We are working on health risk behaviours in young adults. I like the quote below from A Winter's Tale
"I would there would be no age between sixteen and twenty three, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting". From Winter's Tale - cited in the Akerlof paper
The Akerlof paper "Men without Children" is a complex argument on the effects of decreasing marriage rates. Howard Parker has talked a lot about "prolonged adolescence" and there is similarities to what Akerlof is saying. Of particular importance, he stressed the role of shot-gun weddings in the past having an influence on breaking up male peer-groups that engaged in violent or health damaging behaviour. Nowadays, if a young man gets a young woman pregnant, either they know each other so poorly that getting married is not sensible, or the man feels less responsibilty because the woman can choose abortion if she wants. Thus, we see a rise in young men who have had kids but play no role in their lives and maintain their peer-group, most of whom are in the same position. On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who use the fact that they have no children to devote extra time to their career, potentially further enhancing inequality effects.
Some of the above seems better fitted to the US, but we are puzzling in here to find out why drinking has exploded so much among young adults and that young men in particular have seen escalating rates of many types of health damaging behaviours. Rising incomes and technological advances in the supply and distribution of alcohol and drugs have to be seen as part of the story. But the role of marriage and home ownership are poorly understood and garbled by ideological arguments. Akerlof presents lots of econometric results from the NLSY to the effect that married men do less damage to themselves and others even when modelled using panel though the results are not conclusive.
A potential mechanism for the effects of marriage that Akerlof introduces is Laibson's cue-theory of consumption. Marriage and children offer so many cues to act responsibly that behavioural change is inevitable. Though Akerlof himself chooses to talk about marriage being the adoption of a new identity and essentially the choosing of a new utility function. This is a brilliant way of thinking about home ownership in Ireland. Buying a house is essentially the purchase of a utility function with all sorts of positive features. What other initiation rituals exist in a place like Ireland? Have they been eroded and was this a bad thing?
Running through a lot of Akerlof's papers including the presidential address is the problem of the endogeneity of social customs. Where do they come from and how do they change? That's one for another time!
Saturday, February 24, 2007
akerlof's presidential address
The desire to be a person in his own right, to be noticed in the world he lives in, is shared by each of the men on the streetcorner. Whether they articulate this desire … or not, one can see them position themselves to catch the attention of their fellows in much the same way as plants bend to catch the sunlight. (Liebow, 1967, pp. 60–1) - cited in Oxoby 2004.
Akerlof's presidential address to the AEA is below
here
He talks about five "neutrality results" that emerged from the classical critique of Keynes: (i) consumption and current income are independent (ii) investment and finance decisions are independent (iii) Ricardian equivalence (iv) inflation stability only at the natural rate of unemployment (v) failure of macro-stabilisation policy under rational expectations. He argues that all five results break down in the presence of social norms with regard to the workings of the system. The paper invokes identity theory, sociology of the corporation and other anthropological and sociological accounts of different economic units to explain how standard neutrality results break down.
It is interesting to reflect how pride, initiation, evvy, social status, sense of belonging, group identity, obedience, prejudice, snobbery and all of these other things are generating the results we are finding in our studies on education and health. More generally, it would be interesting to talk about the rate of time preference and future orientated behaviour with regard to this. Akerlofs work on obedience and procrastination is interesting in this regard. He also has a paper with Rachel Kranton "Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the Economics of Education" in the Journal of Economic Literature that brings in some of these insights in Education. Im currently reading his paper "Men without Children" for some thoughts on the alcohol work. A full list of his papers is below:
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pak7.html
We already talked about Benabou and Tirole's work on identity. Also, the IZA group are doing interesting work on identity, cognitive dissonance and incentives.
