do payday loans cause bankruptcy abstractpayday loans are used by millions of americans every year despite their annualized interest rates of several hundred percent we provide new evidence on the consequences of payday borrowing and the determinants of personal bankruptcy using an administrative panel data set of loan records in a regression discontinuity design we estimate that payday loans increase personal bankruptcy rates by a factor of two we assess possible mechanisms and find the most support for a novel one payday loan access appears to induce bankruptcy filings by worsening the cash flow position of the household

physical appearance and wages do blondes have more fun abstract this study contributes to the economics literature that links physical characteristics to labour market outcomes by investigating the influence of hair colour on women s own wages and also their spouse s wages using u s panel data we find that blonde women receive large wage premiums

the economic value of teeth abstract this paper examines the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes by exploiting variation in fluoridated water exposure during childhood the politics surrounding the adoption of water fluoridation by local governments suggests exposure to fluoride is exogenous to other factors affecting earnings exposure to fluoridated water increases women s earnings by approximately 4 percent but has no detectable effect for men furthermore the effect is largely concentrated amongst women from families of low socioeconomic status we find little evidence to support occupational sorting statistical discrimination and productivity as potential channels with some evidence supporting consumer and possibly employer discrimination

the looks of a winner beauty and electoral success abstract we study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 finnish political candidates from 10 011 respondents of which 3708 were finnish as finland has a proportional electoral system we are able to compare the electoral success of non incumbent candidates representing the same party an increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20 in the number of votes for the average non incumbent parliamentary candidate the relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks

natural groups and economic characteristics as driving forces of wage discrimination we investigate whether the origin of an employee provides different motives for wage discrimination in gift exchange experiments with students and migrant workers in china in a lab and an internet experiment subjects in the role of employers can condition their wages on the employees home provinces the resulting systematic differences in wages can be linked to natural groups and economic characteristics of the provinces in group favoritism increases wages for employees who share the same origin as the employer while an increased probability of being matched with an employee with a different ethnicity reduces wages furthermore wages in the laboratory increase with the actual wage level in the employees home province nevertheless employees effort is not influenced by these variables only the wage paid in the experiment influences effort

individual risk attitudes measurement determinants and behavioral consequences this paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects homes using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks in general we find that gender age height and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks the experiment confirms the behavioral validity of this measure using paid lottery choices turning to other questions about risk attitudes in specific contexts we find similar results on the determinants of risk attitudes and also shed light on the deeper question of stability of risk attitudes across contexts we conduct a horse race of the ability of different measures to explain risky behaviors such as holdings stocks occupational choice and smoking the question about risk taking in general generates the best all round predictor of risky behavior

ethnic discrimination evidence from china abstract we study the role of ethnicity in experimental labor markets where employers determine wages of workers who perform a real effort task this task requires a true skill which we show is not affected by minority status in some treatments we provide subtle priming to employers about minority status of workers as commonly depicted on chinese hukou identification system we conduct our experiments at two sites located in provinces that differ by their historical shares of ethnic groups in the population we find that 1 han and minority workers are equally productive in both provinces 2 in the diverse province there is no difference in the wages between han and minority workers 3 in the non diverse province minority workers receive 4 7 lower wages than han workers

beauty and the labor market the authors examine the impact of looks on earnings using interviewers ratings of respondents physical appearance plain people earn less than average looking people who earn less than the good looking the plainness penalty is 5 to 10 percent slightly larger than the beauty premium effects for men are at least as great as for women unattractive women have lower labor force participation rates and marry men with less human capital better looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive but the impact of individuals looks is mostly independent of occupation suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination copyright 1994 by american economic association

skills in the city this paper documents the allocation of skills across cities and estimates the impact of agglomeration on the hedonic prices of worker skills we find that large cities are more skilled than are small cities but only to a modest degree we also show that the increase in productivity associated with agglomeration as measured by the urban wage premium is larger for workers with stronger cognitive and people skills in contrast motor skills and physical strength are not rewarded to a greater degree in large cities urbanization thus enhances thinking and social interaction rather than physical abilities these results are robust to a variety of estimation strategies including using nlsy variables that control for worker quality and a worker msa fixed effect specification

bouncing out of the banking system an empirical analysis of involuntary bank account closures using a new database we document the determinants of involuntary consumer bank account closures during 2001 2005 approximately 30 million debit accounts were involuntarily closed for excessive overdrafting we focus on multiple factors to explain this phenomenon household economics and financial decision making ability social capital bank policies and the alternative financial services sector involuntary closures are more frequent in us counties with a larger fraction of single mothers lower education levels lower wealth and higher unemployment closures are higher in communities with high property crime rates and low electoral participation bank policies have an independent relation to closures with counties having more competitive banking markets and more multi market banks experiencing higher closure rates bank structure also seems to affect the speed at which banks adjust their policies to changes in household income finally using both national data and a state level shift in regulation we find evidence that access to payday lending leads to higher rates of involuntary account closure

does beauty matter in undergraduate education physically attractive individuals achieve greater success in terms of earnings and status than those who are less attractive however much about the mechanism behind this beauty premium remains unknown we use a rich dataset to shed light on its nature at the college level we find that students judged to be more attractive perform significantly worse on standardized tests but conditional on test scores are not evaluated more favorably at the point of admission controlling for test scores more attractive students receive marginally better grades in some cases finally there is substantial beauty based sorting into areas of study and occupations

