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How Network Structures Explain Creativity

Collaboration in and across teams increasingly distinguishes production in creative fields whether in academic research, business projects, civic activism, or cultural production, including music, film, design, and new media. The proposed research examines how working teams are expressions of larger, informal, yet relatively stable, communities. The task is to develop a set of network analytic tools to track how teams assemble, disassemble, and reassemble.

Education and Earnings Trajectories Across Generations

Canada and the United States are two of the largest immigrant destinations in the world. For decades, the two countries have received large inflows of immigrants from many common sending nations while pursuing markedly different policies regarding the admission and integration of immigrants. This project examines education and earnings trajectories of immigrants and their descendants in both countries, in light of these notable regulatory differences marking labor market and social policies.

Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Poverty Alleviation in Developing Nations

Poverty reduction is one of the central challenges for development in new democracies. Many of these democracies operate in a context of weak institutions, where policy implementation is subject to the discretion of politicians, This proposal investigates the strategies used to target private benefits and how voters' access to benefits affects their behavior. This project studies the conditions under which local politicians pursue partisan targeting strategies and when voters can circumvent these strategies.

Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Bandits or States?

Some states protect their populations, use restraint in taxation and provide public goods, while others engage in arbitrary expropriation and impede economic growth. Why?

The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Scientific Experimentation

Experimental historian of science, Professor Pamela Smith will lead a team of international interdisciplinary experts and students in the reenactment of experiments that were conducted during the scientific revolution. In 2014-15, the focus will be metalworking and portrait medal casting; in 2015-16, on pigment making and painting; and in 2016-17, on varnish making. These laboratory seminars lay out a new model for collaboration between the humanities and sciences, demonstrating the reciprocal effects of bringing historical research to bear on laboratory activities and vice versa.

Collaborative Research: Understanding the Connections Between Economics Behaviors

This award funds research in behavioral economics that will analyze the possible relationships between economic behaviors using new data and new modeling methods.

Attention Networks and Cognitive Challenges: Positional Advantages in Complex and Distant Search

Network theory has provided novel concepts and analytical tools for understanding how actors can leverage privileged access to others' expertise to make sound decisions. But to date it has focused on the social ties that comprise social communities. By identifying communities through network patterns of attention, instead of through patterns of direct soical network linkages, this project will identify cognitive communities, thereby reorienting network analysis from its traditional focus on social ties.

The Dynamics of Controversial Practices: SEC Sunshine, Aspirational Pay, and the Evolution of Executive Compensation Networks

Stimulated by 2006 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations that required large firms to report their compensation peers, a set of recent papers have concluded that many companies favor "aspirational" peers (i.e., larger companies and with better paid CEOs than the focal company). Research on the use by companies of aspirational peers has focused on the prevalence and average overall level of bias, and has attempted to explain bias in terms of organizational and CEO characteristics rather than in terms of the networked environment.

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Privacy Concerns Regarding the Use of Home Diagnostic Technologies

Under the supervision of Prof. David Stark, Ph.D. student Joan H Robinson, will engage in archival research and interviews to investigate the regulatory framework for home diagnostics, looking in particular at how home diagnostics have contributed to the development of American legal frameworks of personal privacy and disclosure. Utilizing archival materials at the National Archives and those attained through the Freedom of Information Act, she will study the primary sources used by the Food and Drug Administration in their deliberation regarding the Medical Device Amendments of 1976.

Language, Laws, and Labor Contracts in the 20th Century

This research will contribute to our understanding of how firms and workers allocate authority, and how this can be organized to increase productivity and reduce conflict. These questions go back to Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon, as well as the institutionalist school of labor economics. Outside of economics, our results will relate to the large literature in labor and legal history, sociology, and American political development that has concerned itself with the role of the law in the labor contract.

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