CCSS Grants

Linking Public & Private Food Assistance Through Admin. Data

We will build a database linking administrative records on public and private food assistance in New York State, for the first time directly tying benefits data on federal programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), with usage data from private providers, starting with the Food Bank of the Southern Tier (FBST), which serves our six county region. This platform will enable novel research on private and public food assistance programs and lay the foundation for integration of other administrative records for Cornell researchers.

 

Decoding Tacit Knowledge in Apparel Product Development

Apparel product development is an iterative problem solving process that is heuristic in nature, and involves turning 2D flat patterns into a 3D garment that would fit human anatomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, apparel companies have started using 2D/3D digital product development rather than conducting in-person fit sessions. This new way of working changed the mechanism of how tacit knowledge is created and disseminated. The digital transformation trend in product development will accelerate in the post-pandemic era, therefore it would be crucial to understand the dynamics as well as the types of information generated during product development meetings to translate this information into digital realm to better support the future of work in the apparel industry.

 

Growing Denser and Greener: Lessons From the Emerald City

This project is part of a large-scale project on the relationship between urban planning and urban forestry, using the City of Seattle, Washington as a laboratory. In particular, the project involves the production of a data infrastructure system that will be used to investigate: (i) the degree to which urban planning and urban forestry are, or ought to be, pursued as joint enterprises; (ii) the effectiveness of urban forestry in helping Seattle meet its densification requirements under Washington State's Growth Management Act; (iii) the value of social capital accumulated through the linkage of state and local policies aimed at improving quality of life; and (iv) generalizable lessons that can be used to inform policy in other cities, including the economics of arboriculture.

 

Toward Preventing Racial Bias: The Role of Dialect

People’s behaviors are often biased by race, in and out of the laboratory. Stereotypes linking African Americans with violent crime lead to systematic biases in basic perception and action, which can have deadly consequences for Black people. For decades, psychologists have studied racially biased behavior by exposing experimental participants to images of individuals with Black or White skin. Yet, skin color is only one potential trigger of biased behavior. Beyond the lab people make social evaluations, including threat assessments, based on multimodal cues; the way people talk is a powerful cue to their social identity. In the proposed studies, we will investigate how hearing a spoken dialect associated with Black or White Americans can influence racially biased behavior in simulated life-or-death situations(e.g., shoot/don’t shoot decisions). This research may lead to more effective police training, helping officers to combat racial bias based not only on how others look but also on how they sound.  

 

Interpretable AI and Big Data Analytics with Applications in Finance

Economists and social scientists are increasingly using machine learning and AI-tools in their research, yet these tools are typically designed for engineering and science data and problems. There is also a lack of economic interpretation and adaption of AI tools in social sciences. We innovate upon cutting-edge AI tools and big data analytics for finance applications, emphasizing efficacy and economic interpretation.

One application entails reinforcement-learning-based portfolio management, an alternative that improves upon the conventional Markowitz (1952) approach, to directly optimize investors' objectives. We enhance Transformer encoder with cross-asset attention mechanism to effectively capture distinguishing features of financial data. The resulting AlphaPortfolio yields stellar out-of-sample performances even after imposing various economic and trading restrictions. We use polynomial-feature-sensitivity analysis to project the model onto linear spaces for greater transparency and interpretation. Such “economic distillations” reveal key characteristics/topics that drive investment performance. We also develop scalable textual-factor analysis to process texts to construct metrics on governance, innovation, etc., and to use natural language to interpret opaque models. Overall, our project initiates an important agenda highlight the utility of AI and machine learning tools in social sciences and provide procedures for interpreting AI and big data analytics in finance and business economics.

The second application builds upon Cong et al. (2018) that introduces a general framework for analyzing large-scale text-based data, combining the strengths of neural network language models and generative statistical modeling. Cong et al. (2018) generate textual factors by (i) representing texts using vector word embedding, (ii) clustering words using locality-sensitive hashing, and (iii) identifying spanning vector clusters through topic modeling. Their data-driven approach captures complex linguistic structures while ensuring computational scalability and economic interpretability. They then apply textual factor analysis to extract and summarize information from regulatory filings such as proxy statements and texts from media/websites such as analyst reports in order to construct the first comprehensive text-based measure of corporate governance. They use the governance measure to study the most important dimensions of governance and the interaction between governance characteristics. They also analyze the role of management’s engagement with shareholders and study how the way the management explains its governance choices affects proxy advisors’ recommendations and shareholder voting outcomes.