long run labour market and health effects of individual sports activities abstract this microeconometric study analyzes the effects of individual leisure sports participation on long term labour market variables health and subjective well being indicators for west germany based on individual data from the german socio economic panel study gsoep 1984 2006 econometric problems due to individuals choosing their own level of sports activities are tackled by combining informative data and flexible semiparametric estimation methods with a specific way to use the panel dimension of the data the paper shows that sports activities have sizeable positive long term labour market effects in terms of earnings and wages as well as positive effects on health and subjective well being

participation in school sponsored sports and academic spillovers new evidence from the early childhood longitudinal survey the link between participation in school sponsored sports and academic performance has been studied extensively in the literature whilst previous studies tend to show positive academic spillovers

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

the right look conservative politicians look better and voters reward it previous research has established that good looking political candidates win more votes we extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey in which 2 513 non finnish respondents evaluated the facial appearance of 1 357 finnish political candidates we find that political candidates on the right are better looking in both municipal and parliamentary elections and also have a larger beauty premium in municipal but not in parliamentary elections we discuss possible explanations for these patterns based on the fact that municipal candidates are relatively unknown jel code d72 j45 j70

high powered performance pay and crowding out of nonmonetary motives a previous literature cautions that paying workers for performance might crowd out nonmonetary motives to work hard empirical evidence from the field however has been based on between subjects designs that are best suited for detecting crowding out due to low powered incentives high powered incentives in the workplace tend to increase output but it is unknown whether this masks crowding out this paper uses a within subject experimental design and finds evidence that crowding out also extends to high powered incentives in a real work setting with paid workers there is individual heterogeneity however with a minority of workers reporting crowding in of motivation thus the impact of performance pay might depend on the mix of worker types data and the online appendix are available at https doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2017 2846 this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

do consumers need more protection from small dollar lenders historical evidence and a roadmap for future research we summarize the current debate surrounding four small dollar credit products pawn loans vehicle title loans payday loans and cash installment loans from finance companies we review the contributions of scholars that inform this debate we underscore that users of these products fit the description of those whom consumer credit models predict benefit from these products many studies find that on average consumer use of small dollar credit products is at worst innocuous there are however findings of heterogeneity in borrowers experiences the disagreements surrounding these credit products and the difficulty in crafting the proper policy response stems from this heterogeneity jel d18 g23

the real costs of credit access evidence from the payday lending market using geographic differences in the availability of payday loans i estimate the real effects of credit access among low income households payday loans are small high interest rate loans that constitute the marginal source of credit for many high risk borrowers i find no evidence that payday loans alleviate economic hardship to the contrary loan access leads to increased difficulty paying mortgage rent and utilities bills the empirical design isolates variation in loan access that is uninfluenced by lenders location decisions and state regulatory decisions two factors that might otherwise correlate with economic hardship measures further analysis of differences in loan availability over time and across income groups rules out a number of alternative explanations for the estimated effects counter to the view that improving credit access facilitates important expenditures the results suggest that for some low income households the debt service burden imposed by borrowing inhibits their ability to pay important bills copyright 2011 oxford university press

intergenerational transmission of risk attitudes a revealed preference approach using data the german socio economic panel gsoep we investigate whether the willingness to take risks which is revealed via observed choices of occupation is transmitted from parents to children our approach resembles the one by dohmen et al 2008 who investigate the same question using stated preferences as risk variable we use earnings risk measured by the cross sectional coecient of residual variation obtained from mincerian wage regressions we nd that fathers riskiness of the job chosen is a signicant determinant of sons occupational risk our results are robust to dierent specications underpinning the hypothesis of intergenerational transmission of risk preferences

why some anti immigrant parties fail and others succeed a two step model of aggregate electoral support over the past 2 decades some anti immigrant parties have managed to gain substantial electoral support in various european countries most notably austria freiheitliche partei osterreichs and flanders vlaams blok however in other countries the success of such parties either has been insignificant or did not last the most popular models of support for anti immigrant parties focus primarily on the demand side of the electoral process the authors develop a model to explain differences in aggregate level support for these parties which also takes into account the supply side this model builds upon an explanation provided by kitschelt the model is tested empirically for 13 european anti immigrant parties in the period from 1989 to 1999 altogether yielding 25 party year combinations the authors test the sociostructural model and their alternative model at the level of political parties the sociostructural model explains 3 of the variance in success whereas the authors model explains 83

explaining variation in the success of extreme right parties in western europe methodological problems associated with selection bias and interaction effects have hindered the accumulation of systematic knowledge about the factors that explain cross national variation in the success of extreme right parties the author uses a statistical analysis that takes account of these problems to examine the effect of electoral institutions unemployment and immigration on the support for these parties the data set used in this analysis is new and spans 19 countries and 165 national elections there are four substantive conclusions the first is that it is important to distinguish between neofascist and populist parties on the extreme right because their fortunes depend on different factors the second is that populist parties do better in countries where the district magnitude is larger and more seats are allocated in upper tiers the third is that although immigration has a positive effect on populist parties irrespective of the unemployment level unemployment only matters when immigratio

