Brown continued her career until domestic responsibilities combined with her disagreement with many aspects of the women's rights movement and caused her to discontinue lecturing. Writing became her new outlet for initiation positive change for women; in her works she encouraged women to seek out masculine professions, and asked men to share in household duties, yet she retained the belief that women's primary role is care of the home and family. Brown was the author of several books in the fields of theology and philosophy. She also combined science and philosophy, writing The Sexes Throughout Nature in 1875, in which she argued that evolution resulted in two sexes that were different but equal. She answered Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer who she considered to be the most influential men of her day[6] aware she would be considered presumptuous for criticizing evolutionary theory but wrote that "will never be lessened by waiting".[7] Darwin had written a letter to her in 1869, thanking her for a copy of her book, Studies in General Science.[8] She also wrote a novel, The Island Neighbors, in 1871, and a collection of poetry, Sea Drift, in 1902.
Although wide variation in teacher effectiveness is well established, much less is known about differences in teacher improvement over time. We document that average returns to teaching experience mask large variation across individual teachers, and across groups of teachers working in different schools. We examine the role of school context in explaining these differences using a measure of the professional environment constructed from teachers’ responses to state-wide surveys. Our analyses show that teachers working in more supportive professional environments improve their effectiveness more over time than teachers working in less supportive contexts. On average, teachers working in schools at the 75th percentile of professional environment ratings improved 20% more than teachers in schools at the 25th percentile after five years.
Attracting and retaining effective teachers in high-poverty, urban schools remains a critical challenge. Some scholars interpret high turnover rates at these schools as evidence that teachers prefer to work with wealthier, whiter groups of students. Others argue that teachers are leaving behind the poor working conditions that tend to prevail in these schools. We interviewed 95 teachers and administrators in six high-poverty, urban schools in order to understand teachers’ views about their work with students and how school context influences their experience. We found that most teachers chose their schools, and stayed, because of their students. However, when schools failed to provide instructional supports, an orderly environment and extra assistance for students, teachers expressed frustration and their intentions to leave.
In this paper, we develop bias formulas for front-door estimates and front-door/back- door hybrid estimates of average treatment effects under general patterns of measured and unmeasured confounding. These bias formulas allow for sensitivity analysis, and also allow for comparisons of the bias resulting from standard back-door covariate ad- justments (also known as direct adjustment and standardization). We also present these bias comparisons in two special cases: linear structural equation models and nonrandomized program evaluations with one-sided noncompliance. These compar- isons demonstrate that there are broad classes of applications for which the front-door or hybrid adjustments will be preferred to the back-door adjustments. We illustrate this point with an application to the National JTPA (Job Training Partnership Act) Study, showing that by using information on enrollment in addition to pre-treatment covariates, the front-door approach provides estimates that are closer to the experi- mental benchmark than the back-door approach.
In a one-shot Prisoners’ dilemma experiment, female participants are highly sensitive
to the social frame. Male participants are not. Additional evidence suggests that the operative gender difference is in beliefs, not preferences.
The recent housing bust precipitated a wave of mortgage defaults, with over seven percent of the owner-occupied housing stock experiencing a foreclosure. This paper presents a model that shows how foreclosures can exacerbate a housing bust and delay the housing market's recovery. By raising the ratio of sellers to buyers, by making buyers more selective, and by changing the composition of houses that sell, foreclosures freeze up the market for retail (non-foreclosure) sales and reduce both price and volume. Because negative equity is necessary for default, these general equilibrium effects on prices can create price-default spirals that amplify an initial shock. To assess the magnitude of these channels, the model is calibrated to simulate the downturn. The amplification channel is significant. The model successfully explains aggregate and retail price declines, the foreclosure share of volume, and the number of foreclosures both nationwide and across MSAs. While the model can explain variation in sales across MSAs, it cannot account for the aggregate level of the volume decline, suggesting that other forces have reduced sales nationwide. The quantitative analysis implies that from 2007 to 2011 foreclosures exacerbated aggregate price declines by approximately 50 percent and declines in the prices of retail homes by approximately 30 percent.
This article examines the long term consequences of the early introduction of the printing press in the 19th century on newspaper readership and other civic attitudes in sub-Saharan Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, Protestant missionaries were the first both to import the printing press technology and to allow the indigineous population to use it. We build a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant missions in 1903. This dataset includes, for each mission station, a geographic location and its characteristics, as well as the amount and nature of all the investments done by the mission. We show that proximity to a historical missionary settlement endowed with a printing press significantly increases newspaper readership today within regions located close to historical mission settlements. We also find a positive impact on other civic attitudes such as political participation at the community level and behavior toward political discussion. Results are robust to a variety of identification strategies striving against potential endogenous selection of missions into printing and externalities on education and literacy.
This paper questions the common wisdom whereby more competition in the media industry leads necessarily to more information. I investigate the impact of a change in the intensity of competition in the media market on the provided quantity of news and within news on the relative shares of information and entertainment. I show that when the heterogeneity in the consumers' taste for news is low and there is a fixed cost of news production, competition leads to a decrease in the total production of news compared to the monopoly situation due to a "business stealing effect'. Moreover, I find that when newspaper buyers differ less in their taste for information than in their taste for entertainment, competition leads to less information and more entertainment even when the cost of producing information and entertainment is the same. An interesting implication is that in a model in which voters vote strategically media competition can lead to a decrease in turnout. I confirm these predictions empirically using a new panel of local daily newspapers and turnout at local elections in France from 1945 to 2011. I show that, due to an important business stealing effect, an increase in competition leads to a decrease in incumbent newspapers' operating expenses and in particular the number of journalists. Through this channel, I find that an increase in competition leads to (i) a lower provision of total news and, within these news, (ii) a lower share of information and a higher share of entertainment. I also show that more competition leads to an increase in newspaper differentiation. Finally I find that an increase in newspaper competition has a robust negative impact on turnout at local elections.
Why are contracts incomplete? Transaction costs and bounded rationality cannot be a total explanation since states of the world are often describable, foreseeable, and yet are not mentioned in a contract. Asymmetric information theories also have limitations. We offer an explanation based on “contracts as reference points”. Including a contingency of the form, “The buyer will require a good in event E”, has a benefit and a cost. The benefit is that if E occurs there is less to argue about; the cost is that the additional reference point provided by the outcome in E can hinder (re)negotiation in states outside E. We show that if parties agree about a reasonable division of surplus, an incomplete contract can be strictly superior to a contingent contract.
We present new evidence on the relationship between employee productivity and job tenure using data from the teacher labor market. Econometric challenges require identifying assumptions to model the within-teacher returns to experience with teacher fixed effects. We describe the bias introduced by violations of two common assumptions, and we propose a third approach with a different and empirically-testable assumption. Consistent with past research, we find that teachers experience rapid productivity growth early in their careers. However, we find suggestive evidence of returns to experience later in the career, indicating that teachers continue to build human capital beyond these first years.
Courts have articulated a number of legal tests to distinguish
corporate transactions that have a legitimate business or
economic purpose from those carried out largely, if not solely, for
favorable tax treatment. We outline an approach to analyzing the
economic substance of corporate transactions based on the
property rights theory of the firm, and describe its application in
two recent tax cases.
