Faculty can apply for seed funds to support innovative research and collaborative conferences.
-
-
CCSS Grant Program for Cornell Faculty Members
The CCSS is now accepting proposals for the Spring 2021 round of grants. The deadline is Friday, February 5, 2021. Submit your online application here.
The CCSS Grant program supports social science research by Cornell faculty members and conferences that directly benefit Cornell faculty and students. For the Spring 2021 round there are four types of grants: CCSS research grants, CCSS special topic grants, CCSS-Roper Center grants, and CCSS conference grants. All tenured and tenure-track Cornell faculty in the social sciences are eligible to apply for these awards. Those that are not already an affiliate of the CCSS will be required to affiliate when they apply.
CCSS Research Grants
A primary goal is to fund research projects likely to lead to external funding. We are particularly interested in jump-starting research by junior faculty. We also support research by faculty teams spanning social science disciplines or units and interdisciplinary projects led or co-led by social scientists. Maximum award of $12,000.
CCSS Special Topic for Spring 2021: Super-department and School of Public Policy Collaboration Grants
Building on the Provost’s Review of the Social Sciences, the CCSS is offering support to researchers working in economics, psychology, public policy, or sociology. These special collaborative grants will support the catalyzation of innovative research, a central motivation in the creation of the super-departments and Cornell School of Public Policy. Each proposal should be made up of at least two researchers, at least one from each of two of the previous social sciences spaces (e.g., one from psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences and one from psychology in the department of Human Development). Potential promise for future external funding will be considered as part of the review. Maximum award of $30,000 for each proposal.
CCSS-Roper Center Grants
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell has identified hundreds of historical public opinion datasets from around the world that are currently in outdated file formats. These data include Ronald Reagan’s private polls as well as data from India, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, and many other countries. Converting these datasets to usable formats is labor intensive and can be costly, so the Roper Center is partnering with CCSS. Cornell faculty can apply to up to $12,000 in grant funding to convert these data to usable formats. The Roper Center will match the CCSS grant with an in-kind contribution (i.e., a $12,000 award would equal $24,000 in data conversions). As with standard CCSS Research Grants, primary goals include funding projects that are likely to lead to external funding and to jump-start junior faculty research. For questions about Roper data and conversion estimates, contact the Roper Center.
CCSS Conference/Workshop Grants
We provide funding for interdisciplinary conferences, held at Cornell, open to all Cornell faculty members, and publicized. Awards for conferences rarely exceed $5,000. We do not support conferences organized by non-Cornell affiliated entities.
-
We are now accepting spring 2021 grant applications with a due date of Friday, February 5, 2021. Apply here.
Have the following information ready to paste into the application portal:
-
Name, professorial title (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor), departmental and college affiliation
-
Co-PIs (if you have a Co-PI, you must specify a lead PI)
-
Proposal title
-
Total dollar amount requested
-
Proposal type: research or conference
-
Indicate if the application intends to use Roper Center matching funds OR qualifies under one of the special topics for the current round of funding
-
Provide your plan for data replication and archiving
-
Pre-registration of experiments if applicable
-
IRB attestation if human subjects will be used
-
Resubmission: Is this proposal a resubmission to the CCSS? If yes, please discuss your revisions in the proposal narrative.
-
Proposal narrative that is double spaced and no more than five pages in length (see guidelines below). The narrative should include replication details (see above).
-
Budget and budget justification (see guidelines below)
-
CV for the PI, as well as CVs for up to two additional investigators (maximum three pages each)
-
Each CV should list the researcher’s education, major appointments, and most significant publications, presentations, grants, and honors.
-
Proposal narrative guidelines:
-
Should not exceed five pages, should be double-spaced, 12-point font
-
A one-paragraph abstract that is “publication ready” for posting on the CCSS website if the project is funded.
-
A comprehensive description of proposed activities and their significance, including details about the research design (if applicable)
-
Data availability/replicability plan (see guidelines for more info)
-
All funded grants, when appropriate, are expected to comply with CCSS policies on pre-registration, replication, and public data accessibility. Funded PIs will be given guidance on these matters in the award letter.