do positional goods inhibit saving evidence from a life cycle experiment abstract we investigate the effect of positional goods goods for which one s consumption relative to others matters on saving based on results from a life cycle consumption saving experiment in a group treatment we allow inter personal comparisons by assigning subjects to groups and displaying rankings based partly on consumption a baseline individual treatment is similar but without the additional information we find more under saving saving less than the optimal amount and lower money earnings for subjects in the group treatment both effects are economically relevant with magnitudes of roughly 6 7 of expected income and 7 8 of average earnings respectively additional analysis shows that the result is driven by those subjects who are not ranked in the top three in their group keeping up with the joneses and males in particular

short criminals stature and crime in early america abstractwe consider the extent to which an individual s height affected the age at which he entered into criminal activity in early america using data on prisoners incarcerated in pennsylvania s nineteenth century prisons we show that prisoners were short relative to the contemporary population then using weibull continuous time duration econometric models we show that age at entry into criminal activity was negatively associated with an individual s height after controlling for several individual characteristics the results are consistent with recent research showing that shorter individuals face less attractive legitimate labor market opportunities because lower stature is associated with lower cognitive ability and because of general discrimination against shorter people

is the united states still a land of opportunity recent trends in intergenerational mobility abstract we present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the united states using administrative earnings records we find that percentile rank based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971 1993 birth cohorts for children born between 1971 and 1986 we measure intergenerational mobility based on the correlation between parent and child income percentile ranks for more recent cohorts we measure mobility as the correlation between a child s probability of attending college and her parents income rank we also calculate transition probabilities such as a child s chances of reaching the top quintile of the income distribution starting from the bottom quintile based on all of these measures we find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution relative to their parents as children born in the 1970s however because inequality has risen the consequences of the birth lottery t

disease and development the effect of life expectancy on economic growth we exploit the major international health improvements from the 1940s to estimate the effect of life expectancy on economic performance we construct predicted mortality using preintervention mortality rates from various diseases and dates of global interventions predicted mortality has a large impact on changes in life expectancy starting in 1940 but no effect before 1940 using predicted mortality as an instrument we find that a 1 percent increase in life expectancy leads to a 1 7 2 percent increase in population life expectancy has a much smaller effect on total gdp however consequently there is no evidence that the large increase in life expectancy raised income per capita

labor market consequences of poor attitude and low self esteem in youth in a recent national survey that asked employers to rank the importance of particular applicant traits for nonsupervisory and production positions applicant s attitude was the only trait that was reported to be very important in fact academic performance years of schooling completed teachers recommendations and industry based credentials certifying applicant skills all ranked lower bowles et al 2000 a second independent survey of employers in holzer and wissoker 2000 also suggests that more weight is placed on a good attitude than on basic skills among new hires of low skilled workers in this article i assess the role of pre labor market attitude and self esteem in explaining disparities observed in the labor market experiences of a sample of high school graduates the apparent importance employers ascribe to attitude and self esteem gives clear reason to expect that such a relationship exists i demonstrate that such survey responses are corroborated by real economic consequences for those with poor attitude and self esteem using longitudinal data on a 1972 cohort of high school graduates i show that high school students who reveal negative attitudes and self esteem subsequently attain fewer years of postsecondary education relative to their high school cohort are less likely to be employed 14 years following high school and where working for pay earn less accounting directly for the labor force participation decision i also document a higher incidence of unemployment among these individuals furthermore i find evidence that negative attitudes and self esteem are associated with jobs later in life that require the individual to spend time working with things as opposed to people for example and that those who exhibit poor pre labor market attitude and self esteem are subsequently more closely supervised at work and given less discretion in their daily activities all told attitude and self esteem in youth are shown to have important and long lasting economic implications in the following section i briefly discuss related literatures specifically two areas of the literature are considered the effect of joblessness on self esteem and the relationship between other noncognitive skills or worker attributes and labor market outcomes section ii then introduces the data and methods used in investigating the relationships in question empirical results are reported in section iii and are followed by some discussion and concluding remarks i previous literature this article is closely related to two areas of existing literature first there exists a small body of literature that documents a relationship between labor market activity and self esteem however this literature has heretofore focused more on the damage of joblessness to an individual s perception of self worth than on the direction of causality considered here for example goldsmith et al 1995 1996a find relationships between contemporaneous joblessness and self esteem and historic joblessness and subsequent self esteem respectively arguably the causality between attitudes and jobless spells is not clearly in one direction or the other in this article i contribute clear evidence of the reverse causation causation running from attitude and self esteem to future labor market outcomes second there is a growing body of literature on the importance of noncognitive skills in wage determination this literature suggests that measures of aggression and withdrawal osborne 1999 individual motivation goldsmith et al 2000 behavioral problems in high school cawley et al 2001 one s locus of control or outlook on life goldsmith et al 1997b osborne 1999 bertrand and mullainathan 2001 coleman and deleire 2003 and mental health bartel and taubman 1979 1986 frank and gertler 1991 mullahy and sindelar 1993 each have predictive power with respect to wages that employer surveys suggest that attitude is highly valued alone leads one to anticipate that attitude be related to earnings

