socialfactoids

Savings Bonds at Tax Time

2009-09-08T17:41:00.005-04:00

Obama says: "We cannot continue on this course. And we certainly cannot go back to an economy based on inflated profits and maxed-out credit cards; the cycles of speculative booms and painful busts; a system that put the interests of the short-term ahead of the needs of long-term. We have to revive this economy and rebuild it stronger than before. And making sure that folks have the opportunity and incentive to save – for a home or college, for retirement or a rainy day – is essential to that effort. If you work hard and meet your responsibilities, this country is going to honor our collective responsibility to you: to ensure that you can save and secure your retirement. That is why we are announcing several common-sense changes that will help families put away money for the future. We’ll make it easier for people to save their federal tax refunds, which 100 million families receive. Today, if you have a retirement account, you can have your refund deposited directly into your account. With this change, we’ll make it easier for those without retirement plans to save their refunds as well. You’ll be able to check a box on your tax return to receive your refund as a savings bond."

D2D Fund has been one of the prime movers behind this for the past few years. So congratulations to them for all their amazing work on this issue! Some of the early impetus for this work came was back in 2005 when Peter Tufano and I published a piece laying out a number of ideas for reforming Savings Bond policy. One of them, inspired by an archival find in some old bound copies of IRS tax data, was the Treasury re-instate the savings bond purchase option that had been available in the 1960s.

Final thought, I heard Bob Reich this morning talking, as others have, about how household savings appears to be good for individuals (as eloquently stated above) but possibly bad for the economy as a whole which needs spending and stimulus. Obama's approach to this issue in his comments is interesting. He doesn't engage with the issue that Reich raises. Instead, he seems to focus on increased household saving as emblematic of a kind of more general cultural shift that he is trying to generate in the macro-economy.

Less is More?

2009-08-14T15:14:00.005-04:00

One piece of conventional wisdom suggests that more is more, at least when it comes to academic CVs. It is not unusual to see senior faculty with CV's that run into the several dozen pages. We eager graduate students often seek to emulate that, but generally have much less to work with - thus the kitchen sink makes it on the Vitae page. The plus side to this is that we put it all out there and make public all the departmental service, presentations, unpublished papers, and so on that we've spent time on.

I'm wondering what the negative is. Would we be better served to throw "selected" before each section heading and only put on the really good stuff? Perhaps it's just overload to list your 200 presentations at inter-departmental seminars and regional meetings rather than your 2 ASA talks? Maybe better to forget the minor publications and just list that one big paper (for those mythical grad students who have it)?

I guess the real question here is if "junk" somehow diminishes the really good stuff. Are we better off leaving it off?

Advisable? Ethical? Obvious?

Annals of Self-Promotion: ASA

2009-08-09T07:48:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be presenting my paper "Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation" at the ASA session on Gender, The Economy, and Work. It's coming up at 12:30pm Sunday the 9th in the Hilton, Union Square 3-4, 4th floor.

Viviana Zelizer will be the discussant and there are three other excellent-sounding papers.

Savings and Gambling

2009-08-08T00:14:00.001-04:00

OK. Here’s how it works: You buy a lottery ticket for a $1 and at the end of the week, there’s a drawing to see which entrants will win the large cash prizes. Then, next week, the same thing happens again, except, you don’t need to buy a new ticket to enter. And, whenever you want, you can have your $1 back. Sound good?

Then you are just the latest to discover the allure of prize-linked savings products.

This past week, the FDIC’s Committee on Economic Inclusion (ComE-IN) took up the topic of prize-linked savings and heard from Peter Tufano about some new results from a pilot program run by a set of credit unions in the US. Prize-linked savings products have not been used widely in the US, but have proven very successful elsewhere around the world (the UK’s premium bond is perhaps the best known example). Mauro Guillen at Penn has a nice overview piece about these products and I’ve co-authored (along with Peter, Shawn Cole, and Daryl Collins) an HBS case study about the efforts of a South African bank to implement a similar product.

