Social capital and political fantasy: Robert Putnam’sbowling alone

Theory and Society -     

ARE WINNERS PROMOTED TOO OFTEN? EVIDENCE FROM THE NFL DRAFT 1999–2012

Firms engaging in hiring face recruitment costs. To reduce these costs, firms concentrate their efforts in locations that are perceived as talent rich or have produced successful employees in the past. Such recruitment mechanisms may lead to statistical discrimination if they reduce uncertainty for a subset of candidates or if firms relate current employee attributes with the institution. In this article, I test for statistical discrimination associated with an individual's institutional affiliation that results from targeted hiring practices by using a unique individual‐level data set of National Football League (NFL) draft prospects. I find that conditional on individual ability, individuals from highly ranked college teams are drafted earlier than individuals from lower ranked institutions. Over the length of a player's professional career, a player's college institution has no effect on career success, indicating that certain players are damaged by this recruitment mechanism. Even though players can suffer substantial financial damages as a result of being drafted later in the draft, NFL team performance is not sufficiently affected for teams to exploit this bias. (JEL J71, J31)     

CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE,CRIME, AND POLICE INCENTIVES: EVIDENCE FROM THE COMPREHENSIVE CRIME CONTROL ACT OF 1984

The 1984 federal Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CCCA) included a provision that permitted local law enforcement agencies to acquire up to 80% of the proceeds derived from civil asset forfeitures obtained in joint operations with federal authorities. We investigate how this rule governing forfeited assets influenced crime and police incentives by taking advantage of pre‐existing differences in state‐level civil asset forfeiture law and the timing of the CCCA. We find that after the CCCA was enacted crime fell about 17% in places where the federal law allowed police to retain more of their seized assets than state law previously allowed. (JEL K42, K15, H76)     

Bayesian Estimation of Age-Specific Mortality and Life Expectancy for Small Areas With Defective Vital Records

High sampling variability complicates estimation of demographic rates in small areas. In addition, many countries have imperfect vital registration systems, with coverage quality that varies significantly between regions. We develop a Bayesian regression model for small-area mortality schedules that simultaneously addresses the problems of small local samples and underreporting of deaths. We combine a relational model for mortality schedules with probabilistic prior information on death registration coverage derived from demographic estimation techniques, such as Death Distribution Methods, and from field audits by public health experts. We test the model on small-area data from Brazil. Incorporating external estimates of vital registration coverage though priors improves small-area mortality estimates by accounting for underregistration and automatically producing measures of uncertainty. Bayesian estimates show that when mortality levels in small areas are compared, noise often dominates signal. Differences in local point estimates of life expectancy are often small relative to uncertainty, even for relatively large areas in a populous country like Brazil.     

Determinants of Self-Rated Health Among Canadian Seniors Over Time: A Longitudinal Population-Based Study

Self-rated health has been found to be an effective and inexpensive measure of people’s overall health. Although cross-sectional studies have identified determinants of self-rated health (SRH), there is a limited insight into the determinants of SHR overtime and their impact on the change of SRH overtime. This present study compares determinants of SRH among a large community-dwelling cohort of Canadian seniors (N = 3255) at three points in time (1991, 1996, and 2001), and examines the effects of determinants on change in SRH over a 10-year period. Data analyzed were from the Canadian Study of Health and Aging—a large-scale longitudinal population-based study conducted between 1991 and 2001. The results showed that most seniors (over 80 %) rated their health as good, and their SRH remained surprisingly constant over time. Only a person’s physical and instrumental functioning and the number of chronic diseases were consistently associated with SRH at each point in time (1991, 1996, and 2001). Factors including cognition, daily functioning, chronic disease, and availability of help were significantly linked to self-rated health over time. These determinants should be considered important stimuli for improving health among seniors.