Awards 09

2010 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing conference in 2010 at Cornell
Chris Anderson, Hotel
Amr Farahat, JGSM
Sheryl Kimes, Hotel
Huseyin Topaloglu, Engineering

International Seminar for the Study of the Second Slavery
Ed Baptist, History
Rafael Marquese, Sao Paulo
Dale Tomich, Binghamton University

Team Diversity and Financial Decision Making
Vicki Bogan, AEM
David Just, AEM
Chekitan Dev, Hotel

An International Healthcare Reform Conference: From the Whitehouse to the Workplace
Rebecca Givan, ILR
Peter Lazes, ILR
William Sonnenstuhl, ILR

The Effects of Incentive Framing and Probabilistic Management Audits on Fraudulent Behavior
James Hesford, Hotel

Employment Practices of Multinationals in Comparative Context
Sarosh Kuruvilla, ILR

Who knows best: Preschoolers’ causal learning from experts in light of their own play experience
Tamar Kushnir, Human Development

Contrasting Language in Early Stage Alzheimer’s Disease and in Healthy Elderly: Stage Two of a Pilot Study
Barbara Lust, Human Development
Janet Sherman, Massachusetts General Hospital
Suzanne Flynn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alexander Immerman, Cornell Language Acquisition Lab

Rectification, Thought Reform, and Political Education in Khmer Rouge Liberated Zones (1970-1975) and Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)
Andrew Mertha, Government

Bringing STS into Environmental History
Sara Pritchard, S&TS
Dolly Jørgensen, Norwegian University of Science & Technology
Finn Arne Jørgensen, Norwegian University of Science & Technology

Support for organizing a Workshop on Grammar Induction
Mats Rooth, Linguistics
Draga Zec, Linguistics

Application for Funding for Preliminary Research on Local Product (Techan) Specialization in China and Taiwan
Steven Sangren, Anthropology

A Mini-Conference on Gender Inequality in Science, Math, Engineering, and Behavioral Science Occupations
Sharon Sassler, Sociology

Perceptions of “Publicness” in NYC’s Privately Owned Public Spaces
Stephan Schmidt, City & Regional Planning
Jeremy Nemeth, University of Colorado

Computing a Sustainable Future: Fabrication, Ecology and Simulation in the Age of Global Climate Change
Mike Silver, Art, Architecture & Planning
Ann Forsyth, Art, Architecture & Planning

Health Insurance and Changes in Marital Status
Kosali Simon, PAM

“Citizenship Effects”, “Interest Convergence”, and Interest Group Litigants’ Strategy: Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York
Anna Marie Smith, Government

2010 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing conference in 2010 at Cornell

Revenue Management (RM) has been defined as selling the right space (whether a room, an airline seat or a tee-time) at the right time (day of week, time of day) at the right price to the right customer (Smith, Leimkuhler and Darrow 1992). It has been widely studied (for a review of the RM literature, please see Boyd and Bilegan 2003; McGill and van Ryzin 1999; or Weatherford and Bodily 1992).and has been applied to a number of industries including the airline industry (Smith, Leimkuhler and Darrow 1992), the hotel industry (Hanks, Noland and Cross 1992), the restaurant industry (Kimes et al. 1998), the golf industry (Kimes 2000), professional services (Siguaw, Kimes and Gassenheimer 2003), broadcast advertising (Bollapragada et al. 2002) and meeting space (Kimes and McGuire 2001). Companies using RM have shown a revenue increase of 2 – 5 percent (Hanks, Noland and Cross 1992; Kimes 2004; Smith, Leimkuhler and Darrow 1992). RM research falls into essentially three categories: (1) the underlying mathematical models, (2) the interplay with customer and employee behavior and satisfaction and (3) application to other industries. RM seems to work best in industries that have a relatively fixed capacity, perishable inventory, high fixed cost and low variable costs, varying customer price sensitivity, time-variable demand patterns and the ability to inventory demand through either reservations or through waiting lists
(Cross 1997).

