Testing the validity of social capital measures in the study of information and communication technologies

Social capital has been considered a cause and consequence of various uses of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, there is a growing divergence between how social capital is commonly measured in the study of ICTs and how it is measured in other fields. This departure raises questions about the validity of some of the most widely cited studies of social capital and ICTs. We compare the Internet Social Capital Scales (ISCS) developed by Williams [2006. On and off the ’net: scales for social capital in an online era. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), 593–628. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00029.x] – a series of psychometric scales commonly used to measure ‘social capital’ – to established, structural measures of social capital: name, position, and resource generators. Based on a survey of 880 undergraduate students (the population to which the ISCS has been most frequently administered), we find that, unlike structural measures, the ISCS does not distinguish between the distinct constructs of bonding and bridging social capital. The ISCS does not have convergent validity with structural measures of bonding or bridging social capital; it does not measure the same concept as structural measures. The ISCS conflates social capital with the related constructs of social support and attachment. The ISCS does not measure perceived or actual social capital. These findings raise concerns about the interpretations of existing studies of ‘social capital’ and ICTs that are based on the ISCS. Given the absence of measurement validity, we urge those studying social capital to abandon the ISCS in favor of alternative approaches.     

QUANTIFYING THE LIFE CYCLE OF SCHOLARLY ARTICLES ACROSS FIELDS OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Does the life cycle of economic papers differ across fields of economic research? By constructing and analyzing a large dataset that combines information on 9,672 articles published in the top five economic journals from 1970 to 2000 with detailed yearly citation data obtained from Google Scholar, we find that published articles do have a life cycle that differs across fields of economic research (which we divide into the categories of applied, applied theory, econometric methods, and theory). Applied and applied theory papers are the clear winners in terms of citation counts. For the first years after their publication, they receive higher numbers of citations per year than papers in other fields of research do. They also reach a higher peak number of citations per year and apparently sustain those peak levels for longer, in addition to being cited over longer periods of time (i.e., they have a longer lifespan). Citation patterns are much less favorable for theoretical papers, which are the object of fewer citations per annum in the first years following publication, have lower peak numbers and a shorter lifespan. Econometric method papers are a special case; the pattern for most of these papers is similar to the pattern for theory papers, but the most successful papers (as measured by the number of citations) on econometric methods are also the most successful papers in the entire discipline of economics. (JEL A14)     

Alphabet Economics: The link between names and reputation

In economics, most coauthored papers have all coauthors in alphabetical order. It is sometimes argued that this conveys advantages to people whose names start with letters that come early in the alphabet. This paper examines whether the alphabetical ranking of names affects someone's reputation. Overall, we find that faculty members with earlier last name initials are more likely to get employment at high standard research departments. Furthermore, we show that the relationship between alphabetical placement and academic success remains significant if we use as an alternative measure of reputation the number of people showing an interest in the papers of a particular academic. This paper also investigates whether the reported alphabetical effect creates differential incentives for coauthoring. It is found that the reputational advantage of first-authorship motivates people to manipulate their names so as to obtain a more beneficial alphabetical position within the majority of articles.     

Measuring the Role of Central and Eastern European Countries in World Drug Research

This paper explores the sociological behavior of firms in the pharmaceutical industry in Central and Eastern Europe as measured by funding linkages. Using the ISI Web of Science data-base, the number of research papers funded by top American and European pharmaceuticals with at least one author from Central and Eastern Europe are identified. Results indicate that Poland leads in the region by both the number of papers funded and by percentage of a firm’s total papers funded, followed closely by Hungary, Greece and the Czech Republic. Though the percentages of any firm’s linkages with a Central and Eastern European author are small (upper limit being 6.6%), this percentage is skewed due to the fact that the US is cited for 50% of papers for most firms. Roche Corporation is the top funder of papers among both US and European firms. Incidentally, zero top American pharmaceuticals were found to have an R&D center located in Central and Eastern Europe whereas European firms: GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis do—possibly indicating a difference in business strategy between European and American pharmaceuticals.     

