Click to apply: the impact of online job portals on job search outcomes

India has one of the largest and fastest growing populations of internet users in the world. An estimated 190 million Indians use the internet, up from 7 million in 2001. Approximately 40 million Indians go online every day, using the Internet to make purchases, access financial services and education, and interact with friends and family. In a recent IGC project Jeremy Magruder studies the effect of online job portals on labour market and job-matching outcomes

Can Network Theory-based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?

In order to induce farmers to adopt a productive new agricultural technology, we apply simple and complex contagion diffusion models on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify seed farmers to target and train on the new technology. A randomized controlled trial compares these theory-driven network targeting approaches to simpler strategies that either rely on a government extension worker or an easily measurable proxy for the social network (geographic distance between households) to identify seed farmers. Our results indicate that technology diffusion is characterized by a complex contagion learning environment in which most farmers need to learn from multiple people before they adopt themselves. Network theory based targeting can out-perform traditional approaches to extension, and we identify methods to realize these gains at low cost to policymakers. Keywords: Social Learning, Agricultural Technology Adoption, Complex Contagion, Malawi JEL Classification Codes: O16, O13Comment: 61 page

Attrition in the Khayelitsha panel study (2000-2004)

Despite the fact that the original study had not been designed as a panel study (and despite the fact that no attempt to track the respondents had been made in the intervening four years), the response rate was (as we argue below) reasonably good.? This paper describes the two waves of this Khayelitsha panel study, and provides an analysis of attrition.? The first wave of the data (KMP 2000) is publicly available in the Data First Resource Centre of the CSSR.

Exploring attrition bias: the case of the Khayelitsha panel study (2000-2004)

Attrition bias is a problem for users of panel data. Researchers need to know what socio-economic factors are associated with attrition, and whether this is of relevance for the kind of analysis they want to conduct. This paper discusses attrition bias in the 2000/2004 Khayelitsha panel study. It shows that women, shack-dwellers and people living in smaller households are more likely to attrit, but that the impact of these variables on the probability of attrition is relatively small. The implications for labour-market analysis are then explored using Mincerian earnings functions and a probit regression on whether respondents are wage-employed or not. The coefficients generated using a restricted sample of non-attritors do not differ significantly from those generated by the entire sample. This suggests that attrition bias in this particular data set is not a problem for this kind of labour market analysis

Intergenerational Networks, Unemployment, and Persistent Inequality in

Abstract This paper examines the role of parents as network members in helping children secure employment in South Africa, where unemployment is high enough that employment is a key indicator of economic status. This possibility has long been suggested by the intergenerational correlations literature, but has received limited empirical scrutiny due to difficulties inherent in separating networks from correlated fixed effects such as preferences, genetic and wealth endowments, and neighborhood sorting. Unlike previous empirical network papers, this paper examines the covariance of childrens' outcomes with individual network nodes' (i.e. parents) usefulness in job search, as proxied by employment in the parents' industries. A new panel data set in South Africa allows the removal of individual-specific heterogeneity correlated with these parents' industries; while the institutional structure of South Africa allows the creation of control groups who should be impacted by wealth effects correlated with growth in the parents' industry but not networks. This paper finds that fathers serve as useful network connections to their sons when able, but that mothers do not seem to be useful network connections for any of their children. The possibilities of specific human capital, correlated networks, and multinomial choice are examined and do not interfere with the father-son network effect. These results suggest that a decline in economic mobility in 1 South Africa may be attributable to the expansion of small-scale networks, and that caution must be taken in drawing welfare implications from network studies which do not observe the relevant scale of networks

Can Network Theory-based Targeting Increase Technology Adoption?

In order to induce farmers to adopt a productive new agricultural technology, we apply simple and complex contagion diffusion models on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify seed farmers to target and train on the new technology. A randomized controlled trial compares these theory-driven network targeting approaches to simpler strategies that either rely on a government extension worker or an easily measurable proxy for the social network (geographic distance between households) to identify seed farmers. Our results indicate that technology diffusion is characterized by a complex contagion learning environment in which most farmers need to learn from multiple people before they adopt themselves. Network theory based targeting can out-perform traditional approaches to extension, and we identify methods to realize these gains at low cost to policymakers

Weapon-Carrying is Associated with More Permissive Gambling Attitudes and Perceptions and At-Risk/Problem Gambling in Adolescents

Background and aims: A recent call to action highlighted the need to understand the relationship between problem gambling, violence, and health/functioning. As weapon-carrying and gambling behaviors are prevalent in adolescents, this study systematically examined relationships between weapon-carrying status and measures of problem gambling severity and gambling perceptions and attitudes, as well as how weapon-carrying status moderated relationships between problem gambling severity and measures of health/functioning and gambling behavior. Methods: Participants were 2,301 Connecticut high-school adolescents. χ2 and logistic regression models were conducted. Results: Weapon-carriers reported greater problem gambling severity, more permissive gambling perceptions, greater parental approval of gambling, and more family gambling concerns, compared to non-weapon-carriers. At-risk/problem gambling was more strongly associated with family, peers, and adult gambling partners among non-weapon-carriers (vs. weapon-carriers) and with machine gambling among weapon-carriers (vs. non-weapon-carriers). Discussion and conclusions: Greater problem gambling severity and more permissive gambling perceptions and perceived parental approval of gambling in weapon-carrying adolescents suggest that parent–child relationships are important to be considered in prevention efforts. The moderated relationship by weapon-carrying status between problem gambling severity and gambling partners suggests a problem gambling risk group that may be less linked to gambling with traditional social support groups, and this group may benefit from targeted interventions

Association of Over-The-Counter Pharmaceutical Sales with Influenza-Like-Illnesses to Patient Volume in an Urgent Care Setting

We studied the association between OTC pharmaceutical sales and volume of patients with influenza-like-illnesses (ILI) at an urgent care center over one year. OTC pharmaceutical sales explain 36% of the variance in the patient volume, and each standard deviation increase is associated with 4.7 more patient visits to the urgent care center (p<0.0001). Cross-correlation function analysis demonstrated that OTC pharmaceutical sales are significantly associated with patient volume during non-flu season (p<0.0001), but only the sales of cough and cold (p<0.0001) and thermometer (p<0.0001) categories were significant during flu season with a lag of two and one days, respectively. Our study is the first study to demonstrate and measure the relationship between OTC pharmaceutical sales and urgent care center patient volume, and presents strong evidence that OTC sales predict urgent care center patient volume year round. © 2013 Liu et al

Social Networks and the Decision to Insure

Abstract Using data from a randomized experiment in rural China, this paper studies the influence of social networks on the decision to adopt a new weather insurance product and the mechanisms through which social networks operate. We provided financial education to a random subset of farmers and found a large social network effect on take-up: for untreated farmers, having an additional friend receiving financial education raised take-up by almost half as much as obtaining financial education directly, a spillover effect equivalent to offering a 15% reduction in the average insurance premium. By varying the information available to individuals about their peers&apos; take-up decisions and using randomized default options, we show that the positive social network effect is not driven by the diffusion of information on purchase decisions, but instead by the diffusion of knowledge about insurance. We also find that social network effects are larger in villages where households are more strongly connected, and when people who are the first to receive financial education are more central in the social network