Ernst Fehr is doing some work on the costs of incentives that is interesting. http://www.iew.unizh.ch/home/fehr/
Armin Falk looks, in one paper, at how "efficient" surveillance mechanisms reduce employee motivation.
ftp://ftp.iza.org/dps/dp1203.pdf
The original cognitive dissonance experiments of Festinger showed that people who were being paid to perform meaningless tasks did not internalise any positive aspects of them, whereas those who were not being paid or only being paid a small amount "tricked themselves" in to believing that the tasks were worthwhile. Oxoby applies a similar insight to look at how people drop out of society
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2004.00241.x
The first paragraph in the conclusion is key:
"Although economists have paid attention to the role of social comparisons and the interdependence of utility, little attention has been paid to the ways in which individuals make these comparisons. In particular, existing theory assumes individuals agree on the metric that determines relative standing in society. However, research in psychology has demonstrated that the indices individuals use tomcompare themselves change, and change in systematic ways."
Ken teaches a course on the social self in Trinity. It would be really worthwhile to give a shortened version of that here in Geary with a view to translating some of the key findings in to "econo-speak".
Akerlof's presidential address to the AEA is below
here
He talks about five "neutrality results" that emerged from the classical critique of Keynes: (i) consumption and current income are independent (ii) investment and finance decisions are independent (iii) Ricardian equivalence (iv) inflation stability only at the natural rate of unemployment (v) failure of macro-stabilisation policy under rational expectations. He argues that all five results break down in the presence of social norms with regard to the workings of the system. The paper invokes identity theory, sociology of the corporation and other anthropological and sociological accounts of different economic units to explain how standard neutrality results break down.
It is interesting to reflect how pride, initiation, evvy, social status, sense of belonging, group identity, obedience, prejudice, snobbery and all of these other things are generating the results we are finding in our studies on education and health. More generally, it would be interesting to talk about the rate of time preference and future orientated behaviour with regard to this. Akerlofs work on obedience and procrastination is interesting in this regard. He also has a paper with Rachel Kranton "Identity and Schooling: Some Lessons for the Economics of Education" in the Journal of Economic Literature that brings in some of these insights in Education. Im currently reading his paper "Men without Children" for some thoughts on the alcohol work. A full list of his papers is below:
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pak7.html
We already talked about Benabou and Tirole's work on identity. Also, the IZA group are doing interesting work on identity, cognitive dissonance and incentives.
Ernst Fehr is doing some work on the costs of incentives that is interesting. http://www.iew.unizh.ch/home/fehr/
Armin Falk looks, in one paper, at how "efficient" surveillance mechanisms reduce employee motivation.
ftp://ftp.iza.org/dps/dp1203.pdf
The original cognitive dissonance experiments of Festinger showed that people who were being paid to perform meaningless tasks did not internalise any positive aspects of them, whereas those who were not being paid or only being paid a small amount "tricked themselves" in to believing that the tasks were worthwhile. Oxoby applies a similar insight to look at how people drop out of society
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2004.00241.x
The first paragraph in the conclusion is key:
"Although economists have paid attention to the role of social comparisons and the interdependence of utility, little attention has been paid to the ways in which individuals make these comparisons. In particular, existing theory assumes individuals agree on the metric that determines relative standing in society. However, research in psychology has demonstrated that the indices individuals use tomcompare themselves change, and change in systematic ways."
Ken teaches a course on the social self in Trinity. It would be really worthwhile to give a shortened version of that here in Geary with a view to translating some of the key findings in to "econo-speak".
Friday, February 23, 2007
Food Dudes Eat Your Heart Out
Italians pay price for junk food revolution
Long revered as models of healthy living and eating, Italians are abandoning the fruit and vegetable-based Mediterranean diet in favour of fizzy drinks, cigarettes and deep fried food, and are paying for it with their lives, a new government study claimed. Italy's health ministry is planning to send emergency rations of fruit into schools, hospitals and offices after research revealed Italians are dying in their droves from diseases linked to alcohol, smoking and processed food. Southern regions around Naples are worst hit, said Walter Ricciardi of Rome's Catholic University, author of one study.