Analysis of EGM licensing decisions by the gambling regulator,Victoria, Australia

Gambling expansion is commonly justified in public discourse by claims of community benefit, increased employment and capital investment. Compared to other jurisdictions, the Electronic Gambling Machine (EGM) license process in Victoria, Australia, is relatively transparent and amenable to analysis. This article describes research that assessed factors relevant to EGM license decisions made by Victoria’s gambling regulator between 2007 and 2014. During the period under review, the regulator granted 144 of 154 applications, finding that approving these applications would not be detrimental to relevant communities. Most commonly cited factors supporting approvals were commitments to undertake capital works, contribute to community purposes and increase employment. The regulator overwhelmingly agreed that supportive factors would balance harms, such as problem gambling, high levels of expenditure or socio-economic disadvantage. This research demonstrates the difficulty of balancing apparently quantifiable benefits against less readily measurable gambling-related harms in regulatory decision-making. The study found that harms were poorly conceived and understood inadequately and supportive factors frequently overstated. This process may lead to unnecessarily high levels of community harm, contradicting the purposes of the relevant legislation. The article suggests that better, more consistently applied principles are required to ensure the more rigorous scrutiny of supportive factors and improved understanding of gambling harms.     

The engineering of consent: A state-of-the-art review

This study systematically analyzes Engineering of Consent (EOC)-focused scholarly papers published between 1947 and 2018 using content analysis and text mining. It aims to shed light on the progress of EOC research and related disciplines as well as the methodologies, data collection methods, major perspectives, and most frequent words used within these writings. Additionally, this study considers publications by region and the affiliations of first authors. The results show that only a small number of EOC-focused papers have been published since 1947; this area of public relations research has suffered from a lack of scholarly attention despite its relevance to various disciplines, and this is a situation that we hope improves. Recent trends have shown some reasons for optimism. We found that at least one EOC-focused paper has been published annually in most years since 2000 (the exceptions are 2001, 2006, 2010, 2011, and 2015). Our research shows that scholars in the fields of public relations, media studies, and political science published more papers on EOC than scholars in other fields. Research articles usually utilize qualitative research methodologies. Interviews stand out as the most widely used data collection method. Our analysis of publications by region and first-author affiliation shows that the majority of EOC papers were written by faculty and students working or studying in the United States. Seven perspectives frequently discussed by scholars and the most frequently used words within EOC papers are highlighted in a follow-up qualitative review.     

Health and the household

We underscore the close link between the economics of the household and health economics in a framework in which consumers produce their fundamental objects of choice. Health is produced with inputs of market goods and services and the own time of the consumer. Health is demanded not only because it is an argument in the utility function but also because it determines the amount of time available for market and nonmarket production. The latter motive points to health capital as one component of the stock of human capital. The economics of the household has much to say about the determinants of investment in this type of capital. The five health economics papers in this issue of Review of Economics of the Household are connected by an emphasis on the role of time in the production of two aspects of health: obesity and the general health of elderly persons.      

Mapping semantic meaning of corporate reputation in global economic crisis context: A Slovenian study

This paper raises fundamental questions about the meaning of reputation and its measurement. It also considers the context of the recent global economic crisis, which brought about the lowest levels of trust in corporations, and a serious erosion of reputational capital of the corporations previously regarded as highly reputable. It maps out the semantic content of corporate reputation in an attempt to capture the ideas that individuals associate with this concept and to contrast it with the established standard reputational measures of reputation. The empirical part is based on semantic network analysis, a special form of social network analysis, where connections are formed by the use of overlapping concepts. The results show that there are a few strong determinants of reputation. They mainly coincide with the established reputational measures; however, some strong determinates seem to be context-specific and reflect the current global economic and financial crisis. The findings of the study correspond to the proposition in the literature that reputation is socially constructed and deliver insights into the relevance of standard and universal reputational measures.     

