The "misnorming" of the U.S. military entrance examination and its effect on minority enlistments

The score a prospective recruit must earn on the military's entrance examination was raised in 1980 in response to an error discovered in the score scale previously used. Raising this score led to a reduction in enlistments, especially among minorities. Recent plans to reduce the military have also had an adverse impact on service opportunities for minority applicants. This paper considers empirical and theoretical aspects of the relationship between entrance standards and minority representation in the military, focusing on racial differences in the proportion of qualified applicants who enlist. The results suggest that increases in test score standards have a large impact on minority enlistment not only because minorities have lower scores, but also because qualified minority applicants are far more likely than other qualified applicants to enlist.

What a difference a term makes:the effect of educational attainment on marital outcomes in the UK

Abstract In the past, students in England and Wales born within the first 5 monthsof the academic year could leave school one term earlier than those born later inthe year. Focusing on women, those who were required to stay on an extra termmore frequently hold some academic qualification. Using having been required tostay on as an exogenous factor affecting academic attainment, we find that holding alow-level academic qualification has no effect on the probability of being currentlymarried for women aged 25 or above, but increases the probability of the husbandholding some academic qualification and being economically active.33 Halama

Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Intrusiveness

We use data from a large-scale field experiment to explore what influences the effectiveness of online advertising. We find that matching an ad to website content and increasing an ad's obtrusiveness independently increase purchase intent. However, in combination, these two strategies are ineffective. Ads that match both website content and are obtrusive do worse at increasing purchase intent than ads that do only one or the other. This failure appears to be related to privacy concerns: the negative effect of combining targeting with obtrusiveness is strongest for people who refuse to give their income and for categories where privacy matters most. Our results suggest a possible explanation for the growing bifurcation in Internet advertising between highly targeted plain text ads and more visually striking but less targeted ads

Pay What You Want as a Marketing Strategy in Monopolistic and Competitive Markets

Pay What You Want (PWYW) can be an attractive marketing strategy to price discriminate between fair-minded and selfish customers, to fully penetrate a market without giving away the product for free, and to undercut competitors that use posted prices. We report on laboratory experiments that identify causal factors determining the willingness of buyers to pay voluntarily under PWYW. Furthermore, to see how competition affects the viability of PWYW, we implement markets in which a PWYW seller competes with a traditional seller. Finally, we endogenize the market structure and let sellers choose their pricing strategy. The experimental results show that outcome-based social preferences and strategic considerations to keep the seller in the market can explain why and how much buyers pay voluntarily to a PWYW seller. We find that PWYW can be viable in isolation, but it is less successful as a competitive strategy because it does not drive traditional posted-price sellers out of the market. Instead, the existence of a posted-price competitor reduces buyers’ payments and prevents the PWYW seller from fully penetrating the market. If given the choice, the majority of sellers opt for setting a posted price rather than a PWYW pricing. We discuss the implications of these results for the use of PWYW as a marketing strategy

Are there asymmetries in the effects of training on the conditional male wage distribution?

Recent studies have used quantile regression (QR) techniques to estimate the impact of education on the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. In our paper we investigate the degree to which work-related training – another important form of human capital – affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Using the first six waves of the European Community Household Panel, we utilise both ordinary least squares and QR techniques to estimate associations between work-related training and wages for private sector men in ten European Union countries. Our results show that, for the majority of countries, there is a fairly uniform association between training and hourly wages across the conditional wage distribution. However, there are considerable differences across countries in mean associations between training and wages

The Economic Resource Receipt of New Mothers

U.S. federal policies do not provide a universal social safety net of economic support for women during pregnancy or the immediate postpartum period but assume that employment and/or marriage will protect families from poverty. Yet even mothers with considerable human and marital capital may experience disruptions in employment, earnings, and family socioeconomic status postbirth. We use the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the economic resources that mothers with children ages 2 and younger receive postbirth, including employment, spouses, extended family and social network support, and public assistance. Results show that many new mothers receive resources postbirth. Marriage or postbirth employment does not protect new mothers and their families from poverty, but education, race, and the receipt of economic supports from social networks do

The Effect of University Fees on Applications, Attendance and Course Choice:Evidence from a Natural Experiment in the UK

Over the past two decades, large changes have been introduced to the level of university fees in the UK, with significant variation across countries. This article exploits this variation to examine the effect of fees on university applications, attendance and course choice. It finds that applications decrease in response to higher fees with an elasticity of demand of about -0.4. Attendance also decreases. The reduction in applications and attendance is larger for courses with lower salaries and employment rates after graduation, for non-STEM subjects and for less selective universities

Privacy regulation and online advertising

Advertisers use online customer data to target their marketing appeals. This has heightened consumers' privacy concerns, leading governments to pass laws designed to protect consumer privacy by restricting the use of data and by restricting online tracking techniques used by websites. We use the responses of 3.3 million survey takers who had been randomly exposed to 9,596 online display (banner) advertising campaigns to explore how privacy regulation in the European Union (EU) has influenced advertising effectiveness. This privacy regulation restricted advertisers' ability to collect data on Web users in order to target ad campaigns. We find that, on average, display advertising became far less effective at changing stated purchase intent after the EU laws were enacted, relative to display advertising in other countries. The loss in effectiveness was more pronounced for websites that had general content (such as news sites), where non-data-driven targeting is particularly hard to do. The loss of effectiveness was also more pronounced for ads with a smaller presence on the webpage and for ads that did not have additional interactive, video, or audio features

The Eurotower Strikes Back

The 2008 global financial crisis came with fears—and, for some, hopes—that a new wave of public mobilization would emerge in industrialized countries. Especially throughout the European Union (EU), the epicenter of the crisis, large protests were expected. Yet, the energy with which social groups mobilized against the proposed austerity measures quickly fizzled. This article provides new evidence for why this was the case. In line with Neo-Keynesian theory, we argue that the interest rate adjustments and political announcements of the European Central Bank (ECB) limited the potential for mass unrest in the member states of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) affected by the crisis. We provide evidence for our argument with yearly panel data and a new original data set of monthly political protests between 2001 and 2013. Our analyses support the hypothesis that the ECB was able to successfully assuage dissatisfaction with the limited reform options of the Eurozone member states in the wake of the Eurocrisis

Impact evaluation methods in public economics : a brief introduction to randomized evaluations and comparison with other methods

Recent years have seen a large expansion in the use of rigorous impact evaluation techniques. Increasingly, public administrations are collaborating with academic economists and other quantitative social scientists to apply such rigorous methods to the study of public finance. These developments allow for more reliable measurements of the effects of different policy options on the behavioral responses of citizens, firm owners, or public officials. They can help decision makers in tax administrations, public procurement offices, and other public agencies design programs informed by well-founded evidence. This article provides an introductory overview of the most frequently used impact evaluation methods. It is aimed at facilitating communication and collaboration between practitioners and academics by introducing key vocabulary and concepts used in rigorous impact evaluation methods, starting with randomized controlled trials and comparing them with other methods ranging from simple pre–post analysis to difference-in-differences, matching estimations, and regression discontinuity designs