds. In all instances, the groups were rivals in civil wars. While we find almost no altruistic behavior among groups that were engaged in fighting, out-group altruism emerges with the passage of time. To address the underlying mechanism that might explain this puzzling result, we use a laboratory experiment that sorts between a norms revision explanation and a contact hypothesis explanation. Our findings show that contact with out-group members, in a mutually beneficial task, results in a reversion to prior levels of out-group altruism following conflict. Our findings reinforce the idea that deeply held attitudes toward a stigmatized out-group change following productive interactions with those out-group members. It is clear that hostility between groups need not persist over time.     

Gathering dark secrets,hidden and dirty information: Some methodological notes on studying political assassinations

Very little sociological research has been carried out on political assassinations and the methodological experience in sociology regarding this issue is consequently very limited. This paper presents an analytical summary of the methodological problems and experiences which were encountered during three years of research on the sociological and criminological patterns of political assassinations by Jews in Palestine and Israel between 1882–1988. Similar methods could be used to study other phenomena where the information can be characterized as secret, dirty and hidden.     

Parental altruism and nest leaving in Europe: evidence from a retrospective survey

We use retrospective life-history data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to assess parental altruism through the effect of parental resources and home characteristics on the age at which individuals now aged 50 or more left the nest in 13 countries. We show that the nest leaving age has declined from one cohort to the next and that the tendency has been of a relative decline in leaving one’s parents to start a family and an increase in leaving home to pursue higher education, even if the first pattern was still the most common for the baby-boomers. We test an altruistic model where constrained parents push the child out, where less constrained “proximity altruistic” parents can help the child by providing a home or even, for the richest “active altruists”, help the child leave the nest. Taking into account the endogenous child’s choices of education, we find that most parents helped by being proximity altruists, while some helped their children move out and that the quality of the home had an important influence on the nest leaving age.     

Network contact changes in early and later postseparation years

This study explains changes in contact frequency in relationships of the preseparation personal network in the early and later years after partners separate. The explanation includes general and separation-related characteristics of the network relationship and the individual. Personal interviews were conducted in three waves of a 12-year longitudinal study with 40 men and 64 women who separated in 1987 or 1988. Multilevel analyses on 1639 network ties showed that multiplex and kin relationships remained over the long term. Contact changes depended on network relationship characteristics, structural conditions, perceived restrictions, and alternative network relationships. Separation-related characteristics were more important in the early years, general characteristics in the later years after the separation.