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Author: Qi Wu Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in the areas of Industrial Organizationand Applied Microeconomics, examining the role of social interactions on market outcomes and the welfare consequences. The first essay studies the role of social influence on consumer demand and firm competition through pricing strategies. Social influence is an important driver of consumption behavior, but its effect on firm competition and pricing is understudied. This paper investigates whether and how social influence affects product choices and firm competition, drawing on a novel dataset that consists of large-scale de-identified mobile call records from a city in China. I first identify social influence using a new identification strategy that exploits the partially overlapping network of friends and residential neighbors and the intertemporal variation in friend circles. I find that the purchasing probability for a phone model doubles with 10 percent more friends using the same model. Consumers are more likely to conform to wealthier friends and choose visually distinct features, suggesting that status-seeking motivation may be an important driver of social influence. I then evaluate how social influence affects firm competition by building and estimating a structural model that incorporates social influence in consumer demand. I find that social influence favors high-quality products while reducing low-quality products' market share. In addition, a small price drop of a product would lead to larger gains through quantity expansion by peers. Social influence, on average, reduces initial prices by 0.7 percent and increases subsequent prices by 0.1 percent. It also increases the total profits of new products by 3.4 percent and increases consumer surplus by about 1.7 percent. In the second essay, my co-authors and I examine the role of social referrals and information exchange in urban labor markets. We use the universe of deidentified and geocoded cellphone records for over a million individuals from a major Chinese telecommunication provider. We find that information flows, as measured by call volume, correlates strongly with worker flows, a pattern that persists at different levels of geographic aggregation. Conditional on information flow, socioeconomic diversity of the social contacts, especially that associated with the working population, helps to predict the worker flows. We supplement the phone records with administrative data on firm attributes and auxiliary data on job postings and residential housing prices. Referred jobs are associated with higher monetary gains, a higher likelihood to transition from part-time to full-time, reduced commuting time, and a higher probability of entering desirable jobs. The third essay studies the effects of parental retirement on adult children's labor supply through intergenerational time and monetary transfer. My coauthor and I exploit the mandatory retirement age in China as the cut-off point and apply a regression discontinuity (RD) approach to four waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) Dataset. Our findings suggest that parental retirement reduces adult children's annual hours of labor supply by 3 to 4 percent. This reduction is especially pronounced for female children. We find that the reduction can be explained by parents' increasing demand for time and care from children due to the significant drop in parents' self-rated health upon retirement. Although both male and female children increased their monetary and time transfers to parents, we find that parents tend to make more transfers to sons compared to daughters. Daughters are also more likely to make transfers to parents after they retire, both in terms of money and in terms of time.
Author: Qi Wu Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in the areas of Industrial Organizationand Applied Microeconomics, examining the role of social interactions on market outcomes and the welfare consequences. The first essay studies the role of social influence on consumer demand and firm competition through pricing strategies. Social influence is an important driver of consumption behavior, but its effect on firm competition and pricing is understudied. This paper investigates whether and how social influence affects product choices and firm competition, drawing on a novel dataset that consists of large-scale de-identified mobile call records from a city in China. I first identify social influence using a new identification strategy that exploits the partially overlapping network of friends and residential neighbors and the intertemporal variation in friend circles. I find that the purchasing probability for a phone model doubles with 10 percent more friends using the same model. Consumers are more likely to conform to wealthier friends and choose visually distinct features, suggesting that status-seeking motivation may be an important driver of social influence. I then evaluate how social influence affects firm competition by building and estimating a structural model that incorporates social influence in consumer demand. I find that social influence favors high-quality products while reducing low-quality products' market share. In addition, a small price drop of a product would lead to larger gains through quantity expansion by peers. Social influence, on average, reduces initial prices by 0.7 percent and increases subsequent prices by 0.1 percent. It also increases the total profits of new products by 3.4 percent and increases consumer surplus by about 1.7 percent. In the second essay, my co-authors and I examine the role of social referrals and information exchange in urban labor markets. We use the universe of deidentified and geocoded cellphone records for over a million individuals from a major Chinese telecommunication provider. We find that information flows, as measured by call volume, correlates strongly with worker flows, a pattern that persists at different levels of geographic aggregation. Conditional on information flow, socioeconomic diversity of the social contacts, especially that associated with the working population, helps to predict the worker flows. We supplement the phone records with administrative data on firm attributes and auxiliary data on job postings and residential housing prices. Referred jobs are associated with higher monetary gains, a higher likelihood to transition from part-time to full-time, reduced commuting time, and a higher probability of entering desirable jobs. The third essay studies the effects of parental retirement on adult children's labor supply through intergenerational time and monetary transfer. My coauthor and I exploit the mandatory retirement age in China as the cut-off point and apply a regression discontinuity (RD) approach to four waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) Dataset. Our findings suggest that parental retirement reduces adult children's annual hours of labor supply by 3 to 4 percent. This reduction is especially pronounced for female children. We find that the reduction can be explained by parents' increasing demand for time and care from children due to the significant drop in parents' self-rated health upon retirement. Although both male and female children increased their monetary and time transfers to parents, we find that parents tend to make more transfers to sons compared to daughters. Daughters are also more likely to make transfers to parents after they retire, both in terms of money and in terms of time.