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International Seminar for the Study of the Second Slavery

The study of slavery has traditionally seen the institution as not only unjust but as distinct from and antithetical to the processes of economic modernization and cultural modernity. But a new interdisciplinary interpretation that combines the skills and resources of multiple fields of scholarly inquiry is emerging. The scholars who are developing this interpretation remind us that the nineteenth century, the age of industrial revolution and the triumph of Western power over the rest of the world’s societies, was also a period of great expansion for slavery in the New World. They use a wide variety of evidence to argue that nineteenth-century demographic and geographic expansions of slavery, particularly in the U.S., Cuba, and Brazil were—along with technological and organizational transformations of slavery that radically increased the efficiency of slave production in ways that seem very “modern”—were essential components of the industrial and other transformations of the world economy that have shaped the modern world. These scholars, who are based at institutions in the U.S., Cuba, Brazil, Germany, and elsewhere, have been meeting on an ad hoc basis. Now they want to organize themselves more formally, specifically by establishing a regular schedule of meetings (1-2 times a year) and by creating a web-based journal. This proposal seeks seed money, especially for the second task.

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Team Diversity and Financial Decision Making

Within the management literature, there is conflicting evidence as to whether gender and ethnic diversity in group composition leads to better outcomes. However, to our knowledge, an open question remains in the finance and economics literature as to whether team diversity leads to any measurably different outcomes. We will examine empirically the relationship between diversity and performance in the context of portfolio management. Specifically, we hypothesize that diverse fund management teams make different decisions than homogeneous teams. We will test this hypothesis using an experimental economics approach by focusing on investment performance, investment behavior, and investment team diversity.

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An International Healthcare Reform Conference: From the Whitehouse to the Workplace

While social scientists have long studied health care, only recently has it attracted the interest of experts in work, employment relations, workforce development, and leadership issues. The goal of this conference is to bring together healthcare researchers, practitioners, policy makers, regulatory governmental agencies, and union leaders to look at approaches being used to accelerate the implementation of change and to reduce costs, while improving the quality of patient care. This gathering will be an important international conference examining the experiences and impact of various healthcare
delivery system changes and reform activities that have been established in the last few years in both the United States and Europe. This conference comes at a critical phase of President Obama’s healthcare reform initiatives that are being deliberated in Washington. Taking the time to assess these strategic activities will make sure healthcare reform is focused on the correct issues and allow the labor movement to make its appropriate contribution.

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The Effects of Incentive Framing and Probabilistic Management Audits on Fraudulent Behavior

Agency theory assumes that principals and agents are self-interested, their goals are divergent, that agents prefer leisure to effort and agent effort is unobservable (Arrow 1985; Baiman 1982; Levinthal 1988). To overcome these problems, contingent pay contracts are written to align the interests of principals and agents. A number of studies have found that contingent pay plans result in superior job performance when compared to non-contingent pay
plans (e.g., hourly wages and salaries). It is not surprising, therefore, that contingent pay has arisen as common practice throughout most organizations (e.g., Lambert 2001; Lawler and Cohen 1992; Richter 1999). Yet while contingent contracts overcome the problem of shirking, the frequency and
significance of frauds at firms like Fannie Mae, Enron and HealthSouth have caused many to speculate on the role of incentives in inducing managers to engage in fraudulent behaviors. Others are more certain and point a finger directly at performance-contingent pay; well-known investor Warren Buffett and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan are two examples. Buffett (1999) asserted that a growing number of managers manipulate earnings to increase personal income. Greenspan (2002), in testimony to the U.S. Senate, said that managers had “incentives to artificially inflate reported earnings” in part because their personal income depended on doing so. Hesford and McLean Parks (2009) provide evidence that incentive compensation increases fraudulent behaviors mitigated, in part, through the priming of ethical concerns.

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Employment Practices of Multinationals in Comparative Context

The proposal seeks funding for a conference to be held by the ILR School at Cornell University in September 2010. The objective of the conference is to gain a greater understanding of the ways in which MNCs organize and manage their employees both within and across host country environments. Leading scholars from around the world will come to Ithaca to present papers from a series of collaboratively developed, nationally representative, parallel surveys of MNCs and their employment practices in four countries: Ireland, Canada, Spain and the UK. Together, the data from these surveys form an integrated dataset and allow for unprecedented cross-national comparative analysis on the role of MNCs in both integrating and differentiating, between and within, national systems of employment. The proposed conference will permit the dissemination of initial findings from this unique cross-national dataset, but more importantly,
provides an opportunity for ILR faculty and graduate students to work together with these research teams in developing future research projects based on this unique data, and in particular, to explore the possibility of expanding this research to include a broader range of countries. The conference papers will be published as a special issue in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, the leading journal in industrial relations that is based at the ILR school.

