JHR News & Research Highlights

May 24, 2018May 24, 2018

Drug Violence in Mexico Increased Migration Flows to the United States

In 2006 the Mexican government launched an aggressive military campaign against drug trafficking organizations that sparked competition, fragmentation, and alliances among criminal organizations. The move led to instability and a staggering amount of violence. In a new study, Sandra Orozco-Aleman and Heriberto Gonzalez-Lozano analyze the effect of this increase in violence on the inflows of migrants from Mexico into the United States.
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May 16, 2018May 16, 2018

The Dynamics of Families’ Long-Term Care Arrangements—Who Takes Care of Our Elderly in the Long Run?

As the population ages, many families face decisions about how to care for elderly relatives. In a recent publication, Bridget Hiedemann (Seattle University), Michelle Sovinsky (University of Mannheim and CEPR), and Steven Stern (Stony Brook University) consider the dynamics of this decision-making process. Who will provide care for the aging family member—a spouse, an adult child, a formal home health worker, or a nursing home? Will this arrangement change over time?
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May 1, 2018May 1, 2018

Which Kids Party Hard?

In “Uncommon Knowledge: Freaks and geeks, and beyond,” the Boston Globe’s Kevin Lewis highlights a JHR paper on how relative intelligence among teens determines risky behavior.
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April 18, 2018April 11, 2018

Workers with Unique Competence at Their Workplace Say “I’m Taking a Sick Day” Less Often

Workers with unique competence have 10 percent lower sickness absence.

In many production processes, there is a high degree of complementarity between employees in different jobs—in other words, workers with unique functions are each essential and depend on each other to get the work done. In such cases, work absence can be costly for firms, especially if there are few employees with similar skills who can substitute for the absent worker. In a new study, Lena Hensvik and Olof Rosenqvist (both at Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, Uppsala, Sweden) explore how employers are addressing this problem.
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https://uwpress.wisc.edu/jhr-news/?p=316

April 14, 2018April 11, 2018

Are Executives Earning It? How Product Market Competition Shapes Executives’ Pay

The pay of CEOs and other top executives has been the focus of academic and policy debates given its sharp increase in recent decades. A key question for many is whether executive pay is linked to the performance of the firms they manage. In a new paper, Ana P. Fernandes (University of Exeter), Priscila Ferreira (University of Minho), and L. Alan Winters (University of Sussex) explore how performance-related pay is affected by the level of competition in the markets that firms sell in.
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https://uwpress.wisc.edu/jhr-news/?p=320

April 9, 2018April 11, 2018

Understanding Working Hours—Can We Rely on Worker-Recalled Data?

Economists need to understand workers’ reported working hours to develop sound policies related to the labor market, such as income-tax systems, childcare programs, and universal basic-income schemes. In a new study, Garry Barrett (University of Sydney) and Daniel Hamermesh (Barnard College) asked: How well do workers report their hours? Do we really have an accurate understanding of the labor supply?
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April 5, 2018April 5, 2018

Teacher Effects beyond the Test

Though many studies have shown that teachers have large effects on student achievement, we know little about the degree to which teachers affect a broader set of student outcomes. Using data from six large school districts, Matthew A. Kraft (Brown University) estimated how teachers affect a range of student skills and competencies beyond those measured by multiple-choice tests.
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March 9, 2018March 13, 2018

A Two-Child Limit Imposed on Political Candidates in India—Does It Work?

probability of third child and sex ratio before and after two-child policy

In India, policy-makers have looked to population control as a means of increasing resources per capita and reducing widespread poverty. Since 1992, eleven Indian states have experimented with restricting elected village council positions to candidates with two or fewer children. The hope is that leaders with small families would inspire their constituents to follow suit. In a new study, researchers S. Anukriti (Boston College) and Abhishek Chakravarty (University of Manchester) found the policy was effective in reducing family sizes, but it worsened the sex ratio as families favored boys.
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March 8, 2018March 8, 2018

When Families Want Sons, Do Daughters Get an Education?

Gender bias in families is evident in many regions, but the evidence to date does not allow us to fully understand its effects. Stacy H. Chen (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, GRIPS), Yen-Chien Chen (Chi-Nan University, Taiwan), and Jin-Tan Liu (National Taiwan University and NBER) studied the educational outcomes of children in more than 965,000 families in Taiwan to better understand the experiences of daughters and sons.
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https://uwpress.wisc.edu/jhr-news/?p=291

March 5, 2018March 5, 2018

Financial Aid Accelerates College Graduation

Financial aid can affect who goes to college. But how does financial aid affect students already in college who would attend even without the aid? In a new study, Jeffrey T. Denning (Brigham Young University) examines the effect of additional financial aid on these students. He finds that additional aid speeds up graduation for university seniors and increases persistence to the next year for sophomores and juniors.
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