Multiracialism and Meritocracy: Singapore's Approach to Race and Inequality

This paper characterizes Singapore's efforts to tackle the problem of persistent racial inequality in terms of the notion of fair meritocracy. Singapore's race policy attempts to level the playing field through its unique race-based self-help organizations and a comprehensive, racially integrated, public housing program. Individuals are then sorted by the ostensibly objective mechanism of a standardized test based educational system. The social and economic implications of this policy are examined and, using summary data from the 1980 and 1990 censuses, the extent to which Singapore has been successful in creating a fair multiracial meritocracy is assessed.     

The effect of legal status on immigrant wages and occupational skills

Native and foreign-born workers with a high school degree or less education work in different types of occupations. This article exploits the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act to examine whether legal status causes immigrants to work in occupations that use skills similar to those of natives. Legal status decreases the manual skill intensity of immigrants’ occupations by about two percentiles. It increases communication skill intensity by a similar amount. This reduces the skill gap between Mexican-born and native-born American workers by 11–15%.     

I am therefore I own: Implications of organization-based identity for employee stock ownership

Most research on employee stock plan participation investigates the effects of such forms of ownership on employee attitudes, leaving our understanding of the individual differences that contribute to employee ownership largely unknown. Drawing from the consumer behavior literature, our study explores the effect of organization-based identity on the decision to participate in an employee stock purchase plan. The study was conducted in a newly public firm where we examine the effect of organization-based identity on the purchase decision in two time periods. The first point in time was the initial public offering (IPO), when the employee has little information on how the firm's stock will perform in the market. The second point in time was the first quarter following the IPO, when employees have market data to help them with decision-making. Results indicate that, as predicted, organization-based identity is associated with participation in an employee stock purchase plan, at both points in time, above and beyond the influence of several economic and psychological predictors reported in prior studies.     

Assessing Preference Change on the US Supreme Court

The foundation upon which accounts of policy-motivated behaviorof Supreme Court justices are built consists of assumptionsabout the policy preferences of the justices. To date, mostscholars have assumed that the policy positions of Supreme Courtjustices remain consistent throughout the course of their careersand most measures of judicial ideology—such as Segal andCover scores—are time invariant. On its face, this assumptionis reasonable; Supreme Court justices serve with life tenureand are typically appointed after serving in other politicalor judicial roles. However, it is also possible that the worldviews,and thus the policy positions, of justices evolve through thecourse of their careers. In this article we use a Bayesian dynamicideal point model to investigate preference change on the USSupreme Court. The model allows for justices' ideal points tochange over time in a smooth fashion. We focus our attentionon the 16 justices who served for 10 or more terms and completedtheir service between the 1937 and 2003 terms. The results arestriking—14 of these 16 justices exhibit significant preferencechange. This has profound implications for the use of time-invariantpreference measures in applied work.