-
-
Plan of future activities with dates corresponding to major outputs (grant submission deadlines, book draft due date, publication draft submission goals)
-
Plans for pursuing additional funding (including link to RFP), if any
Budget justification guidelines:
-
Total funding amount requested
-
List of the individual expenses and a brief explanation of each expense
-
The budget justification does not count against the five-page-long narrative length limit
-
Replication expenses can be included in the budget
Optional:
-
A brief bibliography (under one page)
-
Brief sample survey, or portion of a survey instrument may be included as an appendix and will not count against the narrative page length
For more information, see the frequently asked questions tab. If you have a question, contact socialsciences@cornell.edu.
-
-
Funding
The maximum small grant award is $12,000. Faculty receiving a previous CCSS grant research award (Or former ISS small grant) are eligible for another research award two years after their most recent award. Research grant awardees can submit a conference grant proposal within the two year wait period and conference grant awardees can submit a research proposal within the two year wait period, as these are tracked separately. Likewise, there is a two year wait period to submit a conference proposal after receiving a CCSS grant conference award.
CCSS approval is required for the principal investigator to reallocate more than 25 percent of the funds at any point after the award is issued. Funds not used within two years are returned to the CCSS for reallocation to other small grant awardees. In the event, the principal investigator leaves Cornell, remaining funds are to be returned to the CCSS.
The CCSS and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation at Cornell University provide the funding for the CCSS’ grant program.
Data Archiving Policy
CCSS is committed to ensuring that research and data are open and available to support cumulative gains in social scientific knowledge. All CCSS funded projects must archive data and replication materials for any published analysis in a permanent archive, such as Dataverse, ICPSR, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, or the Qualitative Data Repository. Published analysis includes books, academic articles, and more popular outlets such as op-eds and blog posts. CCSS also strongly encourages pre-registration of all research with a goal of hypothesis testing.
Exceptions
The goal of making data available may sometimes be in tension with other critical goals. If this is the case, CCSS requires researchers to articulate how they balance these competing concerns. When possible, research proposals to CCSS should anticipate and address these competing goals. In cases where data and research materials cannot be made available, whenever possible, the data/materials should still be archived (just not publicly available), replication/reproduction code should still be made available, and a third-party reviewer should verify the code or analysis guidelines reproduce all results.
Preregistration
Preregistering research means the research plan is specified in advance and submitted to a registry, such as the Center for Open Science. CCSS strongly recommends pre-registration of all confirmatory (i.e., hypothesis-testing) research and requests that when relevant, such details are included in grant proposals.
Support
CCSS can also help you archive your data and you can include the cost of verifying and archiving your results in internal and external grants. Contact us for pricing details.
IRB
If your project will require an IRB, you must receive approval before engaging in the research and provide it to your departmental finance liaison before drawing down funds from your award.
Eligible activities
CCSS grants support direct research expenses. Examples include the costs of collecting data, participant incentives, traveling to and from research or training sites, data replication and archiving costs, meetings with collaborators or potential funders, undergraduate or hourly graduate research assistance supporting the faculty project, and specialized hardware or software necessary to conduct the research.
Examples of expenses ineligible for a CCSS grant award are publication fees or other costs associated with disseminating research (e.g., conference travel), faculty and/or Cornell staff salaries, travel costs for caregivers (for such funding see here), or general-use hardware or software. We also do not pay for training, such as on an econometric technique. We also are unable to support undergraduate or graduate student research projects with faculty CCSS grant funds.
Review Process
The review process for CCSS grants has changed to a reviewing process modeled after many field conference review formats. Each research project application with a budget above 5k is reviewed by three Cornell social science faculty members who have submitted within the same round (but is not in the applicant’s department). Every applicant applying for a grant this round will be asked to review 3-5 applications in the pool. The reviews must be completed by the deadline, or the reviewing candidate’s application for funds will be disqualified. Research proposals with budgets below 5K and conferences will be internally reviewed. Previous recipients of CCSS grants are required to wait two years before they are eligible for another CCSS award.
Application Deadlines
Spring 2021: Friday, February 5, 2021 with awards announced on Wednesday, April 14, 2021
Questions
Contact CCSS if you have questions about any of these policies.
-
Is my research considered social science?