From a policy perspective, prize linked savings products are appealing because they have the potential to motivate small savers who might find the basically negligible interest earned on a $100 or even $1,000 balance to be weak incentive to save.

From a design perspective, these products work by pooling the small interest payments usually made to each individual who saves in a traditional bank account into one or several very large cash prizes and then awarding those prizes randomly to one or several savers. Each dollar invested generally earns the saver one chance at winning and while the chances of winning are certainly small, as evidenced by the success of state lotteries, that isn’t much of a deterrent to participation. But, while in state lotteries your entry stake is forfeited after each drawing, here your stake is simply your savings.

In essence, the marketing pitch is "you buy the first ticket, the rest are on us, and your money back (and maybe a whole lot more)."

Annals of Self-Promotion: SSSP Presentation

2009-08-06T20:45:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be presenting my paper on wealth and marriage at the SSSP Annual Meetings in San Francisco on Saturday. Come check it out if you'll be around.

ATUS in Action

2009-08-01T23:47:00.002-04:00

Very cool new interactive graphic on the NYT website that makes use of ATUS data to provide some demographic breakdowns of how Americans spend their time.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Clicking on any of the striations of the chart brings up averages (by group), data that has already been easily accessible in the BLS's own tables. But, seeing the time distribution of tasks is really interesting and not something that I've seen much of before.

I've mostly focused on housework in my use of the ATUS data and I was struck here by how much housework still gets done in the middle of the day. Some of that is being done by retired folks, but a lot of it seems to be attributable to people not in the labor force.

Totally unrelated to housework, I was struck by how little time Americans spend on average on the internet - just about 8 minutes a day. I'm feeling pretty atypical. Also, really interesting to compare sleep schedules by age and race. Perhaps we're seeing a night shift effect in the different distributions of day-time sleep by race?

Annals of Somebody Should Make A: CV Repository

2009-06-04T22:55:00.000-04:00

When I'm working on a lit review or learning a new area of research, my main resources are academic search tools like google scholar. But, once I identify a key author in the literature, I also often check out that person's CV to get a quick summary of everything he or she has written on the topic. That works well for folks who are still active. But, it doesn't work at all for scholars who were researching before the age of online CVs and it won't work so well when folks who currently have their CVs online start retiring.

So: Somebody should make an online repository of CVs, each archived at the point when faculty retire and reflective of their whole publication record. Participation would be voluntary, but I have the feeling most academics would be willing to have their CVs preserved for posterity. This kind of thing could also be useful for resarch on the profession, such as charting out networks of collaboration based on where people spent time as faculty members.

The New Normal?

2009-05-26T15:03:00.000-04:00

there's an interesting report on insidehighered that graduate schools across the country, especially private universities, will have smaller cohorts of PhD students for next year. That basically fits with the experience of our department where the size of the incoming cohort for next year has dropped as well:

2009 12
2008 17
2007 13
2006 10
2005 12
2004 8
2003 14
2002 6
2001 10
2000 8

One way to look at this is to argue that it is a wise and realistic response to declining job prospects for PhD students given nationwide university cutbacks that will lead to fewer tenure track jobs in the years to come. The counterpoint to that might be to point out that job prospects would be a lot better if universities were not moving rapidly towards more and more adjunct and part-time positions (as discussed over at scatterplot).

But, I think there is also another way to see this. The incoming cohort of 12 (in our department) is only a reduction relative to the last couple of years. Over the past ten years, the department had an average cohort size of 11 and, between 2000 and 2006, cohort size only went above 10 twice. In fact, this incoming cohort of 12 looks pretty big if you take away the last two years.

Maybe it's not so much that private universities are broke like never before, but rather that they just feel broke compared to the shockingly flush last few years. As my office mate says, it's all about relative deprivation.

In this vein, I'd be curious to see how far private university endowments have fallen not just relative to the past couple of years (we know those declines were immense), but how they now stand relative to 2005 or 2004 levels.

