Why Economics is Great - Volume 2

From a survey conducted by people at the University of Bristol. Full link below. Admittedly a little old now.

http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/projects/alumni_survey2004.pdf

Surveys of economics lecturers

following some links that Martin sent on the other day, i found some interesting surveys of economics lecturers taken in the UK. worth reading though it shouldnt come as a surprise that the main issue for economics lecturers with regard to their teaching is student maths ability. its amazing how much tension this generates nowadays.

http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/projects/surveys.htm

Denial of Death

Michael was talking the other day about self-control resources being expended by trying to block out thinking about death. I found some papers on this. There are definitley more out there.

http://hanson.gmu.edu/feardie.pdf
http://www.bepress.com/bejte/advances/vol5/iss1/art5/

Abstract
"We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and may lead to time-inconsistent behavior and other “behavioral” phenomena. In the model, repression of signals of mortality leads to underconsumption for unsophisticated individuals, but forward-sophisticated individuals may over-consume in anticipation of future denial and may seek ways to commit to act according to one’s mortality prospects as currently perceived. We show that the mere possibility of engaging in this kind of denial leads to time-inconsistent but efficient behavior. Refusal to face up to the reality of death may help explain a wide range of empirical phenomena, including the underutilization of tax-advanced inter vivos gifts and inadequate purchase of life insurance"

"opt-out" testing for hiv

the logic of how to combat destructive behaviours driven by inertia is being pushed further. the article below calls for "opt-out" mechanisms for HIV screening in countries with HIV epidemics. Thus, everyone is scheduled to be screened but can refuse.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6703467.stm

Strategy for Science Technology and Innovation

While not a new policy, some of you may not have read this document. very important document in terms of the shape of education, research and innovation over the coming years. Worth reading for anyone working in or around research and higher education in Ireland.

http://www.entemp.ie/publications/science/2006/sciencestrategy.pdf

Data 360

Again, thanks to the Freakonomics blog, i came across this site. very nice site. You could really learn a lot just by plotting some of these.

http://www.data360.org/index.aspx?s_Time_Period=7

Most of the Irish data on the above site comes from the Durex sex survey, the results of which are listed below. Its amazing that they interviewed 340,000 people in 41 countries. I have to say though that the fact that respondents were recruited via the Durex website does make one somewhat cautious in interpreting the results.

http://www.durex.com/cm/GSS2004Results.asp
http://www.durex.com/cm/gss2004result.pdf


Nationmaster is great for this also.

http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php

Best Web-Log I've Seen in a While

The best blog I've seen in a while is the blog of the Columbia research group on multilevel modelling, bayesian statistics and causal inference:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/

There are categories for causal inference, economics and public health, amongst others. Some stuff that caught my attention:

• A debate on "Treating discrete variables as if they were continuous"
• A link to a relatively new competitor called "The Causality Blog"
• A link to a recent rejoinder by Heckman where he debunks the concept of RCT as a gold standard: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/heckman2.pdf
• A link to an article on "Why Helmeted Cyclists Are In More Peril on The Road" - its not because they take more risks, but because drivers give them less leeway!
  

Intute Social Sciences Blog

The Intute Social Sciences Blog is worth looking at.

Intute is a free online service providing access to the web resources for education and research. Intute: Social Sciences is the subject group of Intute that provides web resources for education and research for the social sciences.

The most recent post on the social sciences blog mentions a group called Econ Journal Watch.

This group "brings lively commentary to professional economics. It watches the journals for inappropriate assumptions, weak chains of argument, phony claims of relevance, and omissions of pertinent truths. It tests the science of the scientists. EJW appears three times per year at econjournalwatch.org".

Measuring Innovation?

The U.S. Department of Commerce has developed an initiative to find an innovation metric.

'The Measuring Innovation in the 21st century Economy Advisory Committee will help develop better ways to measure innovation so that public and policy makers can understand better its impact on economic growth and productivity. The committee will study metrics on effectiveness of innovation in various businesses and sectors, and work to identify which data can be used to develop a broader measure of innovation's impact on the economy'

http://www.innovationmetrics.gov

Rise in one-person households in Ireland

A new report from the Central Statistics Office shows that fewer than one in five households in Dublin City are now made up of the traditional family unit of husband, wife and children.

The same trend isn't evident in the national data, but there are clear implications for how HBS data (for 04/05) from Dublin households should be interpreted with the one-person trend in mind.

These implications are also relevant for QHNS data from Dublin households.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0531/cso.html?rss

EU Calls on Food Industry to Tackle Obesity

The EU has urged industry to act voluntarily, but said a review in 2010 would decide whether new laws were needed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6704313.stm

Macro Peace Indicators

There is increasing interest in combining micro and macro data to give mulit-level accounts of things like the determinants of health, well-being, attitudes etc., One set of macro-indicators that might be interesting are these peace indicators reported by the BBC today. there is some debate about the scientific validity of the instruments but worth thinking about anyway.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/6704767.stm

Dublin gives over 55s a 'Passport for Leisure'

A new scheme offering discounted access to Dublin City Council amenities for the over 55s has been launched by Lord Mayor Vincent Jackson.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0530/elderly.html

Giving students the facts to make decisions on which university to attend

I was thinking about how students make decsions to attend universities in Ireland: subject choice (if you want to be a vet, you have to go to UCD) and geography (I reckon that the proportion of non-Munster students attending UCC is small, even though the research side has blossomed recently) play a part.Tradition, proxied by parents' and older siblings' behaviour, might come into play: TCD attracts a lot of Northern Irish students, particularly from mainly Protestant grammar schools, while DCU & UCD simply don't.

