Book review: unexplored dimensions of discrimination edited by Tito Boeri, Eleonora Patacchini and Giovanni Peri

What mechanisms serve to maintain the gender pay gap and what other forms of discrimination persist in the labour market? In Unexplored Dimensions of Discrimination, editors Tito Boeri, Eleonora Patacchini and Giovanni Peri provide a comprehensive, empirically-driven interrogation of various facets of discrimination through data obtained from the USA, Spain and Italy. Ria Ivandic welcomes the book for opening up a highly important academic dialogue on previously unexamined aspects of labour market discrimination

Home is not a safe place for everyone: domestic abuse between partners increased during lockdown

What has happened to the prevalence and nature of domestic abuse during lockdown? Crime economists Ria Ivandic and Tom Kirchmaier collaborated with the Strategic Insights Unit (SIU), from the Metropolitan Police, to answer this question by analysing data from calls to the police and recorded crime in London

Does the number of candidates increase turnout? Causal evidence from two-round elections

A long-lasting question in comparative politics is whether the number of candidates/parties increases turnout. Existing observational studies on the topic find mixed results. We thus apply a regression discontinuity design to data 13,910 legislative and cantonal electoral districts in France since 1978. In the two-round system used in these elections, the candidates who pass a certain vote threshold in the first round can participate in the second round. We use this discontinuity to estimate the causal effect of having a third candidate in the second round: it increases turnout by 3.5% points and the share of valid votes by 7.3% points. We confirm these findings with survey data from the 2012 legislative election. Further, we investigate the mechanism and find evidence supporting the alienation theory, according to which individuals whose preferences do not resonate with the preferences of any of the candidates are likely to abstain

Gender gaps from labor market shocks

Job loss leads to persistent adverse labor market outcomes, but assessments of gender differences in labor market recovery are lacking. We utilize plant closures in Denmark to estimate gender gaps in labor market outcomes and document that women face an increased risk of unemployment and lose a larger share of their earnings in the two years following job displacement. When accounting for observable differences in human capital across men and women, half of the gender gap in unemployment remains. In a standard decomposition framework, we document that childcare imposes an important barrier to women's labor market recovery regardless of individual characteristics

Changing patterns of domestic abuse during Covid-19 lockdown

The effects of preventing a COVID-19 health crisis have had unintended consequences on domestic abuse (DA) victimization. We contribute to the literature on domestic abuse in lockdown by providing insight on how changing patterns of domestic abuse can explain differences in magnitudes reported across studies. We examine the patterns of domestic abuse during the COVID-19 lockdown in Greater London and find that the lockdown changed the nature of reporting and the type of relationship the abuse occurs within. While abuse by current partners as well as family members increased on average by 8.1% and 17.1% respectively over the lockdown period, abuse by ex-partners declined by 11.4%. These findings show that reporting the average change in domestic abuse during lockdown can be misleading when designing a policy response. Moreover, we show that all the increase in domestic abuse calls is driven by third party reporting, particularly evident in areas with high density. This suggests that under reporting is present in the lockdown, particularly in households where the abuse cannot be reported by an outsider. Although these findings pertain to the COVID-19 lockdown, they also highlight the role that victim exposure and proximity has in affecting domestic abuse

Comparing conventional and machine-learning approaches to risk assessment in domestic abuse cases

We compare predictions from a conventional protocol-based approach to risk assessment with those based on a machine-learning approach. We first show that the conventional predictions are less accurate than, and have similar rates of negative prediction error as, a simple Bayes classifier that makes use only of the base failure rate. A random forest based on the underlying risk assessment questionnaire does better under the assumption that negative prediction errors are more costly than positive prediction errors. A random forest based on two-year criminal histories does better still. Indeed, adding the protocol-based features to the criminal histories adds almost nothing to the predictive adequacy of the model. We suggest using the predictions based on criminal histories to prioritize incoming calls for service, and devising a more sensitive instrument to distinguish true from false positives that result from this initial screening

