时间：4月24日 15：00—16：30

地点：后主楼1610

主讲人：薛森

摘要：The role of locus of control in shaping socioeconomic behaviour has been investigated extensively over the past decade. Most studies estimate the effect of locus of control using OLS or other cross-sectional methods. This approach may suffer from omitted variable problems, such as shared family background and genetic factors, and thus lead to biased estimates of the role of locus of control. In this paper, we examine the correlation between locus of control and a number of socioeconomic variables. We adopt a twin design in an attempt to mitigate the omitted variable problem. As in the existing literature, we find that the OLS estimates of the impact of locus of control for both monozygodic and dizygodic twins are statistically significant and economically sizable. In addition our analysis finds sizeable and significant locus of control effect for dizygodic twins using a within-twins fixed effect estimator. However, the within-twins fixed effect estimates for monozygodic twins are almost without exception statistically insignificant and economically small in size. This finding suggests that OLS estimates of locus of control may be substantially biased due to omitted variable problems, and thus an improved identification strategy is called for in future research.

主讲人介绍：薛森，澳大利亚国立大学博士，暨南大学经济与社会研究院助理教授，暨南大学数据调查中心副主任。主要研究领域为：劳动经济学，发展经济学，微观计量经济学，中国经济。在Journal of Comparative Economics、China Economic Review等SSCI杂志上发表论文多篇，并担任China Economic Review等期刊的匿名审稿人。