Author: ekfletch

I am an independent researcher on issues of gender, labor, violence, education, and children.

Surely, someone was going there

This article appeared Monday in the NYT, supposedly in response to the accusations leveled at Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim (and yes, she’s still an alleged victim) concerning her asylum claim. In an earlier post, I expressed the concern that too much attention would be paid to her false claim for asylum. This, unfortunately, in addition to claims that she might be a prostitute, come with the corresponding disinterest in her claims of rape, and possible dismissal of the charges. We might never know what really happened between them because clearly, anyone who has ever lied would lie about being raped and put themselves through the hell and media firestorm that results when claim you’ve been raped.

Snarkiness aside, the somewhat sensationalist NYT article really only confirms one thing, that we have no idea how often people make fraudulent asylum claims. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, and not to say that we’re bad (or good) at catching them, merely that we don’t know. They certainly happen. And from an economic standpoint, it’s likely, though, that if we make the process harder, we would see more fraudulent claims. Or if we make some other part of the immigration process harder, visas for skilled immigrants, for instance, we would see more fraudulent claims. If you increase the costs of something, particularly necessities, you create incentives to get around it, often in ways we don’t like. Most of the data on asylum claims are confidential in order to protect all parties (asylum-seekers, those who represent them, etc), so we’re stuck again in the place where even if we could come up with a clever way to test for fraudulent claims, we don’t have access to what we’d need to do it. We just don’t know.

However, our ability to econometrically test for this, as fun as it might be, is less important than whether people are being afforded the services and assistance they need. To paraphrase the words of a lawyer friend, there is bad legal advice everywhere. Despite attempts to keep lawyers within a strict code of ethics, there are of course people who would encourage clients to exaggerate their claims. There are also people who would do so of their own volition out of fear, all of this even when their own story is horrific enough to merit asylum without lying. What prompts someone to file a fraudulent claim, fear that it’s too difficult to get asylum, fear of returning to one’s country, bad legal advice? Some combination of the above? Also, there are checks in place to prevent fraud. Are they perfect? Probably not, but I have plenty of checks in place to make sure my students don’t cheat, that doesn’t mean some of them haven’t gotten away with it.

The fact that people file fraudulent claims doesn’t mean we should crack down harder on asylum claims, but perhaps we should be examining why someone might feel the need to lie. Gender, in particular, is not grounds for asylum, under most interpretations. You must be part of a particular class, like abused women, to seek asylum. Requirements are open to interpretation, but you must show that you’ve been persecuted for being part of one of those classes or show that you face imminent danger if you return to your country because of being part of one of those classes. It’s not particularly easy to prove, even when you’re telling the truth. But perhaps we should take a closer look at what drives people to lie to seek asylum, rather than using isolated examples of lying to encourage a backlash against all asylum seekers, most who would face real danger if they returned to their countries.

My favorite oligopoly example just got better!

Though my students are quickly becoming far too young to remember the advent of Netflix, I often start a unit on oligopoly or game theory by posing the question of how much the DVD rental service cost when it started. The answer, you might not remember yourself, is around $20. Now, that seemed like a bargain at the time, when your only real option to rent a movie was to haul your butt over to Blockbuster and pay $4.99 for a single movie, and then face late charges, etc, when you couldn’t get it back the next day. Blockbuster didn’t like the competition of course, and soon got into the online/mail business of renting DVDs itself, leaving us with two big companies sharing the bulk of the market–an oligopoly, or a duopoly, more precisely in this situation.

In principles, and in my intermediate classes, too, I use this example to talk about the options oligopolies face. at least in our simplified, basic model. They can collude, or try to keep prices high and capture as much of the monopoly surplus as possible. Or they can cheat, undercutting their competitor’s prices. In a dichotomous world, we see the two options play out in different ways, allowing our oligopoly to look like a monopoly or to look like perfect competition. That is, high prices mean small quantity, and the consumer gets very little surplus. In the other case, where the companies continue to undercut each other, this drives prices towards the perfectly competitive equilibrium, where each company is charging their marginal cost and capturing very little of the surplus.

In some cases, they’ll even drop below their marginal cost, taking a loss in order to try to drive the other companies out of business. If one company can sustain losses for a long time, he might be able to get rid of the others and then raise prices back up to the monopoly level, thus capturing all the monopoly surplus for himself. Now, he doesn’t have to share with the other guys.