 

Exploring and Modeling COVID-19 Vaccination Preferences

Success of immunization programs aiming at controlling the spread of the coronavirus will depend on acceptance rates of vaccination. The main research goal of this project is to better understand and model individual decision-making under threats to health emerging from the COVID-19 outbreak, with special focus on willingness to receive vaccination once an effective and safe vaccine is available. The econometric approach of choice modeling will be adopted as main research method to derive estimates of expected acceptance rates of a COVID-19 vaccine. Choice modeling for statistical inference on behavioral response to immunization will be informed by microdata collected in an online survey across the US with attitudinal questions, stated actual behavioral change in response to the pandemic, and a suite of choice experiments looking at COVID-19 prevention and testing. Using the collected data, a hybrid choice model will be trained and tested to make posterior inference on the willingness to accept a COVID-19 vaccine. 

 

Humanity's Midlife Crisis: The Existential Deadlock of Liberalism

Liberalism may not be dead, but it is in a deadlock and existentialism holds the key. This project submits that humanity's progress towards peace and prosperity increasingly coincides with regress into mass uncertainty and unease, climaxing with the coronavirus crisis. This paradox emanates from the modern impasse of happiness and purpose, the twin facets of hope. Humanity is now undergoing an existential midlife crisis: material achievements are eclipsed by the nagging Am I happy? and the haunting What's the point? We are losing mental ground, moral face, and our sense of collective self. Decoding liberalism's deadlock, however, may help renew hope, and improve our politics. This is a book project, already under contract (CUP), which we expect to completed by late 2021. The project has a global scope, and we want to recruit RAs to help us decode this existential crisis in four big societies: Brazil, China, Japan and India.

 

Intergenerational Trauma: Flint, COVID-19 and Racial Justice

The 2014 Flint Water Crisis (FWC) was set in motion by the virtually unanimous decision of the city's unelected "emergency manager" to switch Flint, Michigan's municipal water source to the Flint River as an austerity measure. The fateful move ostensibly exposed most of Flint's 95,000 residents, most of whom are Black and lower-income, to elevated levels of lead (Pb), carcinogenic trihalomethanes, and various other contaminants. Like the FWC, the generation-defining COVID-19 virus, and the reanimated nationwide upheaval related to police brutality against Black communities, has cast the nation's historical "racist oeuvre" into sharp relief. This project proposes a series of contextually-grounded surveys and semi-structured interviews with an existing cohort of Flint residents around these intricate themes. The project's goal is to identify and contextualize potential patterns of intergenerational trauma in this population, assess health impacts and behaviors, locate areas to build resistance, resilience and community capacity against structural violence, and develop a new tool to measure intergenerational violence in the context of socially-embedded public health disasters.

 

Testing Interventions to Encourage Self-blinding

This project will test interventions to encourage self-blinding, a strategy whereby those performing social evaluations can make more objective decisions by choosing to avoid receiving certain information about a target of evaluation. For example, when grading her students' papers, a professor might choose to "blind" herself to students' names by anonymizing them, thus evaluating the papers on content alone. This project will involve experimental research with select samples (e.g., hiring managers, schoolteachers), exploring whether choices to avoid seeing or receiving potentially biasing information about a target of evaluation can be encouraged. For instance, can a lay belief that more information is always better to have in social evaluative contexts be disrupted by careful reflection? Can an intervention to induce deliberative thinking nudge hiring managers to pre-commit to self-blinding in future evaluations of job candidates? This project offers contributions to research on social perception, mental contamination, and inequality reduction in organizations.  

 

Katie Fiorella, Public Health

Understanding Fish Consumption and Fishing Effort

Approximately 10% of the global population is engaged in fisheries and their value chains. Ninety percent of global fishers work in small-scale fisheries in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), and rely on fisheries for their food and income. Yet the agriculture-nutrition linkages within small-scale fisheries are poorly captured by available data on both fish consumption and harvest effort. Such data limitations are exacerbated by the lack of integration across metrics that fail to connect patterns of fish consumption, harvest effort, and fishery sustainability to understand aquatic food systems. The proposed project will combine a literature review, analysis of existing data, and remote workshops with experts to review data collection metrics, propose improved metrics, and develop grant proposals to implement the use of improved metrics to analyze food system change, including through COVID-19, within aquatic systems.

