Study reveals smaller-than-expected percentage of research in psychology is truly multidisciplinary

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

LAWRENCE — Colleges and universities across the U.S. have seen a decades-long push for scholars to carry out “multidisciplinary” research — academic work that combines experts from different fields who mix know-how to work on a certain topic.

Recently, researchers from the University of Kansas sought to characterize multidisciplinary research that took place over one decade in the field of psychology. Undergraduate student Yoshiaki Fujita and Michael Vitevitch, professor and chair of psychology at KU, have published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

Using network science, the pair examined articles for the years 2008-18 listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index database of the Web of Science, under the subject category of “Psychology, Multidisciplinary.” They found just 25% of citations from articles in these journals referenced research published in fields outside Psychology.

“We were a little surprised to find out even though there are these calls to become more and more multidisciplinary, we're still really not,” Vitevitch said. “When you look at psychology journals identified as multidisciplinary — so they should be reaching out the most to other fields — only about 25 percent of their citations are to journals from other fields. Half were to other psychology journals, and 25 percent were to other multidisciplinary psychology journals.”

Fujita, now a graduate student at Indiana University-Bloomington, and Vitevitch found some topics in psychology attracted multidisciplinary work steadily throughout the decade — such as those relating to physical and mental health — while the percentage of multidisciplinary research for other topics would rise and fall.

“We looked at topics people were investigating to identify potential gaps,” Vitevitch said. “What are themes people are studying in this multidisciplinary fashion, and are there areas that are really hot and areas that have sort of died off?”

The authors think their analysis could help individual researchers identify promising areas of multidisciplinary research.

“If you're wanting to become more multidisciplinary, where might you want to look for topics to investigate?” Vitevitch said. “Maybe there's work being done, but nobody's really bridged those two fields — becoming that bridge might be good if you're looking for a new research topic. So, the approach we use in this paper might help you identify something of interest. For instance, our keyword analysis showing, ‘Hey, these are the topics that people are studying — but there's a gap there.’ That may be something you can do at the level of the individual researcher to become more multidisciplinary.’”

Further, the KU study makes recommendation for administrators at academic institutions who want to boost multidisciplinary scholarship.

“If multidisciplinary work is so good, how do you get it to occur?” Vitevitch said. “A research administrator can create programs to bring people together to talk and share ideas — like the Red Hot Research Talks at KU. One researcher might have this statistical technique that's great for a problem — a technique another researcher didn't even know existed. You’re a sociologist and the other one is an economist, but one has techniques that could solve the other’s problem. Sometimes getting people together helps find interesting theoretical differences as well, when the theory from one field predicts one thing should happen, and a theory from another field predicts exactly the opposite — so OK, let's test this out.”

Vitevitch also said that multidisciplinary research tends to be more influential as measured by peer citations.

The KU team’s work contributes to the growing field of study known as “the science of science,” which often relies on quantitative data — like the citation networks analyzed in this new paper — to answer questions about the nature of academic research.

“It's looking at all of science itself to try to understand how it works and are there things you can do to make it work better,” he said.

The authors said their approach should be valid for measuring multidisciplinary research in other fields besides psychology.

“If we were to have done this with economics, for instance, we probably would still see the same sort of percentage of citations in versus out of the field,” Vitevitch said. “But we need more diversity of perspectives, theories and methodologies to solve the problems we're seeing in society — the problems aren’t getting any simpler. They're getting more and more complex.”

 

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DOI

10.1057/s41599-022-01175-8 

Robotic lightning bugs take flight

Inspired by fireflies, researchers create insect-scale robots that can emit light when they fly, which enables motion tracking and communication

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: INSPIRED BY FIREFLIES, MIT RESEARCHERS HAVE CREATED SOFT ACTUATORS THAT CAN EMIT LIGHT IN DIFFERENT COLORS OR PATTERNS. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY OF KEVIN CHEN, SUHAN KIM,ET AL

Fireflies that light up dusky backyards on warm summer evenings use their luminescence for communication — to attract a mate, ward off predators, or lure prey.