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Who knows best: Preschoolers’ causal learning from experts in light of their own play experience

Young children are natural learners. Even before formal schooling begins they have already learned a great deal about the world. Increasingly, these very young children are being exposed to formal instruction, either at home or in academically-oriented preschool programs. More research is needed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this trend. In particular, the notion that dominates theories of young children’s learning – that they learn best through play (i.e. active exploratory experiences) – suggests that that instruction may not benefit this age group. On the other hand, research on developing social cognition has shown that even preschoolers understand that some people know more than others, and this understanding guides who they choose to learn from. The aim of this proposal is to examine how 3- and 4-
year-old children evaluate evidence from experts in light of their own experiences through play. These experiments involve causal learning, both because causal knowledge has been shown to be central to young children’s early concepts and because new research shows that play is critical to causal learning. Study 1 asks whether 3- and 4-year olds take into account another person’s level of expertise in the face of their own conflicting actions. Study 2 asks whether preschoolers know that some types of causal learning (e.g. learning functions of commonly used tools) benefit from instruction whereas others (e.g. learning about the functioning of individual toys) may benefit more from their own play. ISS funds would support data collection on these preliminary studies, leading to a better chance at securing additional funding for a large scale project on how children’s developing social cognition influences causal learning in both formal and informal settings.

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Contrasting Language in Early Stage Alzheimer’s Disease and in Healthy Elderly: Stage Two of a Pilot Study

In this pilot study, we seek to discover and define changes in language function that occur in early and preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in order to contrast these changes with those that may occur normally with human aging. The discovery of such changes that can inform and identify individuals who may go on to a diagnosis of dementia might facilitate the development of sensitive preclinical diagnostic tools that could aid in early detection of AD and, in doing so, aid in the development of appropriate clinical and social interventions. An interdisciplinary collaboration between Cornell University (CU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has built an infrastructure and developed scientific methodologies for the systematic investigation of such changes. Currently, we are analyzing initial pilot data from the healthy elderly group and anticipating calibrated results from the other two sites. Results from a set of cognitive and linguistic tasks will be correlated to data from a detailed background questionnaire, designed to gather data about potential mediating social and personal factors. This will allow us to test a wealth of hypotheses regarding the development and impairment of language and thought both in normal aging and in clinical AD. At this crucial point in the development of this pilot project, we seek funds to: (1) complete processing and analyses of our initial pilot data; (2) report early results in a series of conferences and papers; (3) prepare larger future funding proposals for a necessarily expanding project; (4) complete our pilot data sample by including a set of bilingual subjects; (5) travel to Boston, MA to meet with collaborators. All data and materials from the project will ultimately be available digitally through the CU-centered Virtual Center for Language Acquisition in conjunction with Cornell Mann Library. This grant proposal to ISS thus serves as a critical bridge between a currently developing pilot study and our application for larger long-term funding required by the project.

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Rectification, Thought Reform, and Political Education in Khmer Rouge Liberated Zones (1970-1975) and Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979)

In what ways and to what degree did rectification play a role in politics and society under Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia? Much of what we know about rectification, thought reform or political education under the Khmer Rouge is as a euphemism for almost certain death through execution, either before (people “taken away at night”) or after giving a torture-induced confession of alleged “crimes.” Western scholarship on this period focuses a great deal on the Tuol Sleng (S-21) execution site and, by implication, similar institutions scattered throughout the country. However, recent data suggests that such a picture is, at best, incomplete. There are all sorts of tantalizing references in the scholarly literature and in memoirs by survivors of the Khmer Rouge era that suggests that there was some degree of political indoctrination that took place. These accounts describe how some people who were taken away, sometimes for months at a time, for “political study” but who actually returned. They depict situations in which people attended routine study sessions at during a typical workday. Finally, they aver that children in particular were subject to both formal and informal indoctrination, but rather than resulting in execution, such indoctrination seems to have been an integral part of Khmer Rouge cadre training. The accumulation of these and many other pieces of data suggest that the Tuol Sleng “model” – in which the very existence of Tuol Sleng was considered top secret, thus “requiring” the execution of all prisoners following completion of their “confessions” – was not the only mechanism employed by the Khmer Rouge to “purify” both cadres and constituents. Such findings would require us to revise substantially our understanding of the Khmer Rouge period as being significantly more complex (and complicated) than is the case today. Beyond this somewhat narrower focus, this project – which will eventually take the form of a structured comparison between Cambodia and China – will increase our understanding about the ways in which we conceptualize the relationship between torture and thought reform and their influence on the substance upon which policy is based. The larger questions that drive this research agenda are what are some of the variations in rectification over space and time and what is the impact on politics and policy?

