New Zealand is becoming more socially diverse, in common with other Western countries. Primarily U.S. based‐evidence suggests that growing diversity may lower people's participation in society, and their contributions towards public goods. We test whether there is evidence of a similar relationship in New Zealand, specifically between social diversity and voluntary contributions towards local s...

This article examines the multilevel linear crossed random effects growth model for estimating teacher and school effects from repeated measurements of student achievement. Results suggest that even a small degree of unmodeled nonlinearity can result in a substantial upward bias in the magnitude of the teacher effect, which raises concerns about its appropriateness for estimating teacher effect...

Social Insurance Networks Based on administrative panel data from Norway, we examine how social insurance dependency spreads within neighborhoods, families, ethnic minorities, and among former schoolmates. We use a fixed effects methodology that accounts for endogenous group formation, contextual interactions, and time-constant as well as time-varying confounders. We report evidence that social...

Researching second screen interactions that form a social soundtrack concerning a major broadcast media event, we perform statistical analysis on more than 800 K postings and 50 K blogs of Super Bowl XLIX on Instagram and Tumblr respectively for three categories (commercials, music and game) during three phrases (Pre, During, and Post) identifying the influence of different social soundtrack fe...

The obesity epidemic and rapidly increasing retirement-aged population have raised concerns about the financing of public health and Social Security programs. After controlling for the endogeneity of retirement with unobserved individual heterogeneity using fixed effects with instrumental variables method, this study finds strong evidence of weight gain from retirement. Retirement is weight gai...

The relationship between inequality, investment, and government expenditure and their impact on economic growth in a panel of countries is empirically analyzed via a fixed effects, semiparametric model. The analysis demonstrates that the marginal impact of inequality on growth is highly nonlinear, and depends critically on both the levels of investment and government expenditure. In the absence...

Of widespread interest in social science are observational studies in which entities (persons, schools, states, countries, etc.) are exposed to varied treatment conditions over time. As in all observational studies, the non-randomized assignment of treatments poses challenges to valid causal inference. An attractive feature of panel studies with time-varying treatments, however, is that the des...

Better Workers Move to Better Firms: A Simple Test to Identify Sorting We propose a simple test that uses information on workers’ mobility, wages and firms’ profits to identify the sign and strength of assortative matching. The basic intuition underlying our empirical strategy is that, in the presence of positive (negative) assortative matching, good workers are more (less) likely to move to be...

This paper develops a two-country new trade theory framework with two types of labor (skilled and unskilled) and an imperfect labor market arising from country-specific real minimum wages. It examines welfare implications of trade liberalization and spillover effects of labor market shocks in a global economy. The model identifies two key forces that shape the results: i) external scale effects...

Social question and answer sites (SQAs) are increasingly popular knowledge sharing platforms. In this paper, we outline how an SQA site functions as a social learning community. The success of an SQA site depends not only on effectively organizing and delivering information, but also on whether it can provide the cues needed by community members to successfully learn to be productive contributo...