 

These glimmering bugs also sparked the inspiration of scientists at MIT. Taking a cue from nature, they built electroluminescent soft artificial muscles for flying, insect-scale robots. The tiny artificial muscles that control the robots’ wings emit colored light during flight.

                 

This electroluminescence could enable the robots to communicate with each other. If sent on a search-and-rescue mission into a collapsed building, for instance, a robot that finds survivors could use lights to signal others and call for help.

 

The ability to emit light also brings these microscale robots, which weigh barely more than a paper clip, one step closer to flying on their own outside the lab. These robots are so lightweight that they can’t carry sensors, so researchers must track them using bulky infrared cameras that don’t work well outdoors. Now, they’ve shown that they can track the robots precisely using the light they emit and just three smartphone cameras.

 

“If you think of large-scale robots, they can communicate using a lot of different tools — Bluetooth, wireless, all those sorts of things. But for a tiny, power-constrained robot, we are forced to think about new modes of communication. This is a major step toward flying these robots in outdoor environments where we don’t have a well-tuned, state-of-the-art motion tracking system,” says Kevin Chen, who is the D. Reid Weedon, Jr. Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the head of the Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and the senior author of the paper.

 

He and his collaborators accomplished this by embedding miniscule electroluminescent particles into the artificial muscles. The process adds just 2.5 percent more weight without impacting the flight performance of the robot.

 

Joining Chen on the paper are EECS graduate students Suhan Kim, the lead author, and Yi-Hsuan Hsiao; Yu Fan Chen SM ’14, PhD ’17; and Jie Mao, an associate professor at Ningxia University. The research was published this month in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

 

A light-up actuator

 

These researchers previously demonstrated a new fabrication technique to build soft actuators, or artificial muscles, that flap the wings of the robot. These durable actuators are made by alternating ultrathin layers of elastomer and carbon nanotube electrode in a stack and then rolling it into a squishy cylinder. When a voltage is applied to that cylinder, the electrodes squeeze the elastomer, and the mechanical strain flaps the wing.

 

To fabricate a glowing actuator, the team incorporated electroluminescent zinc sulphate particles into the elastomer but had to overcome several challenges along the way.

 

First, the researchers had to create an electrode that would not block light. They built it using highly transparent carbon nanotubes, which are only a few nanometers thick and enable light to pass through.

 

However, the zinc particles only light up in the presence of a very strong and high-frequency electric field. This electric field excites the electrons in the zinc particles, which then emit subatomic particles of light known as photons. The researchers use high voltage to create a strong electric field in the soft actuator, and then drive the robot at a high frequency, which enables the particles to light up brightly.

 

“Traditionally, electroluminescent materials are very energetically costly, but in a sense, we get that electroluminescence for free because we just use the electric field at the frequency we need for flying. We don’t need new actuation, new wires, or anything. It only takes about 3 percent more energy to shine out light,” Kevin Chen says.

 

As they prototyped the actuator, they found that adding zinc particles reduced its quality, causing it to break down more easily. To get around this, Kim mixed zinc particles into the top elastomer layer only. He made that layer a few micrometers thicker to accommodate for any reduction in output power.

 

While this made the actuator 2.5 percent heavier, it emitted light without impacting flight performance.

 

“We put a lot of care into maintaining the quality of the elastomer layers between the electrodes. Adding these particles was almost like adding dust to our elastomer layer. It took many different approaches and a lot of testing, but we came up with a way to ensure the quality of the actuator,” Kim says.

 

Adjusting the chemical combination of the zinc particles changes the light color. The researchers made green, orange, and blue particles for the actuators they built; each actuator shines one solid color.

 

They also tweaked the fabrication process so the actuators could emit multicolored and patterned light. The researchers placed a tiny mask over the top layer, added zinc particles, then cured the actuator. They repeated this process three times with different masks and colored particles to create a light pattern that spelled M-I-T.

 

Following the fireflies

 

Once they had finetuned the fabrication process, they tested the mechanical properties of the actuators and used a luminescence meter to measure the intensity of the light.

 

From there, they ran flight tests using a specially designed motion-tracking system. Each electroluminescent actuator served as an active marker that could be tracked using iPhone cameras. The cameras detect each light color, and a computer program they developed tracks the position and attitude of the robots to within 2 millimeters of state-of-the-art infrared motion capture systems.