 

The Role of Individual Inventors in the Energy Transition

Clean energy innovation is critical to reducing the costs of climate change mitigation and allowing society to avoid worst-case scenarios projected by climate scientists. Recent research in economics underscores the importance of clean innovation and provides a theoretical justification for subsidizing clean technology R&D. The details of this R&D policy, though, hinge on the role of individual energy inventors, and there is a dearth of empirical evidence on how economic incentives influence the work of these inventors. This project will fill this gap by using patent data to summarize historical patterns in inventor activity, estimate the causal effects of energy prices on clean and dirty innovation, and test for the presence of heterogeneity in inventor responses to energy prices. The results of this project will have important implications for the design of climate policy.

 

Impacts of Farmer Cooperatives: The Philippines and Colombia

There is strong interest from policymakers and donors to promote smallholder farmer cooperatives to alleviate poverty in rural areas, but more research is needed to understand their impacts on farmer livelihoods. We will develop a unique cross-sectional database to assess differences and similarities of cooperative effects in smallholder agricultural growers in the Philippines (rice) and Colombia (avocado). The data will include socioeconomic, behavioral, environmental, and production data from 1,200 cooperative members and nonmembers. We will construct models to compare and evaluate the impact of cooperative membership on critical dimensions of household welfare, including income, human and social capital creation, access to markets, and negotiation power.  

 

Closing the Gap between COVID-19 Information and Beliefs

We investigate the associations between beliefs about covid-19 infection case counts, risk perceptions, official information about covid-19 cases, and self-reported protective health behavior of individuals. We collected data between March and August 2020 using a daily online survey on MTurk (ð = 12,274) covering all 50 states + D.C., and found an inconsistency between beliefs about future infection cases and perception of infection chances, reflected by both inconsistent levels and weak correlations. Furthermore, in our data, perceptions about cases are closely related to official information while perceptions about chances risk perceptions are not; but risk perceptions are better predictors of reported behavior. Can we close this gap between information-based case perceptions and behavior-relevant risk perceptions? Our proposed research will (a) investigate whether these findings generalize to more covid-related outcomes, including economic outcomes (e.g., unemployment risk), whose baseline probabilities are much higher; and (b) attempt to close the gap between people's inconsistent sets of perceptions using different randomly assigned debiasing treatments. 

 

Training Data for Encoding Social and Political Texts

This seed grant proposal requests funding to search for and catalogue open-ended surveys in the Roper Center archives (estimated to exceed 500 open-ended surveys since the 1990s) and hand label open-ended survey responses and social media posts that are partially linked to closed-ended surveys. This data will lay the foundation for the development and validation of semi-automated tools that can representatively encode and classify public opinion, hate speech and bias, and descriptions of everyday life in text. These tools will measure very broad orientations in text (e.g. sociopolitical biases and heuristics, approaches to life and living), and, in the long run, will assist in estimating that a hand coding scheme has explained a large fraction of the relevant variation in a text corpus. Relevant refers to features of text that often predict offline behaviors, opinions and beliefs when measured in closed-ended survey responses, and outcomes related to health and well-being. 

 

Equity in Group Work between In-person and Remote Labs

The rapid shift to remote and hybrid instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed students' learning experiences. At Cornell, all introductory physics laboratories (labs) have shifted from in-person group work using standard lab equipment to remote labs where students use household materials and collaborate over Zoom. This project aims to understand how this shift changes students' interactions through a direct comparison of recorded Zoom lab sessions this fall with existing video of lab groups from Fall 2019. We will analyze the video for measures of equity in group work in physics labs to compare the students' interactions in the two formats. This work will contribute to national work seeking to understand representation issues in physics and probe potential challenges and opportunities with remote instruction.

 

Revising Anti-Vaccination Beliefs During the COVID-19 Global Pandemic

Medical research has indisputably shown that vaccines are both safe and effective, yet anti-vaccination sentiment is unusually high with regard to the COVID-19 vaccine. This increased skepticism presents a novel and dire problem for those working to counter anti-vaccination attitudes in the United States. Because the COVID-19 vaccine is still in production, previously successful interventions countering anti-vaccination attitudes that cite the history of vaccine effectiveness may not be successful. Drawing on previous literature on belief revision, the proposed research aims to survey the beliefs that drive skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccine (Study I) and employ experimental methods to revise anti vaccination beliefs (Study II).

