The Generalizability of Personality Effects in Politics

A burgeoning line of research examining the relation between personality traits and political variables relies extensively on convenience samples. However, our understanding of the extent to which using convenience samples challenges the generalizability of these findings to target populations remains limited. We address this question by testing whether associations between personality and political characteristics observed in representative samples diverged from those observed in the sub-populations most commonly studied in convenience samples, namely students and internet users. We leverage ten high-quality representative datasets to compare the representative samples with the two sub- samples. We did not find any systematic differences in the relationship between personality traits and a broad range of political variables. Instead, results from the sub-samples generalized well to those observed in the broader and more diverse representative sample

International Remittances, Rural-Urban Migration, and the Quest for Quality Education: The Case of Nepal

Using primary field data from recently developed urban areas of Nepal, we identify households who migrated from rural to urban areas and analyze the impact of international remittances on their investment in education. The results show that rural-urban migrant households who receive international remittances have lower income and consumption but higher human-capital investment, measured by the level and budget share of expenditure on children’s education and the time their children spend studying at home, in comparison to local households and other types of migrant households. The findings suggest that an important motivation for rural-urban migration is the search for higher-quality education, because the experience of international migration helps households to know the higher returns to education abroad and international remittances help to finance the costs of both internal migration and education. We also observe that the quality of education is an increasingly important concern in contemporary Nepalese society, possibly due to the anticipated higher returns to education in the global labor market.JEL Classification Codes: O15, C24, J24http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/leon_gonzalez_roberto/http://doi.org/10.24545/0000160