Research Fields: Economics and Institutions, Economics and Inequality, Economics and Beliefs
I am an applied microeconomist interested in the historical contexts that shape economic development. In particular, I am recently interested in how the roots of development are shaped by past conflicts and in the incentives and actions of institutions that interact with development. In past work, I have studied a range of topics related to skill development and mental health. I also have some work using survey experiments to understand gender norms and motherhood labour market penalties.
CV
Google Scholar Profile
jonathan.norris@strath.ac.uk
Working Papers
The aerial bombing of Cambodia and the recovery of communities (with Thi Tham Ta and Otto Lenhart).
[ Abstract | Draft ]
We study how local areas in Cambodia are still shaped by past exposure to US bombing decades ago, leading to divergent patterns in health and economic development. Using a wide range of geo-coded data and a spatial regression discontinuity adapted to many boundaries, we find that the long-term impacts of past bombings vary significantly by location dependent on whether they persist as unexploded ordnance (UXO). In areas of hard ground, bombs are more likely to detonate leaving destruction but no lingering risk, while in soft ground, bombs fail more frequently leaving UXO. We confirm this pattern using data on causalities from explosive remnants of war, and we then show this difference gives rise to a diverging pattern in health and economic development. In bombed, hard ground locations that are free from the dangers of UXO, investments in economic activities and healthcare infrastructure have even improved outcomes post-conflict. However, in areas where UXO remains a threat, development has been hindered, and negative consequences are persistent. Overall, our results offer an important lesson that while conflicts can be harmful, the impacts on future generations can be mitigated through investments in the post-conflict era, if remnants of war no longer remain.
Beliefs on Children’s Human Capital Accumulation and Mothers at Work (with C'esarine Boinet, Agnese Romiti, Paul Telemo, and Zhan Shi)
[ Abstract | Draft ]
Mothers may face pressure to sort out of the labor market due to perceptions that women have an absolute advantage in child-rearing, even when their earnings potential matches that of men. Guided by a simple model, we use a survey experiment where we equalize earnings potential across gender and show that women are perceived to hold an absolute advantage in child-rearing. We then experimentally test mechanisms underlying these beliefs, finding that mothers are expected to spend more time on skill investments with their children than fathers who have equivalent time available. Finally, we find that when mothers work full-time, children's actual performance is generally underestimated, but providing factual information about their outcomes, leads to more accurate beliefs and reduced expectations of harm to the child. Our results show that beliefs about an absolute advantage for women in child-rearing are indeed present and highlight the need for targeted interventions to address misinformation about children's outcomes when mothers pursue careers.
The Motherhood Penalty: Gender Norms, Occupational Sorting, and Labour Supply (with Agnese Romiti and C'esarine Boinet)
[ Abstract | Draft | IZA Draft ]
In this paper, we examine how pre-birth gender norms shape women's labor market trajectories and occupational choices around motherhood in the United Kingdom. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we first quantify the impact of gender norms on earnings and labor supply post-childbirth. Our results show that traditional mothers experience a 18-percentage-point (pp) higher motherhood penalty in earnings and a 20-pp higher motherhood penalty in hours worked compared to egalitarian mothers. Second, we investigate the role of pre-birth comparative advantage within couples, finding that this mechanism applies only to egalitarian parents.
Third, we examine the interaction between occupational characteristics, including their degree of family-friendliness, and pre-birth gender norms. We find that accounting for occupational sorting significantly reduces the average earnings penalty for both traditional and egalitarian mothers, driven entirely by hours worked for traditional mothers. In addition, we show that occupational sorting explains 80% of the short-run earnings penalty gap between traditional and egalitarian mothers and eliminates the difference in hours worked penalties entirely.
Thus, traditional women seem to sort pre-birth into occupations that facilitate a larger reduction in hours worked post-motherhood, which in turn have a substantial impact on their earnings trajectory.
Income Inequality and Peer Effects in Education (with Marco Fongoni, Agnese Romiti, and Zhan Shi).
[ Abstract | Draft (updated 27/08/2024) | IZA Draft (previous version; different title) ]
We study the long-run effects of income inequality within peer compositions. An increase in the share of low-income peers within school-cohorts improves the educational outcomes of low-income students and negatively affects high-income students. We show this pattern is not likely explained by commonly observed mechanisms. We then propose a model based on reference-dependent preferences and social comparison that rationalizes our findings, highlighting the role of frustration or motivation depending on students’ relative income. We also provide evidence consistent with this mechanism. Finally, we show that better connections in school can help to avoid such unintended consequences of income inequality.
Published Papers
The Long-Run Effects of Peers on Mental Health (with Lukas Kiessling), The Economic Journal 133, no. 649 (2023): 281-322.
[ Abstract | Draft | Published Link | Replication Package | Media ]
This paper studies how peers in school affect students' mental health. Guided by a theoretical framework, we find that increasing students’ relative ranks in their cohorts by one standard deviation improves their mental health by 6\% of a standard deviation conditional on own ability. These effects are more pronounced for low-ability students, persistent for at least 14 years, and carry over to economic long-run outcomes. Moreover, we document a strong asymmetry: Students who receive negative rather than positive shocks react more strongly. Our findings therefore provide evidence on how the school environment can have long-lasting consequences for the well-being of individuals.