Given that the education market is quite inflexible in Ireland, there's an interesting point about the benefits to be gained from highlighting the benefits of one particular university. The amount of easily digestible and impressive info in US universities is amazing: the link will take you to an easily-sourced web page on the University of Virginia website, where its quality is immediately apparent and comparable. Here, facts and figures become the advert. I heard that UCD were very happy with the advertising for the Horizons programe, and they believe it drew in extra students. Would any Irish university stand to gain by copying the format of Virgina?

COMPARE

The website of COMPARE, a project dedicated to providing comparable survey measures was put online in the last few days. Anchoring vignettes is a very large feature of this work


www.compare-project.org

Inequality Lab

Came across this on the Freakonomics blog. i was familiar with Fryer's work and its good that he has formed a lab as the work is very interesting. See below

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~rfryer/index.cgi

Is Lucozade the solution to adolescent delinquency?

As we all know beating desire is hard. To do it we need willpower and recent evidence supports the common perception that our willpower like a battery has a limited supply and using it means losing energy resources. For instance, it has been found a number of times that when self-control is used extensively in a decision making or effortful control task, self-control on a second such task is markedly reduced. However, a recent study has demonstrated that the willpower as resource metaphor can actually be taken quite literally and that the willpower energy lost can actually be quantified in terms of glucose. The authors show that reductions in self-control following a difficult task are matched by reductions in glucose and that subsequent performance is detrimentally affected and that this can be ameliorated by taking a glucose drink. Further, the authors note that juvenile delinquents, who by definition lack self-control, process and tolerate glucose less effectively than comparable adolescents suggesting that glucose deficiency may play a part. The study also gives rise to the paradoxical possibility that munching on chocolate bars may actually increase your self-control (albeit temporarily). I know I often found Lucozade useful for getting the mind in gear for exams, this research shows why!
self-control and glucose

History, social surveys, and diary methods

I've been really impressed by the reviews of Austerity Britain, 1945-1951, by the historian David Kynaston. He uses Mass Observation Reports, and diary extracts to convey the experience of living through these years. I was fascinated by the description of the origin and use of the Mass Observation Reports.

There are some really fine works on social history in the UK and work by Peter Hennessy is well worth looking up; in addition, I recommend Nicholas Timmins's remarkable book on postwar Britain, 'The Five Giants - A Biography of the Welfare State' for its insights into how policymakers were pushed and pulled into the decisions they took on welfare issues.

Assessing the impact of cultural change

I only came across this ESRC-funded unit as I saw a job advert today for a post within it, so I can't say I know a lot about this place.

What I can say is that I've had a good trawl through their website and picked up the essence of what they're trying to do. One of the central problems in social psychology is how we model the impact of larger structures on individuals;

The range of working papers, with stuff like how we value public sector broadcasting (talk to Liam for lots on this - his PhD was in that area) and how concepts of financial prudence have changed, for example - struck me as interesting. I'd recommend people to have a scoot round the relevant pages. I myself am going to have a look at the paper on Ronald Inglehart (my PhD thesis area).

Doctoral Research Training in Health Behaviour

The website of the American Academy of Health Behaviour is worth looking at:

http://www.aahb.org/

They have an interesting white paper with recommendations for doctoral research training in health behaviour.

This should be interesting to researchers at the centre working in both the higher education and health behaviour streams.

slight change

some of my posts lately were a little out of focus and not really what the blog is about, namely to communicate scientific literature. i have taken a couple down and will continue posting as normal.

the elephan in the corner of decision research

Would you go for the sure bet -- say, a guaranteed $100, or a 75% chance on $200? How about receiving $3,400 this month, or waiting two months to get $3,800?

People have widely varying tastes for risk, and different levels of patience. Decision researchers have known this for a while. But Shane Frederick’s work puts a new spin on the subject. With a deceptively simple “cognitive reflection test (CRT),” Frederick has come up with a way of predicting individuals’ predilections for risk-taking.

Frederick found 3,000 plus subjects -- mostly university students across the U.S. – to answer his three CRT questions, as well as to respond to a survey on financial gambles and other risk-based decisions. The CRT, which he describes as functioning like an IQ test, tends to elicit impulsive, erroneous answers. Here’s one sample question: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The intuitive answer is 10 cents. The correct answer is 5 cents.

Frederick discovered striking correlations between individuals scoring correctly on all three CRT questions, and their tendency to take financial gambles. For instance, almost a third of the high scorers preferred a 1% chance at $5,000 than a guaranteed $60. He also found a connection between high scores and patience around financial outcomes.