Netflix and Blockbuster have spent the last few years lowering their prices, creating more and more types of plans to have the lowest prices. But lately, Blockbuster has been in trouble. And, just in time for a new school year, Netflix announced today that it was raising prices by 60% come September 1. That makes my example even better! Netflix has a monopoly, Blockbuster enters with a lower price, Netflix responds by lowering their prices, and tit-for-tat until Blockbuster is in trouble, closing stores down all over the place. So, what does Neflix do? They see less competition and raise their prices. Full circle. I love it.

Picking boys over girls

I start almost every class I teach with a sort of overview of economics and what kind of research I do. My favorite thing to do is throw out facts that seem controversial and get my students a bit riled up. In that vein, my favorite fact to throw out is that if you give money to women, they spend it differently than if you give money to men. I, of course, phrase it slightly more contentiously, claiming that men buy booze and cigarettes and women buy books. In the simplest terms, women are likely to spend an extra dollar on their children, while men are likely to spend an extra dollar on themselves, particularly in the developing world. This is a generalization, of course, and reflects averages, and doesn’t necessarily preclude that men will spend any money on their children. They of course are spending money on their children.

A new strand of literature, in fact, is attempting to tease out exactly how men and women spend money on their children, and in particular, whether there are differences by gender of the child. One of my advisors is very active in this literature and has a recent paper* in the AER on expenditures on children in Mexican immigrant families. She shows that the absence of a male head of household, through migration to the US, shifts resources towards female children. As men send remittances home, women make the decisions about how to spend the money, and thus spend more on girls. When the male heads return, and thus the man resumes decision-making power on expenditures, resources shift back towards the boys. As much as my students might think I’m crazy or sexist, who is making decisions in a household is of extreme importance in determining expenditure allocations.

*Antman, Francisca M. 2011. “Migration and Gender Discrimination Among Children Left Behind.” American Economic Review 100:3, 645-649.

Revictimizing the victim

Since I posted here about Mac McClelland’s piece on her own PTSD, and how she used violent sex to lift herself out of it, I thought it appropriate to give voice to one of her sources. A Haitian woman whose experiences were tweeted by McClelland has found the means to say that she never gave McClelland permission to share her story in such a way. The author here even suggests that McClelland put her source’s life in danger.

There’s a fine line when we choose to share someone else’ experiences through any media outlet, be it social media, a newspaper or an online magazine. I don’t remember who said it, but I was once told that in order to be a good reporter, you have to be warm enough to earn people’s trust, and then callous enough to betray it by telling their story to the world.

We’re all talking more about the problem of rape in war-torn or disaster-affected countries as a result of this story, I’m sure. Haiti, Congo, Syria. Not many of us likely have ideas about how to fix it, but I think we can all agree that retraumatizing a victim does not add up to good work.

A lawyer, an economist and a social psychologist walk into a bar…

Over the last few months, I’ve been hard at work on an amazing project with two even more amazing coauthors. Through my undergrad, I’ve come into contact with so many fantastically smart people and as we all grow professionally, we’re starting to collaborate and work together on various academic projects. It just so happens that this most recent collaboration was proposed to me by a lawyer, to write a handbook chapter on gender-based violence, or GBV, from a social psychology perspective, with the other coauthor being a social psychologist. It starts to sound like a joke, but I promise it’s not.

I delved into this world of social psychology with some trepidation. My advisors expressed their qualms about the project, and not just because it would take time away from finishing my dissertation (it has, but it’s all going to get done). Academics in general, and economists in particular, are wary of crossing disciplinary lines, and there are good reasons for that hesitation. We’ve all been “raised” in very different academic environments, with not only different advisors, but different canonical texts, different standards for what constitutes research, for what constitutes a conclusion, different styles of writing, of citation, etc. In this light, our differences can seem overwhelming, to the point of excluding all possibility of collaboration. When it comes down to it, though, we’re all interested in asking interesting questions and finding answers to them. It’s that curiosity, that drive to solve problems, that I think unites us as academics. Certainly, we all took these (at least theoretical) pay cuts for a reason other than “summers off”.

In the research I did for this paper, and am still doing as organizations get back to me, and more sources and programs come to light, has opened up a whole new world in terms of how we present information. While I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we ask questions, and particularly survey questions, I’ve spent less time in thinking about how we present information to change behavior. It’s easy to agree that gender-based violence is an undesirable outcome, but with the wealth of experience that tells us how easily we can alienate those we try to teach, how teaching can backfire in the face of culture and how unique individual situations are, it’s harder to say that we know how to combat it.

Programs that follow the dicta of social norms marketing fall squarely in this idea of how do we present information to change behavior. It’s a term that at first confused me, the economist, but quickly took hold. We talk about social norms all the time from what constitutes appropriate dinner talk to the acceptability of practices like FGM or honor killings in certain communities. As regards gender-based violence social norms, is gender-based violence acceptable? Or, rather, are there certain situations under which beating your wife is acceptable? We find that the answers to these questions are rather different, and how we pose them to survey respondents greatly affects the data to come out of such surveys.

