AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 1, January 2007
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Women earned 45.1 percent of bachelor's degrees in business in 1984-5 and 50 percent by 2001-2, up from only 9.1 percent in 1970-1.
It is fairly well known that women today outnumber men in American colleges. In 2003, there were 1.35 females for every male who graduated from a four-year college and 1.3 females for every male undergraduate. That contrasts with 1960, when there were 1.6 males for every female graduating from a U.S. four-year college and 1.55 males for...
Article
Child maltreatment roughly doubles the probability that an individual engages in many types of crime. This is true even if we compare twins, one of whom was maltreated when the other one was not.
Child maltreatment, which includes both child abuse and child neglect, is a major social problem. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, over a million children are victims of maltreatment annually. Over half a million children suffer serious injuries...
Article
The home bias puzzle is overstated by quantifying the foreign exposure U.S. investors obtain through the holdings of U.S. multinationals.
Numerous studies have established that investors are biased against foreign securities and tend to undervalue them when assembling their portfolios. In International Diversification at Home and Abroad (NBER Working Paper No. 12220), Fang Cai and Francis Warnock show that if the basis for defining a "foreign" firm is changed from the...
Article
Police performance declines sharply when officers lose arbitration cases. The per capita number of crimes cleared (crimes resulting in arrests) is 12 percent higher in the months following arbitration rulings in favor of police officers.
"Crime doesn't pay" may be a debatable axiom, but new evidence strongly suggests that the more crime-fighters are paid, the better they will combat crime. In Pay, Reference Points, and Police Performance (NBER Working Paper No. 12202...