Using multiple waves of Statistics Canada's Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) linked with the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), as well as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP)/International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) Armed Conflict Dataset, we examine the effect of exposure to pre-migration conflict on the post-migration physical health outcomes of immigrants to Canada. To incorporate self-assessed health and diagnosed chronic conditions, we create an index of physical health using principal component analysis. Our results demonstrate that immigrants from conflict zones face physical health challenges that continue post-migration. Better understanding these challenges will help health policy makers and providers to better respond to the needs of people migrating from these regions of the world.

Employees who receive part of their compensation as tips may be subject to a type of discrimination that is not regulated or prohibited. This discrimination affects not only earnings, but employment. In many US states, employers are able to pay a reduced minimum wage to employees who receive regular tips, as long as the tips are sufficient to bring earnings to the standard minimum wage. Employers therefore have a financial incentive to hire and retain only those workers who are expected to receive adequate tips. Although case study surveys of customers and tipped employees suggest that discrimination in tipping exists and may lead to discrimination in hiring, no large-scale empirical analysis has been undertaken on this topic. In this paper, we identify patterns of gender and racial employment across US states that are linked to the gap between the standard minimum wage and the sub-minimum wage. Importantly, our analysis suggests that white women benefit from consumer discrimination in tipping. In contrast, there is evidence of employer discrimination against minority men and women, most robustly for Black men and women, with regional variation for other groups.

Are all oil price shocks the same? We investigate the effects of three types of global crude oil price shocks using a factor augmented VAR framework and 185 monthly macroeconomic indicators from 1978 to 2017. Our results indicate that while both demand and supply driven oil price shocks lead to a significant increase in the global crude oil price and high degree of pass-through to US consumer and producer prices, oil specific precautionary demand shocks are the main drivers of fluctuations in the price of crude oil and the US price level, followed by global economic activity oil demand shocks. Further, while increases in the price of oil triggered by oil supply shocks lower US economic activity, those triggered by global economic activity oil demand shocks are associated with increased US economic activity. Our results suggest the need for monetary policy to stabilize the pass-through from global crude oil prices to domestic inflation.

This paper provides an overview of the Canadian defence sector following the Cold War. A review of Canadian defence policy in this period indicates that, though the mission of the Canadian military did not change, fiscal realities forced severe restrictions on the size and capabilities of the organization. Comparisons between Canada and other G7 NATO nations indicate that throughout this period, Canada has consistently devoted fewer resources to the military than its allies. A review of Canada’s defence industrial base and defence policy indicates that this limited funding has led to a small and uncompetitive defence sector in the Canadian economy. Lastly, a regression analysis of Canada’s defence spending is undertaken which reveals that domestic economic variables are the primary determinant of Canadian defence spending during this period.

We investigate the effects of three structural macroeconomic shocks (monetary, demand, and supply) on the labor market outcomes of black and white Americans using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) framework with 136 U.S. macroeconomic indicators from 1973 to 2017. Our results indicate that adverse macroeconomic shocks have differential effects on labor market outcomes for blacks and whites, hurting blacks disproportionately more than whites. Black Americans' labor market outcomes appear to be significantly more sensitive to macroeconomic shocks than are the outcomes for white Americans. Our findings indicate that business-cycle costs are disproportionately borne by black Americans and that racial inequality in the labor market rises in recessions. The strongest effects occur in recessions caused by supply side disturbances. Our results suggest policymakers should take these heterogeneous effects into account when designing policy.

The focus of this paper is on labour arrangements characterized by indenture, bondage, or slavery, and the design of credit market policies to free these labourers. We examine bonded or indentured labourers that pay a fee to their patrons or employers for freedom from bondage in a multi-period game between the patron, labourers, and other lenders, where a labourer borrows the fee from a third party lender. Labourers are heterogeneous: they differ in their cost of committing strategic default in repaying the loan. The patron’s determination of the fee, and the possibility of strategic default by the labourer, are two key features that drive our results. Productivity gains are greatest when labourers with both high and low default costs pay the fee. However, there also exists a less socially optimal outcome where only the low default cost labourer participates. Importantly, we also develop a theory of the existence and persistence of bondage.

Are all oil price shocks the same? We investigate the effects of three types of global crude oil price shocks using a factor augmented VAR framework and 185 monthly macroeconomic indicators from 1978 to 2017. Our results indicate that while both demand and supply driven oil price shocks lead to a significant increase in the global crude oil price and high degree of pass-through to US consumer and producer prices, oil specific precautionary demand shocks are the main drivers of fluctuations in the price of crude oil and the US price level, followed by global economic activity oil demand shocks. Further, while increases in the price of oil triggered by oil supply shocks lower US economic activity, those triggered by global economic activity oil demand shocks are associated with increased US economic activity. Our results suggest the need for monetary policy to stabilize the pass-through from global crude oil prices to domestic inflation.

How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model. Within each outcome, prediction error was strongly associated with the family being predicted and weakly associated with the technique used to generate the prediction. Overall, these results suggest practical limits to the predictability of life outcomes in some settings and illustrate the value of mass collaborations in the social sciences.

