meditation's effects on the brain

the bbc has a report up on research of the effects of meditation on the brain

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7319043.stm

The Selection Equation for Participation in Higher Education

The Turbulenece Ahead Blog recently drew attention to a story in the Irish Examiner about secondary school drop-out in the Republic of Ireland. Data released to the Irish Examiner under the Freedom of Information Act shows that one in five pupils drop out before the Leaving Cert.

The Internet and Job Search

Betsey Stevenson

NBER Working Paper No. 13886
Issued in March 2008

---- Abridged Abstract -----

"Examining those who use the Internet for job seeking purposes, I show that the vast majority are currently employed... Examining the unemployed, I find that over the past ten years the variety of job search methods used by the unemployed has increased and job search behavior has become more extensive... Furthermore, the Internet has led to reallocation of effort among various job search activities".

After Midnight: A Regression Discontinuity Design in Length of Postpartum Hospital Stays

Douglas Almond, Joseph J. Doyle, Jr.

NBER Working Paper No. 13877
Issued in March 2008

---- Abridged Abstract -----

"A newborn delivered at 12:05 a.m. will have an extra night of reimbursable care compared to an infant born minutes earlier... Furthermore, a law change in 1997 entitled newborns to a minimum of 2 days in care... The results suggest that for uncomplicated births, longer hospitals stays incur substantial costs without apparent health benefits".

Decisions From Experience

In recent years, studies of decisions from experience have become increasingly popular and influential. Ralph Hertwig and Robin Hau have put together a website where they collect news, resources and literature about this topic. There are also modelling competitions, of the econometric variety.


http://dfexperience.unibas.ch

STATA Summer School

Worth looking at for people needing to get to grips with STATA and in particular working on bio-data

http://www.biostatepi.org/

on the subject of courses, another useful one for those beginning graduate work in health econometrics is below

http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/che/training/regression.htm

Institutions, Motivations and Public Goods

Institutions, Motivations and Public Goods: Theory, Evidence and Implications for Environmental Policy
Date:
2008-01
By:
Andrew Reeson (CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Australia)
URL:
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cse:wpaper:2008-01&r=cbe
In economic terms, the environment is largely a public good. Contributing to a public good is costly to an individual, while the benefits are enjoyed by all. Despite this, many people voluntarily contribute to public goods, both in laboratory economic experiments and through day-to-day environmental decisions. These voluntary contributions are largely motivated intrinsically, that is satisfaction comes from the act itself rather than external rewards. Policy interventions are often required to increase the provision of public goods to the socially optimal level, which usually take the form of extrinsic incentives such as payments or regulations. Theoretical and empirical evidence from psychology and economics suggests that such extrinsic incentives can crowd out the intrinsic motivations which underlie voluntary contributions. As a result, a policy may have less than the anticipated impact. It is even possible for a costly
Keywords:
public goods; environmental policy; intrinsic motivation; crowding out
JEL:
H4 Q0

Career Decision-Making

U.S. News and World Report has an interesting feature on popular careers that the article subjectively deems to be "over-rated". Possible alternatives are also suggested.

This illustrates a potential problem when inferring revealed preferences from early-stage career decision-making - individuals may not know how they actually feel about an occupation until they get to try it out. Therefore, we might expect less instances of job satisfaction closer to exit from school or college.

RateMyHospital.ie

Almost 90% of Irish people are afraid that going into hospital will damage their health, according to a survey by Irishhealth.com. See story here.

Irishhealth.com's new 'Rate My Hospital' is intended to be a 'snapshot' opinion poll which gives a picture of a selection of patient opinion at a given time on the level of hospital service they were offered. Over 11,000 surveys have been completed.

betrayal aversion

http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.98.1.294

Bohnet, Iris, Fiona Greig, Benedikt Herrmann and Richard Zeckhauser. 2008. "Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States", American Economic Review 98(1), pp. 294-310.
DOI:10.1257/aer.98.1.294


Abstract
Due to betrayal aversion, people take risks less willingly when the agent of uncertainty is another person rather than nature. Individuals in six countries (Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States) confronted a binary-choice trust game or a risky decision offering the same payoffs and probabilities. Risk acceptance was calibrated by asking individuals their "minimum acceptable probability" (MAP) for securing the high payoff that would make them willing to accept the risky rather than the sure payoff. People's MAPs are generally higher when another person, rather than nature, determines the outcome. This indicates betrayal aversion. (JEL C72, D81, Z13)

Some Economics Papers on Student Time Use

Some economics papers on student time use that have just come to my attention (when looking for some information on socio-economic background of student time use):

Schmidt, R. M. (1983). Who maximizes what? A study in student time allocation. The American Economic Review, 73(2), 23-28.