Governanceregimes im Wandel

Since the early 1990s, substantial changes have been observed in the organizational and decision structures of the non-university research sector. Drawing on a broad spectrum of quantitative and qualitative evidence, we investigate these changes in the governance regimes of the Max-Planck Society, the Fraunhofer Society, the Helmholtz Association and the Leibniz Association. Our analysis shows that the output efficiency of these four research organizations has increased markedly. Also, new governance mechanisms have become stronger, such as hierarchical management, resource competition, network coordination and international reputational competition. In contrast to developments in the university sector, however, we do not find evidence for a decrease in state influence. Rather, the governance regimes of research organizations have become more complex and tend to be “over-steered”.     

Social Capital,Economic Hardship,and Health: A Test of the Buffering Hypothesis in Transition and Nontransition Countries

Social capital is positively associated with a number of health outcomes, and it is theorized that social capital serves as a “buffer” during economic hard times, reducing the negative quality of life impacts of economic hardship. Using self-rated health as the outcome variable, we test whether social capital modifies the effect of economic hardship in a sample of 35 transition and non-transition countries and multilevel ordinal logistic regression models that interact social capital with economic hardship variables. Overall, we find consistent evidence that social capital improves health but our analyses do not suggest that social capital conditions the effect of economic hardship. Hence, social capital does not appear to act as “buffer” during trying economic times. We suggest that more research is needed to truly understand how social capital improves health.     

SPENDING WISELY? HOW RESOURCES AFFECT KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN UNIVERSITIES

Every year billions of dollars are spent on research grants to produce new knowledge in universities. However, as grants may also affect other research funding, the effects of financial resources on knowledge production remain unclear. To uncover how financial resources affect knowledge production, we study the effects of research spending itself. Utilizing the legal constraints on university spending from an endowment we develop an instrumental variables approach. Our approach instruments for university research spending with time‐series variation in stock prices interacted with cross‐sectional variation in initial endowment market values for research universities in the United States. Our analysis reveals that research spending has a substantial positive effect on the number of papers produced, but not their impact. We also demonstrate that research spending effects are quite similar at private and public universities. (JEL H5, I2, O3)     

Volunteers' Power and Resistance in the Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival

This article presents an analysis of how volunteers use different forms of capital to resist the practices and discourses of the organization for which they volunteer. Volunteers at a large public animal shelter do not share the shelter's institutionally held belief that shelter death is an inevitable result of homelessness among companion animals; to reduce shelter death, they craft challenges to the shelter practice of putting dogs down and work to construct shelter death as an avoidable and problematic outcome. Their repertoire of resistance includes educational, health‐based, relational, moral, reputational, and legal strategies. The findings illuminate that volunteers’ social location outside of the shelter provides them with capital to engage in resistance within the shelter.     

How to Get a Longer Job? Roles of Human and Social Capital in the Japanese Labor Market

This article investigates the roles of human and social capital played in the Japanese labor market. Our research question is whether they interact to accelerate or decelerate each other to provide first jobs of a long duration. Based on the literature, we focus on the bonding functions of friends and relatives. Using the 2005 Social Stratification and Social Mobility Survey Data, we measure human capital by educational attainment (college education) and social capital by job search methods (using friends or relatives). The dependent variable is the hazard rate of turnover from the first job. We find that social capital especially benefits those with low human capital (high school graduates). When friends or relatives introduce workers to jobs, high school graduates tended to stay longer in their first jobs and had a lower turnover than college graduates did. This means that social capital decelerated effects of human capital. Therefore, in the Japanese labor market, social capital plays a complementary role in mitigating educational disadvantage.     

Can incentives for research harm research? A business schools’ tale

This paper develops a simple model of the market for academic publications in business and economics. The supply of papers is presented as the outcome of a game between researchers and schools’ deans under imperfect information about the quality of a given paper. The demand for papers brings into the picture the editorial selection process. After defining the equilibrium of this market, the model allows us to study the consequences of more powerful incentives for publication in major journals. It turns out that too large bonuses, as implemented by business schools in the recent years, might bring about several unpleasant consequences, such as a drop in the quality of major journals, a decline in the number of top-tier publications realized by leading research institutions and a fall in the expected compensation of top researchers.     