Sharp distinctions between men and women emerged from his data. 80% of high scoring men prefer a 15% chance at $1 million over a certain $500, versus 38% of high scoring women.the relation between IQ and decision making strategies,

A video lecture is available at: http://mitworld.mit.edu/stream/378/

recent harvard paper on marriage and fertility

an interesting new working paper on divorce, fertility and marriage

http://econweb.fas.harvard.edu/hier/2007papers/HIER2136.pdf

why economics is great - volume 1

having read that Danny Glover has an economics degree, i thought it would be a good idea to start a new feature on the blog that celebrated economics in a triumphalist manner. to get the ball rolling, here's a few:

1. Economics PhD's have the highest rate of subjective matching to their employment according to Bender and Heywood's 2006 NBER working paper.

http://www.nber.org/~sewp/BenderHeywoodedMismatch.pdf

2. Economics Degrees have high returns in terms of salary (example below)

http://www.cbs.curtin.edu.au/files/04_5.pdf

3. See below for some economics videos if you want to make up your mind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_lectures_in_economics

wiki entry on academic freedom

always worth thinking about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_freedom

Alcohol health warnings by 2008

Alcoholic drinks will carry new health warning labels by the end of 2008 under a voluntary agreement between ministers and the drinks industry (in the UK).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6692593.stm

Augustine's Confessions

Most people are familiar with Augustine's famous line. "I had prayed to you for chastity and said "Give me chastity and continence, but not yet""

As RS Pine-Coffin points out in his introduction to the Penguin Edition, the life of Augustine is interesting because he was a great sinner who became a great saint. I have been reading the Confessions again with my behavioural economics hat on. Indeed Augustine seems very relevant to some of the last posts. He seems to have been a very risky youth though very amiable to his friends and likeable. As he developed self-control (no doubt as his brain was developing similar to the path in the article Ken posted) he becomes more austere.

Like a lot of the young guys in the studies we have been discussing, he also found formal education very boring - "Many and many a time i lied to my tutor, master and my parents and deceived them because I wanted to play games or watch some futile show or was impatient to imitate what i saw on stage". Book 1 in general reads like a compendium of modern behavioural problems.

he puts a lot of his behaviour down to a desire to impress his peers and bodily desire, "the clank of my chains, the fetters of death". his description of moving from essentially a career as a juvenline delinquent with very present-oriented viewpoints to a eternity-focussed theologan is very interesting and contains nearly every theme in the new literature written from a rich subjective perspective. The discussion of his rejection of Manicheaism really could have come straight from the AER (only less equations). His discussions of procrastination are rich:

"For i felt that i was still the captive of my sins, and in my misery, i kept crying 'how long shall i go on saying "tommorow, tommorow"? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?"

anyway, i cant do this justice in a five-minute rant. People who work on memory always cite Confessions as a classic and i think it is also one of the richest accounts of impulse control and personal development. Well worth a read.

The Cost of Self-Control

This article investigates the psychological tradeoffs of self-control using a recently developed self-report measure of self-control and several other personality measures. It is interesting as it points to the rarely discussed disadvantages of self-control in terms of reduced affect (both positive and negative) and a disconnection from felt physiological processes and bodily states. In the context of discounting of future rewards it may be the case that people are unwilling to sacrifice their rich affective lives for greater personality consistency and the associated benefits in terms of achievement and health. This may act as a barrier to change and is also relevant to discussions relating to the ethical dimension of the validity of implementing interventions aimed at behaviour change through promoting self-control.
tradeoffs of self-control

Behavioural Economics and Truckers

This is definitely one to read over

ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp2789.pdf

bubbles are good

Another thing i got from Marginal Revolution was a link to the book "Pop" by Daniel Gross. I haven't read it yet but the main argument is that bubbles are good because they encourage huge investment in ideas and technology (e.g. railroad, internet). While the short-term pain can be hard when they crash - the long run increases in growth potential that they engender make this worthwhile. he argues that we now need a "green bubble" to fuel huge innovation in development of sustainable energy and technologies.

I will have a read of the book when i get my hands on it. I would be interested to see how this argument applies to housing booms. I suppose it could be argued (if we accept that we are in a housing bubble in Ireland) that the long-run effect might have been a much-need increase in the housing stock. The counter-argument is that the investment properties that shot up didn't represent progress in any real sense and that people may not even want to live in much of the apartment accomodation in a few years time.

http://www.amazon.com/Pop-Why-Bubbles-Great-Economy/dp/0061151548

resources for applied econometricians

im going to give a very short talk at the New Economists conference on resources for people starting an applied econometrics thesis. ill review the main textbooks in the area and overview relevant websites. ill start kicking around some ideas during the week. Some things i have been keeping in mind.

(i) STATA based websites e.g. STATA site, UCLA lab, Stata Journal, Stata Digest.

(ii) Short courses e.g. Essex, LSE, Oxford Michigan etc., all run Easter/Summer courses. It would be good to talk about potential demand for running short specialised, high-level econometrics courses and master classes nationally. below is a good resource for keeping track of things that are coming up internationally.

http://econometriclinks.com/

(iii) Websites and courses for other statistical packages e.g. Ox, R, CATS, RATS etc.,

(iv) Online Lectures e.g. Kenneth Train has a superb set of on-line lectures on discrete choice - fantastic resource.

(v) Presenting Results - use of Outreg and graphics functions in STATA. Use of LaTEX and Beamer.

(vi) An overview of career tracks and publication outlets relevant to econometrics.

(vii) Karl Whelan is going to give a talk on publishing papers in top journals.