This is Integration?

2009-05-24T09:14:00.004-04:00

As reported in the NYT, interior decorator Garrow Kedigan "loves the eclecticism of the Upper East Side," he says,

everywhere else in New York is a segregated community,

But not the upper east side!

I see Eliot Spitzer on the sidewalk everyday and I see the homeless people in front of All Soul's Church, and Sting's personal assistant lives downstairs.

I'll grant that Eliot Spitzer and Sting (so perhaps his personal assistant by extension) are quite unlike almost everyone else. But, really?! This is what integration looks like? Oy.

Marriage in the News

2009-05-22T17:53:00.005-04:00

Brad Wilcox has an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal (thank you Google Alerts) on the recent CDC report that I posted about previously. He argues that the real story is not in the uptick in teen births but rather in the continued rise in non-marital fertility. Expressing concern, he revisits some of the voluminous sociological literature on the potential negative effects on child outcomes associated with growing up in a non-marital households.

Let's just set aside the endless debates over causality and selection in this literature. The more interesting thing here is in the final paragraphs of Wilcox's column. He writes:

The meaning of marriage in the U. S. has changed over the past 40 years. As sociologist Andrew Cherlin has noted, marriage used to be the "foundation" for adulthood, sex, intimacy and childbearing. Now, marriage is viewed by many Americans as a "capstone" that signals that a couple has arrived -- financially, professionally and emotionally.

This also helps to explain why college-educated mothers are bucking the trend toward having children out of wedlock. It is easier for these women to attain the level of achievement that the newer, luxury model of marriage before childbearing requires. Only 7% of college-educated women are having children out of wedlock, compared with more than 50% of women with a high-school degree or less, according to a recent Child Trends study.

I basically agree with this and I've previously posted on evidence from my own work that the "level of achievement that the newer, luxury model of marriage before childbearing requires" has changed to include asset ownership in addition to completed education and steady income. But, Wilcox raises an interesting issue ("young Americans have been postponing marriage, but they are not postponing sex and cohabitation") that he (or anyone else I've talked to) is not really able to figure out. Why has marriage changed in such a different way from fertility? Why has the economic standard for marriage risen while the standard for childbearing has not?

Chronicle of Higher Education Gets Snarky

2009-05-21T14:01:00.003-04:00

I really like the Chronicle of Higher Education's column on unsurprising research results:

No Kidding

looking back through the archive, pretty much all of the studies are either medical or psychological. I think that the column might also find some good material in the behavioral economics literature. As much as I'm often fascinated by some of those findings , there is at times a sense of having just read a very careful (often experimental!) proof of the obvious (e.g. marketing works, making something easier makes it more likely that people will do it, etc...)

Anthropolgy - better paid faculty and better paid grad students too!

2009-05-20T22:10:00.000-04:00

Over at scatterplot, Jeremy notes that the latest salary data shows that anthropologists get paid more than sociologists on average. He then has various unkind words about anthropology.

But, while National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships are overwhelmingly concentrated in the "hard" sciences, among the social science awards, anthro beats sociology.

Students in social science disciplines get about 11% of these awards on average (2005 - 2009). Here's the breakdown by year for the four social science fields with the most awards. I guess I was somewhat surprised that anthropology got so many awards and political science relatively few. But, hey, I guess the pay is better in anthropology than sociology for both graduate students and faculty.

One other note: When I've talked with other folks here in sociology and demography about the break-down between the social sciences and the "hard" sciences, their responses have generally been something like "too bad for us, but that's probably about right in terms of national priorities." Thoughts on that?

Archeological Survey Research

2009-05-18T11:19:00.001-04:00

It strikes me that one of the cooler trends in Sociology is what we might call archeological survey research. Historians (and historical sociologists) have long relied on archival material for empirical research. Now, fifty or sixty years after the advent of modern survey research, researchers are able to excavate the records of surveys conducted in those first years and revisit the data. That can mean finding old tapes or even original surveys, re-entering data, and re-analyzing these materials.