Troubled in School: Does Maternal Involvement Matter for Adolescents (with Martijn van Hasselt), Accepted (2023), Journal of Population Economics.
[ Abstract | Draft | Published Link ]
We estimate the causal effect of mother's involvement on the amount of trouble an adolescent experiences in school. We use multiple measures of school trouble and factor analysis to construct a composite and then link this composite with noncognitive skills. Our measure of mother's involvement encompasses discussing school-related matters and providing help with school projects. Using an instrumental variable constructed from a suitably chosen peer group, our main finding is that an increase in maternal involvement leads to a significant decrease in school trouble. We find this result to be robust across a large number of sensitivity tests designed to account for possible selection effects, shocks at the peer group level, and further potential violations of the exclusion restriction. Additionally, we present evidence suggesting that the effect of maternal involvement may operate through its effect on adolescents' college aspirations, mental health, and the perception of parental warmth.
Peer Gender and Schooling: Evidence from Ethiopia (with Daniel Borbely) and Agnese Romiti), Accepted (2022), Journal of Human Capital.
[ Abstract | Draft | Published Link ]
This paper studies how classmate gender composition matters for school absences and test scores in a context characterized by strong social norms and scarce school resources. We base our results on a unique survey of students across classrooms and schools in Ethiopia, exploiting random assignment of students to classrooms. We find a strong asymmetry: while females benefit from exposure to more female classmates with reduced absenteeism and improvement on math test scores, males are unaffected. We further find that exposure to more female classmates improves motivation and participation in class, and in general, that the effects of classmate gender composition are consistent with social interaction effects.
The Skill Development of the Children of Immigrants (with Marie Hull), Economics of Education Review 78 (2020): 102036.
[ Abstract | Draft | Published Link ]
In this paper, we study the evolution of cognitive and noncognitive skills gaps for children of immigrants between kindergarten and 5th grade using two recent cohorts of elementary school students. We find some evidence that children of immigrants begin school with lower math scores than children of natives, but this gap disappears in later elementary school. For noncognitive skills, children of immigrants and children of natives score similarly in early elementary school, but a positive gap opens up in 2nd grade. We find that the growth in noncognitive skills is driven by disadvantaged immigrant students. We discuss potential explanations for the observed patterns of skill development as well as the implications of our results for the labor market prospects of children of immigrants.
Peers, Parents, and Attitudes about School, Journal of Human Capital 14, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 290-342.
[ Abstract | Draft | Published Link ]
Educational attitudes are linked to long-term educational success through motivating effort and greater attention to the future. This study focuses on the role of friends and of parents in the school grade cohort in shaping adolescent attitude development. First, I explore the effect of friends' attitudes on an adolescent's attitudes. Second, I ask whether parental investments and educational expectations in the adolescent's school cohort can moderate the influence of friends on attitudes. I find that adolescents’ attitudes about school respond to friends’ attitudes and that parental educational expectations within a cohort can moderate the influence of friends on attitudes.
Identity Economics: Social Influence and Skill Development, Journal of Economic Surveys 33, no. 5 (2019): 1389-1408.
[ Abstract | Draft | Published Link ]
Within the economic literature, studies in identity economics, peer effects, and skill development have all suggested that social influences have an important role in determining choices. In this review, I draw on lessons learned from the identity economics literature to examine implications from the peer effects and skill development literature. I focus on the role of social identity in generating social group effects from peers and what role identity may have in shaping the development of skills from broader environments, parents and peers during childhood and adolescence.
Work in Progress
Handcuffing the Grabbing Hand: Evidence from China’s Anticorruption Campaign (with Quoc-Anh Do and Fei Xu)
Autocratic Capture of Development (with Daniel Borbely, Mathias Bühler, and Joris Mueller).
Dustbin Papers
Marijuana Legalization and Mental Health (with Daniel Borbely, Otto Lenhart, and Agnese Romiti)
[ Why is this retired? | IZA Draft ]
The analysis of the medical and recreational marijuana effects on mental health are complicated by two points. One, there are effectively two treatments when they occur, a prior medical marijuana policy (MMLs) and then a recreational marijuana policy (RMLs). The RML policies alway follow in states with existing MMLs. There are approaches in the literature to deal with this, but in our view without more data the reliability here is dubious, at least in the time frame we were studying.
Second, the implementation of RMLs for most of the cases in our panel happens to occur during a period that the trends in mental health change drastically. This is something, as far as we are aware, that no one has pointed out in terms of how this could complicate the estimation of RML effects. Why could it complicate estimation? While this change in trend is happening across the US, for a common trends assumption to hold in our setting would require that this change happens exactly the same across all treated and control comparisons. We find this hard to believe once looking deeply enough at just how drastic the mental health trends change starting from around 2013 or 2014. While referees had other valuable concerns about the paper, this was not pointed out. Nevertheless, in our estimation, pushing forward would not be useful to the literature.
A potential idea, is to look carefully at the change in mental health trends happening across the US during the 2010s and use this to assess clearly the difficulty for estimating RML effects. Cast against the backdrop of MML effects the picture becomes messy. In our view, this creates a circumstance that is difficult to effectively estimate effects in a believable way. How far these concerns extend to other settings interested in RML effects is unclear.