I would be grateful if the economics students could let me know if they can think of other areas that would be useful to cover or indeed whether we could run another "value-added" type event on the day as well as the talks by myself and Karl.

a couple of things i learned from May's Marginal Revolution

one of the most active blogs relevant to economics is maintained by Tyler Cowen and is called Marginal Revolution. Very eclectic blog that is very frequently posted. A few random things i learned from the current months posts

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

1. Danny Glover has a degree in economics

2. Norway is an interesting though expensive country

3. Zimbabwe is going to lead the UN Commission on Sustainable Development

4. A good thought experiment that shows that tipping is motivated by fear of dissapproval (May 16th)

5. The US government were worried at one stage last year that Canadian coins were being used as spying devices (may 7th) - a peculiar story

6. he has some nice posts called "markets for everything" including a horrible crime-spree in Baghdad whereby gangs are kidnapping corpses and selling them back for burial.

7. The FED has got some pretty high publishing economists (the blog lists 5 in the top 1000 publishing eocnomists)

8. the debates on Bryan Caplan's work and Libertarian Paternalism are worth looking at.

Some effects of student debt

the following NBER working paper provides a very interesting analysis of one potential effect of bringing in student loans. The paper finds that student debt causes students to take on high-paying "non-public interest" jobs to a greater degree. To me, this implies that student grants, free fees etc., are acting as a subsidy of sorts to public service type jobs. They also find that students who are in debt are less likely to contribute back to college in terms of alumni donations.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13117

superstition and family planning

This is one i wouldnt have thought of. In Vietnamese astrology, some years are lucky and children born in these years are likely to be succesful. the authors of the paper below exploit the fact that parents systematically try to have children born in these years to estimate the effect of "wantedness" on child outcomes. They find that children born in the "auspicious" years tend to do better in terms of health and education which they argue is due to the fact that children born in these years are more likely to have been planned. Im sure the Vietnamese astrological society (if there is one) would claim instead that this validates Vietnamese astrology.


linked here

Migration and Mental Health

We often read of the stresses associated with migration and the potential negative effects on mental health. However, economic intuition would sugggest that well-being should improve with migration (at least compared to the counter-factual). A recent World Bank working paper uses a lottery based natural experiment to examine the effect of migration on mental health, finding positive effects for many groups.


linked here

Automatic Transmission

For anyone interested in automaticity, priming, the perception-behaviour link and the basis for dual-systems models of social cognition this article contains reference to a great deal of the research which has emerged over the last decade: all behaviour is unconscious

(It's a very large file- probably scanned)

Global Development Marketplace

Worth taking a look at some of the projects entered in to this competition. Something like this in Ireland would be exciting.

http://dmblog.worldbank.org/

A worthy journal club article: risk & rationality in adolescents

I like the look of this paper: have just skimmed through it, so cannot say definitively that it's a winner, but the preface by Stanovich is laudatory and the goal (to think theoretically about the concepts of risk and rationality) is a good one.

The End of High Return is Nigh?

Ireland's housing boom is over, according to the OECD.

And the latest quarterly Central Bank study indicates that Ireland now has the most indebted private sector in the euro zone.

a challenge to rational choice

I believe it was a man called Johnson who when asked how he could argue against Berkely's solipsistic model of the world, dropped a stone on his interlocutor's toe and said "I refute it thus". i wonder did something similar happen before the incident described below. "But sir, how could you possibly argue against man being rational calculating animals.?" "Sir, I refute it thus"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6586879.stm

sleepless record

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/6689999.stm


I did worse finishing off my thesis.

What Can Web Browsing and Social Networking tell us?

New research conducted by Microsoft is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. See story here.

Skeptics of the validity of the research should note that experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy!

The approach taken by Microsoft doesn't sound a million miles away from propensity score matching, and it opens up new possibilities for doing work with anonymised web browsing history, if such data could be made available through a Freedom of Information request.

The team at Microsoft say they expect to be able to "refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information", and one day predict our occupations, and our levels of qualifications.

Another similar endeavour in this cyber-data approach is being conducted by the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking. They are funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks, such as MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Ringo and Facebook.

See more on this story here.

They are even considering the harnessing of advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" (championed by the web standards organisation W3C) - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Talk about an empirical economist's dream data!

More Thought Leaders

This time on a site called Monitor Talent.

Larry Brilliant is mentioned here (what a name), as well as a mathematical behaviourist Joshua Epstein.

Joel Kurtzman has some interesting ideas on how the media are always the last to know and on alternative forms of capital.

is the private sector efficient?

ive just rang three letting agencies saying that i wanted to spend roughly 1400 euro a month (slighly more than the average) to rent an apartment pronto, that i was a lecturer in a university and that i could pay immediately and as much in advance as was neccesary. In all three cases, i was put on hold and asked to ring back and then couldnt get in touch with the person and still cant. Either the market is so mad that companies really dont care about business, or there is a principal-agent problem whereby the letting agency doesnt really care about shifting properties quickly or there is just a lot of inefficiency. One could also probably argue that the cost of rapid response outweighs the benefits but surely the cost in this case is more a motivational one than anything else. Levitt caused a bit of a stir over the in the US when he argued that real estate agents tended to shift their own properties quicker for better prices. he gives a great description of this in his Princeton lecture. This brief experience ive just had with an admittedly small sample leaves me wondering how efficient our own property market is, at least the rental side seems daft (pardon the pun).

american war records

i dont know a great deal about historical records in the US but this below looks like a good data-set. 90 million records of americans who fought in wars going way back in the 1600s are being made available.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6681137.stm

gender differences blogging

the paper below looks at age and gender distributions of blog useage and content worldwide. Apparently, women's blogs tend to favour personal issues and men's blogs political and other impersonal issues. men's blogs tend to use words like "democracy" "sport" and "india" whereas women's blogs tend to use words like "yummy" and "gosh".

