Islamist terrorist attacks evoke negative stereotypes and symbolic threat perceptions toward men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin, yet evidence on the labor market consequences of these attacks remains inconsistent. We address this ambiguity by developing a framework that links external shocks to employment outcomes through salience shifts and managerial discretion within workplaces. Salience shifts arise when clusters of terrorist attacks—rather than isolated events—are amplified by media coverage, reinforcing or generating stereotypes and increasing the likelihood that ethnoracial categories become consequential in hiring decisions. Whether such shifts translate into exclusion depends on organizational contexts that mute or permit greater managerial discretion. We test this framework using monthly linked employer–employee data from Germany (1999 to 2019), data on terrorist attacks linked to Islamist motives, name-based measures of perceived origin, and topic-modeled newspaper coverage. Our analyses show that periods marked by multiple Islamist terrorist attacks and heightened media coverage significantly reduce the employment of men perceived to be of Middle Eastern origin. These effects are strongest in workplaces with a high share of non-complex jobs and in settings lacking formal hiring procedures or worker representation, but they are muted where Middle Eastern managers are present. Together, these findings indicate when and where politicized events translate into employment disparities, highlighting the need to account for temporal and organizational contexts.

This research evaluates methodologies to mitigate misreporting in intimate partner violence (IPV) data collection in a middle-income country. We conducted surveys in Russia involving three list experiments, a self-administered tablet questionnaire, a self-administered online survey, and conventional face-to-face interviews. Results show that list experiments yield lower disclosure rates for the complex IPV definitions suggested by the UN. The tablet-based self-administered questionnaire, conducted with an interviewer present, also did not increase IPV reporting. Conversely, the self-administered online survey increased lifetime IPV disclosures by 51% (physical) and 26% (psychological) compared to face-to-face interviews. Women showed greater sensitivity to the online survey mode. This increase is linked to the absence of interviewer bias, enhanced safety by minimizing potential perpetrators’ presence, and reduced cognitive burden. We argue that self-administered online surveys—using sampling bias mitigation—may thus be an optimal, low-cost method for surveying the general population in middle- and high-income countries.

Despite extensive research on education's relationship with family formation, causal evidence remains limited, particularly for postsecondary education in East Asia. This research note provides novel causal evidence on education's effects on marriage and fertility among Japanese women by exploiting a unique quasi-experimental design based on the 1966 “Firehorse” zodiac superstition. We leverage the mismatch between Japanese school year and calendar year to identify women who benefited from reduced educational competition without being directly affected by the superstition. Using a difference-in-differences approach and comprehensive data on approximately 1.8 million women from multiple administrative sources, we examine the effect of increased educational opportunities across all education levels. Our findings reveal that higher education leads to modest delays in marriage and childbearing—effects that are smaller than previously documented—without increasing lifelong singlehood. Women with more education show higher labor force participation at marriage and marry slightly younger spouses while maintaining traditional marriage practices. These results suggest that education's direct effect on family formation is moderate and that institutional factors beyond education may deserve greater attention in understanding demographic trends in East Asia. Our findings contribute to debates about effective family policies in rapidly aging societies facing declining marriage and fertility rates.

In January 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order that would redefine the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment by discontinuing birthright citizenship for future children born to certain noncitizen parents. Prior research estimates that ending birthright citizenship would increase the “unauthorized,” or otherwise precarious noncitizen, population by 2.5 million in one decade. We show that the largest absolute impact of ending birthright citizenship would affect Latinos, who would compose nearly 80% of “unauthorized” births in the short term and more than 90% of U.S.-born “unauthorized” people by 2050, expanding the projected size of the Latino unauthorized population by nearly 30%. This projected increase is attributable to the fact that Latinos currently make up the largest share of unauthorized immigrants. After accounting for population size, however, we show that the Asian population would experience the largest relative impact of ending birthright citizenship, especially in the near future. Specifically, we project 41 “unauthorized” births per 1,000 unauthorized Asians, compared with 17 “unauthorized” births per 1,000 among Latinos. This disparate relative impact on Asians stems from their much larger share of temporary nonimmigrant visa holders, whose U.S.-born children would be newly classified as “unauthorized” under the executive order. These disparate absolute and relative impacts on millions of children and their families deserve a fuller understanding of the associated societal implications.