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Bringing STS into Environmental History

If awarded, this ISS Small Grant Program application would support an international workshop in August 2010 on the intersection of science and technology studies and environmental history. The conference co-conveners Sara Pritchard (Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell), Dolly Jørgensen, and Finn Arne Jørgensen (both from Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Norwegian University of Science & Technology) plan to bring together leading scholars working within and at the interface of these two fields to examine how insights from science and technology studies might help inform historical analyses of humanity’s interactions with nonhuman nature. Moreover, such historical analysis has important implications for current environmental issues and policy-making. The ISS Small Grant Program would: 1) cover the costs of Pritchard’s participation in the workshop as well as those of another
Cornell participant; 2) provide a modest contribution to the overall funding of the conference; and 3) support Pritchard’s return to Norway to co-edit the collection of essays that emerged from the conference. The proposed workshop thus meets four of the specified objectives of the ISS Small Grant Program: research led by junior faculty; interdisciplinary social science research; interdisciplinary conference support; and projects that seek other external funding.

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Support for organizing a Workshop on Grammar Induction

We propose to organize a Workshop on Grammar Induction that would take place at Cornell in Spring 2010. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines, in particular, from linguistics, psychology and computer science, who work on issues such as language acquisition, statistical learning, artificial grammar design, or grammar induction, broadly construed to cover a variety of perspectives and a variety of methodologies. This includes experimental work in both psychology and linguistics on the acquisition and transmission of the knowledge of language, as well as
modeling of this knowledge in computationally minded research. Despite differences across disciplines, the common thread in all this research is developing a better understanding of how language is acquired and transmitted and, more generally, what constitutes the basis of shared linguistic knowledge within speech communities. In sum, this workshop will address an important line of inquiry that is cross-disciplinary in nature.

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Application for Funding for Preliminary Research on Local Product (Techan) Specialization in China and Taiwan

Local-product (techan) specialization is a long-standing and, arguably,
distinguishing element in China's economy that has received little academic scrutiny. The category techan includes a wide variety of commodities ranging from manufactured objects to agricultural products closely associated with particular localities. Intriguingly, these associations in many cases appear historically serendipitous or arbitrary - that is to say, independent of any
self-evident material economic rationale. Moreover, the demand for local specialties is closely linked to the social organization of travel- for example, tourism, religious pilgrimages, and as a sideline of business travel. In its preliminary stages, my project aims to outline in broad, mainly descriptive terms, the nature and magnitude of the culture of local products; to seek relevant earlier research and potential collaborators, especially in Taiwan and China, but also at Cornell; and to undertake some exploratory ethnographic fieldwork. The topic is interesting theoretically insofar as it foregrounds linkages among market organization, culturally defined values, and local identities - i.e., even in the clearly "economic" province of commodities, the utilitarian logic of markets is insufficient to explain everything.

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A Mini-Conference on Gender Inequality in Science, Math, Engineering, and Behavioral Science Occupations

Although increased attention has been devoted to attracting women into Science, Math, Engineering, and Behavioral Science (SMEB) occupations, women continue to be underrepresented in these professions. The goal of this project is to host a one-day mini-conference that brings together specialists studying barriers facing women’s entrance into, retention, and promotion in SMEB occupations. The proposed mini-conference will consist of panels that address work/family balance issues and the particular challenges facing women in science fields, as well as a 'conversational panel' on women in science that will be include the previous and past Program Directors of the section on Science, Technology, and Society at the National Science Foundation. Discussions with other academics and specialists in SMEB fields will enable an established team of Cornell researchers to revise a proposal on the entrance into and retention of women in SMEB occupations for resubmission to NSF.

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Perceptions of “Publicness” in NYC’s Privately Owned Public Spaces

In recent years, the provision of public space through the private sector has led
to a proliferation of privately owned public spaces in New York City. However, the lack of transparency, accountability and public input into the planning of such spaces raises concerns over exactly how public such spaces truly are. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of “publicness,” as a linear relationship from completely private to completely public is problematic, as there is no consensus as to what constitutes a “good” or “ideal” public space. This research will contribute to this debate by examining both the relationship between publicness and diversity of use, as well as the perceptions of, and preferences for, security by users of privately owned spaces. A better understanding of the relationship between user perceptions and preferences and the degree and amount of spatial security will allow us to answer to better understand how public spaces function. In order to undertake this research, we plan on using the ISS Small Grant to conduct field work of privately owned public spaces in Midtown Manhattan and pay for a user intercept survey.