Baffoe-Bonnie, John and Golden, Lonnie, Pennsylvania State University, "Work-Study: Time Use Tradeoffs, Student Work Hours and Implications for Youth Employment Policy" (December 26, 2007).

Lazy Students? A Study of Student Time Use, Philip Stevens and Martin Weale, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2, Dean Trench Street, London SW1P 3HE, Revised 10th May 2004

THE IMPACT OF PAID WORK ON THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CANBERRA, Craig Applegate and Anne Daly, University of Canberra, CLMR DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES 05/1

A little bit of stata programming goes a long way

A useful paper by Christopher Baum


http://fmwww.bc.edu/EC-P/WP612.pdf

Natural Experiments in Time Use Economics

A Primer on the 35-Hour in France, 1997–2007, IZA DP No. 3402, (Philippe Askenazy, 2008)

Abridged Abstract:

France has experienced massive changes in its regulation of working time during the last decade. These changes generate natural experiments that may help to study a variety of issues in labor economics, including work sharing effect on job creation or productivity, labor relations or adaptation of firms to regulation.

On Bullshit

One of the more interesting reads over the Easter,

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html

Frankfurt is brilliant to read in lots of areas. His account of the person written in the early 1970's is still very widely cited and is relevant to a lot of the modern literature on capacity for self-control though i havent seen it mentioned much in this literature.

"Frankfurt, H.G., (1971). ‘Freedom of the Will and the concept of a person’, Journal of Philosophy, lxvii, 1, 5 –20. "

Brief Description of the Bullshit book below from the Princeton University Press Website

"Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

The behavioural economics of the AA 12-step program

Rewards are discounted in proportion to the delay with which they are delivered with greater value being placed on immediate rewards. This concept is of clear value to researchers interested in addictive behaviour. In this article Monterosso and Ainslie discuss systematic preference reverals and how they also predict self-control phenomena. The authors describe a model of choice bundling whereby the motivation to delay gratification can be increased through making choices in terms of whole categories. Through adding expectations about future behaviour as contigencies to current behaviour impulsivity is reduced. This bundling effect is elaborated in the context of hyperbolic discounting using the example of the 12-step program for alcohol addiction.


The behavioral economics of will in recovery from addiction

Decision-making, impulsivity and time perception

Wittman and Paulus point to the experience of time as a core determinant of the perceived costs involved in waiting for delayed beneficial outcomes in their recent TRENDS article on delay discounting. They discuss the cognitive-processing mechanisms that determine the sense of time and include an interesting discussion of the relationships between emotional distress, decision-making and time perception.

Wittman et al. (2008)

influence of political pressure on sports funding in ireland

Below is a paper that examines the county distribution of sports capital funding to examine whether ministerial patronage influences the regional allocation. its a difficult one to prove but the authors argue that the evidence strongly backs this up.

here

gender differences in performance

two papers below show that men react to incentives and competition better than women. In general, women do worse when competing with men than when competing with each other. Its too little evidence to base wide ranging conclusions from but in general, this literature lends support to claims that majority male competitive environments are damaging to women's outcomes. however, it also provides evidence that the bluntening of competition in different walks of life might be harmful to young men's outcomes.

These papers, and others, increasingly indicate to me that competitive (even cash) prizes are needed to motivate young men in academic settings possibly because their brain is hard-wired to respond to this type of incentive or that they are simply not as future oriented as their female colleagues. Either way, the underperformance of men in college entry exams and in college itself throughout the world has received disproportionately less attention and its really worth looking at some policy mechanisms like this that might help to smooth potential time inconsistencies in human capital investment in men. Of course, its also possible that male college underperformance reflects a rational belief in the returns but this is not given wide credence.

http://www.stanford.edu/~niederle/Gender.pdf

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/wp/cheri_wp95.pdf

becker and posner discuss some of this on their blog on March 2nd. Posner raises the declining influence of father's on boys as one potential generator with the idea being that divorce will remove the father from continuous presence with the children more than the mother thus leaving the boys without continuous reinforcement. Other reasons include the much debated suggestion that women, on average, are more intelligent but that males produce far more geniuses and far more at the other end of the distribution. Surprisingly, they dont mention the argument that males can find better outside options than women and this may feed through to their entire education investment.