 

The Dynamics of Luck, Effort, and Redistribution

Research has consistently found that people in many parts of the world are willing to tolerate wealth inequality when it is the outcome of personal choices and effort. On the other hand, people tend to support redistribution if luck is the source of inequality. In practice, luck and effort are often intertwined: luck begets effort and vice versa. This research project aims to explore how people's acceptance of inequality is shaped by how luck presents itself: (1) as an opportunity to demonstrate merit or (2) as a windfall gain independent from merit. The goal is to understand in which environments people accurately grasp the importance of luck in shaping outcomes, and what interventions lead to more precise beliefs. To study these questions, a novel laboratory experiment is proposed to manipulate the dynamics of effort and luck, and to measure how the affected perceptions about the importance of luck versus effort shape demand for redistribution. 

 

David Scales, Internal Medicine

Understanding Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Resistance

Misinformation about Covid-19 is dangerous. Surveys suggest a worrisome proportion of Americans already report they will not seek a vaccine once available. The researchers seek to better understand and characterize vaccine hesitancy, using Covid-19 and influenza vaccines as cases. Vaccine hesitancy literature reveals multiple reasons why some oppose a vaccine for themselves or a loved one, including fear of side effects, concerns about government mandates, religious reasons, or uncertainty about the vaccine. These different reasons for hesitancy lead to different vaccine seeking or rejecting behaviors. Due to Covid-19, the researchers are pivoting to online bulletin boards focusing on Chicago, IL, Newark, NJ and McCulloch County, TX, seeking to understand and characterize three things: first, where people obtain information and develop opinions about a vaccine; second, to explore and categorize participants' reasons for vaccine hesitancy; and, third, to test example threads using our motivational-interviewing-based protocol designed to counteract anti-vaccination sentiment.

 

Simone Tang, SC Johnson College of Business 

Anthropomorphization of Organizations and Its Consequences

Recent events have revealed how vulnerable organizations, such as small and micro businesses, are to social and economic upheaval. When misfortune befalls businesses, how much do we empathize with them? It may depend on a small twist of framing. Although a business is comprised of its constituent members, we test whether the member's frame ("members comprising an organization") elicits more empathy compared to an organization frame ("an organization comprised of its members") because the member's frame humanizes the business. We also investigate important downstream consequences: whether increases in anthropomorphization and empathy also increases perceptions of unfairness and helping behavior.

 

Effects of Social Isolation on Vocal Communication  

Meaningful social relationships are an essential ingredient for human happiness and well-being. Accordingly, the experience of social isolation has detrimental impacts on human health and behavior, and there is a pressing need to understand the brain mechanisms through which isolation impacts emotional states and social behavior. Here, we propose a series of behavioral experiments in mice to measure the effects of social isolation on rodent social behavior and to test the hypothesis that vocal communication can serve as a behavioral read-out for the effects of isolation on social motivation. These behavioral experiments will lay the foundation for neural circuits studies in which we identify neurons that encode the experience of social isolation and mechanisms through which these neurons impact emotional states and engagement in social behaviors. We anticipate that our findings will shed light on how isolation impacts social motivation and mental health in humans.

 

State level COVID-19 Policies: Economics, Equity and Health

State governments' rapid response was critical for COVID-19 prevention, such as social distancing practices, supportive social services, and economic protections. States struggled to balance public health and economic wellbeing, and address inequalities in the social determinants of health. This project will collect data on state governments' actions on COVID-19 in terms of what/when/ how long policies were implemented, and then match the policy data with daily COVID-19 cases to examine the efficiency of policy in flattening the curve. We will examine the relation between state policy, partisan politics, public health, economic wellbeing, and social equity to explore strategies to help governments slow the COVID-19 spread while balancing economic wellbeing and promoting equitable health access for minority groups. The outcomes of this project will contribute to the understanding of state governments' responses to the public health crisis, and explore strategies to reduce health disparities and help communities recover.

 

Jay Yoon, Human Ecology

Roles of Positive Emotions in Human-Product Interactions

This research aims to investigate the roles of positive emotions in human-product interactions. When using consumer products, people can experience a wide range of emotions. These emotions are critical to the design discipline as they strongly influence purchase decisions, usage behavior, product attachment, and subjective well-being of people in the long run. By combining user-centered design methods from design research and experimental study methods from psychology, this research will explore and test the underlying principles by which design evokes positive emotions. In addition, the effects of different positive emotions on human-product interaction will be identified in various dimensions, such as cognitive, behavioral, and motor skills. 