Their overall conclusion is that:
"Male bloggers of all ages write more about politics, technology and money than do their female cohorts. Female bloggers discuss their personal lives – and use more personal writing style – much more than males do."

http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/springsymp-blogs-07.10.05-final.pdf

Summer Interdisciplinary Series

Below is the listing so far for interdisciplinary seminars over the summer. If you are outside Geary and read this blog please feel free to email me (liam.delaney@ucd.ie) to get involved with this series. It is quite informal, attracts a high standard of talk and is open to everyone from undergraduate to senior Professor.

http://geary.ucd.ie/behaviour/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6&Itemid=15

Attitudes to Globalisation

A recent NBER paper by Mayda, O'Rourke and Sinnott looks at risk aversion and attitudes to globalisation. They find that risk aversion predicts anti-trade and associated attitudes but less so in countries with big governments. For me, one of the key things here comes down to what we are measuring by risk aversion questions in surveys. The IZA group have done a great deal of work with risk aversion and we have incorporated the risk preferences question in to all of our survey work lately. I am currently trying to examine whether risk preferences question are statistically distinct from things like personality variables and other perception and preference parameters, mostly through factor analysis and other scaling methods. Martin and myself are giving a talk on this in a few weeks.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13037

Election Prediction

Its time to come off the fence and make an election prediction. I give Fianna Fail about 70 seats, Labour about 20 and I reckon that the two will go in to coalition. Bookmakers odds are given below - another test of gambling markets!

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0522/election3.html

why do football fans cheer?

ive just briefly tuned in to see the game and Milan have just put one past Liverpool. The Italian crowd are leaping up and down with delight. - any theories as to why football fans get so in to this?? not suggesting that football is any more or less meaningful than anything else but it is an interesting model for emotions in the "real world"

Simplification and Saving

I recently had a funding application on testing financial interventions to promote savings behaviour turned down (the body shall remain nameless) on the grounds that such work was "not innovative." The same group were of the view that the Day Reconstruction method was "weak methodologically" and not possible to validate. Its a shame the commitee did not tell this to all the major high-flying US economists who insist on pointlessly rolling out these pedestrian methodologies. Below is another example of some of the best people in our discipline engaging in more uninnovative work. As for me, i have learned my lesson. No more looking to such mediocre outlets as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, Science and Nature for suggestions as to where to direct my research. Any suggestions anyone for where i can find this methodologically innovative work that the funders seemed to think was out there?

http://www.nber.org/digest/may07/w12659.html

Obesity Happiness and all that

http://ftp.iza.org/dp2717.pdf

Avner Offer's work is highly relevant to a lot of the discussion's we've had lately about economic prosperity, obesity, well-being etc., A link to his website is below. Above is a recent IZA working paper that examines rising psych-distress and subjective body dissatisfaction in Britain. I also link below to a recent RAND commentary on the increase in severe overweight in the US.

At the moment, i am also looking at subjective perceptions of body-weight, life satisfaction, alcohol consumption etc.,

http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/staff/postholder/offer_a.htm

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9043-1/

Fertility knowledge

Was thinking about this last week, but was abit wary of putting it up in case it's actually a very well studied area and I just happen to have overlooked it.

It concerns fertility: what kind of parameters structure a person's decision to find out if they are infertile or sterile prior to trying for a child? There's a fairly obvious disincentive for people on one level, as finding out they definiteivley cannot (or are even not likely to) have a child would place a burden on them to tell their partner(s) (subsequent or current), thus running the risk that they will be left single. Moreover, the timing of any such disclosure is also important: if you tell someone fairly early on that you've gone for a fertility test, that might scare the other person into deciding very quickly that their partner is serious about this relationship being a lifelong commitment.

I'd be interested in seeing if patriarchal cultures pressurise women quite early on in a relationship to go for a fertility test. I presume this would be the case for two reasons; less extramarital sex in a less morally relativist society, thus a reduced number of relationships in total per person, and a great pressure to produce children (preferably male, thus explaining the demand in India, for example, for sex-typing of unborn children to occur). But how the 'fertility test' pressure would happen in more secular cultures, particularly among educated partners, would be fascinating (at least I think so, anyway!)

Basic research: is it really worth it?

Basic research, or research where the primary goal is the advancement of human knowledge and theoretical understanding, has throughout its history been pressed by politicians and the public to justify its existence.

Leading economists, sociologists and scientific historians within the growing field of science policy research came together to present examples which dispel such notions, by illustrating the tangible economic and societal benefits it can bring.