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

IAREP/SABE Conference

The deadline for submissions to the IAREP conference is in May

See details below

http://www.luiss.it/iarep2008/submissions.php

Alvin Roth will be giving the IAREP/Elsevier-sponsored Kahneman Lecture.

Jack Knetsch will give the-SABE sponsored Herbert Simon Lecture.
Further details of all these sessions will be given in the Programme.

There is a student prize

http://www.iarep.org/studentpapercompetition.htm

Reading Group

We are getting to the stage with some of the topics in the reading group that we should now "embargo" them from the blog so that the research can be done. Two of the topics are beginning to crystalise and i will blog separately on the children's economic decision making topic.

We also talked about Martin Ryan's PhD topic on the determinants of time useage among university students. Michael Daly will be talking at some stage about his PhD research on self-regulation and affect. Dave Comerford will also talk about behavioural determinants of transport choice. In general, this all will make a nice session at the New Economists conference.

Suicide and Public Expenditure
This project examines the time series behaviour of male and female suicide rates in Ireland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and how it reacts to changes in public health spending particularly spending on mental health initiatives.

Long Run Determinants of Health
This project draws from the Cutler et al paper in the recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It examiens whether the straitened economic conditions of the emergency had effects on the long-term health of Irish people born in this period.

Talks at the Centre this week

Geary Seminar Room

Tuesday 25th March 2008: Anne Carlos (UCD) ""A knavish people..:London Jewry and the Stockmarket during the South SeaBubble.""

Friday 28th March (2pm) Dr Lee Monaghan, University of Limerick. ‘Men and the War on Obesity: Critical Understandings from a Qualitative Study’

Links to Journals

We added a handy set of links on the right hand side to some of the most relevant journals to the work here. You should sign up for email alerts to these if you havent already done so and let me know if there are other particularly relevant ones we should link to.

man's search for meaning

another of ariely's papers examines the effect of a task having meaning on reservation wages to do the task among other things.

http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/emir.kamenica/documents/meaning.pdf

Dan Ariely on Obama

Barack Obama's name has come up quite a lot in relation to behavioural economics

In the video article below, Dan Ariely discussses some explanations for Obama's appeal. One explanation he suggests is a human tendency to fill in lack of knowledge about someone with optimistic thoughts

http://seattlest.com/2008/02/27/dan_ariely_brin.php

Ariely suffered horrific burns while a trainee in the army. He writes about this below

http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/mypain.pdf

His paper are available below though with some broken links. The link with the MIT Media Lab is very interesting.

http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/papers.shtml


His ingeniously titled paper "Tom Sawyer and the Construction of Value" refers to a passage from the Twain novel quoted below from the paper. It refers to a case where Tom is embarrased to have to paint a fence in front of this friends but when they show he pretends to be enjoying it. His act is so convincing that his friends end up paying him to have a go and also enjoy it.


Tom “had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely,
that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing
difficult to attain.”

a new variant on paying kids to go to school

(799 K)
Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Marianne Bertrand, Leigh L. Linden, Francisco Perez-Calle
NBER Working Paper No. 13890Issued in March 2008NBER Program(s): CH ED LS
---- Abstract -----
We evaluate multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries -- the conditional cash transfer (CCT) -- with a student level randomization that allows us to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. We test three treatments: a basic CCT treatment based on school attendance, a savings treatment that postpones a bulk of the cash transfer due to good attendance to just before children have to reenroll, and a tertiary treatment where some of the transfers are conditional on students' graduation and tertiary enrollment rather than attendance. On average, the combined incentives increase attendance, pass rates, enrollment, graduation rates, and matriculation to tertiary institutions. Changing the timing of the payments does not change attendance rates relative to the basic treatment but does significantly increase enrollment rates at both the secondary and tertiary levels. Incentives for graduation and matriculation are particularly effective, increasing attendance and enrollment at secondary and tertiary levels more than the basic treatment. We find some evidence that the subsidies can cause a reallocation of responsibilities within the household. Siblings (particularly sisters) of treated students work more and attend school less than students in families that received no treatment. We also find that indirect peer influences are relatively strong in attendance decisions with the average magnitude similar to that of the direct effect.
This paper is available as PDF 4.0+ (799 K) or via email.
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

global irish muppets

understanding the irish abroad is a major task for research here

below is one of the funniest things i have come across in this field so far


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCbuRA_D3KU&feature=related

A new paper on the health returns to education

The Health Returns to Education: What Can We Learn from Twins?