In our era of low fertility rates, much research has examined factors behind delayed childbearing and childlessness. While scholars emphasize the role of macro-level context in constraining reproductive decision-making, less attention has been paid to how context shapes what it means, subjectively, to remain childless today. For women, whose childlessness has long been theorized as a deviant, stigmatized identity, this question is especially salient. Drawing on 157 interviews with non-mothers in two countries with distinct family landscapes, Japan and the United States, this paper comparatively analyzes how women experience and evaluate childlessness. Japanese participants were more likely to frame not having children as increasingly normalized and justifiable via entrenched gender inequalities whereas American participants were more likely to emphasize the socially isolating and publicly contested nature of childlessness, often drawing on moral logics to justify non-motherhood. To contextualize these divergences, I elaborate on two perceptual processes that emerged as relevant to women’s narratives: their views on the (in)flexibility of becoming and being a “good” mother and their interpretations of national demographic conditions. Together, these findings advance an understanding of childlessness as a status imbued with distinct meanings that are subject to cultural and demographic specificities.

American universities operate as organizational actors with goals and elaborate structures to achieve them, often in interaction with multiple “stakeholders.” Fundraising has increasingly become central in these universities. University development offices with fundraising objectives emerged, expanded, and professionalized, becoming core features of American universities. Yet, it is not clear to what extent fundraising has diffused through higher education outside of the United States. Utilizing an original cross-national sample of 437 non-US universities, this paper seeks to ascertain whether university development orientations are more likely to be found in universities that look more like organizational actors and in more marketized societies. We find strong support for the neo-institutional hypothesis that universities with greater organizational elaboration and links to transnational professional associations are more likely to adopt a development or fundraising orientation. We find that universities in the Anglosphere are also more likely to adopt this orientation. However, other indicators of more marketized societies are not associated with university development structures. These findings contribute to scholarship on organizational actorhood and the globalization of higher education by highlighting the importance of university organization in accounting for their embrace of an American-influenced development-oriented university model.

The uneven distribution of universities across regions has been argued to create educational inequalities based on place of residence. While studies have shown positive associations between college proximity, measured by distance to nearest college or its presence, and enrolment among local residents, regional availability has often been measured insufficiently, and longitudinal evidence on the relationship is limited. Using multiple social survey datasets combined with population census data from Japan, a country that has experienced significant policy shifts regarding university locations, we examine how longitudinal changes in regional university availability in an individual’s residential and neighbouring prefectures are associated with their likelihood of university enrolment and how these associations differ by parental class and education. Our results show that increased university availability in both residential and neighbouring prefectures is positively associated with enrolment. While the strength of the association does not differ significantly by parental class, individuals with tertiary-educated parents are more responsive to increased availability. These findings suggest that increased university availability in underserved areas could reduce spatial inequality in enrolment, though may have a limited role in reducing, or may even be positively associated with, inequality based on social origin.

While the association between apprenticeship dropout and negative labour market consequences is well documented, the causal link and social stratification in this effect are less clear. Using georeferenced German administrative data and a conditional instrumental variable approach that exploits distance between place of residence and large firms, we find negative financial consequences but show that the dropout penalty is entirely concentrated among individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. We further show that these stratified scars partly reflect unequal educational reenrolment rates and unequal employment outcomes among dropouts who do not reenrol. Our results highlight the potential of policies targeting higher graduation rates to reduce social inequality and suggest social advantage buffers the negative financial consequences of apprenticeship dropout, even in institutional settings with strong links between credentials and labour market outcomes.

Statistical discrimination theory suggests that discrimination arises when gatekeepers lack individual-level information and therefore draw on their beliefs on the group-level. According to this perspective, the policy solution is straight forward: provide gatekeepers with accurate individual-level information and discrimination will cease. One such area for intervention is teachers’ grading of students’ academic skills. Previous studies find that teachers exhibit negative grading bias against boys, ethnically and racially minoritized students, and students of parents with short educations so these groups receive signals about lower academic potential than merited. We test whether grading bias stems from statistical discrimination using Danish administrative registers on ninth grade students (N∼400,000) during 2008–2014. First, we leverage the introduction in 2010 of standardized national tests in Danish reading in eighth grade as a natural experiment: teachers were given individual-level information, and we analyse whether this information mitigates grading bias in ninth grade. We further test whether grading bias stems from statistical discrimination by analysing the role of the performance of a given social background group at the same school the year prior. We find substantial grading bias in Danish reading against boys, ethnically minoritized students, and students of non-university-educated parents and in written mathematics against boys and students of non-university educated parents but conclude that statistical discrimination is not likely to play a major role. Hence, our study suggests that other types of discrimination may account for grading bias.