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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Guglielmo Briscese; John List |
| Abstract: | Field experiments provide the clearest window into the true impact of many policies, allowing us to understand what works, what does not, and why. Yet, their widespread use has not been accompanied by a deep understanding of the political economy of their adoption in policy circles. This study begins with a large-scale natural field experiment that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of a widely implemented intervention. We leverage this result to understand how policymakers and a representative sample of the U.S. population update their beliefs of not only the policy itself, but the use of science and the trust they have in government. Policymakers, initially overly optimistic about the program's effectiveness, adjust their views based on evidence but show reduced demand for experimentation, suggesting experiment aversion when results defy expectations. Among the U.S. public, support for policy experiments is high and remains robust despite receiving disappointing results, though trust in the implementing institutions declines, particularly in terms of perceptions of competence and integrity. Providing additional information on the value of learning from unexpected findings partially mitigates this trust loss. These insights, from both the demand and supply side, reveal the complexities of managing policymakers' expectations and underscore the need to educate the public on the value of open-mindedness in policy experimentation. |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feb:natura:00799 |
| By: | Olga Alonso-Villar; Coral del Río |
| Abstract: | We offer a reflection on the measurement of segregation, gathering methodological contributions from sociology and economics, and we use some of them to explore occupational segregation by gender and nativity in Spain. Our goal is to offer a guide to the tools that can be used in empirical analysis, connecting them with theoretical discussions. Our empirical analysis shows that the occupational segregation of immigrant women is a more intense phenomenon than that of native women or immigrant men, although it decreased significantly over the period 2006-2024. Unlike their male peers, occupational sorting strongly penalizes immigrant women after controlling for characteristics. |
| Keywords: | Segregation, gender, migration status, wage gaps, intersectionality |
| JEL: | D63 J15 J16 J31 |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vig:wpaper:2402 |
| By: | María Solana Cucher (Universidad de San Andrés); María Victoria Rosino (Universidad de San Andrés); María Florencia Ruiz (Universidad de San Andrés); Mariano Tommasi (Universidad de San Andrés) |
| Abstract: | Family structure and characteristics are considered an important factor in the reproduction of social inequalities. It has been documented that family structure and its stability correlate with various measures of well-being for children and adults, especially women, involved. In this paper, we use a retrospective survey for the City of Buenos Aires involving three different cohorts of women, to explore their conjugal and fertility trajectories. We describe those trajectories with a vector of variables that expand the notion of “fragile families” and use cluster analysis to characterize these trajectories. We find that our indicator of fragility correlates well with variables capturing social vulnerability both in the families of origin as well as in the women's own trajectories. Other findings include (i) an increase in "modern" lifestyles across cohorts, as captured by our indicators; (ii) a rise in educational attainment, with non-university tertiary education increasing before university education, indicating a transitional effect; and (iii) several indications of intergenerational transmission of family patterns and values – for instance, paternal absence is associated with higher teen fertility, and more "modern" lifestyles tend to be adopted by women whose mothers were the main breadwinners at home. A worrisome finding is that, according to our clustering, the number of women with high fragility has increased substantially. |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sad:wpaper:171 |