130 research outputs found
The London bombings and racial prejudice: evidence from housing and labour markets
This paper investigates the impact of the London bombings on attitudes towards ethnic minorities, examining outcomes in housing and labour markets across London boroughs. We use a difference-in-differences approach, specifying `treated' boroughs as those with the highest concentration of Asian residents. Our results indicate that house prices in treated boroughs fell by approximately 2.3% in the two years after the bombings relative to other boroughs, with sales declining by approximately 5.7%. Furthermore, we present evidence of a rise in the unemployment rate in treated compared to control boroughs, as well as a rise in racial segregation. These results are robust to several `falsification' checks with respect to the definition and timing of treatment
Smarter task assignment or greater effort: the impact of incentives on team performance
We use an experiment to study the impact of team-based incentives, exploiting rich data from personnel records and management information systems. Using a triple difference design, we show that the incentive scheme had an impact on team performance, even with quite large teams. We examine whether this effect was due to increased effort from workers or strategic task reallocation. We find that the provision of financial incentives did raise individual performance but that managers also disproportionately reallocated efficient workers to the incentivised tasks. We show that this reallocation was the more important contributor to the overall outcome
Genetic markers as instrumental variables: an application to child fat mass and academic achievement
Working Pape
Alcohol Exposure In Utero and Child Academic Achievement
We examine the effect of prenatal alcohol exposure on child academic achievement. We use a
genetic variant in the maternal alcohol-metabolism gene ADH1B to instrument for alcohol exposure,
whilst controlling for the child’s genotype on the same variant. We show that the instrument is
unrelated to an extensive range of parental characteristics and behaviour. OLS regressions suggest an
ambiguous association between alcohol exposure and attainment but there is a strong social gradient
in drinking, with mothers in higher socio-economic groups more likely to drink. In contrast to the
OLS, the IV estimates show clear negative effects of prenatal alcohol exposur
Fracturing ranked surfaces
Discretized landscapes can be mapped onto ranked surfaces, where every
element (site or bond) has a unique rank associated with its corresponding
relative height. By sequentially allocating these elements according to their
ranks and systematically preventing the occupation of bridges, namely elements
that, if occupied, would provide global connectivity, we disclose that bridges
hide a new tricritical point at an occupation fraction , where
is the percolation threshold of random percolation. For any value of in the
interval , our results show that the set of bridges has a
fractal dimension in two dimensions. In the limit , a self-similar fracture is revealed as a singly connected line
that divides the system in two domains. We then unveil how several seemingly
unrelated physical models tumble into the same universality class and also
present results for higher dimensions
Evidence of detrimental effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on offspring birthweight and neurodevelopment from a systematic review of quasi-experimental studies
Background: Systematic reviews of prenatal alcohol exposure effects generally only include conventional observational studies. However, estimates from such studi
Multiscale Analysis of Metal Oxide Nanoparticles in Tissue: Insights into Biodistribution and Biotransformation
Metal oxide nanoparticles have emerged as exceptionally potent biomedical sensors and actuators due to their unique physicochemical features. Despite fascinating achievements, the current limited understanding of the molecular interplay between nanoparticles and the surrounding tissue remains a major obstacle in the rationalized development of nanomedicines, which is reflected in their poor clinical approval rate. This work reports on the nanoscopic characterization of inorganic nanoparticles in tissue by the example of complex metal oxide nanoparticle hybrids consisting of crystalline cerium oxide and the biodegradable ceramic bioglass. A validated analytical method based on semiquantitative X‐ray fluorescence and inductively coupled plasma spectrometry is used to assess nanoparticle biodistribution following intravenous and topical application. Then, a correlative multiscale analytical cascade based on a combination of microscopy and spectroscopy techniques shows that the topically applied hybrid nanoparticles remain at the initial site and are preferentially taken up into macrophages, form apatite on their surface, and lead to increased accumulation of lipids in their surroundings. Taken together, this work displays how modern analytical techniques can be harnessed to gain unprecedented insights into the biodistribution and biotransformation of complex inorganic nanoparticles. Such nanoscopic characterization is imperative for the rationalized engineering of safe and efficacious nanoparticle‐based systems
The Many Weak Instrument Problem and Mendelian Randomization.
Instrumental variable estimates of causal effects can be biased when using many instruments that are only weakly
associated with the exposure. We describe several techniques to reduce this bias and estimate corrected standard errors. We present our findings using a simulation study and an empirical application. For the latter, we
estimate the effect of height on lung function, using genetic variants as instruments for height. Our simulation
study demonstrates that, using many weak individual variants, two-stage least squares (2SLS) is biased, whereas
the limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) and the continuously updating estimator (CUE) are unbiased and have accurate rejection frequencies when standard errors are corrected for the presence of many weak
instruments. Our illustrative empirical example uses data on 3631 children from England. We used 180 genetic
variants as instruments and compared conventional ordinary least squares estimates with results for the 2SLS,
LIML, and CUE instrumental variable estimators using
The labour supply effect of Education Maintenance Allowance and its implications for parental altruism
Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was a UK government cash transfer paid directly to children aged 16–18, in the first 2 years of post-compulsory full-time education. This paper uses the labour supply effect of EMA to infer the magnitude of the transfer response made by the parent, and so test for the presence of an ‘effectively altruistic’ head-of-household, who redistributes resources among household members so as to maximise overall welfare. Using data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, an EMA payment of £30 per week is found to reduce teenagers’ labour supply by 3 h per week and probability of employment by 13 % points from a base of 43 %. We conclude that parents withdraw cash and in-kind transfers from their children to a value of between 22 and 86 % of what the child receives in EMA. This means we reject the hypothesis of an effectively altruistic head-of-household, and argue that making this cash transfer directly to the child produces higher child welfare than if the equivalent transfer were made to parents
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