By social science research, we tend to take a broad approach to social science. We typically support research that is eligible for funding from social science directorates of the major federal funding agencies. At the National Science Foundation, for example, this includes the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, the Directorate for Social and Behavioral Sciences, and their subsidiary organizations (e.g., Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Social and Economic Sciences, Law and Social Sciences, Human Resource Development, etc.).
The CCSS funds social scientific research eligible for funding by other federal agencies. For example, the National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, and other agencies all support social science research. In general, the CCSS follows the federal government’s lead and any social science research project eligible for funding from a federal agency is also eligible for CCSS support.
This does not mean that your faculty appointment needs to be in a department that carries the name of one of the disciplines NSF identifies as a social science: Anthropology, Communications, Economics, Linguistics, Government/Political Science, Psychology, or Sociology. Indeed, the CCSS strongly encourages participation by social scientists housed in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary departments across Cornell.
Finally, we support social scientists engaging in collaborative research with non-social scientists, as long as the social scientist has a lead role in the project and the project has a large social science component likely to lead to publications in peer-reviewed social science journals or other outlets. For example, CCSS would consider funding a social scientist who is co-leading, along with a geneticist, a study of the relationship between gene activation and social environments. It would not support a geneticist who is the sole investigator on a study of the relationship between gene activation and social environments.
What constitutes a strong budget justification?
A detailed budget justification gives the review committee a clear idea of what the funds will support and includes sources for cost estimates. For example, list the model of equipment or software to be purchased and its cost from a particular vendor, like Buy.com. How much does a ticket cost on Expedia or from AAA for car rental or air travel at the same time you estimate you will be in the field? How many hours and at what rate per hour do you plan to hire a research assistant, based on what precedent?
At the time of submission of the proposal, does the proposed experiment already have to have IRB approval?
No.
Do all the research project’s team members have to be at Cornell?
No.
Can the research project include co-PIs, post-docs, or graduate assistants who are not members of the faculty?
The lead PI must be a Cornell tenure-track or tenured faculty member. However, the entire research team does not have to be on Cornell’s faculty. The team can include non-tenure track research associates, post-docs, and graduate students participating as collaborators and/or hired research assistants. However, CCSS grants cannot be used for tuition, stipends, or student fees on graduate assistantship lines. Grants cannot be used for graduate student research projects.
If awarded a CCSS grant, when could I expect to receive the funding?
The PI is asked to complete an award transfer form. Once the award transfer form and any additional paperwork are submitted to the CCSS, small grant awards are typically transferred by the end of the month. CCSS small grant awards must be transferred by the end of the fiscal year.
Is there a time period restricting when the funds must be spent?
Grant awards have a term date of roughly two years. At that time, the PI is asked to file a 45-word impact statement and a brief report to the CCSS director regarding research progress, outcomes, and disposition of the awarded funds. If the PI does not request an extension, funds that are not used within two years are returned to the CCSS for reallocation to subsequent grant awardees.
What do I do if the research or conference budget needs to be reallocated after I receive my award?
PIs need CCSS approval to reallocate more than 25 percent of the funds at any point after funding. Please contact Anneliese Truame to request an extension and include the award year, account number, account balance, and reason for requested extension.
How do I apply for a no-cost extension?
If you have not been able to complete your research by your award’s term date, you may request a no-cost extension by contacting Anneliese Truame. Please include the following in your request:
-
year and season of your funding (i.e. Fall 2018)
-
amount of funds remaining
-
progress thus far
-
revised timeline for completion of the project
-
revised research plan if the research is being tackled in a different way than originally proposed (due to Covid or other factors)
-
reallocation above 25% of the original award amount, if applicable (due to Covid or other factors)
How does the CCSS evaluate proposals?
Three peer scholars from the same application round, outside the applicant’s department, evaluate each proposal based on the following criteria: quality of social science scholarship (including theory and methodology), the importance of the core ideas and whether they are innovative, whether the work is likely to inspire future research, and whether the budget is appropriate. We also consider whether the research design is methodologically sound, the likelihood of the research resulting in publication in peer-reviewed journals, and whether the project is likely to obtain external funding at some point. We fund conferences of interest to social scientists across the university, when the budget appears justified, and primarily supports Cornell social science faculty members as opposed to faculty from other institutions.
If I have been funded by the CCSS before, how long should I wait before reapplying?
