College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item ESSAYS ON SKILLS AND VICTIMIZATION(2015) Sarzosa, Miguel; Urzua, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent literature has shown that skills are not only essential for the development of successful adults, but also that they are malleable and prone to be affected by many experiences. In this dissertation, I explore these two sides of skills and development. I use skills as a vehicle to study the consequences victimization events have on adult outcomes, and as the channels through which the gaps in those adult outcomes materialize. I use novel longitudinal surveys and rely on an empirical strategy that recognizes skills as latent constructs. First, I estimate the treatment effects being bullied and being a bully in middle school have on several outcomes measured at age 18. I find that both, victims and bullies, have negative consequences later in life. However, they differ in how non-cognitive and cognitive skills palliate or exacerbate these consequences. Then, I move on to investigate the channels that open the gaps in adult outcomes between victims and non-victims. I estimate a structural dynamic model of skill accumulation. I allow skill formation to depend on past levels of skills, parental investment and bullying. Also, I allow bullying itself to depend on each student's past skills and those of his or her classmates. I find that being bullied at age 14 depletes current skill levels by 14% of a standard deviation for the average child. This skill depletion causes the individual to become 25% more likely to experience bullying again at age 15. Therefore bullying triggers a self-reinforcing mechanism that opens an ever-growing skill gap that reaches about one standard deviation by age 16. Finally, under the light of skills, I explore how other type of victimization, namely discrimination against sexual minorities, creates income gaps against non- heterosexual workers. I estimate a structural model that relies on the identification of unobserved skills to allow schooling choices, occupational choices and labor market outcomes to be endogenously determined and affected by the sexual preference of the worker. The results show that difference in skills, observable characteristics, and tastes for tertiary education and type of occupation, contribute to at least half of the income gaps non-heterosexuals face.Item The Dynamics of Political Participation: An Analysis of the Dynamic Interaction between Individuals and their Political Micro-Environment(2012) Wendel, Stephen A.; Oppenheimer, Joe; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While political choices are rarely isolated or simultaneous, the vast majority of empirical models in political science assume they are. This dissertation examines the dynamic interactions over time between individuals and their micro-environment, in which a single factor both influences, and is influenced by, the act of voting. These dynamic interactions occur in a surprisingly broad swathe of the current literature on American voting behavior, as implicit but unexamined elements of four major research traditions. When these interactions are present, they establish feedback cycles that pose both theoretical and statistical challenges if not analyzed appropriately. Researchers ignoring these cycles tend to underestimate long term influences on voting behavior, make unrealistic assumptions about changes in voting behavior over time, and produce biased results under certain conditions. I propose a methodology that can successfully identify and model these interactions: employing simulation models to represent dynamic interactions in an intuitive format, and using optimization techniques to conduct parameter estimation and hypothesis testing against empirical data. To guide the development of these simulation models, I outline a theoretical framework of the major pathways by which dynamic interactions can influence voting behavior. I then present two applications of this methodology, to study the dynamic impacts on voting of political mobilization, and of social conformity over time. In both cases, the models receive strong statistical support, in benchmark tests against existing econometric models and against empirical data on voting behavior. Both mobilization and social conformity have unstudied indirect impacts that can lead to an additional 1.7% to 4% increase in voter turnout beyond existing models. Targeted use of peer pressure can lead to even more significant increases in turnout - up to a 30% increase among otherwise indecisive voters. In the long term, targeted mobilization can create cadres of repeatedly-mobilized activists, which raises questions about whether political campaigns effectively use their mobilization funds to build their parties in the long term. These two simulation models also provide a foundation for a host of new research questions, ranging from the impact of high-intensity get-out-the-vote drives on future mobilization efforts, to the effects of an aging population on turnout behavior over time.