We study how couples allocate retirement-saving contributions across each spouse's account. In a new dataset covering over a million US individuals, we find retirement contributions are not allocated to the account with the highest employer match rate. This lack of coordination—which goes against the assumptions of most models of household decision-making—is common, costly, persistent over time, and cannot be explained by inertia, auto-enrollment, or simple heuristics. Complementing the administrative evidence with an online survey, we find that inefficient allocations reflect both financial mistakes as well as deliberate choices, especially when trust and commitment inside the households are weak.

We revise the conventional wisdom that Africa’s international borders were drawn arbitrarily. Europeans knew very little about most of Africa in the mid-1880s, but their self-interested goals of amassing territory prompted intensive examination of on-the-ground conditions as they formed borders. Europeans negotiated with African rulers to secure treaties and to learn about historical state frontiers, which enabled Africans to influence the border-formation process. Major water bodies, which shaped precolonial civilizations and trade, also served as focal points. We find support for these new theoretical implications using two original datasets. Quantitatively, we analyze border-location correlates using grid cells and an original spatial dataset on precolonial states. Qualitatively, we compiled information from treaties and diplomatic histories to code causal process observations for every bilateral border. Historical political frontiers directly affected 62% of all bilateral borders. Water bodies, often major ones, comprised the primary border feature much more frequently than straight lines.

How do perceptions of scientists’ moral values relate to support for science in society? Recent advances in the sociology of science and religion suggest that people associate scientists with moral values in addition to factual knowledge, and that concerns about scientists’ morality are why members of some religious groups are more critical of science than non-religious people. We test this theory using data from a probability sample of U.S. adults that includes new measures of beliefs about scientists’ moral values, such as their compassion, fairness, and generosity (n = 1,513). Results from structural equation models indicate that active members of all religious groups are, to varying degrees, more skeptical than atheists and agnostics of scientists’ moral character. A decomposition of direct and indirect effects indicates that beliefs about scientists’ moral values play an intermediary role in the relationship between religion and support for science, and that support for science among the religious is partially suppressed by their concerns about scientists’ morality. This article offers the first direct evidence of the moral culture the U.S. public associates with scientists. We suggest that religious differences in support for organized science reflect religious differences in beliefs about scientists’ moral values.

Forecasts of regional electricity net-demand, consumption minus embedded generation, are an essential input for reliable and economic power system operation, and energy trading. While such forecasts are typically performed region by region, operations such as managing power flows require spatially coherent joint forecasts, which account for cross-regional dependencies. Here, we forecast the joint distribution of net-demand across the 14 regions constituting Great Britain’s electricity network. Joint modeling is complicated by the fact that the net-demand variability within each region, and the dependencies between regions, vary with temporal, socio-economic and weather-related factors. We accommodate for these characteristics by proposing a multivariate Gaussian model based on a modified Cholesky parameterization, which allows us to model each unconstrained parameter via an additive model. Given that the number of model parameters and covariates is large, we adopt a semi-automated approach to model selection, based on gradient boosting. In addition to comparing the forecasting performance of several versions of the proposed model with that of two non-Gaussian copula-based models, we visually explore the model output to interpret how the covariates affect net-demand variability and dependencies. The code for reproducing the results in this article is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7315105. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

Since the mid-2000s, the use-of-force continuum—a global standard for providing law enforcement with guidelines on the proportionate use of force—has been central in Turkish police training and reporting practices. Liberal police accountability tools, like the use-of-force continuum, rely on standardization to prevent police violence. Yet these techniques still result in maimed bodies and psyches and police impunity. Rather than taking the standardization of police force simply as a failed project, a sham, or a mere techno-fix, I examine how powerful actors like police align with such standards and how they start thinking and acting through them while repurposing them. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 among the Turkish National Police, I show how the transnational standardization of police force has in fact enabled police in Turkey to redefine and ultimately reclaim the violence they are professionalized in as what I call “force experts.” Force defies standardization in both theory and practice; however, what sanctions police violence now is not just technical standardization but the expert framing of the democratically reformed police force. This is the violence of standardization, especially in contexts where governments retool reforms to criminalize suspect Others whom they perceive as a “threat” to their rule.

This essay examines the birth of French medieval studies in America as a product of the racial anxiety and cultural-linguistic precarity experienced by Creoles. It argues that the idea of the French Middle Ages in North America, the conceptual matrix through which it became thinkable and desirable as a coherent subject of study, was made possible through engagements with minoritized Francophones who were assumed to embody the deep past. Part 1 examines how scholars in France’s Second Empire became invested in patois as a marker of “primitive” French cultural expression thought to have been transmitted over hundreds of years by oral recitation. Part 2 turns to a specific instantiation of French scholars’ pursuit of dialect: collectors of creole stories and grammars in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and south Louisiana who analogized creole utterances to the first French vernaculars as they emerged from Latin. Part 3 focuses on the pursuit of creolité as evidence of medievality in south Louisiana, and considers the racial anxiety evident in local deployments of the term creole. It concludes by discussing historical methods informed by creolization and mixed temporalities, and by imagining how these methods might transform medieval studies.

Educators have become increasingly committed to social and emotional learning in schools. However, we know too little about the typical growth trajectories of the competencies that schools are striving to improve. We leverage data from the California Office to Reform Education, a consortium of districts in California serving over 1.5 million students, that administers annual surveys to students to measure social and emotional competencies (SECs). This article uses data from six cohorts of approximately 16,000 students each (51% male, 73% Latinx, 11% White, 10% Black, 24% with parents who did not complete high school) in Grades 4–12. Two questions are addressed. First, how much growth occurs in growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness from Grades 4 to 12? Second, do initial status and growth look different by parental educational attainment and gender? Using accelerated longitudinal design growth models, findings show distinct growth trends among the four SECs with growth mindset increasing, self-management mostly decreasing, and self-efficacy and social awareness decreasing and then increasing. The subgroup analyses show gaps between groups but patterns of growth that are more similar than different. Further, subgroup membership accounts for very little variation in growth or declines. Instead, initial levels of competencies predict growth. Also, variation within groups is greater than variation between groups. The findings have practical implications for educators and psychologists striving to improve SECs. If schools use student-report approaches, predicting steady and consistent positive growth in SECs is unrealistic. Instead, U-shaped patterns for some SECs appear to be normative with notable declines in the sixth grade, requiring new supports.