We present our system, CruzAffect, for the CL-Aff Shared Task 2019. CruzAffect consists of several types of robust and efficient models for affective classification tasks. We utilize both traditional classifiers, such as XGBoosted Forest, as well as a deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) classifier. We explore rich feature sets such as syntactic features, emotional features, and profile features, and utilize several sentiment lexicons, to discover essential indicators of social involvement and control that a subject might exercise in their happy moments, as described in textual snippets from the HappyDB database. The data comes with a labeled set (10K), and a larger unlabeled set (70K). We therefore use supervised methods on the 10K dataset, and a bootstrapped semi-supervised approach for the 70K. We evaluate these models for binary classification of agency and social labels (Task 1), as well as multi-class prediction for concepts labels (Task 2). We obtain promising results on the held-out data, suggesting that the proposed feature sets effectively represent the data for affective classification tasks. We also build concepts models that discover general themes recurring in happy moments. Our results indicate that generic characteristics are shared between the classes of agency, social and concepts, suggesting it should be possible to build general models for affective classification tasks.

Sociological research typically involves exploring theoretical relationships, but the emergence of “big data” enables alternative approaches. This work shows the promise of data-driven machine-learning techniques involving feature engineering and predictive model optimization to address a sociological data challenge. The author’s group develops improved generalizable models to identify at-risk families. Principal-components analysis and decision tree modeling are used to predict six main dependent variables in the Fragile Families Challenge, successfully modeling one binary variable but no continuous dependent variables in the diagnostic data set. This indicates that some binary dependent variables are more predictable using a reduced set of uncorrelated independent variables, and continuous dependent variables demand more complexity.

Successful online communities accumulate large amounts of long-term content. However there has been little quantitative, theoretically-motivated exploration of how communities organize such content, nor which community members take responsibility for active organization. We examine one aspect of long-term content organization through link behavior, also exploring role differences between enterprise community leaders and members in the context of life-cycle community models. We first classify how content is linked within posts, identifying usage patterns that organize information within and outside communities. We next present an exploratory quantitative analysis of 2,010 communities including 428,476 posts and 1,246,570 links. We show paradoxically that although mature communities accumulate substantial content, organizing that content using links decreases over time. Further analyses suggest that this arises from a recency bias, with communities being focused on current content. Our results also challenge descriptive lifecycle community models, which propose that regular community members adopt greater responsibility over time. We explore explanations for our findings and implications including new tools that encourage responsibility for active organization, as well as methods for members to revisit critical content.

The financial crisis of 2007–2009 was arguably the most severe financial crisis in American history and the subsequent Great Recession was the worst economic downturn in the USA since the Great Depression. In this paper, we analyze data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the effects of the crisis and recession on the wealth of White and Black families using graphical, cross section, and panel empirical models. While other studies have measured the short-term effects of the crisis and recession on American household wealth, we are able to look at longer-term wealth effects by incorporating data from the recently released 2015 wave of the PSID. Our results indicate that the negative consequences of the economic downturn on Black families’ wealth were severe and longer-lasting than for White families.

From the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War One, the Swiss economy grew to be among the most advanced in the world. Economists however have not yet completely determined the reasons for Switzerland’s economic success. One source of this success may have been the Swiss banking system. This article explores the link between Swiss banks and Swiss economic development using historical analysis and time series econometric techniques. The evidence suggests that Switzerland’s banks contributed to Swiss economic success and that Switzerland’s universal banks in particular contributed to the country’s industrial development.

The question of how financial development affects economic inequality is a subject of much debate. This paper adds to this literature by examining whether banking deregulation affects income inequality using state-level data from the United States from the late 20th century. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that the deregulation of interstate branch banking restrictions had an effect on income inequality as measured by the Gini Coefficient and Thiel Index. We conduct our tests using fixed-effects OLS models and System GMM dynamic panel analysis. Our results suggest that branching deregulation has resulted in increased income inequality in the United States. (C) 2018 Western Social Science Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Online enterprise communities often have clear informational goals, for example, for experts to answer novices’ factual questions. However, emotional support is also critical for developing online social relationships. But what is the optimal balance between informational and emotional communication for such communities? To address this, we develop and validate a model to assess the relative prevalence of emotional versus factual communication. We next test hypotheses about how this prevalence relates to community member satisfaction in enterprise communities. Overall, factual, not emotional, posts predict perceived member satisfaction. This relationship also depends on community subtype. Although prior work argues that Communities of Practice (CoPs) rely on frequent emotional communication, instead we found CoPs showed less satisfaction when members focused on emotional concerns. We discuss implications for both community tool design and the practices of community leaders.

Within the field of public economics, there is the perception that Republicans are associated with small government' and Democrats with big government'. We test this notion by examining whether economic freedom is affected when a single party is in control of the state legislature. We find no link between party control and our main economic freedom indicator, but we do find a positive link between Republican control and the taxation component of economic freedom, suggesting a Republican legislature leads to lower taxation.

We investigate the characteristics of factual and emotional argumentation styles observed in online debates. Using an annotated set of "factual" and "feeling" debate forum posts, we extract patterns that are highly correlated with factual and emotional arguments, and then apply a bootstrapping methodology to find new patterns in a larger pool of unannotated forum posts. This process automatically produces a large set of patterns representing linguistic expressions that are highly correlated with factual and emotional language. Finally, we analyze the most discriminating patterns to better understand the defining characteristics of factual and emotional arguments.

This paper describes two projects that analyze online community behaviors. The first discusses the modeling of emotional and factual language within argumentative forums. When applied to enterprise communities, this model is found to be a predictor of member satisfaction. The next project covers a unique perspective of member and owner content creation and curation behaviors across the lifecycle of online communities. Both members and owners are found to increase in content posting but the level of linking is role dependent.