 

“We are very proud of how good the tracking result is, compared to the state-of-the-art. We were using cheap hardware, compared to the tens of thousands of dollars these large motion-tracking systems cost, and the tracking results were very close,” Kevin Chen says.

 

In the future, they plan to enhance that motion tracking system so it can track robots in real-time. The team is working to incorporate control signals so the robots could turn their light on and off during flight and communicate more like real fireflies. They are also studying how electroluminescence could even improve some properties of these soft artificial muscles, Kevin Chen says.

 

 

This work was supported by the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.

 

###

 

Written by Adam Zewe, MIT News Office

Additional background

 

Paper: “Firefly: An Insect-scale Aerial Robot Powered by Electroluminescent Soft Artificial Muscles”

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9786652

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JOURNAL

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

DOI

10.1109/LRA.2022.3179486. 

ARTICLE TITLE

“Firefly: An Insect-scale Aerial Robot Powered by Electroluminescent Soft Artificial Muscles”

Oregon State University research finds evidence to suggest Pacific whiting skin has anti-aging properties that prevent wrinkles

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: BASKET FULL OF PACIFIC HAKE (MERLUCCIUS PRODUCTUS) ON THE NOAA SHIP MILLER FREEMAN DURING THE HAKE ACOUSTIC SURVEY. view more 

CREDIT: VANESSA TUTTLE, NOAA FISHERIES

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The gelatin in the skin of Pacific whiting, an abundant fish on the Pacific Coast of North America, may help prevent skin wrinkling caused by ultraviolet radiation, a new Oregon State University study found.

Pacific whiting is caught in large volumes in the United States but consumers have little familiarity with the mild, white meat fish also known as hake. It is popular in Europe, though, where it is the eighth most consumed species. In the U.S., the 10 most-consumed species account for 77% of total per capita seafood consumption and Pacific whiting is not among the top 10.

By studying Pacific whiting. Jung Kwon, an assistant professor at Oregon State’s Seafood Research & Education Center in Astoria, Oregon, is looking to change that and alleviate pressure on stocks of those 10 species, which include salmon and tuna.

She studies marine organisms and their potential to improve human health and is particularly interested in the benefits from parts of marine organisms such as fish skin, which many U.S. consumers choose to discard rather than eat.

“Fish skins are an abundant resource that we already know have valuable nutritional properties,” Kwon said. “But we wanted to find out what additional potential value might be found in something traditionally considered a byproduct.”

In a paper recently published in the journal Marine Drugs, Kwon and a team of researchers looked at molecular pathways that contribute on a cellular level to the wrinkling of skin. That wrinkling is promoted by chronic exposure to ultraviolet light, which breaks down collagen in the skin.

The researchers extracted gelatin from Pacific whiting fish and then looked at what impact it had on anti-oxidant and inflammatory responses and pathways known to degrade collagen and promote synthesis of collagen.

They found that the Pacific whiting skin:

• Reactivated to a certain level the collagen synthesis pathway that had been suppressed by UV radiation.
• Prevented activation to a certain level of the collagen degradation pathway that had been accelerated by UV radiation.
• Promoted additional anti-oxidant activity. Antioxidants are substances that can prevent or slow damage to cells.
• Promoted additional anti-inflammatory effects. 

Kwon cautioned that these are initial results obtained in her lab through a human cell model system. Further research is needed using animal models.

“We saw some potential with a positive response in the cell model system,” she said. “This gives us good evidence to take those next steps.”

Co-authors of the paper are Elaine Ballinger of Oregon State and Seok Hee Han and Se-Young Choung of Kyung Hee University in South Korea.

The research was funded by Pacific Seafood, a harvester, processer, and distributor of seafood.

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JOURNAL

Marine Drugs

Tenochtitlán’s lessons for the future of megacities

700 years of water adaptation in Mexico City demonstrate vulnerabilities cannot be eliminated, only negotiated

Meeting Announcement

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION

WASHINGTON — At the time of Spanish conquest in 1521, the Aztec’s capital Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, was already one of the largest, most populous cities in the world, managing complex problems of urban development, flooding and water supply.