It can also mean adding to those surveys by conducting new interviews. There's a recent New Yorker piece about a classic psychological study done at Stanford on self-control that exemplifies this aspect of this trend - tracking down respondents from these early studies and re-interviewing them. Eddie Telles and his colleagues also did this kind of thing, uncovering long forgotten data and then following-up with the respondents and their descendants to construct a really remarkable inter-generational data set.

This method of research differs from traditional archival research in that the historical records in these cases were created by social scientists, forgotten and then resurrected. I saw an interesting talk by Steve Ruggles at PAA where he showed some photos from the IPUMS project to give a sense of what this kind of "archeology" actually entails - finding old tapes in dusty storerooms, cleaning them carefully, and recreating data sets.

Predicted vs. Observed Values and Inference about Social Change

2009-05-16T22:42:00.000-04:00

Richard Florida (he of orgtheory whisper ASA presidency campaign fame) links to a some interesting work by Nate Silver on Americans' driving habits.

Silver fits a model of average monthly miles driven between 1980 and 2009 based on gas prices and unemployment, adjusted for seasonality and a general upward time trend. He produces a nice graphical display that shows that recently, observed behavior has radically diverged from the predicted values. Silver then suggests that this deviation might portend a shift in American driving culture.

My first response was to worry that Silver had just left out some key variables from his models and that including them would realign the predicted and actual values. However, his model seems to fit the observed data pretty well in prior periods.

This then seems like it could be an interesting approach to assessing changes in behavior. If sociologists can build reasonably well-fitting models and then point to times in which observed behavior deviated from predicted values, can they then point to "social change"? It's important to note here that Silver's model doesn't have anything to say about why things may have changed, only that they may have.

Non Nonmarital Fertility in Japan

2009-05-14T13:09:00.002-04:00

The Times has a story on a new report from the CDC on non-marital fertility in the United States. The key finding is that non-marital births now account for about 40% of all births in the United States, the highest level basically ever. The article has some nice quotes from Wendy Manning (Professor of Sociology at BGSU and current president of that ASA section on Sociology of Population) laying out the debate over the connection between child outcomes and family type.

One thing that jumped out to me in all of this was Japan. The US is basically in the middle of the pack of developed countries in terms of the share of births that are to unmarried mothers. Iceland leads the way at 66% while Italy and Spain lag at around 25% (though these rates mean very different things for how kids fare because of real differences in how cohabitation works in the US as compared with other countries). But, Japan! The share of births to unmarried mothers doubled in Japan between 1980 and 2000. Doubled! From 1% to 2%.

who wants to go on a choo choo train!?

2009-05-14T12:38:00.006-04:00

so most of the time I really like being a grad student and being able to carry my work around with me on my laptop. I end up getting a lot of work done at this cafe pretty near to our house. It's me, Avi (the owner), and a couple of other work-from-home types (a fact checker, a writer, and a lawyer who seems to conduct all his business by pacing around outside the cafe, smoking cigars, and yelling into his cellphone). the problem is that today it's me, Avi, the writer and 20 screaming toddlers, their parents (all moms), and a lady with a guitar. "Hurry hurry put out the fire, ding ding ding ding ding" Yes, it's "Mommy and Me" afternoon. oy vey.

OK. now the people on the bus are going up and down. kind of drowns out Gottschalk and Danziger on earnings inequality....

Arrg I kill you filthy!

2009-05-13T21:20:00.007-04:00

Not because I'm the first to notice it, but because it is one of the best things I've ever seen: John Levi Martin's Guide to Red Marks.