 

Effect of Gossip on Children's Well-being and Belonging

A sense of belonging is crucial for children's emotional health and school success, and can be undermined or strengthened by gossip. The current proposal investigates the functions gossip serves early in childhood, and how gossiping or being the target of gossip impacts children's social belonging. This work will provide the groundwork to better understand how gossip typically emerges and operates in childhood, and help improve upon current bullying interventions.

Spring 2020

 

Mortgage and Corporate Debt in the U.S. Great Depression

This grant would facilitate the gathering of new micro-level data on U.S. cities and individual firms in the late-1920s to assess the extent to which corporate and mortgage debt issuance helped precipitate the banking crises of the Great Depression. The project will transcribe data from new sources on corporate debt, corporate financials, employment, and industrial production for a random sample of about ~500 firms from 1925-1931, in addition to mortgage and construction data covering 94 U.S. cities. Among industrial firms that took on potentially excessive levels of debt in the late-1920s, the project will investigate whether these firms see decreased industrial production, capital expenditure, employment growth, and corporate bankruptcy in the early 1930s as a result of their high debt issuance. Using the new data set on mortgage lending and new construction in 94 U.S. cities, we plan to exploit geographical variation to understand the connection between build-ups in mortgage lending and subsequent local economic conditions.

 

A Role-Model Intervention to Motivate Young Girls in Science

Women's pervasive underrepresentation in science is rooted in childhood. As early as the elementary school years, girls acquire gender stereotypes about scientists and show decreased science engagement. The question of how to engage girls in science is of urgent practical importance, yet little research exists on ways to promote girls' participation in science before adolescence. The proposed project responds to this call by devising and testing a novel intervention with 5- to 7-year-old children. We hypothesize that assuming a female scientists identity (beyond merely being exposed to the scientist) will increase girls' self-scientist association (Studies 1 and 2), which, in turn, will foster their motivation (Study 1) and persistence (Study 2) in science. As one of the first studies devising interventions for young children, this research sheds light on the developmental causes of the gender disparity in STEM and beyond, and contributes to continuous efforts aimed at reducing gender inequality from their roots.

 

The Yiddish Immigrant Left from Popular Front to Cold War

The Jewish Studies Program, together with colleagues from Syracuse University, will be holding a 1.5 day interdisciplinary conference on the Jewish Left from May 17-18th, 2020 at the A.D. White House.The conference is attracting faculty from across the United States and beyond, bringing together historians, literary theorists, geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists to discuss how a radicalized Soviet-oriented immigrant Left organized in response to the pressures of rapid migration and difficult labor and housing conditions. The conference offers participants the opportunity to explore newly digitized archives of the Jewish section of a multi-ethnic immigrant fraternal order shut down during the McCarthy period. New York State donated the confiscated organizational files of the International Workers Order (IWO) and its Jewish section to the ILR School’s Kheel Center.Additional sponsors include the Central New York Humanities Corridor as lead sponsor, Cornell’s Martin P. Catherwood Library, and the Society for the Humanities.

 

Using VR to Explore Young Children’s Transfer of Learning

The proposed studies test the feasibility of using Virtual Reality (VR) to advance learning in young children. The first experimental study examines two- and three-year-old children's interpretation of experiences in the nascent medium of virtual reality whereas the second experimental study tests two- and three-year-old children's ability to generalize learning from a VR environment to the real-world and compares this ability to learning from another digital experience (i.e., video). These studies are innovative in leveraging the immersive, realistic experiences of VR to test young children's ability to generalize learning in VR to naturalistic (i.e., real-world) settings and comparing this to learning from video, a common digital experience. The results will provide essential pilot data for a federal proposal on the transfer of learning in very young children, highlight VR's potential as a powerful research tool, and examine children's ability to generalize learning across increasingly relevant digital contexts.

 

The Developmental Origins of Sensitive Parenting

What are the origins of individual differences in parenting ability? Why are some parents effective in scaffolding the social and cognitive development of their children, while others are not?  Research from several vocal learning species indicates that early social experience influences later communicative competence, but such findings have not been incorporated into studies of parenting. The zebra finch, a socially gregarious songbird, has several close parallels with humans and is an ideal model system for studying transgenerational social influences on the development of communication.  In a multigenerational study, the early social experience of young females will be manipulated to assess the role of social stimulation in the development of maternal motivation and sensitivity to offspring vocal cues. These females will then rear a new generation of offspring. Maternal behavior and offspring song learning will be assessed. Results will provide mechanistic insight into the developmental origins of sensitive parenting. The avian model will inform our studies of human parenting, with emphasis on translating the findings to our intervention program for at-risk families.