The city’s ongoing struggles to balance these same issues, 500 years later,  are a case study in environmental adaption with lessons for contemporary decision makers and the future of megacities, according to Beth Tellman, a human-environmental geographer at the University of Arizona.

“Can megacities adapt to climate change, are they going to collapse, or are we going to figure it out? I think looking at Mexico City is a really interesting way to answer that question because it's a city that's been figuring it out for 700 years and that's had consequences. Some people have really gained from that adaptation and other people have lost out,” Tellman said.

One of the essential lessons from revisiting and synthesizing the many existing records of the city’s history, Tellman argues, is technological innovation alone can’t solve water problems that have social and political dimensions.

“If a new diversion protects a community from flood, but drowns another community in the diversion path, is it a success? Any time you build a levy, it's going to move water faster downstream or to the other side. We need to be thinking more about: Whose adaptation is this? Do we actually have all affected people at the table?”

Tellman will speak today about her research on how urban managers mitigate — and create — vulnerability to environmental hazards in Mexico City and other cities around the world in at 5:00 pm EDT session at the Frontiers in Hydrology meeting, convening this week in San Juan, Puerto Rico and online.

The Frontiers in Hydrology meeting is a partnership between AGU and the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) designed to inspire new ideas and solutions for the future of water by bringing together engineers, hydrologists, social scientists, urban planners, atmospheric scientists and affiliated communities from around the world that work on all aspects of water issues.

Free media registration is available for online and in-person attendance at the meeting.

Complex trade-offs

“As cities grow and get more complex, managing risks in a separate way is a strategy that does not work and ignoring that reality makes it worse, because instead of anticipated consequences of adaptation decisions, you have these unanticipated consequences,” Tellman said.

Tenochtitlán, and later Mexico City, like many modern cities, started out managing water supply, flooding and urban development separately. But as the city grew, the three adaptation pathways intersected in complex ways, creating complicated risk trade-offs.

The city, built on an island in saline Lake Texcoco, controlled flooding through a sophisticated network of dikes, levees and canals. Aqueducts, sluices and other infrastructure provided fresh water and kept it separated from the salty lake water. But aqueducts contributed to destructive flooding, and dikes to prevent flooding in one location channeled floodwaters into others.

After conquest destroyed much of the original city infrastructure, the Spanish chose to deal with flooding by draining the lake, which created new problems. Now a megacity of 20 million, Mexico City continues to battle flooding, while simultaneously struggling with water shortages. Groundwater pumping to supply fresh water has caused the city to sink, breaking drains, which causes more flooding. Both problems hit neighborhoods unevenly, with the greatest burden falling on low-income areas, Tellman said. Technological solutions like rainwater capture do not reach people with greatest need, because of political barriers to providing city improvements to undocumented residents.

“Vulnerability cannot be eliminated,” Tellman said. “It's transferred over time or space or to different populations, and what that means is that we should not have the engineering hubris to say we're going to eliminate vulnerability. What we should instead do is democratically negotiate the consequences of adaptation. It’s not just climate adaptation, but climate justice.”

AGU (www.agu.org) supports 125,000 enthusiasts to experts worldwide in Earth and space sciences. Through broad and inclusive partnerships, we advance discovery and solution science that accelerate knowledge and create solutions that are ethical, unbiased and respectful of communities and their values. Our programs include serving as a scholarly publisher, convening virtual and in-person events and providing career support. We live our values in everything we do, such as our net zero energy renovated building in Washington, D.C. and our Ethics and Equity Center, which fosters a diverse and inclusive geoscience community to ensure responsible conduct.

Notes for journalists

Tellman will present “143-01 - The consequences of adaptation: mitigating and producing vulnerability in Mexico City” in an oral session on “ridging Resolutions: Natural Hazards & Civilization II Oral: on Monday, 19 June, at 5:00 pm Atlantic Standard Time (UTC-4 hours).

This session will not be live streamed, but reporters may gain expedited access to the session recording by emailing news@agu.org.