the charity beauty premium satisfying donors want versus should desires abstractdespite widespread conviction that neediness should be a top priority for charitable giving this research documents a charity beauty premium in which donors often choose beautiful but less needy charity recipients instead the authors propose that donors hold simultaneous yet incongruent preferences of wanting to support beautiful recipients who tend to be judged as less needy but believing they should support needy recipients the authors also posit that preferences for beautiful recipients are most likely to emerge when decisions are intuitive whereas preferences for needy recipients are most likely to emerge when decisions are deliberative these propositions are tested in several ways first when a beautiful recipient is included in basic choice sets this recipient becomes the most popular option and increases donor satisfaction second heightening deliberation steers choices away from beautiful recipients and toward needier ones third donors explicitly state that they want to

obesity weight loss and employment prospects evidence from a randomized trial this study presents credible estimates for the causal effect of bmi growth on employment among the obese by exploring random assignment of a weight loss intervention based on monetary rewards i provide convincing evidence that weight loss positively affects the employment prospects of obese women but not of obese men consistent with this significant effects of weight loss on proxy variables for labor productivity are found only for obese women

the politics of inequality voter mobilization and left parties in advanced industrial states why is it that some countries have witnessed significant increases in inequality since the 1960s while at the same time experiencing very little change in the way politics is conducted and why is it that in other countries where inequality has increased much less the left has become substantially more redistributive the answer the authors argue has to do with the interaction between inequality and political mobilization of low income voters the authors make two points in this article first high levels of inequality move left parties to the left second although increasing inequality pushes the core constituencies of left parties to the left it also makes some individuals less likely to be involved in politics the authors argue that left parties will respond to an increase in inequality only when low income voters are politically mobilized they explore these claims through a comparative analysis of left party programs in 10 organisation for economic cooperation and development countries over the period 1966 to 2002

beauty vs brains early labor market outcomes of high school graduates this paper examines the wage returns to attractiveness for young high school graduates findings show that wage returns to attractiveness are large relative to ability and beauty and ability are complements at high attractiveness ratings but substitutes at low ratings

stature skills and adult life outcomes evidence from indonesia abstractwe investigate the effect of height on earnings occupational choices and a subjective measure of wellbeing among indonesian men we explore the extent to which height captures the effects of endowments set before entry in the labour market physical and cognitive skills co determined with stature early in life do not explain much of the height earnings premium directly yet human capital more broadly including cognition educational attainment and other factors related to childhood conditions explains around half of the height premium and does so through occupational sorting indeed taller workers tend to have more education and educated workers tend to work in more lucrative occupations that require brain and social skills not brawn the unexplained share of the height earnings premium may reflect a specific role of stature on social interaction labour market advantages or self assurance we also find a height premium in happiness half of which simply accounts for the educational and e

beauty productivity and discrimination lawyers looks and lucre we propose models with an ascriptive characteristic generating earnings differentials and causing sectoral sorting allowing us to distinguish among sources producing such differentials we use longitudinal data on a large sample of graduates from one law school and measure beauty by rating matriculation photographs 1 betterlooking attorneys who graduated in the 1970s earned more than others after 5 years of practice an effect that grew with experience 2 attorneys in the private sector are better looking than those in the public sector differences that rise with age these results support theories of dynamic sorting and customer behavior

applicant screening and performance related outcomes a fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees most economic models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking but there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees and that is to screen job candidates to find workers with a stronger work ethic who require less monitoring we might therefore expect employers who screen candidates more intensively to monitor them less using data from a national sample of us employers we find that employers who screen applicants more intensively for factors that should predict work ethic also monitor employees less and also make greater use of systems such as teamwork where monitoring by supervisors is more difficult this screening is also associated with higher wages higher employee productivity and lower involuntary turnover rates screening for other attributes such as work experiences and academic performance does not produce these results jel codes m51 m54 j30

does a picture paint a thousand words female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly due to constraints on women s time and mobility often reinforced by social norms we analyze a marketing experiment designed to encourage female uptake of a new microcredit product a brochure with two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups one cover featured 5 businesses run by men while the other had identical businesses run by women we find that both men and women respond to psychological cues men who are not themselves business owners have lower measured ability and whose wives are less educated respond more negatively to the female brochure as do women business owners with low autonomy within the household women with relatively high levels of autonomy shown the male brochure have a similar negative response while there is no effect on female business owners with autonomy shown the female brochure overall these results suggest that women s response to psychological cues such as posit

taxation of economic rents economic rents have long been identified as an efficient tax base in addition the recent literature documents that rent income is highly concentrated and that rents are quickly increasing rent taxation thus seems attractive for reasons of both efficiency and equity nevertheless rent taxation remains a marginal topic in research and policy making in a systematic review of the neoclassical literature on different rent types we find that some types of rents reflect inefficiencies and should thus be minimized while others reward investments and should be supported in line with social welfare what remains for taxation are land rents one of the few true scarcity rents land rents have significant potential to improve the efficiency of the tax system we then begin to develop a comprehensive theory of land rent taxation by identifying relevant efficiency and equity effects the interaction of many of these effects remains unexplored which might explain policymakers hesitation in using land taxes to date

payday loan choices and consequences high cost consumer credit has proliferated in the past two decades raising regulatory scrutiny we match administrative data from a payday lender with nationally representative credit bureau files to examine the choices of payday loan applicants and assess whether payday loans help or harm borrowers we find consumers apply for payday loans when they have limited access to mainstream credit in addition the weakness of payday applicants credit histories is severe and longstanding based on regression discontinuity estimates we show that the effects of payday borrowing on credit scores and other measures of financial well being are close to zero we test the robustness of these null effects to many factors including features of the local market structure