Faculty who have previously received a CCSS grant as a lead PI or received CCSS Faculty Fellow funding can reapply for funding after a two-year wait. In other words, if CCSS funding was received in Fall 2017, the faculty member may reapply in Fall 2019. Exceptions to this is that prior research grant awardees are able to submit a conference grant proposal and vice versa, within the two-year wait period and responses to calls for research on special topics may not be subject to the two-year rule. Research grant awardees must wait the full two years before submitting another research grant proposal and conference grant awardees must wait the two years before submitting another conference grant proposal.
Can CCSS Grants be used to fund graduate student research?
Not at this time.
For more information on the small grants program, please see the Overview section. Please direct questions to socialsciences@cornell.edu.
-
-
-
-
Building a Modern Policing and Mass Incarceration Archive
The first major element of this research project is to Identify and create digital copies, with associated metadata, of 20th and 21st-century newspaper stories of police shootings/other violence against African Americans (focusing on those newspapers already archived in digital form). The newspapers selected will pair African-American newspapers with newspapers from the same community, but with historically white ownership, editors, and markets. The second major element will be to identify and create digital copies, with associated metadata, of 20th century US memoirs and autobiographies of incarceration. Each dataset will be used for textual analysis, and the demographic and other metadata will also make possible demographic, geographic, and other kinds of analysis.
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.
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.
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.
-
Jonathan Boyarin, Anthropology, Near Eastern Studies, Jewish Studies Program, AS
Elissa Sampson, Near Eastern Studies, ASThe 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.
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.
-
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.
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.
Marlen Gonzalez, Human Development, CHE
Adam K. Anderson, Human Development, CHE
Roger Figueroa, Nutritional Sciences, CHENeural 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, CALSEffects 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.
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?
Nicolas Ziebarth, Policy Analysis and Management, CHE
Catherine Maclean, Temple University
Stefan Pichler, ETH ZurichUS 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.
-
The Moral Psychology of Public Life: An Interdisciplinary Conference
In recent years, interdisciplinary inquiry into the effects of human psychology on morality has exploded, engaging researchers from across the humanities and sciences in the rapidly coalescing discipline of moral psychology. At the same time, increasing technological and social complexity has heightened contemporary ethical challenges, and scientifically informed solutions to these challenges are sought by the public and policy-makers alike. The interdisciplinary conference The Moral Psychology of Public Life features leading experts in moral psychology who employ agenda-setting research to investigate topics in moral psychology—including group conflict, moral judgment and decision-making, outrage, and empathy—with connections to contemporary social issues. Cornell faculty in allied fields will present their work and commentary. The conference, on April 17–19, 2020, will further offer an understanding of morality as it unfolds in the transforming of the public domain, and will spark dialogue across the university and wider Cornell community.
Democratic Representation: Acts, Aesthetics, Institutions
On May 15–16, 2020, Cornell will host its first annual conference of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought. CSPT is the oldest scholarly organization dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the history of political thought. Originally founded in Toronto in 1967 by J.G.A. Pocock, Melvin Richter, and Neal Wood, CSPT is now composed of an extensive international network of affiliated groups and scholarly organizations. The organization aims to hold one major conference each year on a topic of broad theoretical and political significance, drawing together scholars from political science, political and social theory, intellectual history, philosophy and related fields. This year’s conference is titled “Democratic Representation: Acts, Aesthetics, Institutions.” The political crisis of our time—sometimes described as the international “populist explosion”—is often attributed to a systemic crisis of political representation. There are multiple symptoms of this crisis: the breakdown of traditional party systems, the polarization and paralysis of parliaments and legislatures, the degeneration of established systems of electoral accountability, the proliferation of extremist micropublics fueled by new social media, and the rise of charismatic authoritarian leaders claiming to speak on behalf of the “real people.” Political theorists have responded with a renewed interest in the normative and institutional underpinnings of political representation in constitutional democracies. Moving beyond preoccupations with what Hanna Pitkin described as the “mandate-independence controversy,” recent scholarship is considering not only how political representation can best reflect already constituted preferences, interests, constituencies, or identities, but also how different forms of political representation give shape to, mobilize, or enact those interests, preferences, and identities. This year’s CSPT conference at Cornell expands and elaborates on these questions by exploring the theoretical, historical, and empirical dilemmas internal to the very idea of democratic representation, which poses distinctive difficulties arising from the fraught nature of its constituent subject—the people—as well as from the concept and practice of representation itself. A group of distinguished scholars will explore the diverse challenges of democratic representation along three interdependent dimensions—acts, aesthetics, and institutions—that together articulate a complex and dynamic ecology of democratic representation, where no single agent, activity, or embodiment can claim final democratic authority, and where contest among and between them animates the agon of democratic politics.