The marketing part is the presentation of information. Through pamphlets or television shows or radio programs, advertisements, participatory workshops or events, social norms marketers try to present information about social norms, or rather present information about desirable social norms, using methods that are familiar, or not. Some of the most successful social norms marketing programs for gender-based violence rely on what are essentially soap operas and likable characters to portray desirable behavior.

Perhaps it’s my relatively naivete in the subject, but it really warms my heart to see new campaigns like this coming out. While in all reality, they really haven’t been sufficiently evaluated, the glimmers of promise in their success at creating desirable social norms around violence (it’s not okay to hit your wife, ever; rape is not something real men do, etc) bode well.

My coauthor recently sent me these videos from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, featuring a famous Congolese rapper in various roles portraying strong, loving, respectful real men. Real men who make their wives dinner when they’re late coming home from work instead of beating them and real men who treat women as equals instead of demanding sexual favors in return for employment. The videos don’t have subtitles and I don’t speak much French, but they’re cool nonetheless. I don’t see them winning an Oscar by any means, but hopefully they’ll change someone’s mind.

The Westerns

I’ve just returned from San Diego, where I took part in the annual conference of the Western Economic Association and spent a little time with some very good friends I don’t get to see nearly often enough.

I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I didn’t spend perhaps as much time at the conference as I have spent at others, but I did chair a session and present and even caught a few oher papers. My experience last year with the Westerns was that the quality of papers was exceptionally disheartening. The conference is traditionally grad student friendly, and due to its size, the call for papers ends just short of seven months before the conference. I’m not sure whether these things contribute to average quality, or the fact that it’s always in a fun, beautiful, outdoorsy place during the summer, but not many people seemed to put much thought into what they were presenting last year. I could have also just been extremely unfortunate in my choice of sessions.

In my session, I presented my job market paper, “Match Quality and Maternal Investments”, in which I tease out the association between subjective quality of a romantic relationship and investments in children’s cognitive skills. The session was well-attended and my paper well-received. I had fun presenting it (even though my heart was still beating a million miles a minute from having lost and magically found my flash drive only moments before). I’ve presented the paper so many times now that I can feel it calling at me to get out. Go forth and publish! Or at least go forth and submit (and wait, and submit, and wait, sorry, this wasn’t supposed to be commentary on publishing lags in economics).

I thought my session particularly interesting because we had four papers dealing with divorce and union dissolution in four very different ways. I discussed a paper by Risa Kumazawa of Duquense University on the effects of divorce on children’s educational attainment. A fellow CU grad student discussed her paper on spillover effects of divorce laws on marriage markets using LMAs and divorce law changes. And Claudia Smith of Grand Valley State discussed the effects of immigration policy on divorce and marriage. I was really impressed with all the papers and I’m excited to see them develop.

I also fully survived my first chair experience, keeping everyone within the time limit and being sufficiently organized. I’m sure someone is dying to make a joke about the diversity of my participants, but we had a great international group and I got to see a lot of papers about migration and labor market participation that I might have otherwise never seen. All in all, I was really pleased with the conference.

The Westerns are great because they give access to everyone. Their paper acceptance rate is high and while it increases the variability in quality, it definitely allows for a broad spectrum of ideas to come from lots of places, which is really fun. Next year, it’s in San Francisco and will hit my own hometown of Denver before going to Hawaii in 2016. I think I can get behind all of those stops.

Happy Fourth of July!

More trouble for asylum seekers?

The former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been released from house arrest following revelations that his alleged victim may not be the most credible. I’ve seen several posts from friends, namely those associated witH Duke in some way, hearkening back to the Duke lacrosse case.
There are similarities, it seems, but a looming concern is how this might affect asylum seekers. Last week, journalist Jose Antonio Vargas published an inspired piece on his struggle to remain in the US, but likely fueled a lot of the “immigrants are all criminals” set with his tales of fudging papers ad skirting laws to retain some status. Now, with DSK’s accuser accused of lying on her own asylum application and possibly exaggerating the danger she faced in her home country, it’s hard to know what the impact will be. I fear that women who come seeking asylum with similar stories of repression will find it even harder to find relief in a system in which the odds are already stacked against them.

Ploughs vs. sticks

There is small strain of the economics literature that deals with religion and culture and tries to take these things at face value. While much of economics (and economists) take culture out of the picture when creating models, there are whole conferences devoted to how culture influences our decision-making.