The Guardian
Long revered as models of healthy living and eating, Italians are abandoning the fruit and vegetable-based Mediterranean diet in favour of fizzy drinks, cigarettes and deep fried food, and are paying for it with their lives, a new government study claimed. Italy's health ministry is planning to send emergency rations of fruit into schools, hospitals and offices after research revealed Italians are dying in their droves from diseases linked to alcohol, smoking and processed food. Southern regions around Naples are worst hit, said Walter Ricciardi of Rome's Catholic University, author of one study.
The Guardian
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Gender Differences in Response to Incentives
We have been talking for a long time about ideas to incentivise students to unleash creativity etc,. An interesting paper below from Cornell looks at gender differences in response to incentives. On the positive side, it seems to be the case that men react well increasing performance by 10% in reaction to the incentive in the paper. Women, on the other hand, do not show a response in particular when the environment is mostly male. The paper concludes by arguing that such incentives may improve performance but at the expense of gender equity. On the other hand, given the gap that is opening up across education, perhaps it is worth thinking of these incentive schemes as a way of addressing the fact that men in particular tend to be more present-orientated and competition-driven. This paper looked at graduate students but competitive scholarships at Leaving Certificate and undergraduate level would also be worth thinking about.
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/wp/cheri_wp95.pdf
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/wp/cheri_wp95.pdf
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Too good to be ‘true’? The handicap of high socio-economic status in attractive males
Theres hope for you singletons : forthcoming in Personality and Individual Difference
Simon Chu , Romy Hardaker and John E. Lycett
Empirical evidence concerning human mate-choice preferences suggests that females should select partners on the basis of cues to genetic quality and/or ability to contribute resources to childcare. Paradoxically, while high levels of both factors should be an attractive combination to females, they might also dissuade females from entering into a relationship with such males since, by definition, they are likely to be highly attractive to other females, and therefore might increase the likelihood that such a male may cheat or desert the relationship. If so, females should be wary of entering into long-term relationships with physically attractive, high status males as compared with males of lower physical attractiveness or status. We asked females to rate a number of different males in terms of attractiveness as a long-term partner. Females were presented with attractive, average and unattractive male faces paired with lonely-hearts advertisements implying high, medium or low socio-economic status. Highest ratings were consistently given to attractive males of medium status rather than high status. We suggest that females see physically attractive, high status males as being more likely to pursue a mating strategy rather than parenting strategy. Under particular circumstances, high socio-economic status in males can be subtly counter-productive in terms of attractiveness as a long-term partner.
Simon Chu , Romy Hardaker and John E. Lycett
Empirical evidence concerning human mate-choice preferences suggests that females should select partners on the basis of cues to genetic quality and/or ability to contribute resources to childcare. Paradoxically, while high levels of both factors should be an attractive combination to females, they might also dissuade females from entering into a relationship with such males since, by definition, they are likely to be highly attractive to other females, and therefore might increase the likelihood that such a male may cheat or desert the relationship. If so, females should be wary of entering into long-term relationships with physically attractive, high status males as compared with males of lower physical attractiveness or status. We asked females to rate a number of different males in terms of attractiveness as a long-term partner. Females were presented with attractive, average and unattractive male faces paired with lonely-hearts advertisements implying high, medium or low socio-economic status. Highest ratings were consistently given to attractive males of medium status rather than high status. We suggest that females see physically attractive, high status males as being more likely to pursue a mating strategy rather than parenting strategy. Under particular circumstances, high socio-economic status in males can be subtly counter-productive in terms of attractiveness as a long-term partner.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Socio-Cultural Reference Points and Uncertainty in Human Capital Investment
A new IZA paper "Skill Uncertainty and Social Inference" (Oxoby) gets at something relevant to occupational choice that myself, Kevin and Liam were talking about last week. Essentially that school-leavers may under-estimate their capabilities (or lack confidence about their ability) because they lack a familiar reference point for academic achievement.