Whose America? U.S Immigration Policy Since 1986
Immigration scholars from across the disciplines will come together in April 2020 for a one-day conference to examine the impact of post-1980 immigration laws and policies on U.S. society and transnational immigrant communities. The demographic changes brought about by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the political realignments of the post-Cold War period, and global neoliberal economic policies have elicited a corresponding impulse to reinforce borders, reassess humanitarian commitments, and privilege particular forms of labor. Today’s policies and practices—the dramatic shift toward border militarization, family separation, and deterrence practices such as expedited removal, for example—have been decades in the making and have their ideological and discursive origins in the 1980s and 1990s. The conference presentations (and the anthology that will follow) will address such issues as the deterrence and detention of undocumented workers and asylum seekers; the technologies of border enforcement; the privileging of high-skilled labor; diversity lotteries; racial, gender-based and ideological exclusion; migration as a tool of foreign policy; citizenship; Temporary Protected Status (TPS); and the sanctuary movement.
Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 30) - Support for Organizing a Conference
Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 30 will take place at Cornell University from April 24–26, 2020. This annual international, interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers who study every aspect of meaning in natural language. SALT includes presentations on a wide range of phenomena from a variety of languages and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. These presentations focus on data from experiments, fieldwork on understudied languages, individual judgments or surveys of language communities. These data concern the form, meaning, and context of everyday language use, and are analyzed in terms of interacting linguistic and social competencies. Since being founded at Cornell in 1991, SALT has become the premier conference on the semantics of natural languages. Bringing SALT back to Cornell for the special occasion of its 30th installment will reaffirm Cornell’s position as a leader in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field, and enhance the already vibrant community of scholars working on this topic here.
Social Science Symposium on Climate Change
As David Fahrenthold noted in the Washington Post, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored: a vast, slow-moving problem, with no single villain, affecting communities and ecosystems across generations and around the globe. But as each new round of international negotiations reveals, climate change is also profoundly social: how people understand, engage with, and experience the issue is powerfully influenced by how others respond to the problem. Despite this growing recognition, and an urgent need for practical insights to bridging old and new social divides on the issue, social behavioral science research on climate change remains remarkably siloed within many social science disciplines (e.g., sociology, political science, psychology) relative to the natural sciences. The goal is to facilitate a social science symposium on climate change to bring together a group of distinguished scholars and practitioners to discuss emerging research on climate change, with a particular focus on bridging perspectives across the social and behavioral sciences. This two-day meeting (to be held in Claremont, California, in April 2020) will feature invited talks from leading researchers, and a follow-up workshop discussion on the state of the science and its application. Talks will showcase research that can advance scholarship on climate change as both an individual and collective decision-making problem, and its applications, and will result in an edited volume, to be published as part of the highly-cited Claremont Symposium on Applied Social Psychology book series, under contract with Routledge. This volume is intended as an accessible and influential source for considering how insights from the social and behavioral sciences can inform climate change communication, advocacy, and public policy. In addition to the book, the symposium will provide critical time and space for leading researchers to plan grant proposals, such as NSF’s Research Coordination Networks (RCN) grants, that elevate emerging, interdisciplinary research.
-
Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects
Inequality in life chances is often rooted in the opportunity structure of previous generations. This project examines whether two successive generations of childhood exposure to neighborhood disadvantage is associated with respondents’ future adult well-being outcomes and the childhood health outcomes of their children. In addition, this project examines two potential sources of variation for neighborhood effects: (1) the timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods in childhood and (2) race and ethnicity. Studying the timing of exposure has the potential to uncover particular stages of childhood development when neighborhood-level policies and interventions may be most effective. Studying variation in neighborhood effects by race and ethnicity can also direct policy and intervention resources to particularly vulnerable population sub-groups.