 

Neural Instantiation of Physical and Social Nutrients

Public health is threatened by a rise in two ostensibly preventable phenomena: environment-induced metabolic disorders and social isolation. Metabolic and social functioning are connected via a surprising microscale biomarker: blood glucose. Using fMRI, the present study investigates the social regulation of blood glucose and neural response to carbohydrate consumption within an ecological framework. Methods: Twenty-five adult dyads in healthy relationships will be recruited. One partner will have their fasted blood glucose assayed and then complete a visuo-spatial N-back task under four conditions. For each condition, participants will receive either a placebo solution or an 18% concentration of maltodextrin, a tasteless carbohydrate. They will also either be alone or holding the hand of their partner. Hypothesis: Social support and maltodextrin will coincide with decreased activation in putative regulatory (ACC, dlPFC) and social-cognitive (pre-central gyrus, precuneus) regions, but increased activation in homeostatic-related regions (hypothalamus). Higher resting-state blood glucose with diminish the effects of social support. 

 

Rene Kizilcec, Information Science, CIS

Content & Impact of Diversity Statements in Course Syllabi

First impressions and early signals of inclusion can be influential in shaping expectations about the experience in college courses. They can influence students' decision to enroll in courses and their interpretations and responses to difficulty therein. To communicate their commitment to inclusion and promoting diversity, especially to members of historically underrepresented groups, some instructors have added a diversity statement to their syllabus. This project examines the prevalence of this practice, the content of diversity statements, and the effects of different kinds of statements on students. We analyze data from the Open Syllabus Project (6 million course syllabi) and test the impact of statements in randomized controlled trials to inform educational policy making.

 

Taking a Computational Approach to Implicit Social Cognition

Although explicit (self-reported) attitudes toward marginalized social groups have become considerably more egalitarian in the United States over the past decades, inequality persists in consequential domains, including education, healthcare, and housing. A large body of social cognition research suggests that implicit (subtle, automatic, and often unintentional) anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ attitudes significantly contribute to the maintenance of such inequality. In spite of significant past efforts, durable shifts in implicit social attitudes from negative to neutral have remained elusive. Here we propose that taking a computational approach relying on reinforcement learning will contribute to a deeper theoretical understanding of the information processing mechanisms underlying implicit social cognition and thereby help guide interventions aimed at producing enduring change in implicit social attitudes.

 

A Platform-wide Analysis of Firm Responses to Platform-owner

In recent years, policymakers and antitrust authorities have become increasingly concerned about platform-owner conduct in cases where the platform owner has chosen to compete in its own marketplace, in particular, because of the potential for anticompetitive, self-preferencing behavior. This project aims to conduct a comprehensive, platform-wide analysis of the competitive and welfare impacts of platform-owner entry in the context of Apple's App Store mobile platform. Using data on the full population of apps on the App Store over a five year period, this project will investigate how Apple's entry into particular submarkets affected third-party firm's product quality, innovation, pricing, and entry and exit decisions. The results of this project will inform ongoing public policy debates regarding the role of platform markets in the economy.

 

The Geopolitics of Ottoman Imperialism in the Horn of Africa

Relying on a newly released set of archival records on the Ottoman political, social, and diplomatic involvement in Africa, this book project analyzes Ottoman imperialism in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea Basin between 1885 and 1915 by highlighting a North-South axis of power stretching from Istanbul to Addis Ababa, in the process provide a new avenue for the comparative study of late-19th-century imperialism. Supplemented by a multi-sited research in Istanbul, London, Durham, Cambridge, Damascus, Khartoum, and Addis Ababa, as well as oral and material field research in Djibouti and Somaliland, this book will provide a rich trans-regional history of shared political interests and competing imperial goals by focusing on the often-neglected northern Somali coast--from the tip of the Horn of Africa to Bab al-Mandab--and the African Red Sea coast--from Djibouti to the Suez--at the turn of the 20th century.