Oxoby suggests that full information regarding one’s own ability is not always available. This may seem like a strange suggestion but the logic is that unless an individual undertakes tasks that test their prior beliefs, he/she may be uncertain about how much human capital to acquire. To solve this problem, the individual may also use public, socially observable information to form beliefs about their own ability.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Too Many Graduates Spoil the Pot
This is another interesting article: "The Wage Effects of Graduate Competition" (Brynin and Longhi, 2006). It gets at the importance for returns to education, of graduate supply within particular occupations. This is referred to as "graduate density" and is estimated using the British Labour Force Survey. We'll be able to get a nicer measure of graduate density in Ireland using that data I sent round earlier in the week which shows how many graduates emerege from each discipline at each level in each HEA institution.
Does Income Affect Educational Attainment?
My discussion paper in the Geary series finds no effect from income on participation in higher education. A new working paper from the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (I don't whether they're for or against) is called "Does Money Buy Higher Schooling? Evidence from Secondary School Track Choice in Germany".
This paper suggests that income has no positive causal effect on educational attainment and that differences between high- and low-income households are driven by unobserved heterogeneity, e.g. differences in motivation. This is getting at something very interesting.
I'll look into the author (Marcus Tamm) a bit more, but I already think that he could be somebody very worthwhile getting over for a Geary seminar.
Instrumental Variables and Career Choice
A new NBER working paper by Oyer (The Making of an Investment Banker: Macroeconomic Shocks, Career Choice, and Lifetime Income), uses a survey of Stanford MBAs from the classes of 1960 to 1997 to analyse the relationship between the state of the stock market at graduation, initial job placement, and long-term labor market outcomes.
This is a good line of thought to get into for the Irish Universities Study.
This is a good line of thought to get into for the Irish Universities Study.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Patience amongst children
E Bettinger, R Slonim, Journal of Public Economics , 91, 1-2 , February 2007, 343-363 .
Recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children (and often their families) to induce better health and educational choices. These policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient (i.e., have high discount rates); however, little is known about the nature of children's patience, how it varies across children, and whether children can even make rational inter-temporal choices. This paper examines the inter-temporal choices of 5- to 16-year-old children in an artefactual field experiment. We examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future. We find that children's choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting, boys are less patient than girls, older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores, private schooling and parent's patience are not correlated with children's patience. We also find that although more than 25% of children do not make rational inter-temporal choices within a single two-period time frame, we cannot find variables that explain this behavior other than age and standardized mathematical achievement test scores
Recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children (and often their families) to induce better health and educational choices. These policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient (i.e., have high discount rates); however, little is known about the nature of children's patience, how it varies across children, and whether children can even make rational inter-temporal choices. This paper examines the inter-temporal choices of 5- to 16-year-old children in an artefactual field experiment. We examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future. We find that children's choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting, boys are less patient than girls, older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores, private schooling and parent's patience are not correlated with children's patience. We also find that although more than 25% of children do not make rational inter-temporal choices within a single two-period time frame, we cannot find variables that explain this behavior other than age and standardized mathematical achievement test scores
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Prof Ray Fuller
Professor Ray Fuller (TCD Psychology) will give a talk this Tuesday in the boardroom at 3pm on driving and risk.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID, IF YOU LEARNED TO:
STUDY ON FEAR RESPONSES SUGGESTS NEW UNDERSTANDING OF ANXIETY DISORDERS
A new study on rats has identified a part of the brain's cortex that controls learned but not innate fear responses.The results suggest that hyperactivity in a region of the prefrontal cortex might contribute to disorders of learned fear in humans, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders, say authors Kevin A. Corcoran, PhD, and Gregory Quirk, PhD, of the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. Their report appears in the January 24 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
The above got me thinking:in economics we think of discounting as that which mediates present and future consumption.Could it be fear/anxiety? If people are anxious about the (unknown) future then they may appear to economists as high-discount types. But there is a big difference,for example there are no drugs for having a high discount rate. So should would-be school drop-outs be put on Valium or given a few sessions of CBT ?Sleep and Brain Cell Growth
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6347043.stm
The linked study from PNA looks the relationship between stress hormones, sleep and brain cells.