Wealth and Marriage

2009-05-12T11:01:00.005-04:00

Marketplace had a fascinating segment in their Morning Report today on NPR. The story begins with the anchor, Bill Radke, asking the show's China corespondent, Scott Tong, about the idea of a "Chinese Dream" that might be the analog to the "American Dream." After a bit of cultural sensitivity training (it's a big misconception, Bill, to think that "everyone else in the world probably lives and thinks like we do"), Scott Tong reports some really interesting stuff about the connection between home ownership and marriage in contemporary China.

The exchange goes like this:

TONG: Well, the one thing you can have in China that buys you a piece of the rock is owning your own place. And so it is almost a national obsession.

RADKE: What is this drive to own property done to social life in China?

TONG: Well here's one giant implication. If you run this question by single guys in Shanghai or any city in China what they'll tell you is if you don't own your own place, you basically can't get hitched. The women will say no. And it sounds like a joke and it sounds funny, but except that it's true. A lot of women will say, 'you know, I need some kind of financial stability in the mate that I pick.' And what does that mean in China? It means owning your own place.

I've been writing about this phenomenon in the United States. In my research, I find that wealth has become an important pre-requisite of marriage in the United States. Having some money in the bank, owning a car, and owning a home significantly raises young people's odds of first marriage, even after adjusting for income, education, and family background. Moreover, this link has become stronger across cohorts.

One implication of this increasing emphasis on wealth as pre-requisite of marriage in the United States is that sub-groups of the population, like blacks and the less educated, that are particularly wealth-poor have much more difficulty meeting these standards for marriage. In fact, taking account of wealth helps to explain some of the gaps in marriage behavior that have emerged along the lines of race and education.

I haven't thought much about this outside of the US context, but we do know from some classics in historical demography that wealth was an important pre-requisite of marriage in Europe all through the 19th and early 20th Centuries. It would be cool to try to think cross-nationally and historically in a more general, synthetic and theoretical way about how development, inequality, and demography fit together to shape these cultural standards of marriagability and affect marriage behavior.

Liz Lemon on Father Absence and Child Wellbeing

2009-05-12T08:33:00.000-04:00

"Look, Jack, I don't have a lot personal life experience, but if I have learned anything from my Sims family, when a child doesn't see his father enough he starts to jump up and down and then his mood level will drop until he pees himself"

Mortgage Modification

2009-05-11T11:49:00.000-04:00

NYT reports that:

"So far, the federal programs to reduce foreclosures have largely fallen flat, particularly the Hope for Homeowners program approved by Congress last summer. Only one mortgage was modified under the program, which lawmakers had hoped would help as many as 400,000 homeowners."

One!?

No More 401K So The Professor Will Stay?

2009-05-08T14:32:00.008-04:00

Insidehighered reports on results from a new TIAA-CREF survey of plan participants suggesting that faculty members may be delaying plans for retirement as a consequence of stock market losses and home value depreciation. The implication is that fewer people retiring will lead to fewer people getting hired.

The article doesn't reveal much about the survey's methods which raises some questions. For instance, I wonder to what extent respondents who report planning to delay retirement were about to retire anyway. The sample was simply limited to people over 50, so it could well be that many of those who are now reporting plans to delay retirement weren't originally going to retire for some time anyway. I could imagine that if your retirement account had declined in value substantially but not catestrophically and you had really definite plans to retire you might do so anyway. But, if retirement still felt fairly remote, you might report planning to delay it even further.

I think the more interesting question though is what effects a general delay in retirement, if it really did happen, would have on academic fields. In some ways, this is a nice natural experiment to look at how the age/seniority structure of academic fields affects the intellectual output of those fieldz. Will we see fewer new theoretical positions or fewer new methodological advances emerge as a consequence of this shift towards fields being composed of a larger share of senior scholars?

Q: where do (fancy-shmancy) sociology professors come from?

2009-05-02T11:05:00.001-04:00

A: they come from other fancy-shmancy places.

I went through the CVs of faculty at the top 26 sociology departments (at least according to US News) and checked where they received their PhDs. There are 876 faculty members all together at these 26 departments. This chart shows the percent earning their PhD from each of those same 26 departments, other US departments, or abroad.