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Computing a Sustainable Future: Fabrication, Ecology and Simulation in the Age of Global Climate Change

This conference will explore the intersection of novel, computationally advanced modeling, fabrication and analysis technologies and how these new approaches impact the design of sustainable environments. The gathering is intended to probe the possibilities of new tools in an age of high throughput simulation, computer-aided manufacturing and Geographic Information
Systems (GIS). With these innovative techniques of digital mapping, simulation and production designers and policy makers are now in the position to create sophisticated proposals for complex architectural and urban interventions, shifting their focus from the manipulation of simple forms to the creation of dynamic social and physical systems. As new information technologies provide researchers in other fields with the ability to comprehend complex material
processes and energetic interactions, at scales ranging from the planetary to the sub-molecular, how will the disciplines of architecture and urban design be transformed? What are the limits of computational analysis? What new ways of thinking and planning will emerge as a result of exponential increases in data processing speed? How will innovative materials and methods of production affect the way we construct a sustainable world? How can buildings and cities, the greatest contributors to global climate change, evolve through the application of new technologies? In order to address these concerns “Computing a Sustainable Future” will assemble a wide range of experts from fields as diverse as regional and urban planning, economics, ecology, computer science, and building design. By connecting architecture and technology more fully to the social sciences at Cornell our ISS supported conference will help
facilitate a more humane design discourse, drawing comprehensive links to the scientific study of people, places and the complex systems of material development driven by new mode of information processing. In this way “Computing a Sustainable Future” will create a unique cross-disciplinary exchange that will support collective decision-making, ethical design practices
and an enhanced understanding of architecture’s ecological connection to the lives of real people.

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Health Insurance and Changes in Marital Status

As of 2007, 45.7 million Americans were uninsured, including 8.1 million children (U.S. Census Bureau, 2008). Uninsured Americans experience well known problems related to health, health care access and financial stability. It is important to note that there is a large degree of churning in health insurance status. Eligibility for certain kinds of coverage change due to changes in employment (employer based insurance), marital status (dependent coverage), income (Medicaid/SCHIP), or age (Medicaid/SCHIP and dependent coverage). About 2 million people lose health insurance every month, while a similar number gain insurance, and the risk of being uninsured anytime during a 2 year period is almost twice that of being uninsured during a year. Thus, to understand the ramifications of lack of coverage and to inform potential policy remedies, investigating health insurance dynamics is important. The objective of this project is to study the risk of losing or gaining health insurance due to change in marital status. While prior research has show that family structure is an important determinant of health insurance for children, that family change has causal effects on labor supply ( e.g. Johnson and Skinner, 1986) and that state social program policies have a causal impact on children’s health insurance, there is no prior work on the causal effect of family change on children’s health insurance, and how these effects may be mitigated by social policies.

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“Citizenship Effects”, “Interest Convergence”, and Interest Group Litigants’ Strategy: Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York

My proposal deals with one section of my multi-year research project based upon Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, a recent decision handed down by the highest court in New York ordering the state to increase its allocations to the city’s public education system by several billion dollars to lift the quality of its educational opportunities up to the state constitutional adequacy threshold. In this particular phase of the project, I intend to carry out qualitative research, especially open-ended interviews with parents who became involved with the case. I will be pursuing three specific questions in this phase. Did the Campaign’s strategy allow it to successfully head off potential opposition from wealthier parents and other possible opponents where the implementation of the decision was concerned? Did their strategy intensify the “citizenship effect” of the case, namely its impact on the civic orientation and political mobilization of the low-income parents who were included in the class action? Did their strategy amplify the “radiating effects” of the case — its impact on the wider political field in New York City and New York State where education reform and public education funding are concerned?

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Managing Strategic Paradoxes: A Longitudinal Study of Leadership in a Social Enterprise

Globalization, financial crises, and environmental destruction have created a world filled with social ills. Social enterprises are an emerging organizational form that responds to these challenges by using for-profit business models to accomplish social objectives. Yet social and financial goals are strategically paradoxical. While social missions and financial performance can be mutually reinforcing, they are also associated with inconsistent cultures, motivations, and goals and are in direct conflict for scarce organizational resources. How do these hybrid organizations manage the strategic paradoxes associated with attending to both social and financial metrics, utilitarian and altruistic motivations, and for-profit and not-for-profit cultures? To investigate this question, we examine leadership, decision-making, and organizational structures in an internationally acclaimed social enterprise, Digital Divide Data (DDD). DDD strives to break the cycle of poverty in Southeast Asia by providing education and employment opportunities through a for-profit data entry business. With interview, observation, and archival data we will identify the major strategic issues and decisions DDD leaders faced over the first eight years of the organization’s existence and explore how they made strategic tradeoffs between social and financial goals. We will use these analyses to construct a process model of how organizations manage conflicting objectives over time. This project is part of a broader stream of research we are pursuing on behavior and leadership in hybrid organizations that combine social and financial goals. The current study has the potential to advance understanding of social enterprises, contribute to the literature on stakeholder management and social responsibility, and provide insights into the processes of managing strategic paradoxes more broadly.

