Community

The programme director is Professor Alan Manning.
Room: 32L 2.36 A
Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 6078,
Email: a.manning@lse.ac.uk

Research from the well-being programme and elsewhere shows that it is the quality of people's interactions with others that is an important determinant of their well-being. Values, beliefs and social interactions are also likely to be important in shaping economic outcomes. These values are not primarily influenced by the laws and policies enacted by government but by the self-organising and self-regulating rules and norms that govern interactions between people. Other social sciences have traditionally paid more attention to these issues than economists but the traditional emphasis of economists on deriving aggregate behaviour from individual decisions and the use of quantitative analysis offers the hope of making progress on these very important issues.

The newly-established community programme will investigate both the sources of stability and change in values and their consequences with the ultimate aim of understanding how we can sustain social cohesion in the face of changing attitudes, faster migration, globalization and crime.

Below are some of the projects currently being undertaken by the Community Programme If you are interested in this area of research please do contact Alan Manning.

1. Admiration (Alan Manning, Amar Shanghavi)

Most people have a desire to be thought well of by others, and this desire can sustain pro-social behaviour. So what is admired by people is likely to be encouraged. Since the late 1940s Gallup have, every year, asked Americans who is the living man and woman they most admire. This project will analyse the micro data underlying these polls to investigate whether there are trends in the type of people who are most admired and to offer explanations for any trends found.


2. Social Housing and Attitudes to Immigrants (Richard Dickens, Alan Manning, Jonathan Wadsworth)
   
   Data from the UK Citizenship Survey suggests that a large fraction of white British people feel they are discriminated against in the allocation of social housing. This project will investigate whether there is any truth in these beliefs. It will also try to create a local area measure of the likely increase in the demand for social housing from increased immigration and relate this to local measures of anti-immigrant attitudes.
   
   
3. The Determinants of Lone Parenthood (Leonardo Felli, Yona Rubinstein)
   
   The project is aimed at identifying causes for the dramatic increase in lone parenthood that has occurred in many countries. It will use US data from the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the NLSY.
   
   
4. The Impact of Citizenship Laws (Ciro Avitabile, Irma Clots-Figueras, Paolo Masella)
   
   This project analyzes the consequences of the introduction of birthright citizenship in Germany in 2000. The project studies the effect of the reform on (i) the cultural integration of immigrant parents, measured by their level of interaction with the local community and their use of German language, (ii) important economic choices such as fertility decisions and the level of parental investment on their children and (iii) health and cognitive and non-cognitive skills of children affected by the reform.