What is the Advantage of Medicare Advantage? Supply and Demand Factors in Medicare Beneficiaries’ Enrollment in Private Insurance
Historically, the U.S. government’s Medicare program directly paid health-care providers for delivering medical services to elderly and disabled beneficiaries. But over the past decade, more and more Medicare beneficiaries have chosen to instead enroll in private health insurance via the Medicare Advantage program. As of 2018, 32% of the U.S. government’s $731 billion in Medicare spending is routed to Medicare Advantage insurers. Colleen Carey (Cornell, Department of Policy Analysis and Management) and Marika Cabral (University of Texas) combine a state-of-the-art statistical technique with large geographic variation in the Medicare Advantage enrollment rate to determine what market features predict high Medicare Advantage enrollment. Since Medicare Advantage plans differ from traditional Medicare in limiting beneficiaries to a network of physicians, the authors develop a novel measure of Medicare Advantage network breadth to determine how plan networks affect enrollment. The research will help improve the design and regulation of the Medicare Advantage program.
Returns to Mechanization through Rental Equipment Markets
In this project, we study misallocation in equipment rental markets and its impact on agricultural productivity. Mechanization is one of the main inputs in modern agriculture, and the lack of it, an important contributor to the low productivity observed in poor countries. Mechanization is particularly difficult for smallholder farmers, because mechanized practices require scale and equipment purchases that are large, relative to a farmer’s wealth. The development of rental markets for equipment is a key mechanism to grant access to mechanization to smallholder farmers. Yet, not much is known about their workings and their impact for farmers’ livelihoods and agricultural productivity. This project fills the gap by gathering the first systematic detailed transaction information, leveraging a government intervention in India. With this information we aim to answer: What is the extent of misallocation in equipment usage across farms? What type of market arrangements can improve upon the current ones? In developing countries, most rental contracts are relational, lack enforcement mechanisms, and tend to disadvantage smallholder farmers with long delays in service provision. The government of Karnataka has set up a first-come-first-serve (FCFS) rental provider to improve accessibility to this market. We combine administrative data from that intervention with our own survey data from 7000 farming households. We show that delays in service provision are costly, particularly so for smallholder providers. We structurally simulate a market arrangement where equipment owners rent their own equipment and compare outcomes with the FCFS allocation calibrated to fit the data. The solution to the optimal service queueing problem and the computation of productivity losses require evaluation of our structural model in 45 hubs over 90k transactions.
Community Needs Assessment on Facilitators and Inhibitors of Food Security in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico
Fifteen million U.S. children live in “food-insecure” households, which means children within these households have limited access to nutritious foods due to cost, proximity and/or other types of resources. Families in predominantly minority and low-income neighborhoods are at increased risk for food insecurity. In Puerto Rico (P.R.), a Latin American country within a U.S. territory and of predominantly Latino residents, food insecurity affected 1.5 million people in 2017. That same year, childhood food insecurity rates in P.R. were nearly triple the average for the rest of the U.S. (56%). In the aftermath of hurricane Irma and Maria in the second half of that same year, Puerto Rican families are still facing contextual challenges across many levels (i.e., cultural, environmental, social, political) that exacerbates the food insecurity issues among many residents in the island. Since tackling food insecurity requires an examination of the contextual factors that ultimately shape such an issue, community-centered approaches to build capacity offer a promising model to address both social determinants of health inequalities and familial health outcomes in at-risk community settings. The purpose of this study is to conduct a community needs assessment to identify facilitators and inhibitors to building capacity towards sustainable food security efforts in an underserved community setting in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico. This study is part of a larger community-based participatory research (CBPR) project, which will employ a community engaged collaborative process to develop a culturally-sensitive, family-centered intervention for Puerto Rican parents and their children (aged 0–8) to improve food accessibility, affordability, availability, and intake.