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Re-evaluating Africa and World War II

The scholarship on Africa and World War II remains very limited despite a vast literature on the war. This conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to re-examine Africa's role in World War II and the war's impact on African communities. The papers from this collection will be published as an edited volume for graduate students and scholars. The collection, which will draw on insights from several fields including spatial analysis, cultural studies, gender analysis and environmental history, will address a lacuna in African history and world war II studies. Both literatures largely construct Africa as being incidental to the war and the war as tangential to Africa's history. This collection will illuminate the distinctive social, economic and political changes the war generated on the continent, broaden the discussion of racial policies during the war beyond Germany to include those of Britain and France, and highlight Africa's centrality to the prosecution of the war.

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Supporting Communities of Memory and Reminiscence

This grant's goal is to fund a workshop at a visible technical conference, probably CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) 2010, to explore how social scientists can inform and participate in research that uses technology to support memory, reminiscence, and aging. A growing wave of work around technology and reminiscence focuses on development novel technologies for reminiscing; this work, though interesting, often does not align with actual reminiscing practices and tends to focus on individual experiences at the expense of the social. Bringing this work closer to people who theorize about and study human memory and reminiscence practices will improve research opportunities for both social science and technology researchers, and recent growth in the amount of work around reminiscence in both engineering and social sciences suggests that this is an opportune time to bring these communities together. The funding will be used to subsidize social scientists' paying the high technical conference registration fees and to fund travel to nourish the interdisciplinary research and grant proposals that will result.

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Rural Schools: Planning and Decisionmaking in Times of Fiscal Stress

Population decline, falling property values, frozen or reduced state school aid, and the proposal for a school property tax cap, is creating a need for improved data analysis and data-based decisions across the state of New York. Specifically, this proposal is responding to a very real need to stimulate cutting edge research and quality outreach on fiscal stress and school reorganization in rural New York communities. Using longitudinal GIS analyses with property, tax, and enrollment data, this proposed study will provide practitioners and scholars with state-of the art data and analyses to assist in future decisionmaking. The specific work to be funded by the ISS will serve to jump start this broader study to identify hot spots of fiscal stress, communities where intervention is more likely to be needed, and the advancement of methodological issues in studying fiscal stress and the pressures to avoid or engage in consolidation. Specifically, this ISS small grant will fund the basic work to begin construction of the dataset necessary and build the relationships to ensure project success.

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Behavioral Tendencies in Newsvendor Decision Making: Capturing the Chinese Perspective

After many decades on focusing only on quantitative approaches for making decisions in manufacturing and supply chain management, researchers in operations management have recently acknowledged the importance of understanding the human behavior tendencies underlying these decisions. The result is a new stream of research in operations management focused on experiments using human subjects. However, most of these experiments were
conducted in the US and Europe with the subject pool (students as well as practitioners) with western cultural and educational backgrounds. As the students and practitioners in China are culturally and educationally different from their western counterparts, it is conceivable that their behavioral tendencies are very different. Given that a large portion of the world’s
industrial output comes from China and other Asian countries, an understanding of the behavioral tendencies specific to those geographical regions is absolutely essential to achieve significant efficiency gains in the world economy.

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Longitudinal Effects of Computer-Mediated Self-Presentations on Scholastic Self-Concept and Achievement

This study examines self-presentation on the Internet as “academically hard-working” and the potential long-term impact it has on academic identity and academic behavior. Self-perception theory proposes that people construct attitudes about the self through self-observation (Bem, 1972). This effect also occurs via the internet (Gonzales & Hancock, 2008), which may intensify self-perception effects on identity (Gonzales & Hancock, under review). To date, this line of research has only examined short-term self-concept change. The aim of this proposal is to explore the long-term effect of Internet-based self-presentation on one’s identity as scholastically proficient, and its associated behavioral outcomes. Results of this study will aid in the integration of psychological and communication theory in a new theoretical model of hyperself-perception. Establishing important behavioral implications of a hyperself-perception effect, such as improvement of education outcomes, will support future interventions designed to enable positive self-concept change through use of digital media.

