This article challenges the widespread notion that spanning recognized categories, or generalism,is disadvantageous. In markets, buyers face the fundamental challenge of gaining insight into the underlying ability of sellers. Economic sociologists rely on theories of categorization to explain...

We study copyright law and its relationship with cultural conceptions of authorship and technicalconstraints on the economics of publishing in the US. Because American copyright law was first developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we focus on that time period. And because...

Despite unprecedented extensions of available unemployment insurance (UI) benefits during the “Great Recession†of 2007-09 and its aftermath, large numbers of recipients exhausted their maximum available UI benefits prior to finding new jobs. Using SIPP panel data and an eventstudy...

We review the literature about the rich, the affluent and the top incomes focusing in two issues: identification and measurement, and the analysis of the determinants of richness. The review discusses data sources, indicators, populations and units of analysis used for the identification of the...

This paper examines the recent changes in the relationships between public research universities and financial markets, using the University of California as a case study. Between 2003 and 2011, UC’s outstanding bond debt to investors more than doubled. Funds raised through borrowing were...

Why are blue-collar blacks less likely to help jobseekers than jobholders from other ethnoracial groups or even than more affluent blacks? Drawing from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 97 black and Latino workers at one large, public sector employer, we find that blue-collar black...

Understanding how a task group’s demographic composition influences its effectiveness requires considering situational demands. We explore this insight in a high-pressure situation, Himalayan mountain climbing. We hypothesize that the distribution of members’ nationality...

We nested a large-scale field experiment into the national rollout of the introduction of performance pay for medical care providers in Rwanda to study the effect of incentives for health care providers. In order to identify the effect of incentives separately from higher compensation, we held...