fund raising success and a solicitor s beauty capital do blondes raise more funds abstract this study uses a door to door fund raising field experiment to explore the returns to physical appearance on fund raising success interestingly blonde females earn more on average than brunette counterparts however the returns to physical appearance depend critically on the race of a potential donor

beauty and the sources of discrimination we analyze discrimination against less attractive people on a tv game show with high stakes the game has a rich structure that allows us to disentangle the relationship between attractiveness and the determinants of a player s earnings unattractive players perform no worse than attractive ones and are equally cooperative in the prisoner s dilemma stage of the game nevertheless they are substantially more likely to be eliminated by their peers even though this is costly we investigate third party perceptions of discrimination by asking subjects to predict elimination decisions subjects implicitly assign a role for attractiveness but underestimate its magnitude

the intergenerational transmission of income volatility is riskiness inherited this article examines the intergenerational transmission of income risk do risky parents have risky kids income volatility a proxy for income risk is not observed directly instead it must be estimated with substantial error from the time series variability of income i characterize an income process with individual specific volatility parameters and estimate the joint distribution of volatility parameters for fathers and for their adult sons in data from the panel study of income dynamics fathers with higher income volatility have sons with higher income volatility this finding is correlated with but far from fully explained by the intergenerational transmission of risk tolerance and of the propensity for self employment

explaining social policy preferences evidence from the great recession to what extent do personal circumstances as compared to ideological dispositions drive voters preferences on welfare policy addressing this question is difficult because a person s ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences the article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis the analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship particularly the loss of a job had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending this effect was appreciably larger among republicans than among democrats a result that was not simply due to a ceiling effect however the large attitudinal shift was short lived dissipating as individuals employment situations improved the results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable yet overall transient effect on voters social policy preferences

numeracy and the impact of high food prices in industrializing britain 1780 1850 abstract using census based data on the ability to recall one s age we show that low levels of nutrition impaired numeracy in industrializing england 1780 to 1850 cognitive ability declined among those born during the napoleonic wars the effect was stronger in areas where grain was expensive and relief for the poor an early form of welfare support was limited nutritional shortages had a nonlinear effect on numeracy with severe shortages impairing numeracy more nutrition during childhood also mattered for labor market outcomes individuals born in periods or counties with low numeracy typically worked in occupations with lower earnings

myth or fact the beauty premium across the wage distribution in germany abstract we allow for differential effects of physical appearance across the wage distribution using a technique traditionally used in the finance literature we find an average beauty premium of 2 4 for women which is concentrated at the bottom of the wage distribution the average beauty premium for men is larger at 5 7 and is present throughout the wage distribution both of these vary by education level we find that differences in characteristics such as age family composition labor market attributes etc between beautiful and plain people contribute to the beauty premium identified using traditional regression models isolating this characteristic effect from the unexplained effect using decomposition techniques leads to smaller beauty premia

positional deprivation and support for radical right and radical left parties we explore how support for radical parties of both the left and right may be shaped by what we call positional deprivation where growth in income of individuals at a given point in the income distribution is outpaced by income growth elsewhere in that distribution we argue that positional deprivation captures the combination of over time and relative misfortune that can be expected to distinctly spur support for radical left and right parties we explore this possibility by matching new measures of positional deprivation to individual level survey data on party preferences in 20 european countries from 2002 to 2014 we find that positional deprivation is robustly correlated with supporting radical populist parties first positional deprivation generally measured as average income growth across deciles of a country s income distribution minus a respondent s own decile s growth is associated with respondents retreat from mainstream parties and with support for both radical right and particularly radical left parties second positional deprivation relative to the highest and the lowest ends of the income spectrum play out differently for radical right and for radical left support a respondent s positional deprivation relative to the wealthiest decile s growth in his or her country tends to spur support for radical left but not radical right parties in contrast positional deprivation relative to the poorest decile s growth in a respondent s country tends to spur support for radical right but not left parties the results suggest that the combination of over time and relative economic misfortune may be key to how economic experience shapes radical backlash of the left and right

why beauty matters we decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market where employers determine wages of workers who perform a maze solving task this task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness we find a sizable beauty premium and can identify three transmission channels a physically attractive workers are more confident and higher confidence increases wages b for a given level of confidence physically attractive workers are wrongly considered more able by employers c controlling for worker confidence physically attractive workers have oral skills such as communication and social skills that raise their wages when they interact with employers our methodology can be adopted to study the sources of discriminatory pay differentials in other settings

does a picture paint a thousand words evidence from a microcredit marketing experiment female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly because of constraints on women s time and mobility which are often reinforced by social norms this paper analyzes a marketing experiment designed to encourage women to adopt a new microcredit product a brochure with the same content but two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups one cover featured five businesses run by men while the other showed identical businesses run by women men and women responded to psychological cues among men who were not business owners had lower measured ability and whose wives were less educated the responses to the female brochure were more negative as did female business owners with low autonomy within the household women with relatively high levels of autonomy had a similar negative response to the male brochure while there was no effect on female business owners with autonomy overall these results suggest that women s response to psychological cues such as positive role models may be affected by their level of autonomy at home and more intensive interventions may be required for more disadvantaged women