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What are the Pieces of Language Knowledge?

The project initiates a collaboration between two junior colleages, one
in Linguistics at Cornell and the other in Psychology at Harvard. The
collaboration involves two face-to-face meetings during the 2009-2010
academic year. The first meeting is a mini-workshop that brings the
latest information about probabilistic models of natural language to
the broader Cornell community. The second meeting focuses on research:
the collaborators intend to apply new techniques in Bayesian
statistics and computation to the longstanding debate about whether
language is best understood as a system of rules or a collection of templates.
We address this debate by building a model of relative clause
processing difficulty whose predictions are evaluated against self-paced
reading times. The results have the potential to re-shape our conception
of what it means for members of a speech community to ‘know’ a
language.

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Novelty and Popularity in Markets for News

Empirical evidence shows that consumers of news care about both the novelty of the news they read, as well as how popular that news topic is with others. We develop a continuous time dynamic model that predicts how news providers invest in covering stories with either high novelty or high popularity, and
how this investment depends on the market structure (monopoly, oligopoly, competition). We then seek to test the predictions of the model by examining which stories magazines select for their cover, and how that depends on the novelty and popularity of the topic, by looking at how those stories are covered in daily newspapers. This work has implications on innovation more broadly, specifically novelty and popularity can be thought of as innovation and technology transfer.

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Agglomeration, Product Differentiation, and Firm Entry

How does product differentiation affect agglomeration patterns within an industry? And how does the combination of the two affect firm turnover and industry growth? This project addresses these questions by analyzing entry rates and how they relate to agglomeration levels within an industry, measured across different “markets” based on geographic location and product category. The existing literature on agglomeration economies is primarily focused on measuring agglomeration within and across industries and on searching for a positive impact of geographic clustering of firms on productivity and wages as evidence of agglomeration economies. While researchers have begun to seek microfoundations for these economies, they have relied rather heavily on traditional urban economics explanations and, due to data limitations, have tested theories using almost exclusively information from the manufacturing sector. This research extends prior work on several dimensions. First, it empirically tests new theories from the industrial organization literature that suggest that agglomeration should increase with product differentiation. Second, it brings new longitudinal, establishment-level data to bear on these theories. In particular, this project will use extensive hotel-level panel data that cover nearly all existing hotel properties in the US during 2003-2006. The data include information not only on the opening date and geographic location of each hotel, but also its industry segment. Taken together, these data allow for a detailed analysis of the extent to which geographic clustering of establishments within and between segments affects patterns of firm entry. Combining different streams of literature, this research is not only of broad interest to academics, but also to policy makers and private firms. It will enrich our understanding of within-industry product competition, which is crucial for product market regulation policies as well as firm location choice and market expansion decisions. The proposed research will be interdisciplinary and will involve close collaboration with faculty in ILR. I am requesting funds to support additional data collection, conference presentations and research assistance.

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The Aggregate Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated Tax Policy Changes

Whereas some consensus has been reached on the effects of monetary policy, there is still widespread disagreement about the aggregate effects of fiscal policies. An important empirical obstacle is the fact that many fiscal measures are announced prior to their implementation such that economic decisions are affected before the actual implementation of new policies. In recent work, we adopt a methodology based on the narrative approach that allows for the identification of anticipation effects of changes in tax liabilities. We request funding to extend our work and characterize separately the effects of the different tax components. We also seek to apply our analysis to other countries. Our main research objectives are to gather additional evidence for our current findings, extend our theoretical work on the transmission mechanism of tax shocks and to develop empirical tests based on the analysis of different types of taxes to distinguish between different transmission channels.

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Education and Changing Patterns of Fertility Over The Life Course

College graduates have long had higher fertility than their less educated counterparts (Yang and Morgan 2003), but the long-standing inverse relationship between education and fertility may be changing: increases in substitutes for mothers’ time and flexibility in high-end jobs may be easing the competition between work and family among college graduates, as may increases in their chances of getting and staying married, relative to less educated women. This project will examine the evolving relationship between women’s education and fertility in the context of class-based changes in work and family across cohorts. Social class differences in many domains of family life have been widening (McLanahan 2004), and education differences in fertility are a critical piece of understanding the nature and meaning of these broader cleavages in family experiences. This project will use large-scale, nationally representative panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women (14-24 in 1968; 39-49 in 1993) and Youth (14-21 in 1979; 41-48 in 2006) to situate fertility in the individual contexts of marriage and employment histories and in the social context of changing opportunities and constraints by birth cohort. Marrying individual-level modeling and aggregate-level simulation, this proposal is unique in examining cohort change in total fertility within a life course perspective.