Sub-Saharan African Migration Project (S-SMAP) (African Futures Project)
This is a multi-sited interview project focused on Ghanaian and Kenyan youth enrolled in secondary and tertiary educational programs. The project seeks to determine what, if any, benefits are accrued by migrants through long-term migration by generating the most suitable comparison group for migrants: similarly situated peers who have not migrated. Baseline interviews with respondents with similar social and economic backgrounds will be conducted before long-term international migration has occurred. From this baseline sample, there will be two rounds of follow-up interviews (five and ten years removed from the baseline interviews). By the second and third interview waves, it is anticipated that a sizeable portion of respondents will have migrated. These six data points will help clarify what (if any) characteristics separate those who eventually migrate from those who remain and whether migrant social and economic outcomes after migration differ drastically from peers with similar backgrounds who remain in the sending society. This project uses mixed methods for this undertaking, which includes a screening survey, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and an assessment of institutional information and support for those who desire to migrate.
The Take-Off of the Korean Wave: Antecedents and Consequences of the Globalization of Korean Pop Culture
This study proposes an in-depth examination of the globalization of Korea pop culture (the “Korean wave”) to better understand the antecedents of successful cultural products and their subsequent consequences to the domestic market. Korean cultural products including pop music (K-pop) and TV dramas (K-drama) have diffused to numerous foreign markets since the late 1990s. The Korean wave is exemplary in that Korea was not considered to be a cultural powerhouse but Korean cultural products gained popularity beyond Asian markets but also in culturally dissimilar markets and mainstream markets such as the U.S. In the context of the Korean wave, this study specifically investigates 1) how institutions including government-driven policies can positively impact the development of domestic cultural industries, 2) what types of cultural products can succeed in different foreign markets, and 3), how the success of cultural products can have a broader impact on domestic industries and the economy. By investigating the success story of the Korean cultural wave, this study contributes to theories of cultural diffusion and globalization of cultural products as well as highlighting implications to policy-makers and managers in cultural industries.
The Impact of Nature Engagement on the Health and Well-Being of University Staff and their Families
This pilot study aims to examine the impacts of a loose parts recess program intervention at public elementary schools on the outdoor play, learning, and social activities of school-age children. The pilot study would utilize an observational approach known as behavior mapping to analyze children’s outdoor play activities at two schools, one in Toronto, Canada and one in Ithaca, New York, both before and after the implementation of a loose parts recess program. Loose parts programs install a diverse range of manipulable and non-prescriptive materials (e.g., tires, cardboard boxes and tubes, sand, building materials, pine cones, crates, etc.) in the school yard to increase the quality and diversity of self-directed outdoor play opportunities during recess. This pre–post behavior mapping study will isolate and examine the impact of loose parts provision on children’s play behaviors outdoors at school, particularly those that foster child development, learning and well-being, as well as discern spatial patterns in children’s social and environmental interactions with and without the availability of loose parts.
The Capacity to be Aggressive: Structured Management and Tax Behavior of Firms
This project aims to consider the effect of firms’ organizational capacity—proxied by structured management practices—on tax planning behavior of multinational firms (MNEs). Management practices improve productivity and hence should increase taxable corporate income of firms. However, better managed firms may also be better at tax avoidance. We explore the relationship between reported profits and structured management practices in MNEs headquartered in high-tax home countries operating in a low-tax host countries. We consider whether the patterns of reported profits across jurisdictions are consistent with more “organizationally capable” firms shifting profits out of high-tax country affiliates into low-tax country affiliates. This project aims to add a novel explanation for why some firms are more likely to engage in aggressive tax planning, with implications to the cost-benefit analysis of government-funded management upgrading projects.
The Effects of Avatar Appearance and Customization on Embodied Applications
A number of clinical and educational applications hinge on creating a sense of embodiment and social presence in an avatar, or digital representation, of a patient or user. Research suggests that a more realistic appearance can enhance this sense of embodiment. However, increasing the level of realistic detail also means that the avatar will inevitably diverge from the actual appearance of any individual user. In social science experimentation, avatars are frequently customized only to the extent that they align to broad social categories, such as gender and race/ethnicity, but this imperfect customization may damage the illusion of embodiment for some participants. This proposal tests two current approaches to customizing avatars: first, what choices users would prefer to see in avatar customization, and second, what the effects of having well- or ill-matched avatars have on a number of measures relevant to social science. This research may highlight ways in which future development can improve avatar resemblance in a diverse population. It can also provide guidelines for researchers currently working in this area.
-
-
-