AGU and CUAHSI  are hosting the first biennial Frontiers in Hydrology meeting (#FIHM22) in San Juan, Puerto Rico and online, 19 – 24 June 2022.

• Media registration and eligibility
• Online and on-site press information
• Presentation abstracts and schedule

Live-streamed and recorded content

Registered media can stream plenaries, online-only oral sessions and hybrid sessions live in the meeting platform. Hybrid sessions will include presenters in person in San Juan as well as online participants. Traditional in-person-only oral sessions will be recorded and available to view in the online meeting platform within a week of the events. Live-streamed presentations will also be recorded and available for later viewing. Remote attendees have access to an online poster gallery.

 Children who had bronchitis linked to adult lung problem

Long term consequences of childhood infection explained

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

 

IMAGE: LONG RUNNING HEALTH STUDY ESTABLISHES CONSEQUENCES OF INFECTIONS IN CHILDREN view more 

CREDIT: THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Bronchitis in early childhood has been found to increase the risk of lung diseases in middle age according to research from the Allergy and Lung Health Unit at the University of Melbourne.

Researchers found that Australian children who had bronchitis at least once before the age of seven were more likely to have lung problems in later life.

They also established that the lung diseases the children suffered from by the time they reached the age of 53 were usually asthma and pneumonia, rather than chronic bronchitis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Lead author of a paper published today in the journal, BMJ Open Respiratory Research, Dr Jennifer Perret, said the findings come from one of the world’s oldest surveys, the Tasmanian Longitudinal Health Study, which followed 8,583 people who were born in Tasmania in 1961 and started school in 1968.

“This is the first very long-term prospective study that has examined the relationship between childhood bronchitis severity with adult lung health outcomes. We have seen already that children with protracted bacterial bronchitis are at increased risk of serious chronic infective lung disease after two to five years, so studies like ours are documenting the potential for symptomatic children to develop lung conditions, such as asthma and lung function changes, up to mid-adult life,” she said.

Researchers established the link between childhood bronchitis and adult lung problem by surveying the original participants when they joined the study. Participants were then tracked for an average of 46 years with 42 per cent completing another questionnaire, including doctor-diagnosed lung conditions and a clinical examination, between 2012 and 2016.

By categorising participants into groups based on groups based on the number and duration of episodes of “bronchitis” and/or “loose, rattly or chesty cough”, they found that the more often a participant had been diagnosed by a doctor as having pneumonia and asthma, the more likely the participant had bronchitis as a child.

Dr Perret said the numbers in the most severe subgroup were small (just 42 participants were in this category and of these just 14 had current asthma in middle-age), but the trends across bronchitis severity categories were significant.

“Compared with the majority who never had from bronchitis, there was an incremental increase in risk for later asthma and pneumonia which strengthened the more often a person had suffered from bronchitis as a child, and especially if they had recurrent episodes which were prolonged for at least one month in duration.

“It is notable that the link with later adult active asthma was seen for participants who did not have co-existent asthma or wheezing in childhood, and a similar finding has been recently seen in a very large meta-analysis of school-aged children who had had a lower respiratory tract infection during early childhood.”

Researchers hope the study will help doctors identify children who could benefit from more careful monitoring and earlier interventions to keep them in better health into mid-adult life.

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JOURNAL

The BMJ

DOI

10.1136/bmjresp-2022-001212 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Systematic review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Childhood ‘bronchitis’ and respiratory outcomes in middle-age: a prospective cohort study from age 7 to 53 years

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

21-Jun-2022

Walking gives the brain a ‘step-up’ in function for some

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER MEDICAL CENTER

It has long been thought that when walking is combined with a task – both suffer. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester found that this is not always the case. Some young and healthy people improve performance on cognitive tasks while walking by changing the use of neural resources. However, this does not necessarily mean you should work on a big assignment while walking off that cake from the night before.

“There was no predictor of who would fall into which category before we tested them, we initially thought that everyone would respond similarly,” said Eleni Patelaki, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory and first author of the study out now in Cerebral Cortex. “It was surprising that for some of the subjects it was easier for them to do dual-tasking – do more than one task – compared to single-tasking – doing each task separately. This was interesting and unexpected because most studies in the field show that the more tasks that we have to do concurrently the lower our performance gets.”