bite me abc s shark tank as a path to entrepreneurship business pitch competitions provide early stage finance and mentoring for entrepreneurs in this paper we analyze data from the most public high stakes pitch competition in the usa abc s shark tank we construct a dataset comprising all entrepreneurs firms that have aired between august 2009 and may 2016 our findings 1 funding on the show seems to relax an internal financial constraint rather than signal the quality of the venture to potential outside investors 2 to the extent that the latter is occurring there is plausible evidence that the signaling effect works in an unexpected direction for women entrepreneurs it may crowd out attention from potential investors 3 while it is fairly clear that this pitch competition is associated with longer run existence of firms it has no significant impacts on innovation 4 there are no consistent differential impacts on racial ethnic minorities these findings complement the literature on the impact of pitch competitions and early access to finance

orchestrating impartiality the impact of blind auditions on female musicians a change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras adoption of blind auditions with a screen to conceal the candidate s identity from the jury provides a test for sex biased hiring using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed effects framework we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras

beauty weight and skin color in charitable giving abstract this paper examines bias in online charitable microfinance lending we find that charitable lenders on a large peer to peer online microfinance website appear to favor more attractive lighter skinned and less obese borrowers borrowers who appear more needy honest and creditworthy also receive funding more quickly these effects are quantitatively significant borrowers with beauty one standard deviation above average are treated as though they are requesting approximately 11 less money statistical discrimination does not appear to explain our findings as these borrower attributes are uncorrelated with loan performance or borrower enterprise performance the evidence suggests implicit bias could explain our findings more experienced lenders who may rely less on implicit attitudes appear to exhibit less bias than inexperienced lenders

height skills and labor market outcomes in mexico abstract taller workers are paid higher wages a prominent explanation for this pattern is that physical growth and cognitive development share childhood inputs inducing a correlation between adult height and two productive skills strength and intelligence this paper explores the relative roles of strength and intelligence in explaining the labor market height premium among mexican men while cognitive test scores account for a limited share of the height premium roughly half of the premium can be attributed to the educational and occupational choices of taller workers taller workers obtain more education and sort into occupations with greater intelligence requirements and lower strength requirements suggesting a possible role for cognitive skill

strengthening state capabilities the role of financial incentives in the call to public service we study a recent recruitment drive for public sector positions in mexico different salaries were announced randomly across recruitment sites and job offers were subsequently randomized screening relied on exams designed to measure applicants intellectual ability personality and motivation this allows the first experimental estimates of i the role of financial incentives in attracting a larger and more qualified pool of applicants ii the elasticity of the labor supply facing the employer and iii the role of job attributes distance attractiveness of the municipal environment in helping fill vacancies as well as the role of wages in helping fill positions in less attractive municipalities a theoretical model guides each stage of the empirical inquiry we find that higher wages attract more able applicants as measured by their iq personality and proclivity towards public sector work i e we find no evidence of adverse selection effects on motivation higher wage offers also increased acceptance rates implying a labor supply elasticity of around 2 and some degree of monopsony power distance and worse municipal characteristics strongly decrease acceptance rates but higher wages help bridge the recruitment gap in worse municipalities

how payday credit access affects overdrafts and other outcomes despite a dozen studies the welfare effects of payday credit are still debatable we contribute new evidence to the debate by studying how payday credit access affects bank overdrafts such as returned checks bankruptcy and household complaints against lenders and debt collectors we find some evidence that chapter 13 bankruptcy rates decrease after payday credit bans but where we find that we also find that complaints against lenders and debt collectors increase the welfare implications of these offsetting movements are unclear our most robust finding is that returned check numbers and overdraft fee income at banks increase after payday credit bans bouncing a check may cost more than a payday loan so this finding suggests that payday credit access helps households avoid costlier alternatives while our findings obviously do not settle the welfare debate over payday lending we hope they resolve it to some extent it by illuminating how households rearrange their financial affairs when payday loan supply changes

impacts of interest rate caps on the payday loan market evidence from rhode island abstract interest rate caps are the most common form of payday loan regulation yet little academic research has examined their consequences i investigate the impacts of tightening the cap from 15 to 10 in rhode island using a difference in difference framework and a unique proprietary dataset of payday loans issued by major nationwide lenders between 2009 and 2013 lenders always charge the prevailing cap creating a sharp and clean variation in interest rate i show that loan usage increases at the extensive and intensive margins amounting to elasticity estimates in the range of 0 7 1 0 i also find that loan sequences become longer and more likely to end with default no lenders exit the market implying that market power existed furthermore i find no evidence of credit rationing as a result of the lower cap these changes imply an upper bound of 3 3 million per year for neoclassical consumer surplus however i show that behavioral consumers can be worse off by the policy if more than half of the increase in demand is due to overborrowing

the effect of adolescent experience on labor market outcomes the case of height taller workers receive a wage premium net of differences in family background the disparity is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps we exploit variation in an individual s height over time to explore how height affects wages controlling for teen height essentially eliminates the effect of adult height on wages for white men the teen height premium is not explained by differences in resources or endowments the teen height premium is partially mediated through participation in high school sports and clubs we estimate the monetary benefits of a medical treatment for children that increases height