See more here.

begorrah

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6638711.stm

ah sure faydin begorrah, isnt hard its been with all these new machines and things. thanks beeb for a wonderful overview of the Celtic Tiger. It always scares me when I read stuff like this - you wonder if they get it so wrong about the place you know most, what does that say about what you read about other places. to their defence, they are representing the views of particular groups; in this case farmers, pensioners and experimental rock musicians. but what a completely one-sided overview.

the fact that ireland has done so well in the last few years has really bothered some people. in fairness to the article, i agree that there has been some relative losers from the Celtic Tiger process, including farmers. however, the article gives the impression that we are all sitting around bemoaning this terrible progress that has been thrust upon our innocent heads. having grown up in a working class housing estate in the 1980's at a time of double-digit unemployment, mass level industrial actions (ok still some of these!), recessions, forced emigration etc., etc., ill take what we have now thanks.

Innovation Policy and Social Equity

Also in the current edition of the PAER, Joseph Stiglitz has an article "Prizes, not Patents". He suggests that a new system is required where the incentives to conduct medical research do not result in temporary monopoly power.

This is extremely relevant to some of the work in the Centre related to Fourth Level Ireland. There's a lot of work building on how to encourage innovation, on the micro/behavioural level, with discussions about things such as the policy emphasis to put PhD students (in science and technology etc.) through training courses that will teach them how to patent successfully. But should our energy instead be focused on thinking about alternatives to the patent system?

I noted from Stiglitz's PAER article, that he's part of a group called "Project Syndicate". This is an international association of 304 newspapers in 126 countries, devoted to the following objectives:

• bringing distinguished voices from across the world to local audiences everywhere;
• strengthening the independence of printed media in transition and developing countries;
• upgrading their journalistic, editorial, and business capacities.

There's some great monthly posts on it by "thought leaders" such as Rob Shiller, Ken Rogoff, Brad de Long and Jeffrey Sachs. Also worth checking out are the sections on "Science & Society" and "Health & Medicine". A veritable treasure trove.

Is Conversation Free in a Talking Shop?

You may remember Arjo Klamer from his books with David Colander on "Conversations with Economists" and "The Making of An Economist". Both highly recommended.

Now he's teamed up with Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak on a new project called "The Economic Conversation".

This is a new approach to teaching economics based on conversations, which has the potential to increase intellectual rigour not just amongst the students, but also amongst the teachers.

The authors provide a good overview of their project here in the current edition of the PAER:

"There's more than one way to skin an intellectual cat---and ... a fair and public hearing of the alternatives is crucial to the health of the economic conversation".

dan gilbert ted talk

Dan Gilbert's talk focuses heavily on the focusing illusion whereby people are bad at predicting what makes them happy. He draws a lot on studies such as the Brickman et al (1978) paper thats showed that people who had been rendered paraplegic and people who had won the lotto reverted back to their base level of happiness. His talk reminds me of the "alchemies of the mind" book ive been reading by Elster. Its a good counterbalance to our commonsense notions of happiness being attained through achievement but there a lot of counterpoints to be made such as Sen's ideas about the invalidity of self-reports.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/97

TED Talks

Below is a TED (technology entertainment design) talk by the founders of Google. Look through the rest of the site for some amazing talks on lots of relevant areas

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/118

Sense of unfairness increases heart risk

We have talked a lot of utility functions and the recent attempts to dig in to them. One interesting off-shoot of this literature has been the examination of preferences for mechanisms and preferences for distribution. Some of the literature has found that people have preferences for fair outcomes and will even destroy personal gain to achieve a more equitable outcome. Other research associated with Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer has argued that people have procedural utility and their well-being is directly influenced by how fair they perceive the mechanism that dealt them their hand. The Journal of Epidemilogy and Community Health has just published a paper showing that a sense of perceived unfairness raises heart risk. The data are from the famous Whitehall study led by Michael Marmot.

http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/61/6/513

To be fair to the authors, they recognise the potential weakness of the findings:

"Further research is needed to disentangle the effects of unfairness from other psychosocial constructs and to investigate the societal, relational and biological mechanisms that may underlie its associations with health and heart disease."

I think the above is understating it somewhat. Even though they have controlled for lots of unobservables, perceived fairness must be related to dozens of underlying unobservables that may imply all manner of different intepretations. In terms of explaining health outcomes using trait variables, there is a lot of work to be done. In economics, we are measuring and using as explanatory variables things like time preferences, risk perception and risk preferences though its unclear where this will ultimately lead .

Let's Call a Grade a Grade

I mentioned a story to some people yesterday about the argument over grade inflation in Irish third-level institutions.

The story is on the Irish Times website and is called: "Are standards in our third-level colleges slipping?"

Read the 'Yes' and 'No' sides to the argument here.

Vertical Workstations

Walking while you work might help fat people shed as much as 66 pounds - or nearly five stone - in one year, according to a study published today.

See here.


Guinea pig: Roger Highfield, science editor of The Daily Telegraph, lost nine pounds on the treadmill

Breakdown of Will. G Ainslie (Cambridge UP 2001)

This looks relevant to people working on risky behaviour as well as neuroecon.

Synopsis
Ainslie argues that our responses to the threat of our own inconsistency determine the basic fabric of human culture. He suggests that individuals are more like populations of bargaining agents than like the hierarchical command structures envisaged by cognitive psychologists. The forces that create and constrain these populations help us understand so much that is puzzling in human action and interaction: from addictions and other self-defeating behaviors to the experience of willfulness, from pathological over-control and self-deception to subtler forms of behavior such as altruism, sadism, gambling, and the 'social construction' of belief. This book integrates approaches from experimental psychology, philosophy of mind, microeconomics, and decision science to present one of the most profound and expert accounts of human irrationality available. It will be of great interest to philosophers and an important resource for professionals and students in psychology, economics and political science.