Improving means changes in the brain

Using the Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, researchers monitored the brain activity, kinematics and behavior of 26 healthy 18 to 30-year-olds as they looked at a series of images, either while sitting on a chair or walking on a treadmill. Participants were instructed to click a button each time the image changed. If the same image appeared back-to-back participants were asked to not click.

Performance achieved by each participant in this task while sitting was considered their personal behavioral “baseline”. When walking was added to performing the same task, investigators found that different behaviors appeared, with some people performing worse than their sitting baseline - as expected based on previous studies - but also with some others improving compared to their sitting baseline. The electroencephalogram, or EEG, data showed that the 14 participants who improved at the task while walking had a change in frontal brain function which was absent in the 12 participants who did not improve. This brain activity change exhibited by those who improved at the task suggests increased flexibility or efficiency in the brain.

“To the naked eye, there were no differences in our participants. It wasn’t until we started analyzing their behavior and brain activity that we found the surprising difference in the group's neural signature and what makes them handle complex dual-tasking processes differently,” Patelaki said. “These findings have the potential to be expanded and translated to populations where we know that flexibility of neural resources gets compromised.”

Edward Freedman, Ph.D., associate professor of Neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute led this research that continues to expand how the MoBI is helping neuroscientists discover the mechanisms at work when the brain takes on multiple tasks. His previous work has highlighted the flexibility of a healthy brain, showing the more difficult the task the greater the neurophysiological difference between walking and sitting. “These new findings highlight that the MoBI can show us how the brain responds to walking and how the brain responds to the task,” Freedman said. “This gives us a place to start looking in the brains of older adults, especially healthy ones.”

Impact on aging

Expanding this research to older adults could guide scientists to identify a possible marker for ‘super agers’ or people who have a minimal decline in cognitive functions. This marker would be useful in helping better understand what could be going awry in neurodegenerative diseases.

Additional authors include John Foxe, Ph.D., and Kevin Mazurek, Ph.D., of the University of Rochester Medical Center. This research was supported by the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Pilot Program, the University of Rochester CTSA award number KL2 TR001999 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institutes of Health. Recordings were conducted at the University of Rochester Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (UR-IDDRC).

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JOURNAL

Cerebral Cortex

DOI

10.1093/cercor/bhac227 

Economists Show International Trade Can Worsen Income Inequality

By PETER DIZIKES, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY JUNE 19, 2022

MIT economists studying individual income data in Ecuador found that international trade generates income gains that are about 7 percent greater for those at the 90th income percentile, compared to those of median income, and up to 11 percent greater for the top percentile of income. Credit: MIT News

Using Ecuador as a case study, economists show international trade widens the income gap in individual countries.

International trade intensifies domestic income inequality, at least in some circumstances, according to a new empirical study that two MIT economists helped co-author.

The research, focusing on Ecuador as a case study, digs into individual-level income data while examining in close detail the connections between Ecuador’s economy and international trade. The study finds that trade generates income gains that are about 7 percent greater for those at the 90th income percentile, compared to those of median income, and up to 11 percent greater for the top percentile of income in Ecuador.

“Earnings inequality is higher in Ecuador than it would be in the absence of trade.”

“Trade in Ecuador tends to be something that is good for the richest, relative to the middle class,” says Dave Donaldson, a professor in the MIT Department of Economics and co-author of a published paper detailing the findings. “It’s pretty neutral in terms of the middle class relative to the poorest. The [largest benefits] are found both among those who have founded businesses, as well as those who are well off and work as employees. So, it’s both a labor and capital effect at the top.”

The study also identifies the dynamics that generate this outcome. Ecuadorian exports, mostly commodities and raw goods, tend to help the middle class or those less well-off, while the country’s import activities generally help the already well-off — and overall, importing has a bigger effect.

“There is a horse race between the export channel and the import channel,” says Arnaud Costinot, also a professor in the MIT Department of Economics and co-author of the paper. “Ultimately, what is quantitatively more important in the data, in the case of Ecuador, is the import channel.”

