The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

The growth of U.S. labor productivity rebounded in the second half of the 1990s, after nearly a quarter century of sluggish gains. We assess the contribution of information technology to this rebound, using the same neoclassical framework as in our earlier work. We find that a surge in the use of information technology capital and faster efficiency gains in the production of computers account for about two-thirds of the speed-up in productivity growth between the first and second halves of the 1990s. Thus, to answer the question posed in the title of the paper, information technology largely is the story.

/pdf/the-resurgence-of-growth-in-the-late-1990s-is-information-2f0266bcc2.pdf

The Resurgence of Growth in the Late 1990s: Is Information Technology the Story?

The article reviews the book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other," by Sherry Turkle.

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

This paper investigates the role of relational goods for subjective well-being. Using a large sample of individuals from the World Values Survey, we find that relational goods have a significant effect on life satisfaction, while television viewing plays a key role in crowding-out relationality. Both results are robust to the use of alternative indicators of relationality and to instrumental variable estimation to deal with possible simultaneity. The findings suggest that the relational treadmill can provide an additional explanation of the income–happiness paradox: the effect of higher income on happiness is offset by lower consumption of relational goods, with television playing a significant role in explaining underconsumption of relationality.

/pdf/watching-alone-relational-goods-television-and-happiness-c2gfmkscvw.pdf

Watching alone: Relational goods, television and happiness

The author presents new evidence on the effects of attendance on academic performance. He used a large panel data set for introductory microeconomics students to explicitly take into account the effect of unobservable factors correlated with attendance, such as ability, effort, and motivation. He found that neither proxy variables nor instrumental variables provide a solution to the omitted variable bias. Panel estimators indicate that attendance has a smaller but significant impact on performance. Lecture and classes have a similar effect on performance individually, although their impact cannot be identified separately. Overall, the results indicate that, after controlling for unobservable student characteristics, attendance has a statistically significant and quantitatively relevant effect on student learning.

/pdf/the-effects-of-attendance-on-academic-performance-panel-data-1ge3pasqeq.pdf

The Effects of Attendance on Academic Performance: Panel Data Evidence for Introductory Microeconomics

This paper investigates the relationship between parenthood and well-being in a large sample of individuals from 94 countries worldwide. We find that having children is negatively related to well-being. Conditioning on economic and socio-demographic characteristics can only partially help to explain this finding. We show that the negative effect of parenthood on well-being is explained by a large adverse impact on financial satisfaction, that dominates the positive impact on non-financial satisfaction. The results are robust to the use of alternative empirical specifications and to the inclusion of the reported ideal number of children as a proxy variable to account for the endogeneity of parenthood decisions.

/pdf/suffer-the-little-children-measuring-the-effects-of-2dcmbu2mzi.pdf

Suffer the little children: Measuring the effects of parenthood on well-being worldwide

https://iris.unibocconi.it/bitstream/11565/4021054/1/JOEP_2017.pdf

Connecting alone: Smartphone use, quality of social interactions and well-being

This paper argues that television viewing produces higher material aspirations, by enhancing both adaptation and positional effects, thus lowering the effect of income on life satisfaction. Using individual data from the World Values Survey we present evidence indicating that the effect of income on both life and financial satisfaction is significantly smaller for heavy television viewers, relative to occasional viewers. This finding is robust to a number of specification checks and alternative interpretations. Overall, the results can be interpreted as providing an additional explanation for the income-happiness paradox: the pervasive and increasing role of television viewing in peoples life, by raising material aspirations, reduces the effect of income on individual happiness.

/pdf/income-aspirations-television-and-happiness-evidence-from-2y59jhfkvu.pdf

Luca Stanca

Papers

Watching alone: Relational goods, television and happiness

The Effects of Attendance on Academic Performance: Panel Data Evidence for Introductory Microeconomics

Suffer the little children: Measuring the effects of parenthood on well-being worldwide

Connecting alone: Smartphone use, quality of social interactions and well-being

Income Aspirations, Television and Happiness: Evidence from the World Values Survey