Nearly 10% of faculty at the top 26 departments earned their PhD from Chicago. About 60% of faculty earned their PhD from one of just 10 departments. Just 13% came from a US institution other than one of the top 26.

More on this in future posts.

Disclaimer: data were coded by hand (by me) in a frenzy of procrastination. must be some errors in there.

on the ground responses to the foreclosure crisis

2009-04-30T23:09:00.000-04:00

I was lucky enough to catch a talk by Wayne Meyer at the Rutgers 2009 Conference on Community Development. Meyer is Housing Director at Housing and Neighborhood Development Services, Inc. (HANDS) in NJ.

He talked about how HANDS has had a long-term commitment to rehabbing abandoned housing in Orange and East Orange Counties outside of Newark. The organization conducted annual censuses of the housing in those areas to keep track of their progress and for at least a decade they had made steady headway. In 2007, their data pointed to an unexpected reversal. The number of abandoned properties in their area was increasing. HANDS' intensive community involvement basically provided an early warning of the crisis to come.

Wayne gave an amazing and passionate presentation about how HANDS has since worked to cope with the downturn. The core of his presentation revolved around the organization's effort to bulk purchase about 40 non-performing loans from WaMu. He made a couple of interesting points on this:

1. He argued that there's basically a prisoner's dilemma in terms of purchasing foreclosed property in neighborhoods heavily affected by the crisis. A private individual can purchase a house, but the property values of that first mover are basically determined by whether anyone will follow her lead. So no one wants to be the first mover. By purchasing non-performing loans in bulk and carefully rehabing the properties, HANDS can eliminate that disencentive and can make it much less risky for other private actors to step in.

2. WaMu was really reluctant to sell the loans, and it seemed like at least in part because doing so would mean valuing the loans at their actual fair market value. Marking to market was just not that appealing for the bank. When Wayne finally convinced them to sell, I imagine that they did have to report the fair market value for that pool of 40 loans. Any sense of if that valuation would have had to have been applied to comparable loans still on the bank's books?

flu and fares

2009-04-29T13:21:00.003-04:00

Are airline fares market-responsive? Maybe a little. Here's a recent chart from Kayak of fares between JFK and MEX for flights on June 1st. Looks like a pretty sharp drop around the same time the swine flu news broke.

Annals of Self Promotion: PAA Talk

2009-04-29T09:42:00.003-04:00

I'm going to be presenting my paper "Norms and Nuptials: The Changing Social Price of Marriage" at the PAA session on Marriage and Union Formation (Thursday, April 30th from 1:30pm - 3:20pm).

The paper argues that wealth has become an important economic pre-requisite of marriage and that inequality in wealth ownership by race and education in the face of a commonly held wealth-based standard of marriage can help to explain emergent gaps in first marriage timing by race and education.

general exams come to life

2009-04-29T09:34:00.003-04:00

A number of news outlets have reported on the high mortality rates for the swine flu. In turn, some blogs (Andrew Sullivan and TPM) have pointed out that the current mortality rate is probably biased by an over-reporting of deaths and an under-reporting of less serious cases.

This whole debate reminded me of a question from an old general exam in demography here at OPR. The 2003 general asks:

"As of 17 May, there had been 7761 cases of SARAS and 623 SARS deaths reported by WHO. Both the media and WHO have stated that the case fatality rate (the proportion of people diagnosed with SARS who die) is 623/7761=8%. Why is this estimate biased?"

It thought it was cool that the general mirrored a current issue and depressing that I spent enough time studying for it that I remember the old exam questions...

putting your money where your science is

2009-04-28T20:40:00.000-04:00

Obama says "My budget also triples the number of National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships. This program was created as part of the Space Race five decades ago. In the decades since, it’s remained largely the same size – even as the numbers of students who seek these fellowships has skyrocketed. We ought to be supporting these young people who are pursuing scientific careers, not putting obstacles in their path."