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The Food and Financial Crises and their Impact on the Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa

The Institute for African Development at Cornell University, in collaboration with other Cornell units, will be hosting a two-day symposium on May 1-2, 2009 on The Food and Financial Crises and their Impact on Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Africa. This double catastrophe of rising food and fuel prices and financial market instability has propelled millions of people worldwide into hunger. It has also threatened to undermine the gains made in Africa towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the U.N. General Assembly to galvanize global efforts and improve the condition of the world’s poor. The most vulnerable are the hardest hit and nowhere is this more apparent than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, the growing financial crisis has widely been expected to reduce economic growth and increase poverty levels as a result of its anticipated impacts in slowing export expansion, foreign direct investment, foreign aid and other adverse outcomes. The objective of the Symposium is to examine the impact of high commodity prices and the global financial crisis on Africa. The immediate effect is that symposium discussions will
help influence policy directions in dealing with the crises. Longer term, a publication of the proceedings will continue to inform and lay out the key strategies in dealing with the crises.

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Workshop on the Global Impact of the Financial Crisis

The current financial crisis has generated considerable scholarly research on its consequences in industrial economies. But despite originating in the financial industries of the United States and Europe, the crisis has also had powerful consequences in emerging market economies. These remain poorly understood. This proposal seeks partial funding for a scholarly workshop that on the global impacts of the financial crisis, with a focus on its consequences for middle-income developing economies and emerging markets. The goal of the workshop is to produce a set of theoretically-informed and comparatively-focused research papers, to be submitted in Fall 2010 as an edited volume at a university press.

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Consequences of Teen and Early Fatherhood

Although teen fertility rates in the U.S. have fallen by 33 percent since 1991, the U.S. still has higher teen fertility rates than other industrialized countries. A large body of literature documents the negative effects of teenage motherhood on their labor market and human capital outcomes, although the size of those effects vary widely depending on the statistical techniques used to control for endogeneity and the datasets from which the samples were drawn (see Hoffman, 1998 for a review). Surprisingly, very little empirical work has been done to estimate the consequences of teenage or early fatherhood. In this project we focus on estimating the economic and social consequences for fathers, utilizing many of the same empirical techniques that have been used for mothers. We compare the consequences for men and women, and we investigate the idea suggested by some of the literature that fatherhood may have positive as well as negative consequences for men. We use three
different data sets that enable us to analyze changes over time.

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The Second Urie Bronfenbrenner Conference: Improving the State of Americans

In this proposal, we seek funding to support the second biennial conference in honor of Urie Bronfenbrenner. The conference, titled “Improving the State of Americans: Translational Research in the Social Sciences” builds on the commitment of Urie Bronfenbrenner – a founder of Head Start – to translate the findings of basic social scientific research into programs and policies to improve national well being and to address disparities in development and health (Bronfenbrenner et al. 1996). The aim of this conference is to help make Cornell University a national force in the emerging area of translational research, and the world leader in the translation of scientific research in the social sciences to action and policy changes that will improve the well-being of Americans across the life span. The conference will bring together leaders in translational research from across the country with Cornell researchers, many of whom are also considered leaders in the methods and practice of translational research. The initiative will be built on cutting-edge interdisciplinary translational research already in progress across the country and at Cornell University. The conference will result in an edited volume on translational research in the social sciences, which (through prior arrangement) will be published by the American Psychological Association. We believe that the time is ripe for this conference. In his 2008 address to graduating seniors and their parents, Pres. David Skorton identified the process of research translation and social impact as one of the critical areas of contribution for Cornell University. As we will describe below, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at NIH has identified the translation of social science findings into understanding disparities in human development and health as a top priority for funding at NIH. Although there has been considerable research progress in the social and behavioral sciences most would argue that the lessons of that research have yet to be integrated – or translated – into policy and practice. Cornell has the talent and resources to develop a world-class program on translational research in the social sciences, and a number of social scientists who conduct translational research, but these resources have yet to be brought into creative synergy. We propose this conference as a way to develop connections among Cornell researchers that may result in thriving collaborations between social scientists whose work has application for improving the health of Americans across the life span.

For more information, please see the FAQ, funding statistics, and overview.

All questions should be directed to Anneliese Truame (607-255-3304), ISS Adminstrative Coordinator.