THE AGENCY OF POLITICS AND SCIENCE

We study a principal‐agent relationship between a politician and a researcher that captures stylized facts regarding the involvement of politics into scientific research. The politician has some ideal policy that he would like to implement, but needs to contract with a researcher to choose a policy that is supported by scientific advice. We study the implemented contracts under symmetric and under asymmetric information about the researcher's ability and concern for reputation, and discuss with which types of researchers the politician will contract. We identify several conflicts between the interests of voters and those of the politician. (JEL D72, D82, D83)     

Individual vs. couple behavior: an experimental investigation of risk preferences

In this article, we elicit both individuals’ and couples’ preferences assuming prospect theory (PT) as a general theoretical framework for decision under risk. Our experimental method, based on certainty equivalents, allows to infer measurements of utility and probability weighting at the individual level and at the couple level. Our main results are twofold. First, risk attitude for couples is compatible with PT and incorporates deviations from expected utility similar to those found in individual decision making. Second, couples’ attitudes towards risk are found to be consistent with a mix of individual attitudes, women being more influent on couples’ preferences at low probability levels.     

(Un)natural disaster: vulnerability,long-distance displacement,and the extended geography of neighborhood distress and attainment after Katrina

After Hurricane Katrina, socioeconomically vulnerable populations were slow to return to their poor and segregated pre-disaster neighborhoods. Yet, very little is known about the quality of their post-disaster neighborhoods. While vulnerable groups rarely escape neighborhood poverty, some Katrina evacuees showed signs of neighborhood improvement. The current study investigates this puzzle and the significance of long-distance moves for neighborhood change among participants in the Resilience in the Survivors of Katrina Project. Seven hundred low-income, mostly minority mothers in community college in New Orleans before Katrina were tracked across the country a year and a half later. The findings show that respondents’ immediate and extended neighborhoods and metropolitan areas after Katrina were less disadvantaged, less organizationally isolated, and more racially and ethnically diverse compared to their pre-hurricane environments, and to the environments of those staying or returning home. Counterfactual analyses showed that more than within-neighborhood changes over time, between-neighborhood mobility and long-distance migration decreased respondents’ exposures to distress in their neighborhood, extended geographic area, and metropolitan area.     

Improving Overall Mortality Forecasts by Analysing Cause-of-Death, Period and Cohort Effects in Trends

The major goal of this study is to propose improvements in the methods for forecasting overall mortality. In order to reach this goal, three types of trend-oriented forecasts have been studied. Each type of forecast is conditional on developments in one of the three factors, period, cohort and cause of death, which are known to represent symptomatic measures of certain causal mechanisms. Mortality projections have been made for four developed European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway. The projections are based on observed mortality data over the years 1950--1994 and cohorts born in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The results of the analyses do not show a best solution, though the cause-of-death approach looks the most promising. However, the period and cohort approaches certainly have additional value in the forecasting process. The cause-of-death approach should ideally be used jointly with the overall mortality period (or overall mortality cohort) approach. However, the cause-of-death approach is not optimal for forecasting the mortality of the oldest-old. Another modelling method, for instance parameterization of overall mortality, should be considered for that purpose. The cohort approach can be used to improve forecasting of period mortality.     

Urban Poverty and Neighborhood Effects on Crime: Incorporating Spatial and Network Perspectives

Research on neighborhoods and crime is on a remarkable growth trajectory. In this article, we survey important recent developments in the scholarship on neighborhood effects and the spatial stratification of poverty and urban crime. We advance the case that, in understanding the impact of neighborhoods and poverty on crime, sociological and criminological research would benefit from expanding the analytical focus from residential neighborhoods to the network of neighborhoods that individuals are exposed to during their daily routine activities. This perspective is supported by re‐emerging scholarship on activity spaces and macro‐level research on inter‐neighborhood connections. We highlight work indicating that non‐residential contexts add variation in criminogenic exposure, which in turn influence offending behavior and victimization risk. Also, we draw on recent insights from research on gang violence, social and institutional connections, and spatial mismatch and call for advancements in the scholarship on urban poverty that investigates the salience of inter‐neighborhood connections in evaluating the spatial stratification of criminogenic risk for individuals and communities.     

When dogs meow: An electrophysiological study of lexical–semantic processing in toddlers

The goal of this study was to investigate lexical–semantic processing at an early phase of language development. Adults often communicate with children using infant-directed speech that typically involves lexical and syntactic modifications such as onomatopoeias (Soderstrom, 2007). Here, we asked how and when children start to show an advantage for processing conventional linguistic forms, such as common nouns, and consequently decreasing sensitivity to onomatopoeias. We recorded event-related brain potentials in children of two age groups (16–21 months and 24–31 months) and in an adult control group during the presentation of four conditions in which either common nouns or onomatopoeias were presented auditorily followed by a picture of an either congruent or incongruent object. We focused on the N400 effect, a more negative ERP response to incongruent compared with congruent semantic relations. The younger children showed an N400 effect only for onomatopoeic words, while the older children showed an N400 effect only for common nouns. The adults showed N400 effects for onomatopoeia and nouns. These different N400 effects suggest that onomatopoeia and common nouns are differently organized in children's semantic memory and that the acquisition of linguistic abilities affects and modifies semantic processing of different lexical information.     

Discerning Work as a Calling: The Role of Job Crafting

On the basis of career construction theory (CCT), the authors aimed to describe mechanisms by which work may be perceived as a calling. They did so by measuring the mediation and moderation effects of job crafting and power distance orientation (PDO) within the relationship between cognitive flexibility and calling. PDO levels become essential for high‐power‐distance societies such as Indonesia because PDO can decrease proactive behaviors, such as job crafting. Three hundred four employees in Indonesia responded to measures of calling, PDO, job crafting, and cognitive flexibility. Analyses indicated that the relationship between cognitive flexibility and calling is mediated by cognitive crafting and moderated by PDO. Results support CCT as useful for understanding the mechanisms of calling. For a high‐power‐distance country, the process of discerning a calling is influenced by submissive attitudes toward a superior. Thus, in assisting job‐crafting processes, counselors should focus on the relationship between employees and their superiors.     

Negotiating Violence Prevention

Evaluation research typically treats standards of violence prevention programs, like other curricula, as unquestioned values of a good society, while identifying youth as the problem to be solved. This article explains how the evaluative gaze can, in contrast, be critically fixed on the interpretations of various stake holders in the violence prevention enterprise, including curriculum authors, teachers, and youth, whose social values are often under-represented. In the context of a year-long literacy-based violence prevention curriculum focusing on racial and ethnic discrimination in 3^rd and 5^th grade urban classrooms, 5 teachers, their classes, and 36 individual students from these classes expressed contradictory and conforming values, suggesting to us the need to invite negotiation of social values as part of democratic education.