Author: Chen, Xi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 526
Book Description
This dissertation is composed of a literature review, Chapter 1, an in-depth analysis of data used in the dissertation, Chapter 2, and three main essays, Chapters 3-5, on relative concerns, social interactions and unintended consequences. To uncover the nature of social interactions, Chapter 3 studies how rural residents form social networks, and what explains the recent gift spending escalation. Chapter 4 focuses on a typical market that carries significant social stigma - paid blood plasma donation in China. I explore the role of peer interactions in the networks. Building upon it, Chapter 5 evaluates how in utero exposures to frequent and costly social events for the impoverished families impacts early child nutrients intake and health status. Chapter 1 This chapter reviews the recent literature on inequality and income distribution in rural China utilizing panel datasets. On the basis of the review, this chapter identifies new research areas with existing panel datasets and my new household panel dataset, i.e., the IFPRI-CAAS, which could shape future research. Chapter 2 The tradition of keeping written gift record in many Asian countries offers researchers an old-fashioned but underutilized means of data collection for development and social network study. This chapter documents a long-term spontaneous household gift record I collected from the field. I discuss the data collection and network structure, highlighting its unique features for studies at household and dyadic link level. Chapter 3 The growth rate of gift and festival spending in some developing countries has been much higher than that of consumption and income. I test three competing explanations of the phenomenon-peer effect, status concern, and risk pooling-based on the IFPRI-CAAS and the gift network data. I find that gift-giving behavior is largely influenced by peers in reference groups. Status concern is another key motive for keeping up with the Joneses in extending gifts. In contrast, risk pooling does not seem to be a key driver of the observed gift-giving patterns. I also show that large windfall income triggers the escalation of competitive gift-giving behavior. Chapter 4 Despite the resultant disutility, people are still engaged in behavior carrying social stigma. Empirical studies on stigma behavior are rare, largely due to the formidable challenges of collecting data on stigmatized goods and services. Combining the IFPRI-CAAS and the gift network data, I examine frequent blood sales, widely regarded as a stigmatized behavior and the driving force of public health crises. Using a novel spatial identification strategy, I find social interactions with heterogeneous intensities affect plasma sales decisions. Peer effects are directional and work through preference interactions that reduce stigma. Families with unmarried son are more likely to sell plasma to offset costs of getting married in a tight marriage market, such as a bigger house, a higher bride price and a more lavish wedding banquet. Chapter 5 Participating in and presenting gifts at funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies held by fellow villagers have been regarded as social norms. However, it is more burdensome for the poor to take part in these social occasions than the rich. Because the poor often lack the necessary resources, they are forced to cut back on basic consumption, such as food, in order to afford a gift to attend the social festivals. Using the IFPRI-CAAS and the gift dataset, this chapter shows that children born to mothers in poor families who are exposed to a greater number of ceremonies during their pregnancies are more likely to display a lasting detrimental health impact.
Author: Gregory K. Dow Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 0802097022 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
B. Curtis Eaton is one of Canada's leading microeconomists. As an applied economic theorist, Eaton has contributed greatly to industrial organization literature and has also worked in labour economics, economic geography, and organizational theory. The essays in this volume, by former students and present and former colleagues, call attention to the path-breaking work of Professor Eaton. The first two chapters provide a short overview of Eaton's research contributions and argue that his work laid the foundation for important research programs across the country. The remaining chapters, including an unpublished paper by Eaton himself, consist of original work that can be divided into the three broad categories of industrial organization and spatial competition, trade and productivity, and social interaction. Not only a collection of laudatory essays, Industrial Organization, Trade, and Social Interaction presents cutting edge research by leading scholars.