Much of the reason that culture is often excluded from economic models is that it is, or at least seems, endogenous. Culture determines our decisions which determines our culture, so we have a chicken-and-egg argument. You could say, then, that the point of the field of Economic History—which aims to bring economic reasoning to historical events and data–is to tease out which came first, the culture or the decision, the tradition or the allocation.

A recent paper by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano and Nathan Nunn tackles this chicken-and-egg question by comparing places where the plough was readily adopted and places where more labor (digging with sticks, weeding by hand) than capital prevailed as the dominant agricultural tool. They argue that fertility, or how many children one decides to have, was influenced on a societal level by the adoption of the plough. The reasoning is rather straightforward. The plough, as a labor-saving device, reduced the need for women and children in the fields, thus creating a less egalitarian culture–where women stayed at home instead of working outside the home–and one where women had less children.

They note the fertility result as surprising; their original hypothesis had been that a plough would increase fertility as it increased the time mothers would have to bear children. I don’t find it particularly surprising, knowing it takes a lot of hands to run a farm, but I do think it’s an interesting attempt to identify the source of cultural norms.

The evolution of marriage

Mark Oppenheimer has a semi-profile of Dan Savage, semi-critique of modern marriage in the NYTimes Magazine this weekend. Savages suggests that as we begin to expand the definition of marriage to include gay couples (as NY did last week and RI sort of did yesterday), we might also want to decrease our expectations around fidelity.

Interesting quote:

“In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women ‘the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,’ we extended to men the confines women had always endured. ‘And it’s been a disaster for marriage.’ ”

Savage argues that before feminist movements sought marriage equality, men ran around with concubines and mistresses and it was mostly accepted. While this is a rather sweeping generalization, it is interesting to think about what would have happened if marriage had become more egalitarian in the sense that women were allowed to pall around, as opposed to men now being held to higher standards.

My interest in the subject is less on the benefits of nonmonogamy, and more on how a culture of “working through” cheating would affect divorce rates and children.

A number of papers in economics have recently tried to tease out the effect of divorce on children, but the trend, as Savage suggests, is towards advocating stability over monogamy. It’s not that he’s saying nonmonogamy for all, necessarily, just “the cultural expectation should be if there’s infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.” When most of these papers talk about stability, they often refer to the mother having more than one partner or the father moving in and out of the picture multiple times, but the divorce brings a lot of trauma regardless of whether the parents ever remarry. The negative affects appear to be amplified when you add in new boyfriends and step-parents.

My research, however, shows that some of the negative effects may be in place whether or not the couple ever divorces. A lot of the economic reasoning behind the findings suggests that people are forward-looking and adjust their behavior (particularly investment in children) in anticipation of divorce. So, if we create a culture whereby sticking it out is the norm, we essentially raise the costs of divorce by increasing public admonition or shunning by peers or some other means. We could think about retreating from no-fault and unilateral divorce laws, but let’s say we don’t want to return to those dark ages, either.

We raise the costs of divorce and if we succeed, we keep more marriages intact. But if negative effects are in place before, or even in the absence of, divorce, and can be attributed to something other than anticipation of divorce, then we don’t really solve the problem of hurting kids. We maintain stability, in some sense, as a parent or parent’s lover isn’t walking in and out constantly, but kids aren’t stupid. Especially older children will likely notice something is amiss, behavior will change and we’ll still likely see negative effects. Will they be measureable? Will they be significant enough to observe? Perhaps not on average, but I don’t think asking parents to stay together, unhappy, solves the problem.

The other large problem with raising the costs of divorce is differentiating between socially acceptable causes for divorce and not socially acceptable causes. If we say that one-night stands should be overlooked, what about a weekend fling? Or a two-week fling? Or a month-long tete-a-tete? Where do we draw the line? Savage realizes the Schwarzeneggers, for instance, were doomed, but what’s in the middle? And the intersection of cheating and intimate partner violence is much larger than I think Savage realizes. Infidelity is often a tool of abuse and while a culture that overlooks a fling might seem a big leap from a culture that overlooks a slap or controlling money or a broken arm, I think we’re far enough down that road already.

To his credit, Savage advocates each couple figuring the process out for themselves. Monogamy, he says, still works for some couples even if it doesn’t work for all. Keeping it together for the kids may seem like a noble goal, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all goal, and the associated negative externalities could be large.

Not about economics, but

This piece in Good Media by a female journalist about her PTSD isn’t about economics. But it is about sex and gender and violence and feelings we don’t necessarily understand. In the words of a friend, “this piece devastated me.”