Popularity breeds contempt: The evolution of reputational dislike relations and friendships in high school

In this study, we examined the dynamics of the perception of “dislike” ties (reputational dislike) among adolescents within the contexts of friendship, perceived popularity, substance use, and Facebook use. Survey data were collected from a longitudinal sample of 238 adolescents from the 11th and 12th grades in one California high school. We estimated stochastic actor-based network dynamic models, using reports of reputational dislike, friendships, and perceived popularity, to identify factors associated with the maintenance and generation reputational dislike ties. The results showed that high-status adolescents and more frequent Facebook users tended to become perceived as or stay disliked by their peers over time. There was a tendency for friendships to promote the creation and maintenance of reputational disliking but not vice versa. Adolescents tended to perceive others as disliked when their friends also perceived them as disliked. There was no evidence that either cigarette smoking or drinking alcohol affected reputational dislike dynamics. This study highlights the important role that the hierarchical peer system, online peer context, and friendships play in driving information diffusion of negative peer relations among adolescents.     

Capital mobility and spatial inequalities in income and industrial location

This paper considers how imperfect capital mobility affects spatial inequalities in income and industrial location. The framework of Takahashi et al. (2013) is applied to investigate the effects of integrating the capital market. Several new findings are obtained. First, the inequality in nominal income displays a bell-shaped relationship with falling trade costs if capital mobility is not too low. Second, keeping the trade costs fixed, the inequalities in nominal income and industrial location behave differently when the capital market is integrated. Finally, integration of the product market and integration of the capital market have different impacts on inequality in real income. This explains why empirical findings on spatial inequalities are mixed.     

Tax Reforms as Capital Market Development Factor

The article presents the preconditions of Armenian capital market development. A few hypotheses are proposed concerning correlation between direct taxes (in particular, profit tax and income tax) and financial sector development mediated with shadow economy. On the basis of studied theories and our empiric research (regression analysis of key indicators), our hypotheses were proven. So for the further development of Armenian capital market we consider it necessary to depart from profit tax, concurrently reducing income tax and social security tax rates.     

SOME ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF ANTICIPATING TECHNICAL ADVANCE

Using a simple model of a long run profit maximizing firm, we investigated the consequences of foreseeing future technical advance upon the adoption of new technology, scrapping of old, and for price and output of the firm's product. To simplify the analysis and highlight the conclusions, we assumed all technologies embodied in equipment and all equipment infinitely durable. It was shown that the often-used formulas for the unit cost of using capital over a finite (rkj/(l — a^T)) or infinite (rkj) life are appropriate only if the equipment does not become outmoded during its economic life and if there are no demand shifts in that time interval. Otherwise, the current cost of using capital (ex ante) must reflect future lesser or greater earning power of that capital due to outmodedness or demand shifts. Anticipation of technical advance tends to delay scrapping of old equipment and retard installation of new, with current output smaller and price higher than if technology is stagnant. Selection among currently competing technologies is also affected by the course future technical advance is expected to follow. The economic lifetime of capital equipment is independent of the elasticity of demand for the firm's output. On the other hand anticipation of demand expansion tends to partially or wholly offset the effect of anticipating future technical advance, while expected demand decline tends to reinforce it. Uncertainty about when improved technology will appear tends to retard adoption of current best practice technology, to retard scrapping of outmoded technology, restrict output and elevate price, in comparison with pptimal policy when the time of availability is believed known. The optimal policy is unaffected when it is the magnitude of the improvement rather than its timing which is unknown.     

LABOR MARKET SEGMENTATION AND INCOME INEQUALITY IN URBAN CHINA

Though central to the market transition debate, the effect of the institutional realignment on stratification order has not been adequately addressed. I reformulate market transition hypotheses and use data from a recent survey in a Chinese city to test market transition theory and path dependence arguments. I make the linkage between literatures on labor market segmentation and literatures on market transition. I show different returns to human and political capital in the private and state sectors in urban China. My research suggests modifications of the conceptual issues used in the market transition debate.