Laura K. Gee

The Nature of Giving Time to Your Child's School

How do households view contributions of time (via volunteering/fundraising) to their children’s schools? Time contributions produce a public good (improved school quality for all students) and private benefits (e.g., better class placement). If private benefits increase with number of own children at a school and households value private benefits, then the level of contribution should be affected by the number of own children enrolled at a single school. Using a nationally representative sample of more than 2,500 multichild households, I find that time contributions have a statistically significant relationship with number of own children enrolled in the same school. For example, households with multiple children at the same school have a 13 percentage points higher propensity to volunteer at the school than households with a single child in each school. This result implies that private benefits have a strong influence on the parents’ decision to contribute time to their children’s schools.

Social Networks and Labor Markets: How Strong Ties Relate to Job Finding on Facebook’s Social Network

Social networks are important for finding jobs, but which ties are most useful? Granovetter has suggested that “weak ties” are more valuable than “strong ties,” since strong ties have redundant information, while weak ties have new information. Using 6 million Facebook users’ data, we find evidence for the opposite. We proxy for job help by identifying people who eventually work with a pre-existing friend. Using objective tie strength measures and our job help proxy, we find that most people are helped through one of their numerous weak ties but a single stronger tie is significantly more valuable at the margin.

Anger Management: Aggression and Punishment in the Provision of Public Goods

The ability to punish free-riders can increase the provision of public goods. However, sometimes, the benefit of increased public good provision is outweighed by the costs of punishments. One reason a group may punish to the point that net welfare is reduced is that punishment can express anger about free-riding. If this is the case, then tools that regulate emotions could decrease the use of punishments while keeping welfare high, possibly depending on pre-existing levels of aggression. In this lab experiment, we find that adopting an objective attitude (objective), through a form of emotion regulation called cognitive reappraisal, decreases the use of punishments and makes a statistically insignificant improvement to both net earnings and self-reported emotions compared to a control condition (natural). Although the interaction between the emotion regulation treatment and level of aggression is not significant, only low aggression types reduce their punishments; the results are of the same direction, but statistically insignificant for high aggression types. Overall, our findings suggest that pairing emotion regulation with punishments can decrease the use of punishments without harming monetary and mental welfare.

Fragmentation versus Standardization in the Market for Digital Rights Management Solutions: A Case Study of the Online Market for Audio and Video Content

The emergence of digital technologies has facilitated the creation and the distribution of digital content. At the same time a set of new technologies, called Digital Rights Management (DRM) Systems, has been adopted to prevent illegal copying and to control usage rights. These new systems have challenged Intellectual Property rules and have redefined the economic relationships between creators and consumers of copyrighted works. Despite the important implications, the literature on the subject is scarce and at the very early stages. A recent paper by Park and Scotchmer (2004) argues that firms will have a tendency to adopt a shared system for technical protection which will lower the prices of digital copyright protected content. The empirical evidence, however, shows that there is increased competition among different DRM systems and a tendency toward fragmentation of the market for DRM solutions. One explanation for existence of proprietary DRMs is the new possibilities for business that these systems offer. DRMs not only protect content, but have allowed companies to expand their business models, thus providing new sources of revenue. We argue there are various incentives at play in the market for digital protection and DRM systems that counter tendencies for standardization. The goal of this paper is to provide an understanding of DRM solutions and of the market environment in which these systems operate in order to better inform the emerging literature.