CAN THE PRESIDENT REALLY AFFECT ECONOMIC GROWTH? PRESIDENTIAL EFFORT AND THE POLITICAL BUSINESS CYCLE

Presidential elections are often seen as referendums on the health of the economy; however, little evidence exists on the president's ability to influence gross domestic product (GDP). This study examines the effect of the incentive to be reelected and the resulting increase in presidential effort on GDP growth. Growth is found to rise in reelection years for first‐term presidents after 1932 and to fall in election years before 1932, when reelection was uncommon, and for second‐term presidents generally. This effect is largest for high‐quality presidents—who probably have the highest return to effort—and is spread across multiple sectors of the economy. (JEL D78, D72, E32, J24)     

Pleasing the students: teachers' orientaton to classroom life in adult education

It is noted that existing sociological research on classrooms has focused too narrowly on compulsory schooling with the result that we have no data showing the rituals and routines of Adult Classrooms or the ways that teachers cope and resolve them. The paper presents fieldnote and interview data from a small ethnographic study of the two Adult Evening classes. The data suggest that in contrast to the teacher of school aged pupils, who seeks control and discipline, ‘pleasing students’ is the major orientation to classroom life of the evening class teacher. Do not say, the people must be educated when after all you only mean amused, refreshed, soothed put into good spirits and good humour or kept from vicious excesses. (Newman, 1873).     

2½‐Year‐Old Children Use Animacy and Syntax to Learn a New Noun

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 × 3 design, animacy status (e.g., animate agent, inanimate patient) and labeling syntax (agent, patient, nonlabel control) were varied. Across most events, 2 1/2‐year‐old participants responded as if they expected animate entities to be named. However, in a prototypical (animate agent‐inanimate patient) event condition, children responded differentially across different syntactic structures. Thus, the clearest evidence for attention to syntactic cues was found in the prototypical event condition. These results suggest that young children attend to the animacy status of unfamiliar entities, that they have expectations about animacy relations in events, and that these expectations support emerging syntactic knowledge.     

Assessing accuracy of a continuous screening test in the presence of verification bias

Summary.  In studies to assess the accuracy of a screening test, often definitive disease assessment is too invasive or expensive to be ascertained on all the study subjects. Although it may be more ethical or cost effective to ascertain the true disease status with a higher rate in study subjects where the screening test or additional information is suggestive of disease, estimates of accuracy can be biased in a study with such a design. This bias is known as verification bias. Verification bias correction methods that accommodate screening tests with binary or ordinal responses have been developed; however, no verification bias correction methods exist for tests with continuous results. We propose and compare imputation and reweighting bias-corrected estimators of true and false positive rates, receiver operating characteristic curves and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for continuous tests. Distribution theory and simulation studies are used to compare the proposed estimators with respect to bias, relative efficiency and robustness to model misspecification. The bias correction estimators proposed are applied to data from a study of screening tests for neonatal hearing loss.     

The Effect of Learning Experiences and Context on Infant Imitation and Generalization

Over the first years of life, infants gradually develop the ability to retrieve their memories across cue and contextual changes. Whereas maturational factors drive some of these developments in memory ability, experiences occurring within the learning event may also impact infants' ability to retrieve memories in new situations. In 2 experiments we examined whether it was possible to facilitate 12‐month‐old infants' generalization of learning in the deferred imitation paradigm by varying experiences before or during the demonstration session, or during the retention interval. In Experiment 1, altering the length, timing, or variability of training had no impact on generalization; infants showed a low, but consistent level of memory retrieval. In Experiment 2, infants who experienced a unique context for encoding and retrieval exhibited generalization; infants who experienced the context prior to the demonstration session, or during the retention interval, did not. Specificity is a robust feature of infant memory and is not substantially altered by encoding experiences in an observational learning paradigm. Previous history with a learning environment can, however, impact the flexibility of memory retrieval.