Immigration and the earnings of youth in the U.S.

"This article reports findings that have emerged from an effort made at statistically measuring the effects of immigration on the earnings of U.S.-born youth. The presence of immigrants arriving before 1965 has a positive impact on youth earnings. Recently arrived immigrants impact negatively, however. These results are consistent with recent findings that the skill level of immigrants arriving within the last two decades is lower relative to that of immigrants arriving earlier. The results also show that the negative effects diminish as the youth ages, reflecting skill acquisition and job mobility of the young worker into jobs less vulnerable to competition from immigrant workers."     

Explaining the move toward the market in US academic science: how institutional logics can change without institutional entrepreneurs

Organizational institutionalism has shown how institutional entrepreneurs can introduce new logics into fields and push for their broader acceptance. In academic science in the United States, however, market logic gained strength without such an entrepreneurial project. This article proposes an alternative “practice selection” model to explain how a new institutional logic can gain strength when local innovations interact with changes outside the field. Actors within a field are always experimenting with practices grounded in a variety of logics. When one logic is dominant, innovations based on alternative logics may have trouble gaining the resources they need to become more broadly institutionalized. But if a changing environment starts systematically to favor practices based on an alternative logic, that logic can become stronger even in the absence of a coherent project to promote it. This is what happened in US academic science, as growing political concern with the economic impact of innovation changed the field’s environment in ways that encouraged the spread of local market-logic practices.     

Small-Sample Improved Seasonal Unit Root Tests for Trending and Breaking Series

In this article three unit root tests that allow for a break in both the seasonal mean and linear trend of the data are proposed. The tests, which can be seen as small-sample corrected versions of already known asymptotic tests, are shown to perform very well in simulations, and much better than their asymptotic counterparts.     

A note on the asymptotic distribution of a Perron-type innovational outlier unit root test with a break

This note provides the asymptotic distribution of a Perron-type innovational outlier unit root test developed by Popp (J Stat Comput Sim 78:1145–1161, 2008) in case of a shift in the intercept for non-trending data. In Popp (J Stat Comput Sim 78:1145–1161, 2008), only critical values for finite samples based on Monte Carlo techniques are tabulated. Using similar arguments as in Zivot and Andrews (J Bus Econ Stat 10:251–270, 1992), weak convergence is shown for the test statistics.     

The Politicization of Knowledge Claims: The “Laffer Curve” in the U.S. Congress

Political debates over knowledge claims often become emotionally charged, with two sides not only disputing what is true but seeing those on the other side as deluded or worse. By looking at use of the term “Laffer curve” in the U.S. Congress from 1977 to 2010, we draw attention to two ways such debates over knowledge claims can evolve. The Laffer curve is a simple schematic representation of the relationship between tax rates and government revenue that was influential in U.S. tax policy in the late 1970s. Early on, Republicans and Democrats faced off over the Laffer curve as a cognitive symbol to be debated with argument, evidence, and reference to experts. Over time, Republicans continued to treat the Laffer curve as a cognitive symbol, but for Democrats it became a polluted expressive symbol that could be dismissed without debate. Democrats also articulated the Laffer curve as part of an ironic narrative about the failure of the Reagan administration, which ended the possibility of serious deliberation. We suggest that the dynamics seen here may also be present around other politicized knowledge claims, such as the claim that human activity is causing climate change.     

The Relation of Cumulative Demographic Risk to Mothers' Responsivity and Control: Examining the Role of Toddler Temperament

The relations of cumulative demographic risk and children's temperament to mothers' parenting behaviors were examined when children were 18 (T1, n = 247) and 30 (T2, n = 216) months of age. Mothers, nonparental caregivers (e.g., child care providers), and observers reported on children's temperament to create a temperament composite, and mothers reported on demographic risk variables. Maternal responsivity and control were observed during 2 mother–child interactions at both time points. Cumulative demographic risk was related to low maternal responsivity concurrently and longitudinally, even after controlling for earlier temperament and responsivity, and demographic risk was positively related to maternal control at T1 and T2. Regulated temperament (i.e., low frustration and high regulation) was linked with high maternal responsivity at T1 and T2 and low maternal control at T2. Moreover, the positive relation between cumulative risk and maternal control at T1 was stronger when children were viewed as less regulated.     

Before the Professional Project: Success and Failure at Creating an Organizational Representative for English Doctors

Theories of the professions do not sufficiently explain how individuals with different and often ill-defined interests can organize themselves into a group coherent enough to undertake a “professional project.” I suggest that concepts from institutional and organizational theory can help fill this gap and apply such concepts to one of the first professional projects, that of English doctors. In the early nineteenth century, two groups sought to become the organizational representative of the incipient profession. The first rapidly organized a sizeable fraction of practitioners and achieved some legislative success, but could not transform its early accomplishments into a position as the doctors' representative. The second had only moderate impact in its early years and was dismissed as politically irrelevant, but eventually united the profession and continues to this day as the British Medical Association. The professions literature, most of which is pitched at a broader level of analysis, does not provide theoretical tools to explain these divergent outcomes. I argue that they can be accounted for by analyzing English medicine as an institutional field. The groups' different structural locations within the field affected their trajectories, and a novel organizational model borrowed from an adjacent field helped the latter group keep doctors mobilized and achieve legitimacy. As a result, an unlikely–looking group of outsiders with limited resources was eventually able to lead a successful professional project, while an initially promising group fell by the wayside.Elizabeth Popp Berman is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing a dissertation titled “Creating the Market University: Science, the State, and the Economy, 1965–1985.” Her areas of interest include organizations, economic sociology, science, the professions, and historical sociology.     

The Effect of Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture on Household Nutrition and Food Poverty in Northern Ghana

The study examines the effect of women’s empowerment in agriculture on household nutrition—i.e. the availability of carbohydrates, protein, and fat—and household food poverty measured by monetary food shortfall. The analysis is done by applying instrumental variable estimation to a sample of 2642 households from a 2012 population-based survey conducted in northern Ghana. Overall, the results indicate that women’s empowerment positively influences nutrient availability and negatively influences monetary food shortfall. By decomposing women’s empowerment into its component domains, this study identified that the domains of Income, Production, and Leadership are areas for intervention to influence households’ nutrient availability and monetary food shortfall outcomes. The effect of the Time and Resources domains reveal that some intra-household trade-offs may exist. Thus, policies aimed at empowering women to ultimately improve household nutrition and food poverty need to be based on the understanding of these specific interactions.