Author: Waleed Aly Publisher: Black Inc. ISBN: 1921825367 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 144
Book Description
Where did the Right go wrong? With the departure of George W. Bush and John Howard, conservative parties in the US and Australia entered a period of turmoil. Foreign affairs, economics, the environment – all were issues to be avoided. Most profoundly, conservatives no longer seemed to have a compelling vision of the future – and arguably still don’t. How did the Right end up in this state? How might conservatism renew itself? In this illuminating essay, Waleed Aly begins by unravelling the terms “Right” and “Left,” arguing that these have become meaningless. He contends that conservative parties have backed themselves into a corner by embracing free-market extremism, and that an illiberal social politics – including prescribing who or what is Australian – is not the answer, electorally tempting though it may be. Aly discusses what a better conservatism might look like. He predicts that the key issues of the day, such as climate change and the financial crisis, mean a reactionary brand of politics is unlikely to work because public opinion is swiftly leaving it behind. He draws on the work of conservative thinkers, past and present, to sketch the kind of conservatism that seems scarce in Australia, but which would be a welcome presence here. This is a supple, clear and original argument for political change. “Our political discourse is drenched in Left and Right because it is so deeply impoverished. These terms are the hallmark of a political conversation that is obsessed with teams and uninterested in ideas.” —Waleed Aly, What's Right?
Author: Lorenza Mondada Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000929493 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
This collection highlights new perspectives on the work of Erving Goffman, revisiting his place in contemporary social theory and interactional linguistics research and its impact in surfacing new insights in conversation analysis and our understanding of Goffman’s legacy. The volume outlines the theoretical foundations of Goffman’s research across linguistics and the social sciences. Bringing together a crossdisciplinary group of scholars, the book is organized around these themes, with sections on self and identity, participation, and bodily practices in social interaction. Each chapter comprises three perspectives— look back at Goffman’s original texts, their correlation in contemporary empirical research in conversation analysis, and a discussion of conceptual implications in relevant fields such as interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, critical sociolinguistics, and related disciplines. Taken as a whole, the book not only offers a comprehensive critical overview of Goffman’s legacy in empirical work in conversation analysis and the social sciences but also the conceptual grounding for new studies to investigate his continuing role in contemporary scholarship. This innovative collection will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and critical discourse analysis as well as sub-disciplines of sociology and psychology.
Author: Alfredo Saad Filho Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 900439320X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
Value and Crisis brings together selected essays written by Alfredo Saad-Filho. This book examines the labour theory of value and its implications for the nature of neoliberalism, financialisation, inflation, monetary policy, and the crises of contemporary capitalism.
Author: Nico Stehr Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317255925 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
Nothing affects modern society more than the decisions made in the marketplace, especially (but not only) the judgments of consumers. Stehr's designation of a new stage in modern societies with the term "moral markets" signals a further development in the social evolution of markets. Market theories still widely in use today emerged in a society that no longer exists. Consumers were hardly in evidence at all in early theories of the market. Today, growing affluence, greater knowledge, and high-speed communication among consumers builds into the marketplace notions of fairness, solidarity, environment, health, and political considerations imbued with a long-term perspective that can disrupt short-term pursuits of the best buy. Importantly, such social goals, individual apprehensions, and modes of consumer conduct become inscribed today in products and services offered in the marketplace, as well as in the rules and regulations that govern market relations. Stehr uses examples to illustrate these trends and build new theory fitting today's changing consumerism.
Author: Tim Hill Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429996055 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 124
Book Description
What fuels capitalism and what stops it from collapsing? Does marketing communications support and sustain the economic and political status quo? This book is not about describing the ways in which businesses can optimize the messages they put across or about adding to the marketing communicator’s toolkit. This book argues that marketing communications plays an increasingly important role in bolstering contemporary capitalism. Drawing on conceptualizations of the ‘market’ from political economy and sociology, it focusses on five logics that underpin and sustain the form of capitalism in which we live: the logic of competition, the logic of sustainability, the logic of individualism, the logic of objectivity, and the logic of distraction. It does this by exploring those arenas which are increasingly dominated by the communicative activities of business: sport, CSR, social media, statistics, and entertainment. Bringing theories from marketing and consumer research, sociology, cultural studies, technology and media studies to bear on marketing communications, this book is necessary reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics who wish to understand the broader role of marketing communications in the reproduction of contemporary capitalism.
Author: Mary Ann Hinsdale Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0567678334 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 472
Book Description
Including classical, modern, and postmodern approaches to theological anthropology, this volume covers the entire spectrum of thought on the doctrines of creation, the human person as imago Dei, sin, and grace. The editors have gathered an exceptionally diverse range of voices, ensuring ecumenical balance (Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox) and the inclusion of previously neglected perspectives (women, African American, Asian, Latinx, and LGBTQ). The contributors revisit authors from the “Great Tradition” (early church, medieval, and modern), and discuss them alongside critical and liberationist approaches (ranging from feminist, decolonial, and intersectional theory to critical race theory and queer performance theory). This is a much-needed overview of a rapidly evolving field.
Author: Qi Wu
Author: Qi Wu
Author: Chen, Xi
Author: Gregory K. Dow
Author: Waleed Aly
Author: Lorenza Mondada
Author: Alfredo Saad Filho
Author: Nico Stehr
Author: Tim Hill
Author: Mary Ann Hinsdale
Author: Merve Büşra Altundere