Princeton University

Assistant professor Delia Baldassarri has received $495,000 from the National Science Foundation to study the social factors that shape the economic outcomes of producer organizations, which unite individual farmers in the developing world and are viewed by many development scholars as essential to poverty reduction. Baldassarri's research will measure the impact of social capital, such as social networks and inter-village relationships, on economic outcomes, using as a case study Uganda's Agriculture Productivity Enhancement Project (APEP). Started in 2003, APEP links more than 60,000 farmers in some 2,500 village-level organizations. The research will contribute to a more empirically grounded understanding of the relationship between social capital and economic performance and also directly inform policy planning.

Professors Angus Deaton and Anne Case were awarded a $97,000 subaward from National Institutes of Health funding to the National Bureau of Economic Research to explore links between socioeconomic factors and health in early and late life. Their research on early life is motivated by the long reach of early childhood health into adult and late life health and cognitive function. Their work on late life will focus on the measurement of well-being and the way in which well-being evolves with health over the course of a lifetime, documenting and analyzing patterns among the elderly in more than 140 countries.

Assistant professor Kosuke Imai has received $98,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop new statistical methods to analyze causal relationships. Experiments are increasingly used in the social science disciplines to prove whether a particular variable caused a certain outcome, but standard statistical measurements do not offer much insight into how or why the outcome was affected. Imai's proposed methods will explore these causal relationships more fully, with wide applicability in the social science disciplines and beyond, including epidemiology and medicine.

Imai also was awarded $65,000 from the National Science Foundation to explore problems with current measurement strategies used to identify the way information in the media during electoral campaigns affects public opinion. Using this as a foundation, he will develop more accurate methods to determine "media priming" effects and propose new experiments to explore the consequences of various measurement techniques. In addition to use in political science, the work is broadly applicable to psychological studies that examine how subtle manipulations affect people's opinions.

Professor Sara McLanahan was awarded $223,000 from the National Institutes of Health to accelerate progress on a study of the short-term effects of the current recession on the health and well-being of mothers, fathers and children in vulnerable families. The research is part of the longitudinal Fragile Families Study of approximately 3,700 unmarried parents and 1,200 married parents and their children born in large American cities between 1998 and 2000. The new study will explore the effects of the recession on five variables: economic well-being; the formation of unions and households; the parents’ mental and physical health; parenting; and child well-being.

Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School Christina Paxson has received $186,000 from the National Institutes of Health to build on her ongoing investigation of low-income, minority parents who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. The new support will allow Paxson and her collaborators at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Harvard University to obtain social neighborhood data as well as information about survivors’ genetic factors to supplement existing data on psychosocial and contextual variables. These additional data will allow a more comprehensive understanding of risk and resilience in the wake of the Katrina tragedy.

Professor Stephen Redding has received a $54,000 subaward from a National Institutes of Health grant to the National Bureau of Economic Research to continue work exploring the distributional consequences of globalization. Although the idea that countries as a whole can gain from trade while particular individuals and groups within those countries can lose is central to neo-classical economics, existing frameworks for understanding the distributional effects of trade liberalization have severe limitations. Redding and his collaborators will use the funds to further an alternate framework they have developed, which incorporates key features of product and labor markets to overcome problems with current models that describe risk and inequality in a global economy.

Professor Keith Whittington has received $138,000 from the National Science Foundation to support a collaborative effort to backdate the U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database to include nearly 20,000 cases resolved between 1792 and 1946, the earliest year in the current database. Broadening the scope of the database in this manner will facilitate the application of modern social science methodologies to historical data, allowing judicial specialists to broaden their time horizons, test theories and gain historical perspective on the functioning of today's Supreme Court.