Football, alcohol and domestic abuse

We study the role of alcohol and emotions in explaining the dynamics in domestic abuse following major football games. We match confidential and uniquely detailed individual call data from Greater Manchester with the timing of football matches over a period of eight years to estimate the effect on domestic abuse. We first observe a 5% decrease in incidents during the 2-hour duration of the game suggesting a substitution effect of football and domestic abuse. However, following the initial decrease, after the game, domestic abuse starts increasing and peaks about ten hours after the game, leading to a positive cumulative effect. We find that all increases are driven by perpetrators that had consumed alcohol, and when games were played before 7pm. Unexpected game results are not found to have a significant effect

Jihadi attacks, media, and local hate crime

Empirical connections between local anti-Muslim hate crimes and international jihadi terror attacks are studied. Based upon rich administrative data from Greater Manchester Police, event studies of ten terror attacks reveal an immediate big spike up in Islamophobic hate crimes and incidents when an attack occurs. In subsequent days, hate crime is amplified by real-time media. It subsequently attenuates, but hate crime incidence cumulates to higher levels than prior to the series of attacks. The overall conclusion is that, even when they reside in places far away from where jihadi terror attacks take place, local Muslim populations face a media magnified likelihood of hate crime victimization following international terror attacks. This matters for community cohesion in places affected by discriminatory hate crime and, from both a policy and research perspective, means that the process of media magnification of hate crime needs to be better understood

Impact of different ventilation strategies on aircraft cabin air quality and passengers’ comfort and wellbeing – the ComAir study

Indoor air quality can affect occupants in numerous ways. Especially carbon dioxide (CO2) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) have been debated in their effects on health, well-being, and cognition of people. Aircraft cabins present indoor environments with distinctive features, where passengers are exposed to a mixture of outside and recirculated air. They include conditions such as high occupant density, inability to leave the environment, low relative humidity and need for pressurization. The ComAir study, funded by the Clean Sky 2 Initiative of the European Union, aims to investigate the impact of reducing outdoor air intake in the total volume of air supplied on cabin air quality and passengers’ wellbeing. The main experiment of the study uses a 2(‘occupancy’) X 4 (‘air ventilation regime’) factorial design with stratified randomization of participants. Occupancy denotes the number of people in the aircraft (half vs. full) and varies the psychological important wellbeing factor of proxemics. The four air ventilation regime levels are: Baseline with typical aircraft airflows regimes per person, ASHRAE 161 requirement (standard recommendation), ASHRAE 161 half (half of the recommended flow), and a recirculation regime with a target CO2 concentration close to regulatory limit. This paper presents the background and experimental procedure of ComAir and gives some preliminary results on environmental conditions and subjects’ wellbeing and health under the baseline air ventilation regime

Cost-benefit analysis of extending support to domestic abuse victims with NRPF: a technical report for the Domestic Abuse Commissioner

This report provides the technical underpinning to the report by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Report1 laid before Parliament in December 2022. That report was in response to the Home Office request that she set out ‘the gaps in evidence available to the Home Office on support for Migrant Victims of Domestic Abuse, by establishing the number of victims and survivors of domestic abuse who have no recourse to public funds, the cost of supporting those who need support, and the cost benefit of such interventions.2’ LSE was asked by the Commissioner to provide a detailed technical analysis to underpin her response. This LSE report provides our views on relevant evidence but no policy recommendations. Such recommendations are made in the Commissioner’s report, having considered our evidence alongside the evidence of other stakeholders and people she has consulted. Our analysis required us to make strong assumptions, and there is significant uncertainty around many of them. There is considerable uncertainty in published validated statistics about the numbers of migrants in the UK with each visa status, and even more uncertainty about numbers of undocumented migrants and of ‘visitors’. There is also uncertainty about how many of these migrants currently experience domestic abuse, and an added and independent uncertainty about the proportion of those people who would present at services. We have also had to make various assumptions which affect the costs and benefits. We address and mitigate these and other uncertainties through our sensitivity analysis and additional modelling in this report. In addition, an accompanying Excel workbook sets out in detail our assumptions and how they underpin our conclusions, which allows for further sensitivity analysis and modelling to be done