When the Classroom Mimics Reality: A Simulation in International Trade and Relations
Students participate in an international trade simulation in which they are "born" into a country and must produce and sell goods to survive. Countries, ranging in economic power from the United States and Japan to Ethiopia and Somalia, are endowed with a level of raw materials commensurate with their national income, and must produce at a level sufficient to maintain both their population and environmental quality. As a result of this interaction, students discover that there is a reason why poor nations remain poor, and why international relations are so problematic. Students also see firsthand the economic effects of the production process, such as the declining use of labor and increased use of capital in producing a country's output.
Leveraging Web-Based Environments for Mass Atrocity Prevention
A growing literature exploring large-scale, identity-based political violence, including mass killing and genocide, debates the plausibility of, and prospects for, early warning and prevention. An extension of the debate involves the prospects for creating educational experiences that result in more sophisticated analytical products that enhance preventive policy action. This article details an attempt to bridge the theory to practice gap. It describes the role of a simulation COUNTRY X within the educational contexts of both a graduate course in prevention of mass killing and genocide at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and a practitioner training workshop designed for regional conflict early warning analysts in Africa. The authors review educational theory describing problem-based learning and apply it to a web-based educational simulation. Using a recent training of professional conflict early warning analysts as their case study, they explore several assumptions regarding the utility of simulated environments as educational tools in moving from theory to practice. Use of the simulation resulted in active and engaged participation by learners, increased capacity for well-reasoned perspective taking, and improved analytical confidence in complex scenarios.
The effect of family size on parents' labor supply and occupational prestige: Evidence from Taiwan and Mainland China
Abstract This paper studies the effect of family size on parents' labor supply and occupational prestige, using the censuses of both Taiwan and Mainland China. We rely on the exogenous increase in child quantity that results from having twins at the first birth. Our results indicate that an increase in family size has negative effects on the labor supply of mothers, but not of fathers, in both Taiwan and Mainland China. In addition, we find that in Taiwan fathers tend to switch to occupations with lower prestige scores in response to an increase in family size. However, the negative effect of family size on occupational prestige is not observed in Mainland China, where the occupational mobility is low.