The paper, “Imports, Exports, and Earnings Inequality: Measures of Exposure and Estimates of Incidence,” appears online in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors are Rodrigo Adao, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; Paul Carillo, a professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University; Costinot, who is also associate head of MIT’s Department of Economics; Donaldson; and Dina Pomeranz, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Zurich.

Commodities out, machinery in

The effect of international trade on a nation’s income distribution is hard to pinpoint. Economists cannot, after all, devise a country-size experiment and study the same nation, both with and without trade involvement, to see if differences emerge.

As an alternate strategy, the scholars developed an unusually detailed reconstruction of trade-related economic activity in Ecuador. For the period from 2009 to 2015, they examined revenue from 1.5 million firms with a tax ID, and income for 2.9 million founders and employees of those firms. The scholars collected revenue data, payments to labor, and divided up individual income data according to three levels of education (ending before high school, high school graduates, and college graduates) across all 24 provinces in Ecuador.

Digging further, the research team compiled customs records, VAT (Value-Added Tax) data on purchases, and domestic firm-to-firm trade data, to develop a broad and detailed picture of the value of imports and exports, as well as business transactions that occurred domestically but were related to international trade.

Overall, oil accounted for 54 percent of Ecuador’s exports in the period from 2009 to 2011, followed by fruits (11 percent), seafood products (10 percent), and flowers (4 percent). But Ecuador’s imports are mostly manufactured products, including machinery (21 percent of imports), chemicals (14 percent), and vehicles (13 percent).

This composition of imports and exports — commodities out, manufactured goods in — turns out to be crucial to the relationship between trade and greater income inequality in Ecuador. Firms that employ well-educated, better-paid individuals also tend to be the ones benefitting from trade more because it allows their firms to buy manufactured goods more cheaply and flourish, in turn bolstering demand for more extensively educated workers.

“It’s all about whether trade increases demand for your services,” Costinot says.

“The thing that is happening in Ecuador is that the richest individuals tend to be employed by firms that directly import a lot, or tend to be employed by firms that are buying a lot of goods from other Ecuadorian firms that import a lot. Getting access to these imported inputs lowers their costs and increases demand for the services of their workers.”

For this reason, ultimately, “earnings inequality is higher in Ecuador than it would be in the absence of trade,” as the paper states.

Reconsidering trade ideas

As Costinot and Donaldson observe, this core finding runs counter what some portions of established trade theory would expect. For instance, some earlier theories would anticipate that opening up Ecuador to trade would bolster the country’s relatively larger portion of lower-skilled workers.

“It’s not what a standard theory would have predicted,” Costinot says. “A standard theory would be one where [because] Ecuador has [a] relatively scarcity, compared to a country like the U.S., of skilled workers, not unskilled workers, as Ecuador turns to trade, the low-skilled workers should be the ones benefitting relatively more. We found the opposite.”

Additionally, Donaldson notes, some trade theories incorporate the idea of “perfect substitution,” that like goods will be traded among countries — with level wages resulting. But not in Ecuador, at least.

“This is the idea that you could have a country making a good and other countries making an identical good, and ‘perfect substitution’ across countries would create strong pressure to equalize wages in the two countries,” Donaldson says. “Because they’re both making the same good in the same way, they can’t pay their workers differently.” However, he adds, while “earlier thinkers [economists] didn’t think it was literally true, it’s still a question of how strong that force is. Our findings suggest that force is quite weak.”

Costinot and Donaldson acknowledge that their study must take into account a variety of complexities. For instance, they note, about half of Ecuador’s economy is informal, and cannot be measured using official records. Additionally, global “shocks” can affect trade patterns in a given country at a given time — something they test for and incorporate into the current study.

And while trade patterns can also change more gradually, the data from the 2009-2015 time period are stable enough to suggest that the researchers identified a clear and ongoing trend in Ecuador.

“People don’t change jobs very often, and the income distribution does not change very much,” Donaldson says. “We did make sure to check that — within the sample, the stability is very high.”

A global pattern?

The study also naturally raises the question of whether similar outcomes might be found in other countries. In the paper, the authors list many other countries to which their methods could be applied.

