Tobin Scholar Newsletter: Income inequality and class divides in parental investment, decision making about charitable giving, and more...

New and exciting research from scholars in the Tobin Project network.

View this email in your browser

Economic Inequality

Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investment

How does rising income inequality reduce intergenerational mobility? Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Study between 1980 and 2014, Daniel Schneider, Orestes P. Hastings, and Joe LaBriola find that increased income inequality at the state level leads wealthy parents to spend not just more money, but also a larger share of their income on lessons, schooling, and childcare. The authors hypothesize that inequality heightens anxiety among high-socioeconomic status parents, resulting in larger class gaps in financial investments in children. Since parental investment transmits advantage across generations, this paper contributes to the growing body of research indicating a negative relationship between rising inequality and intergenerational mobility.

This paper was selected for Tobin’s 2018 Prize for Exemplary Work on Inequality and Decision Making.
[Read the paper]

High Stakes: A Little More Cheating, A Lot Less Charity

How do people make decisions about charitable giving? In this experimental study, Zoe Rahwan, Oliver Hauser, Ewa Kochanowska, and Barbara Fasolo find evidence that as people resist the temptation to cheat for larger rewards they are likely to donate a lesser proportion of those rewards to charity. Participants in the study were randomly selected into high stakes and lower stakes groups and then asked to complete a coin-flipping task, with rewards varying from one cent to five dollars per flip. Consistent with previous studies, the authors find that increasing the possible reward for each winning flip only slightly increased participants’ propensity to cheat. However, after the game each participant was given the opportunity to donate a percentage of their earnings to a well-known charity of their choice. The participants in the high stakes group donated proportionately less to charity than those in lower stakes groups. Moreover, only the participants who resisted cheating in high stakes situations appeared to “leverage” feelings of morality when donating a lower percentage of their earnings to charity. The authors argue that these findings suggest that individuals who resist immoral self-interested behavior may then feel comfortable “balancing” these actions by refraining from pro-social behavior.
[Read the paper]

Economic Inequality

Institutions of Democracy

Government & Markets

National Security

Do you have any new work you would like to share with the network? Let us know!

Tobin Project News

Tobin Announces Winners of the 2018 Inequality Prize

The Tobin Project is pleased to announce that the 2018 Prize on Inequality and Decision Making has been awarded to Orestes P. Hastings (Colorado State University) and Daniel Schneider (University of California, Berkeley) for their paper with Joe LaBriola on “Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments.” A summary of their winning research can be found in this newsletter, and you can read more about the prize on our website. The Tobin Project is grateful to all the scholars who submitted papers for consideration for the prize and to our incredible selection committee of Nancy Adler (University of California, San Francisco), Marianne Bertrand (The University of Chicago Booth School of Business), and Christopher Jencks (Harvard Kennedy School) for their service.

Request for Proposals: Cultural Influences in Regulatory Capture

The Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) Scholarly Borderlands Initiative, in collaboration with the
Tobin Project, seeks graduate student grant proposals for short-term, ethnographic research on how cultural factors may contribute to regulatory capture. More information about the application process can be found here. Any questions should be directed to scholarlyborderlands@ssrc.org.

Tobin Convenes Scholars for When Democracy Breaks

On September 6th, the Tobin Project gathered ten scholars for the first meeting of our research inquiry on When Democracy Breaks. This project seeks to explore past cases of democratic collapse and identify the factors that led to decline, with the goal of better understanding why democracies fail and how we can sustain a robust democracy over time. We look forward to convening additional discussions around this topic and working to publish this research.

Scholars Share Research on Reassessing Threat Assessment

On August 28th and 29th, the Tobin Project’s National Security initiative held a meeting as part of our continuing work on Reassessing Threat Assessment, which seeks to build understanding of the practices and processes that yield accurate and reliable assessments of national security risks facing the United States. In the coming months, we plan to work with the contributors and scholar-leaders to finalize and submit for publication the research prepared for this inquiry.

Tobin Holds Meeting on the Antimonopoly Tradition and American Democracy

On July 18th, the Tobin Project convened eleven scholars for a meeting on the role of the antimonopoly tradition in American democracy. Amid growing interest regarding the emergence of new monopolies and their implications for democracy, attendees considered potential avenues for research that could deepen public understanding of how economic concentration and government regulation thereof have shaped democratic outcomes throughout American history.

Institutions of Democracy

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

In her recent book, Martha Jones examines the efforts of black Americans to define their legal status in the antebellum United States. Jones writes that the citizenship and rights of free slaves and their descendants remained contested in American politics throughout the nineteenth century. Legal histories have tended to emphasize the roles of major treatises, high court decisions, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in establishing citizenship. Jones argues that these studies largely overlook the crucial work of black Americans, who found ways to assert their citizenship well before any judicial or legislative consensus formally granted it to them. Focusing on Baltimore during the antebellum period, she documents how the city’s free black community used local courts to claim birthright citizenship and resist black laws and the threat of forced removal. Jones suggests this activism might represent an important democratic practice by which people without rights manage to claim them.
[Read the book]

Government & Markets

Presidentially Directed Policy Change: The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs as Partisan or Moderator?

How do presidents’ politics affect regulatory rulemaking? In this article, Simon F. Haeder and Susan Webb Yackee cross-reference approximately 1,500 final-stage executive branch regulations with an index of the partisanship of federal agencies derived from a survey of government employees. Focusing on the Bush II and Obama presidencies, the authors examine which agencies’ rules were most likely to be significantly changed by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). In particular, they test the hypotheses that the White House may be more likely to change rules proposed by agencies with “extreme” politics or politics that oppose the president in power. Haeder and Yackee find support for neither theory. Instead, they determine that White Houses of both parties tend to change rules proposed by the most liberal agencies, suggesting that the OIRA review process may be a tool for presidentially directed deregulation.
[Read the paper]

National Security

Markets or Mercantilism? How China Secures its Energy Supplies

China’s efforts to secure access to oil have been critiqued as unnecessary, hostile, and less efficient than procuring oil from global markets. In their new article, Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press argue instead that a clear strategic logic underpins China’s “energy mercantilist” approach. China, the authors suggest, is vulnerable to blockades, embargoes, and potential adversaries that use oil as a tool of coercion. It has effectively reduced this vulnerability by increasing its control over suppliers of oil, diversifying its oil sources, building a strategic oil reserve, and improving its capability to protect sea lanes and overland oil pipelines. This approach leads Lind and Press to conclude that the United States has lost some coercive leverage over Beijing, revealing the enduring influence of mercantilism in the global market.
[Read the paper]

Tobin Project

1 Mifflin Place Suite 240

Cambridge, MA 02138

Add us to your address book

unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences