Past research shows a statistically significant relationship between college completion and sociopolitical attitudes. However, recent scholarship suggests the effects of college on social outcomes may be confounded with unobserved family background. In this study, we leverage the shared family and social background of siblings to better identify the effect of college on sociopolitical attitudes. We draw data from the Study of American Families and General Social Survey and use sibling fixed effects to assess the effect of college on political orientation, support for civil liberties, and beliefs about gender egalitarianism. We find that earning a four-year college degree has a significant impact on support for civil liberties and beliefs about gender egalitarianism, but the effect of college on political orientation is confounded by family background.

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The literature concerning psychiatrists' responses to patient suicide is sparse (Brown, 1987; Chemtob et al, 1988; Alexander et al, 2000) but even less attention has been given to the psychiatrist's role in the aftermath of such an event. Psychiatrists infrequently discuss their own experience of patient suicide with their colleagues, either at an individual level (Kaye & Soreff, 1991) or in group settings such as team meetings (Ruben, 1990). This is all the more remarkable when one acknowledges that the suicide of a patient is arguably the event that causes most concern for clinicians, irrespective of their experience or seniority (Kaye & Soreff, 1991).

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We examine the impact of reduced search costs on prices of commodity products in electronic marketplaces. Conventionally, reduced consumer search costs may be expected to engender stronger price competition between firms, resulting in lower prices and improved consumer welfare. This notion was formalized in Stahl (1989, "Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search," American Economic Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, pp. 700--712) in a model of static firm competition. In this paper, we show that these standard welfare conclusions may be neutralized or reversed in a dynamic environment. We focus on self-enforcing collusion by firms and characterize the conditions under which collusive equilibria exist. We show that less costly consumer search can facilitate firms' abilities to collude, resulting in higher prices and reduced consumer welfare, even with imperfect or no monitoring by sellers of each other's prices. If the same technology that eases consumer search also allows firms to monitor each other's prices more easily, then firms can more easily detect cheating on a collusive price arrangement, allowing an even greater scope for collusion. This raises antitrust concerns with respect to the electronic marketplace and suggests that at least some of the anticipated competitive gains from electronic market systems may be difficult to realize.electronic markets, search costs, collusion, repeated games, monitoring, pricing, Internet