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The overall goal of the proposed research is to address the erosion of democracy, an urgent problem that can lead to a loss of rights and freedoms, economic decline, increased inequality, and violent conflict. We propose to examine democratic norms within mass the electorate. Norms are our expectations about what other people believe, and what others expect us to believe. The examples of past research do not typically measure shared democratic norms directly, but instead measure citizens’ personal beliefs about democracy. We, therefore, propose to measure norms separately from beliefs. After all, an individual may believe in accepting the outcome of an election, regardless of who wins, but may not expect that others will share this belief.

By modeling the co-evolution of democratic norms and beliefs over the period of the proposed project, we will be able to assess the resulting state of Canadian democracy, a crucial finding for academics and civil society organizations working to strengthen support for democracy in Canada. Understanding the role that norms play will improve the ability of civil-society organizations in Canada and abroad, and democratic governments broadly to develop their own interventions to promote democratic principles.

This research project studies how Colombia’s Free Housing program affected the criminality of participants. Colombia’s Free Housing program provided high-quality public housing units to 100,000 disadvantaged recipients for free. The transfer was incredibly generous: The market value of the housing units was roughly US$30,000, representing ten years of wages for the average recipient. First, the project leverages the fact that some individuals were randomly assigned to public housing via lottery to gauge the causal impact of receiving a public housing unit on the propensity to commit a crime.

However, the concentration of low-income individuals in housing projects raises concerns that these areas will become epicenters of criminal activity, fostering criminal behavior via social interactions among residents. This research project will also try to shed new light on this issue by leveraging the fact that public housing unit assignment within each housing project was random for all beneficiaries. We will therefore investigate whether the propensity for one to commit crime is related to the prior criminal history of your proximal neighbours, shedding light on how social interactions lead to crime.

The Women's Manuscript History Project, 1700-1830 will form a sister project to the Women's Print History Project, which launched in 2019 (womensprinthistoryproject. com). Building upon the work we have done to recover women and their printed writing in that project, we will forge new understandings of women's literary manuscripts from the long eighteenth century in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, and North America. Aimed at scholars interested in the history of women's writing, as well as public audiences interested in women's history more generally, this project will contribute a systematic analysis of women's engagement with manuscript culture that goes beyond the work of canonical authors. Over five years, we will collect information about extant women's literary manuscripts using a variety of print and digital resources and archival research. Our intent is to advance knowledge as we contextualize, assess, and compare these unique handwritten documents alongside analyses of the history of their production, circulation, and preservation.

This project aims to explore the impacts of government debt on the private sector, specifically focusing on households and firms. Government debt is a critical issue that affects economic stability and growth. Despite its importance, the intricate ways in which government debt influences the behaviour of private entities remain underexplored. Understanding these effects is crucial for both advancing economic theory and informing policy decisions. 

This research will provide a better understanding of the private sector's response to government debt, bridging the gap between macroeconomic policy and microeconomic behaviour. From a policy perspective, our findings will provide findings to policymakers about the broader implications of government debt on the private sector. Understanding these impacts could lead to more informed decisions regarding debt management and fiscal policy, potentially guiding governments to adopt debt policies that consider their effects on private sector growth, household welfare, and overall economic stability.

Economic sanctions are an increasingly popular foreign policy tool, yet we still do not understand the full ramifications of this complex instrument on the populations living in sanctioned countries. Sanctions may have unintended consequences, potentially strengthening rather than weakening the regimes they target through a "rally-around-the-flag" effect.

Our research will explore how economic sanctions causally affect the political attitudes and voting behavior of Iran's population by developing a novel econometric framework that captures county-level variation in sanction exposure, and by examining new evidence from Iran's most heavily sanctioned period over the past 40 years. One possible effect we want to study in particular is whether sanctions lead to increased support for the sanctioned government rather than the intended weakening effect, implying a political "backfire" that may be undermining the effectiveness of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument.

Police officers are routinely given discretion to conduct their duties, with a latitude that enables them to make subjective decisions about investigative actions, including how they initiate and respond to policing incidents. This discretion is provided on the legal basis that a “reasonable police officer” would find certain behaviours to be appropriate based on the situation. Although the courts recognise the unique standard of a “reasonable police officer,” and public rhetoric suggests that police officers should outperform civilians on policing tasks, there is little empirical research to test whether police officers actually perform better than civilians on such tasks. Research is thus needed to assess the accuracy and reliability of police performance on policing tasks as well as the extent to which officers’ judgements may be driven by biases, expectations, pre-existing beliefs, and/or contextual information. For our five-year project, we will conduct three studies that employ survey and experimental methodologies to comparatively assess the perceived and actual abilities of civilians and police officers. Specifically, we will examine both groups’ performance on tasks that police officers are routinely expected to complete and which have significant consequences for both civilian rights and public safety.