Abstract:

Why do some dissident groups survive government repression while others get eliminated? This paper argues that a group's ideology conditions its organizational structure and underground organizing capacity, in turn affecting survival. Extreme groups tend to develop a compartmentalized structure and have militants skilled in underground organizing. Compartmentalization and underground organizing decrease the probability of capture, as well as mitigate the downstream effects of captures. Using a novel dataset of individuals on Pinochet's wanted lists and the victims of the dictatorship in Chile, this paper demonstrates that the rate of victimization of ultraleftists is significantly lower than that of more moderate but similarly targeted groups. Archival and interview data show that differences in survival are due to organizational structure and skills, and that these characteristics flow from ideology. In contrast to other research on repression, this study compares the intended-to-repress and repressed populations to better understand the heterogeneous effects of violence.

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Abstract:

Three years after the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted, it's already clear we will fall short on our current trajectory. Global challenges are getting more complex, and the fast pace of change is disrupting the status quo faster than we can adapt. Bridging this gap will require a fresh mindset. Rather than rigid programs, we need to embrace risk and accelerate learning in order to create more cost-effective and scaleable solutions. It's time to bring the best practices for innovation that have underpinned Silicon Valley's success to global development.

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Ann Mei Chang is a leading expert on social innovation the author of Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good (Wiley, Oct 2018). Previously, she served as the Chief Innovation Officer at both USAID and Mercy Corps. Prior to her pivot to social good, Ann Mei was a seasoned Silicon Valley executive, with more than 20 years experience at such leading companies as Google, Apple, and Intuit, as well as a number of startups.

Abstract:

Influential theories indicate concern that campaign donors exert outsized political influence. However, little data documents what donors actually want from government; and existing research largely neglects donors' views on individual issues. We argue there should be significant heterogeneity by party and policy domain in how donors' views diverge from citizens'. We support this argument with the largest survey of U.S. partisan donors to date, including an over sample of the largest donors. We show that Republican donors are much more conservative than Republican citizens on economic issues, whereas their views are similar on social issues. By contrast, Democratic donors are much more liberal than Democratic citizens on social issues, whereas their views are more similar on economic issues. Both parties' donors are more pro-globalism than their citizen counterparts. We replicate these patterns in an independent dataset. These patterns can help inform significant debates about representation, inequality, and populism in American politics.

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Labor market duality refers to the coexistence of temporary workers with low dismissal costs and permanent workers with high dismissal costs within the same firms. The prevalence of temporary employment is a common feature in several countries, such as Continental European countries. Further, since the 1980s, the Japanese labor market has been experiencing a substantial increase in temporary jobs. The quality of temporary jobs tends to be lower than that of permanent jobs (e.g., the former includes lesser job security, lower wages, and fewer training opportunities compared to the latter). For this reason, the causes and consequences of widespread temporary employment have both policy and academic implications. To date, most of the research on this topic has focused on the supply side of labor markets (demographic changes in workforce), macroeconomic impacts (business cycles), and labor-market institutions. However, since the majority of temporary workers tends to be involuntary, the demand-side analysis is important, as well. It has rarely been examined how market competition would affect firms’ demand for temporary and permanent labor, particularly within the context of economic globalization.

Our study attempts to fill this gap. By proposing a heterogeneous-firm trade model with a dual labor market, we examine the relations between the demand for temporary and permanent workers and economic globalization. Our model highlights intensified product market competition as a driving force behind the shift in demand from permanent to temporary workers. In addition, our model demonstrates that international outsourcing effectively reduces labor adjustment costs, which decreases the demand for permanent workers. Using industry-level data from the Japanese manufacturing sector, we empirically test the relations between the demand for temporary and permanent workers and economic globalization and find that they support most of our theoretical predictions.

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The Effects of U.S. School Shootings on Children’s Antidepressant Use

More than 220,000 American students have experienced a school shooting since the 1998 Columbine High massacre. School shootings are vastly more common in the U.S. than in any other developed country, and are becoming more frequent and deadly in recent years. While these events receive widespread media coverage and incite public debates, there is little empirical research quantifying their population-level mental health impacts. We combined data on 44 school shootings between January 2008 and April 2013 with data on antidepressant prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies between January 2006 and March 2015. We compared the number of antidepressants prescribed to children under age 20 by providers located in close proximity of a school that experienced a shooting (shooting-exposed area) to those prescribed to children by providers located slightly further away (reference group), both in the two years before and the two years after a shooting. The average number of monthly antidepressant prescriptions written to children was significantly higher in the shooting-exposed areas relative to the reference groups in the two years after a fatal shooting versus the two years before. The effect persisted when extending the post-shooting observation window to three years and was similar when using an alternative reference group of providers located in close proximity to observationally similar schools without a shooting. We found no significant effects on children’s antidepressant prescriptions following non-fatal shootings or on adult antidepressant use. Our results suggest that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases antidepressant use among children under 20 years old, a previously unmeasured cost of these events.

Maya Rossin-Slater
Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Faculty Fellow, SIEPER
Faculty Research Fellow, NBER
Research Affiliate, IZA

Maya Rossin-Slater is an Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Affiliate at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2013, and was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2013 to 2017. Rossin-Slater’s research includes work in health, public, and labor economics. She focuses on issues in maternal and child well-being, family structure and behavior, and policies targeting disadvantaged populations in the United States and other developed countries.