The linked study from PNA looks the relationship between stress hormones, sleep and brain cells.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Enrique Leon
Enrique Leon will give a talk on Friday 9th at 11am in the seminar room on measuring affect in IT environments.
Govt. sets up Social Finance Foundation
The Government has announced the establishment of the Social Finance Foundation. One of its main functions is to provide seed capital for small locally based enterprises. For more, see here.
The Importance of Critical Mass in PhD Labour Supply
Pfizer have pulled out of Cork today, see story here. I know these are manufacturing job losses but does anyone know what kind of manufacturing we are talking about? If its high-grade maufacturing that only be done by PhD graduates, then this is a very ill omen. Pharmaceuticals has been cited as one of three important areas where we need a greater supply of PhD researchers (Expert Group on Future Skills Needs).
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
How Many Hours Did You Sleep Last Night?
A new study shows that getting the right amount of sleep may help kids to avoid developing an obesity problem. http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2007/02/07/hscout601685.html
This lends credence to Liam's endeavours when he asks survey respondents about how much sleep they get.
By the way, can't seem to embed a weblink in the text of a word anymore.
This lends credence to Liam's endeavours when he asks survey respondents about how much sleep they get.
By the way, can't seem to embed a weblink in the text of a word anymore.
Satisfaction guaranteed
Ken drew my attention to a really interesting little piece that shows that when answering questions via a Likert scale people are biased towards responses on the left of the page, a phenomenon known as psuedoneglect. So a descending scale (good,fair,bad) will get a better response than an ascending one. This clearly has implications for survey design as well as helping some of us improve our teaching evaluations. It would be interesting to know if there is any bias when the scale is arranged vertically: the theory would say not.
Michael E.R. Nicholls, Catherine A. Orr, Matia Okubo, Andrea Loftus (2006)
Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Effect of Spatial Biases on Responses to Likert Scales
Psychological Science 17 (12), 1027–1028.
Michael E.R. Nicholls, Catherine A. Orr, Matia Okubo, Andrea Loftus (2006)
Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Effect of Spatial Biases on Responses to Likert Scales
Psychological Science 17 (12), 1027–1028.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Blog
Evan Davis, BBC economics editor & my former boss at IFS , has an interesting blog
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/evandavis/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/evandavis/
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Kevin Denny talk
Kevin Denny (UCD) will give a talk on Tuesday 1pm in the Geary Institute Seminar room. The title of the talk is.
"Hemispheric indecision and cognitive ability: 2 surpluses and a deficit"
"Hemispheric indecision and cognitive ability: 2 surpluses and a deficit"
New Paper by Benabou and Tirole
Benabou and Tirole have done some amazing work integrating economics with psychology, in particular theories of identity. Below is a link to their latest work, which is breathtaking in scope.
http://ftp.iza.org/dp2583.pdf
Who would ever have thought that the following paragraph would appear in a cutting-edge economics paper
"males subjects who were told by the experimenters that their score on a personality test was so atypical as to place them squarely in the female part of the distribution were subsequently much more likely than the control group to harass a female (but not a male) chat-line user by sending her pornographic images. This effect was further accentuated when she (a confederate) had previously described herself as a professionally ambitious feminist rather than a meek, family oriented traditionalist; it was also more pronounced, the more the subjects had initially self rated themselves as masculine."
Seriously though, this is one to devote some time to
http://ftp.iza.org/dp2583.pdf
Who would ever have thought that the following paragraph would appear in a cutting-edge economics paper
"males subjects who were told by the experimenters that their score on a personality test was so atypical as to place them squarely in the female part of the distribution were subsequently much more likely than the control group to harass a female (but not a male) chat-line user by sending her pornographic images. This effect was further accentuated when she (a confederate) had previously described herself as a professionally ambitious feminist rather than a meek, family oriented traditionalist; it was also more pronounced, the more the subjects had initially self rated themselves as masculine."
Seriously though, this is one to devote some time to
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