Business

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • (2019) Jiranaphawiboon, Abhisit
    Thesis
    Public concerns about potential harms of violent video games are often based on a positive association between exposure to video game violence and aggression found in psychology experiments. Whether this aggressive tendency manifests itself in terms of actual criminal behavior seems unclear. In this paper, I utilize temporal variation in aggregated violence exposure using data containing weekly unit sales of the top 30 game titles in the United States from 2005-2014, and analyze the impact of this exposure on assaults committed by young males. I find that weeks with high intensely violent video game sales have a lower number of assaults. The effect becomes more noticeable during the 9 P.M. – 12 A.M. time window over the weekend. One million additional sales of intensely violent games reduces assaults by 2.15% during that time period. I interpret this finding as a product of time substitution, where people play games that they have recently bought for longer hours, which draws them away from risky outdoor activities. As a result, crime drops in response to the absence of proactive criminals on the streets. A highly pronounced impact among young males can be explained through self-selection: they disproportionately commit impulsive crimes, and also identify as frequent purchasers and avid players of intensely violent games. In further evidence of the time substitution hypothesis, crime rates are higher in the week preceding a new release, when gamers are likely to reduce their playing hours of old games in anticipation of beginning the new game. The presence of time substitution in this natural experiment reconciles with the opposite findings from the lab. Gamers cannot commit crimes spurred on by their heightened aggressive tendencies while simultaneously gaming.

  • (2017) Pugh, Kevin
    Thesis
    I conduct a survey of the newly available academic performance and social context data relating to Australian schools. I set this in the context of available school data sets internationally, highlighting the education economics literature that has been made possible by those data sets. I set out the new research opportunities that have become available to researchers using the Australian data, before giving a practical example of the use to which the new data can be put, by constructing and estimating an empirical panel data model using a six-year panel of the Australian data. The model I construct estimates school competition effects through an index measure of competition developed for each school. The index is derived from schools’ own standardised test scores and those of nearby schools. Since the index is a proxy signal for relative local market quality, I test the hypothesis that an increase in index values will be associated with an increase in test scores in the following year, as schools respond to competitive pressure. In parallel, and to dismiss the possibility that positive and significant findings may be due to regression to the mean, I develop a synthetic index for each school. This is created by substituting for each school’s actual index score one derived from the scores of nearby schools for a school randomly drawn from a subset of schools with similar baseline scores. This gener¬¬ates a robustness check, whereby the validity of parameter estimates for the actual index would be supported by estimates for the synthetic index that are not significantly different from zero. I find significant effects for the competition index, in particular for primary schools and schools in metropolitan areas. Findings are validated by the absence of significance for synthetic index parameter estimates.

  • (2017) Tian, Wei
    Thesis
    It is well acknowledged that early life skills have profound implications on a variety of later life outcomes. Evidence has also shown that the levels of these skills diverge earlier than school age for children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and remain stable throughout the schooling years. This paper focuses on child development before age 6, and tries to determine whether time allocation has an impact on child skill formation during this critical development stage. I find that in general, children's cognitive skills at both age 3 and 5 are most sensitive to different time inputs around age 3; non-cognitive skills at age 3 are mostly affected by parenting styles around age 3; and non-cognitive skills at age 5 are neither affected by specific time inputs nor by parenting styles - they are mainly affected by non-cognitive skills at age 3. The findings indicate that there exist heterogeneous stages in child skill development from birth to age 5. Age 3 seems to be the period when children develop more rapidly and are more sensitive to investments from parents within this time window.