The New Formalism?

Bernheim and Rangel have a paper out in the current edition of the AER on choice-theoretic foundations for behavioural welfare economics. According to these authors, standard welfare analysis is based on choice, not on utility or preferences. And they have devised a new approach to welfare analysis where individuals make inconsistent choices.

See a version of the paper here.

It's not what you do, its the way that you do it

Are models and data on choice processes useful as a complement to revealed preferences in decision theory?

Benhabib and Bisin (2007).

RESPONSE TO FINANCIAL LOSS PARALLELS PAIN

People process information about financial loss through mechanisms in the brain similar to those used for processing physical pain, according to a new imaging study. The results could provide a new understanding of excessive gambling.

The new study detected activity in the striatum, a region that processes signals in the brain's system of reward and defensiveness. Previous studies had shown activity in the striatum increasing when subjects were awarded money, but falling silent when subjects lost money. The new study's lead author, Ben Seymour, MD, and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging in London suggest that the negative value people associate with losing money stems from an evolutionarily old system involved in fear and pain. This could provide some biological justification for the popular concept of "financial pain." Their study was published in the May 2 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The Situationist- Neurolaw?

“Suppose neuroscience could reveal that reason actually plays no role in determining human behavior, suppose I could show you that your intentions and your reasons for your actions are post hoc rationalizations that somehow your brain generates to explain to you what your brain has already done”.

For the rest of the article-

http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/law-the-brain/

The old free will debate sparks up again, this time in the context of the emerging area of neurolaw. The idea that neuroscience research can seriously inform decision-making in law cases is a fairly contentious one. There is of course a case for such input in cases where defendents have sustained serious brain injuries resulting in disinhibition, misunderstanding of social cues, and general uncontrolled impulsivity with or without an understanding of right and wrong. However, as usual where to draw the line is the difficult question. Schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses should of course be given dispensation, but in other cases such as anti-social personality disorder, criminality or a lack of respect for the law is in very much intrinsic to the diagnosis and the majority of prison inmates could be diagnosed as such. It is in these cases where individuals are characterised by their impulsivity, irresponsibility and disregard for safety of for laws that automaticity arguments against free will could potentially play a deciding role.

This article gives a brief introduction to work of Libet and carried on by Wegner on the "illusion of conscious will". It's an interesting debate though I would say most lawyers would lean towards the side of common sense and that of philosophers who would say that experiments which show automaticity on a time-scale of under a second are not really testing the existence of free will as this is a long term process which involves engaging in intentional projects and that specific behaviours are subsumed under the umbrella of such projects and still should be considered "free". The tendency of those who are high in impulsivity to perceive time as faster than normal, to fail to operate within the frame of intentional projects and long-term goal-striving to the same extent as those in the normal range would suggest that these people are more prone to "automatic" behaviour. But should this get them off!?

affect and decision-making

The Journal of Behavioural Decision Making published a special issue on affect and decision-making last year. Thanks to Michael Daly for pointing out some of the papers

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/112579389

delaying fertility - to whose benefit?

http://ftp.iza.org/dp2778.pdf

a paper from the IZA above that shows for a wide range of econometric specifications that being born to a mother in her teens is associated with several worse outcomes for the child at ages 20 on. Obviously, the usual policy conclusion here is to adopt some mechanism to persuade people to delay fertility. The philosophers have made the case though that from the point of view of the children who are born, it probably is less important to them that their outcomes are slightly worse than it is that they exist at all. By delaying fertility the future mother should have better outcomes and the future child should have a better outcome than the child who would have been born sooner. However, the child born sooner now no longer exists. We have in a sense thrown one child off the life-raft on the basis of him/her being slightly less viable. in some sense, the child born sooner will never regret the fact that their parent did not delay fertility, assuming that their existence is valuable to them. Taking this to extremes, it doesnt matter how many children the mother has or when she has them - all these children will be glad that the decision was made.


I dont know if he ever addressed this particular topic but Derek Parfit's philisophical work examines a lot of these types of issues. I have read several ways of resolving this philosophical issue but it really does throw a bit of a spanner in the works. Worth having a read of this debate - some of the book is available on the link below. Shane Frederik's PhD thesis at MIT is linked below also and has some fantastic references

here


http://www.mit.edu/people/shanefre/Thesis_S.Frederick.pdf

boys educational outcomes

A few papers that we have looked at in the last few months have indicated that boys tend to respond to immediate incentives to a greater extent than girls. i was re-reading the paper "Patience among children" by Bettinger and Slonim. They show that boys are markedly more impatient than girls, as measured by choice behaviour in a field experiment involving incentives. In particular, young boys may need educational incentives that give immediate rewards (rewards that they actually like!). The literature on domain specific discounting indicates that money itself may or may not be the incentive but it strikes me that if it is case that boys are falling behind, one hypothesis is that the immediate cost that they get from studying very hard is relatively higher than the discounted benefit. The benefit itself may be roughly the same and I haven't seen much evidence that returns to education are lower for boys than for girls. However, the discounting process may be different. In terms of the feminisation of teaching argument, i suppose this could be seen as different costs of study, with the idea being that a more feminised subject matter would impose a higher study cost on the boys in terms of them having to contend with subject matter less interesting to them. One argument for the role of gender composition is that it is more plausible to suggest that this has varied over the last few years than it is to suggest that relative discounting processes have varied. as with all this discussion though, it should be borne in mind that outcomes for males are improving in almost every conceivable domain and therefore, looking for reasons why "boys are failing" etc., is not the correct language. The relative changes in gender performance in school exams is an interesting question though.