“Ecuador is definitely very different from the United States, but it’s not very different from many middle-income countries that are mostly exporting commodities in exchange for manufactured goods,” Costinot says. Donaldson, for his part, is already working on a similar project in Chile.

“That pattern of participation [in global trade] is important, and exporting could be very different across countries,” Donaldson says. “But it would be very easy to know, if you just found the data.”

Reference: “Imports, Exports, and Earnings Inequality: Measures of Exposure and Estimates of Incidence” by Rodrigo Adão, Paul Carrillo, Arnaud Costinot, Dave Donaldson and Dina Pomeranz, 2 March 2022, The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjac012

Support for the research was provided, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Center for Economic Policy Research, the U.K. Department for International Development, and the European Research Council.

New Understanding of Earth’s Architecture: Updated Maps of Tectonic Plates

By UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE JUNE 19, 2022

New tectonic plate model with boundary zones in darker shading. Credit: Dr. Derrick Hasterok, University of Adelaide 

New models that show how the continents were assembled are providing fresh insights into the history of the Earth and will help provide a better understanding of natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes.

“We looked at the current knowledge of the configuration of plate boundary zones and the past construction of the continental crust,” said Dr. Derrick Hasterok, Lecturer, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide who led the team that produced the new models.

“The continents were assembled a few pieces at a time, a bit like a jigsaw, but each time the puzzle was finished it was cut up and reorganized to produce a new picture. Our study helps illuminate the various components so geologists can piece together the previous images.

“We found that plate boundary zones account for nearly 16 percent of the Earth’s crust and an even higher proportion, 27 percent, of continents.”

“Our new model for tectonic plates better explains the spatial distribution of 90 per cent of earthquakes and 80 per cent of volcanoes from the past two million years whereas existing models only capture 65 percent of earthquakes.”

— Dr. Derrick Hasterok, Lecturer, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide

New models showing the Earth’s architecture. Credit: Dr. Derrick Hasterok, University of Adelaide

The team produced three new geological models: a plate model, a province model, and an orogeny model.

“There are 26 orogenies – the process of mountain formation – that have left an imprint on the present-day architecture of the crust. Many of these, but not all, are related to the formation of supercontinents,” said Dr. Hasterok.

“Our work allows us to update maps of tectonic plates and the formation of continents that are found in classroom textbooks. These plate models which have been assembled from topographic models and global seismicity, have not been updated since 2003.”

The new plate model includes several new microplates including the Macquarie microplate which sits south of Tasmania and the Capricorn microplate which separates the Indian and Australian plates

“To further enrich the model, we added more accurate information about the boundaries of deformation zones: previous models showed these as discrete areas rather than wide zones,” said Dr. Hasterok.

“The biggest changes to the plate model have been in western North America, which often has the boundary with the Pacific Plate drawn as the San Andreas and Queen Charlotte Faults. But the newly delineated boundary is much wider, approximately 1500 km, than the previously drawn narrow zone.

“The other large change is in central Asia. The new model now includes all the deformation zones north of India as the plate bulldozes its way into Eurasia.”

A tale told by the continents. Credit: Dr. Derrick Hasterok, University of Adelaide

Published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, the team’s work provides a more accurate representation of the Earth’s architecture and has other important applications.

“Our new model for tectonic plates better explains the spatial distribution of 90 percent of earthquakes and 80 percent of volcanoes from the past two million years whereas existing models only capture 65 percent of earthquakes,” said Dr. Hasterok.

“The plate model can be used to improve models of risks from geohazards; the orogeny model helps understand the geodynamic systems and better model Earth’s evolution and the province model can be used to improve prospecting for minerals.”

Reference: “New Maps of Global Geological Provinces and Tectonic Plates” by Derrick Hasterok, Jacqueline A. Halpin, Alan S. Collins, Martin Hand, Corné Kreemer, Matthew G. Gard and Stijn Glorie, 31 May 2022, Earth-Science Reviews.
DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.104069

The work included researchers at the Universities of Adelaide, Tasmania, Nevada-Reno, and Geoscience Australia