can school sports reduce racial gaps in truancy and achievement while existing research supports that participation in high school athletics is associated with better education and labor market outcomes the mechanisms through which these benefits accrue are not well established using individual microdata collected daily and team specific schedules we retrieve estimates of the causal effect of high school athletic participation on absenteeism suggesting that participation decreases absences driven primarily by reductions in unexcused absences in boys there are also strong game day effects in truancy in both boys and girls with truancy declines on game days more than offset by subsequent absenteeism important heterogeneity by race gender and family structure may serve to substantially reduce racial gaps in truancy and achievement jel i21 l83

beauty job tasks and wages a new conclusion about employer taste based discrimination using novel data from the berea panel study we show that the beauty wage premium for college graduates exists only in jobs where attractiveness is plausibly a productive characteristic a large pr

statistical discrimination productivity and the height of immigrants building on the economic research that demonstrates a positive relationship between height and worker ability the author compares wage returns to height for immigrants and for natives to explore possible explanations for the positive wage height gradient using multiple data sets the article presents a robust empirical finding that the wage gains associated with height are almost twice as large for immigrants as for native born individuals this wage relationship occurs because the productivity gap between tall and short immigrants is greater than the productivity gap between tall and short native born workers the author next tests for the possibility that in the relative absence of other sources of information about immigrants employers place more importance on height for immigrants than for native born individuals the evidence does not support the hypothesis of statistical discrimination based on height

swimming upstream trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s using michigan panel study of income dynamics data for 1979 and 1988 we analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low wage workers the decrease is traced to gender specific factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high skilled more than middle and low skilled women by analyzing wages we find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high skilled women

height and earnings the role of cognitive and noncognitive skills we use large scale register data on 450 000 swedish males who underwent mandatory military enlistment at age 18 and a subsample of 150 000 siblings to examine why tall people earn more we show the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as family background and muscular strength for the height earnings relationship in addition we show that a substantial height premium remains after these factors have been accounted for which originates from very short people having low earnings this is mostly explained by the sorting of short people into low paid occupations which may indicate discrimination by stature

trust and credit the role of appearance in peer to peer lending although it is well known that appearance based impressions affect labor market and election outcomes little is known about the role appearance plays in financial transactions we address this question using photographs of potential borrowers from a peer to peer lending site consistent with the trust intensive nature of lending we find that borrowers who appear more trustworthy have higher probabilities of having their loans funded moreover borrowers who appear more trustworthy indeed have better credit scores and default less often overall our findings suggest that impressions of trustworthiness matter in financial transactions as they predict investor as well as borrower behavior a man i do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in christendom john pierpont morgan 1913 the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

the effect of interest rate caps on bankruptcy synthetic control evidence from recent payday lending bans abstract citing consumer protection concerns several states have recently enacted interest rate caps on small loans after cataloguing the history of such legislation we test whether these laws caused a decrease in the number of payday lending establishments and subsequently prompted variation on incidence of bankruptcy filings to motivate a causal interpretation of our estimates we create a synthetic control that serves as a counterfactual from which we estimate the aggregate treatment effect of these interest rate ceilings importantly we estimate the treatment effect for each period after the imposition of the cap yielding novel insights about the dynamic heterogeneity in the relationship between payday loan access and bankruptcy our results show payday lending establishments drop by approximately 100 a banishment of the industry we find no short run or long run effects of these bans on bankruptcy the range of our estimates allows us to rule out magnitudes that were documented in several previous studies

global income distribution from the fall of the berlin wall to the great recession we present an improved panel database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008 in 2008 the global gini index is around 70 5 having declined by approximately 2 gini points china graduated from the bottom ranks changing a twin peaked global income distribution to a single peaked one and creating an important global median class 90 of the fastest growing country deciles are from asia while almost 90 of the worst performers are from mature economies another winner was the global top 1 hence the global growth incidence curve has a distinct supine s shape with gains highest around the median and top

war and stature growing up during the nigerian civil war the nigerian civil war of 1967 70 was precipitated by secession of the igbo dominated south eastern region to create the state of biafra it was the first civil war in africa the predecessor of many we investigate the legacies of this war four decades later using variation across ethnicity and cohort we identify significant long run impacts on human health capital individuals exposed to the war at all ages between birth and adolescence exhibit reduced adult stature and these impacts are largest in adolescence adult stature is portentous of reduced life expectancy and lower earnings

the structure of inequality and the politics of redistribution against the current consensus among comparative political economists we argue that inequality matters for redistributive politics in advanced capitalist societies but it is the structure of inequality not the level of inequality that matters our theory posits that middle income voters will be inclined to ally with low income voters and support redistributive policies when the distance between the middle and the poor is small relative to the distance between the middle and the rich we test this proposition with data from 15 to 18 advanced democracies and find that both redistribution and nonelderly social spending increase as the dispersion of earnings in the upper half of the distribution increases relative to the dispersion of earnings in the lower half of the distribution in addition we present survey evidence on preferences for redistribution among middle income voters that is consistent with our theory and regression results indicating that the left parties are more likely to participate in government when the structure of inequality is characterized by skew

when does weight matter most past empirical work establishes a wage penalty from being overweight in this paper i exploit variation in an individual s weight over time to determine the age when weight has the largest impact on labor market outcomes for white men controlling for weight at younger ages does not eliminate the effect of older adult weight on wage being overweight as a young adult only adds an additional penalty to adult wages however for white women what they weigh in their early twenties solely determines the existence of an adult wage penalty the female early twenties weight penalty has a persistent effect on wages and differences in marital characteristics occupation status or education cannot explain it it also is not a proxy for intergenerational unobservables