Jeff Niederdeppe, Communication, CALS

Jiawei Liu, Communication, CALS

Effects of Prevalence Information in Framing Health Problems

The prevalence rates of obesity and diabetes continue to rise in the United States and as a result, are frequently depicted in mass media and health campaigns. It is often assumed that highlighting (high) prevalence statistics can raise public awareness of public health problems, motivate behavioral changes and increase support for public policies to address such problems. Preliminary research casts doubt on this assumption, however, revealing that people tend to overestimate prevalence rates of public health problems in the absence of any statistics. We hypothesize that depictions of prevalence statistics may indeed be consequential, but in ways that run counter to public health objectives. This project will use a web-based experiment to compare the effects of messages about obesity and diabetes that (a) describe the health problem without prevalence information, (b) state that the prevalence is high in the absence of statistics, or (c) present prevalence statistics in multiple forms (raw frequencies versus percentages) on public perceptions, behavioral intentions, and policy support. In doing so, we will also examine the effects of prevalence statistics that combine overweight and obesity population groups, and prevalence statistics that combine diabetes and pre-diabetes population groups. Findings from this study will advance our understanding of the impact of prevalence information and statistics in health communication and inform both health advocates and media professionals of the function of prevalence information in designing messages regarding major public health issues. 

 

Political Science and the New Politics of Authoritarianism

This proposal seeks funding in partial support of two research workshops on political science and the new politics of authoritarianism. Bringing together a small group of established and emerging experts in authoritarian politics in countries around the world, the workshop will tackle central issues in the study of authoritarianism. Our intended goal is to produce a major collective statement on the state of the field in research in authoritarianism that outlines new directions for research and identifies challenges methodological, practical, and ethical in studying authoritarianism today.

 

Landowners, Roadside Ditch Right-of-Ways, and Pollution

Networks of roadside ditches criss-cross every landscape and are critical contributors to floods and water pollution. Cornell's 2014 survey of NYS highway staff indicated that ditches along New York's 157,000 km of roads are in poor to fair condition, and therefore contribute to downstream water pollution. However, staff also reported that a key barrier preventing improved ditch management was ownership by private landowners of the ditch Right-of-Ways (ROWs). ROWs represent a ubiquitous type of public-private interface, with strong potential for water quality management. Surprisingly, no published research has evaluated landowner attitudes about their ROW.  This project will use mail-out surveys to 2000 NYS landowners to determine the knowledge, perspectives, and activities associated with their roadside ROW and ditches. The findings will provide new insights into managing public-private common spaces, and provide the basis for a new education campaign to engage landowners in better ditch management and water resource protection.

 

Psychological Insecurities, Disclosure, and Friend-Avoidance

People disclose much of themselves to friends, as they trust friends more than others (e.g., strangers) to understand and support them. However, when disclosing their personal insecurities, do people rely as much on friends as they normally do? This research demonstrates that, although people tend to rely more on friends than strangers to self-disclose at an absolute level, they vary this tendency based on the topic of disclosure. Results from studies show that people decrease their tendency to rely more on friends than strangers to self-disclose when disclosing personal insecurities (vs. other personal or non-personal stories). The authors theorize and demonstrate that this effect occurs because people fear being made to ruminate over their insecurities as a result of disclosure which they perceive as having a higher risk of occurrence with friends than strangers. 

 

Millionaire Migration after the Trump Tax Bill 

Progressive taxation is highly polarized in the US, as some states have millionaire taxes while others have no state income tax at all. President Trump's tax reform amplified these differences by capping the SALT deduction: reducing top tax rates in red states much more than in blue states. Many expect this new tax differential will set off a wave of millionaire tax flight, and a race to the bottom in state taxes. Using confidential data from IRS tax returns, I examine elite mobility and embeddedness in the wake of the Trump tax reform: are the rich moving from high-tax to low-tax states? Will this harm the ability of individual states to address inequality? 

 

US Sick Pay Mandates: Coverage and Welfare Effects

The proposed research project will empirically evaluate the effectiveness of sick pay mandates as a policy instrument to reduce labor market inequalities in the United States. It will use administrative data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS) from 2009 to 2018 to first document the existing large inequalities in access to paid sick leave by socio-demographics and industries. Next, using difference-in-differences and event-study methods, it will assess the effectiveness of sick pay mandates in reducing labor market inequalities. Preliminary findings suggest that the mandates have been effective in reducing inequalities in access to paid sick leave, particularly in small businesses, non-unionized and part-time jobs. Moreover, preliminary findings do not provide evidence for unintended consequences, such as reductions in non-mandated benefits like vacation days. Also, increases in labor costs have been modest.