This essay summarizes how women historically became an economic force and why, despite being vital to the world’s economies, they still earn less than comparable men even in nations with family-friendly policies and gender-neutral laws, norms, and values.

Socioeconomic disadvantage is a major correlate of low political participation. This association is among the most robust findings in political science. However, it is based largely on observational data. The causal effects of early-life disadvantage in particular are even less understood, because long-term data on the political consequences of randomized early-life anti-poverty interventions is nearly nonexistent. We leverage the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to test the long-term effect of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods—and thus out of deep poverty—on turnout. MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever implemented in the United States. Although MTO ameliorated children’s poverty long term, we find that, contrary to expectations, the intervention did not increase children’s likelihood of voting later in life. Additional tests show the program did not ameliorate their poverty enough to affect turnout. These findings speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.

Partnered men and women show consistently gendered patterns of labor market behavior. We test whether not only a person’s own gender, but also their partner’s gender shapes hours worked. We use Dutch administrative population data on almost 5,000 persons who had both male and female partners, whose hours worked we observe monthly over 15 years. We argue that this provides a unique setting to assess the relevance of partner’s gender for labor market behavior. Using two-way fixed effects and fixed-effects individual slopes models, we find that both men and women tend to work more hours when partnered with a female partner compared to a male partner. These results align with our hypothesis that a partner’s gender influences labor market behavior. For women, we conclude that this finding may be (partly) explained by marital and motherhood status. Additionally, we discovered that women decrease their hours worked to a lesser extent when caring for a child if they have a female partner. Finally, we found that for men, the positive association between own and partner’s hours worked is weaker when one has a female partner, indicating a higher degree of specialization within these couples.

We describe semiparametric estimation and inference for causal effects using observational data from a single social network. Our asymptotic results are the first to allow for dependence of each observation on a growing number of other units as sample size increases. In addition, while previous methods have implicitly permitted only one of two possible sources of dependence among social network observations, we allow for both dependence due to transmission of information across network ties and for dependence due to latent similarities among nodes sharing ties. We propose new causal effects that are specifically of interest in social network settings, such as interventions on network ties and network structure. We use our methods to reanalyze an influential and controversial study that estimated causal peer effects of obesity using social network data from the Framingham Heart Study; after accounting for network structure we find no evidence for causal peer effects. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Cultural heritage law and processes, it is widely known, authorize certain forms of identity that are more often than not aligned with a national project (Lowenthal, 1998). What happens, however, when the national project turns away from being one of harmony and continuity with the past (as is still the case in many countries, most notably China, as Bideau and Bugnon show in this collection), and becomes about a break with—or at least renegotiation of—the past? What happens when, in the same breath, heritage becomes part of a project that is not just about recognition but also contains within it at least some elements of redistribution? Can we stretch the limits of the authorizing forces around heritage (Smith, 2006) so that they operate in a register that can deliver on decolonial possibilities and promises? A recent example in Brazil speaks to these questions and suggests that there is potential, albeit limited, for decoloniality through heritage.

The Bracero Program (1942–64), a bilateral agreement to regulate labor migration between the United States and Mexico, oversaw more than four million contracts enabling Mexican men to work “temporarily” in the United States. Historians of the Mexico-US borderlands and of global migration have interpreted the program through hemispheric as well as broader imperial lenses. Yet this article shows that the program’s foundational ideas emerged from two decades of transatlantic exchange and circulation that cannot be contained within a single continent, nor a single framework such as imperialism. During the interwar period, Mexican politicians, intellectuals, and migrant labor activists eagerly participated in transatlantic and inter-American dialogues about migration policy, compared themselves to Italy, and admired the bilateral labor migration agreements that had recently emerged in Europe. Meanwhile, US officials heard but resisted pleas from migration scholars and the International Labor Organization to emulate European receiving countries. The two parties’ differing engagements with European migration policies meant that when World War II pushed US officials to suddenly propose the agreement, Mexican actors’ transatlantic knowledge inspired their participation and crucially shaped the program’s design. This article thus pushes historians of migration policy towards studies of not just comparison but also entanglement.

The underlying mechanisms of bright light therapy (BLT) in the prevention of individuals with subthreshold depression symptoms are yet to be elucidated. The goal of the study was to assess the correlation between midbrain monoamine-producing nuclei treatment-related functional connectivity (FC) changes and depressive symptom improvements in subthreshold depression. This double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial was conducted between March 2020 and June 2022. A total of 74 young adults with subthreshold depression were randomly assigned to receive 8-week BLT (N = 38) or placebo (N = 36). Depression severity was measured using the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS). The participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging at baseline and after treatment. The dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN), ventral tegmental area (VTA), and habenula seed-based whole-brain FC were analyzed. A multivariate regression model examined whether baseline brain FC was associated with changes in scores on HDRS during BLT treatment. BLT group displayed significantly decreased HDRS scores from pre- to posttreatment compared to the placebo group. BLT increased the FC between the DRN and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and between the left VTA and right superior frontal gyrus (SFG). Altered VTA–SFG connectivity was associated with HDRS changes in the BLT group. Moreover, the baseline FC between DRN and mPFC could predict HDRS changes in BLT. These results suggested that BLT improves depressive symptoms and increases midbrain monoamine-producing nuclei and frontal cortex connectivity in subthreshold depression, which raises the possibility that pretreatment FC of DRN–mPFC could be used as a biomarker for improved BLT treatment in depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)