gender bias and credit access we extract an exogenous measure of gender bias from survey responses by descendants of u s immigrants on questions about the role of women in society we then use data on around 6 000 small business firms from 17 countries and find that in high gender bias countries female entrepreneurs are more likely to opt out of the loan application process and to resort to informal finance even though banks do not appear to actively discriminate against them these results are not driven by credit risk differences between female and male owned firms or by any idiosyncrasies in the set of countries in our sample

compliance with endogenous audit probabilities in this paper we study the effect of endogenous audit probabilities on reporting behavior in a face to face compliance situation such as at customs in an experimental setting in which underreporting has a higher expected payoff than truthful reporting we find an increase in compliance of about 80 percent if subjects have reason to believe that their behavior towards an officer influences their endogenous audit probability higher compliance is driven by considerations about how their own appearance and performance affect their audit probability rather than by the social and psychological effects of face to face contact

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

international systems and domestic politics linking complex interactions with empirical models in international relations following older debates in international relations literature concerning the relative importance of domestic versus systemic factors newer debates emphasize interdependence among states and the complex interactions between systemic and domestic factors as globalization and democratization advance theories and empirical models of international politics have become more complicated we present a systematic theoretical categorization of relationships between domestic and systemic variables we use this categorization so that scholars can match their theory to the appropriate empirical model and assess the degree to which systemic factors affect their arguments we also present two advances at the frontier of these empirical models in one we combine hierarchical models of moderating relationships with spatial models of interdependence among units within a system in the other we provide a model for analyzing spatial interdependence that varies over time this enables us to examine how the level of interdependence among units has evolved we illustrate our categorization and new models by revisiting the recent international political economy ipe debate over the relationship between trade policy and regime type in developing countries

remittance income volatility and labor supply in mexico author affiliation catalina amuedo dorantes camuedod mail sdsu edu corresponding authorsusan pozo susan pozo wmich edu acknowledgment we would like to thank the anonymous referees and the editor for their comments and suggestions on how to improve the manuscript 1 background and significancea significant body of academic and policy research analyzes the impact of international remittances the earnings that emigrants send home in economies around the globe studies have been carried out to ascertain the effect of remittances on a wide range of economic outcomes including household decisions concerning capital accumulation health and housing expenditures country exchange rates economic growth income distribution poverty rates and as we do in this study labor supply evidence of the impacts of remittances on the well being of recipients and on economic progress is mixed some studies find that countries and households reap positive benefits from these resource transfers e g adam and page 2005 while others find negative or ambiguous effects e g narayan narayan and mishra 2011 an overall consensus on the impacts of remittances is unlikely to emerge for some time given the complexity of this research topic not to mention the varying characteristics of countries under analysis 1we propose to contribute to this important debate using an expanded approach for assessing the effects of remittances on individual and household decision making our contribution is to note that while the level of resource transfers received by the household is likely to influence individual and household behaviors volatility with regard to the stream of inflows is also likely to play an important role to date research on the impact of remittances on remittance receiving households has tended to focus on the way in which the level of remittance inflows affects either individual or household behavior without considering the volatility surrounding these inflows however if the volatility that surrounds remittance inflows influences individual and household behaviors a strategy that only examines the level of inflows is likely to miss out on a more complete understanding of the effects of remittances on individual and household decision making and therefore of their impacts on remittance receiving economies amuedo dorantes and pozo 2010 in this study we focus on the labor market and investigate how volatility of remittance inflows influences male and female labor supply a crucial dimension in the influence of remittances on remittance receiving countries limited numbers of studies have examined the impact of the incidence and level of remittance income on labor supply patterns although conclusions differ owing in part to the various data sources and methodological approaches being used a majority of the studies have concluded that the receipt of remittances results in labor supply reductions for instance rodriguez and tiongson 2001 report that remittances lower employment in the philippines while funkhouser 1992 estimates that remittances reduce the employment likelihood of nicaraguan men and women by 2 and 5 percentage points respectively studies by amuedo dorantes and pozo 2006 and hanson 2007 found that the impact of remittances on the labor supply of mexicans is conditioned on gender they conclude that mexican women reduce labor supply on account of remittance inflows whereas men do not in contrast limiting their study to mexican households that receive persistent remittances cox edwards and rodriguez oreggia 2009 conclude that remittances have no impact on the labor supply of household members remaining in mexico with the exception of urban women in traditionally low migration states for whom labor supply rises however we still lack an understanding of the ways in which the volatility in remittance inflows can impact labor supply in remittance receiving countries

what unites right wing populists in western europe re examining grievance mobilization models in seven successful cases unlike for the green party family no empirically backed scholarly consensus exists about the grievances mobilized by populist right parties in western europe to the contrary three competing grie

high cost credit and consumption smoothing in this paper i show that high cost credit helps households smooth consumption following periods of temporary financial distress after experiencing distress that is extreme weather events i find that access to high cost payday lending mitigates declines in overall spending and nondurable goods spending generally the results are particularly concentrated among households with a higher propensity to use payday credit or that have limited alternatives lower income households households with less than a college degree and households with low levels of saving these results highlight the consumption smoothing role that high cost credit plays for households with limited access to other types of credit