Recent RAND paper on advertising's effect on adolescents

RAND have recently published a paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health showing very large effects of alcohol advertising on adolescent alcohol consumption. The news release is below. This builds on earlier work that they did looking at effective exposure to alcohol advertising. An Irish paper looked at this using qualitative analysis and showed very high degrees of brand awareness among 13 year olds. Proponents of total alcohol advertising bans cite this type of evidence to further their argument. The current code in Ireland prohibits any marketing to children but clearly if you are marketing constantly to adults, it is difficult to see how children are not going to pick up the message, particularly given that they look to their older peers for role models. Once again, we have little causal information in Ireland but apriori the case must be seen as strong and worth investigation.
http://www.rand.org/news/press.07/05.03.html

nba referees and the irish public sector

A paper that is generating a lot of debate at the moment in the US is linked below. It looks at racial biases in NBA refereeing decisions. The Freakonomics blog has some interesting discussion about it and Levitt and O'Donohue have written a similar paper about racial biases in arrests.

http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/Papers/NBARace.pdf

It would be interesting to think of rigorous ways of looking at such biases in the Irish context. As well as race, gender is of course an interesting area. There is a lot of work done in Ireland on gender discrimination. Perhaps someone can correct me if Im wrong but i have never seen a gender paper in Ireland that has anything approaching causal inference and I strongly suspect that we have made a lot of policy on the basis of correlations and ideological preferences dressed up as science. Based on what i have been reading (admittedly just for the last ten minutes to get me psyched to go back to my real work!), a couple of issues come to mind:

(a) does the gender composition of decision makers (e.g. police giving tickets, lecturers marking scripts, committees hiring staff etc.,) have an effect on the gender distribution of outcomes? In what domains of activity is this particularly relevant in Ireland.

In the abscence of further information, it is clearly non-sense to say that the reason there are more female nurses is that women discriminate against men or that the reason there are more men in finance is that men discriminate against women. We need something more causal.

(b) continuing from a previous post, how will the occupational segregation by gender affect welfare outcomes. Will a predominately female teaching profession produce worse outcomes for boys. We have already argued that simply observing a correlation between feminisation of teaching and declining relative position of boys in education is completetly unrigorous. We would need more to go on before we could even begin to claim that. Looking from the other side, does the fact that the Dail is mostly male have negative implications for women? can we find clear differences in the decisions made by political representatives as a function of gender. The gender quota system introduced by some of the parties might be a (albeit fairly noisy) way to look at some of this.

(c) Can we find clear causal effects of the imposition of public sector gender reforms in Ireland on gender composition of hiring and promotion? Can we find any evidence that this either improved or detracted from the performance of the agencies involved. My unfounded hunch would be that they (almost by definition) do have an effect on gender composition of hiring but i dont believe either the story that women are somehow better at certain jobs and thus productivity improves or that women have multiple objectives outside work and thus productivity worsens. My (again unfounded) hunch is that public sector employment by and large attracts more skilled applicants than is needed because of the extra benefits in terms of job security and conditions. You would have to go very far down the distribution to have a marked negative effect on productivity. The reforms probably represent a redistribution of "cushy jobs" from men to women. Given that us men probably dont do our fair share outside the job market, maybe this is fair enough. The big losers are the altruistic men at the margins of good public sector employment who just fail to get in. My other suspicion here is that focusing men's minds on gender quotas can lead to an exagerration of their effect.

smoking cessation

an interesting new report on demand for smoking cessation products on the RWJF website. We still have over 20% of adults puffing away. It would be interesting to think how the new behavioural economics literature would have insights in to these types of interventions.

I am working on a note about the linkage between the leisure sector in Ireland (including tourism, sport, pubs etc.,), time preferences, social capital and public policy. It builds on a lot of the policy work i did in the ESRI where we effectively did an audit on a lot of this but examines all of this within the framework of discounting and behavioural economics. I will send it to B+F in the next few weeks but would be good to chat about some of this in terms of potential research hypotheses.

here

"Get out of my way!" - Rage

The pace of life in cities around the world is literally getting faster, a study has shown. Psychologists have measured the speed at which people walk and discovered a 10% increase in the last decade. Singapore is the busiest city apparently.

Here.

Your Round, Make Mine a Low Strength!

Here is a story about how lower strength beers (3.5% alc) are being launched in Australia. I also heard about a similar launch in the UK when listening to a UK radio station last week. I think the UK product is actually going to be a 2% alcohol content beer.

It would be interesting to assess the behaviour of the people who switch over to these beers. Will they drink less alcohol, or will they drink just as much alcohol as before and develop obesity problems? Or might they start to drink more frequently given that their perceptions of a lower strength beer might be different?