This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins.The results suggest a causal effect of education on health. Higher educational levels are found to be positively related to self-reported health but negatively related to the number of chronic conditions.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp3399.pdf

you could get hit by a bus

“Consumption Smoothing and Household Responses to Health Shocks: Evidence from Random Exogenous Health Shocks” CID Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Fellow Working Paper No. 23, January 2008

Endogeneity in the health-wealth relationship is one of the biggest challenges in studying the causal effect of health on household consumption, wealth and labor responses. In my dissertation research, I introduced an innovative study design that helped get around this endogeneity problem in the health-wealth relationship. My empirical strategy relies on health shocks that were suffered by passengers injured in a bus accident, with “controls” drawn from travelers on the same bus routes, matched on age, gender, area of residence. The matching strategy ensures that the exogenous health shocks from the bus accident are random, conditional upon matching. Using data from my household survey conducted one year after the accidents, I find evidence of imperfect consumption smoothing and large effects on household debt. Debt was the principal mechanism used by households to mitigate effects of the shock. The shock related expenses, equal on average to two months of household income, caused exposed households to reduce educational expenditures by roughly 20% and festival expenses by 9%. I find that the odds of having debt among exposed households were five times higher and the average size of debt was almost twice as much compared to the unexposed. These findings inform two key areas of research and policy. First, the large effect of health shocks on household debt in developing countries can exacerbate long-term financial insecurities through potential default of debt or depletion of assets as a result of the high debt burden. Second, these findings lend support to the argument that the conventional focus on consumption smoothing alone as a measure of household welfare ignores the fact that households resort to costly mechanisms to mitigate effects of health and income shocks. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2008 American Economics Association Conference in New Orleans (available here).

Download latest version of paper here

Marcel Zeelenberg

Marcel Zeelenberg gave the most recent behavioural seminar in Geary

Details of Marcel and his fascinating work are available below

http://zeelenberg.socialpsychology.org/

Economics and psychology in the twenty-first century

- Peter Earl - Cambridge Journal of Economics 2005, 29, 909–926

According to Earl, there are four different possible forms of the relationship between economics and psychology - which have different connotations in terms of the relative status of the two disciplines. He focuses on the future for one of these, psychological economics...

If you find Earl's paper interesting, you may be interested in this conference:


What is the behavioral in behavioral economics?

Trento, Italy - from 5-6 June 2008.

Further information at: http://www-ceel.economia.unitn.it/

Vacancies at the Centre

We are hiring three research assistants.

Details below:

http://geary.ucd.ie/behaviour/index.php/Table/Vacancies/

ISNE Conference - Galway 2008

The Irish Society of New Economists (ISNE) has announced a call for papers for its fifth annual conference. This conference will be held in the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) on Friday 3rd October 2008. Applicants should submit a title and 300-word description of their topic by Monday 30th June to isne08@gmail.com

The conference is intended to provide a forum for new economists (in post-graduate research programs or private/public sectors) to present papers from any area of economics. This forum is intended for anybody in the early stages of a career in economics - eligibility to present has nothing to do with age.

More details are available on the conference website here. There is also a poster for the conference. Please feel free to put this up in your institution, or to send it on to anyone who might be interested.

Behavioural Economics Reading Group

We are going to do a few things during the year to make the reading group format more lively. Pretty soon, the current group are going to give a mini-presentation on their ideas and i will keep people posted on this. I would also like to have a session at the ISNE based on this. The scope of the group is mostly behavioural economics but also extending to "non-behavioural" aspects of economic psychology like explaining suicide rates by macrostructural factors. Feel free to come along to one of these.

In the last session we discussed the following

Suicide:
How do we causally assess the influence of large scale expenditure programmes designed to alleviate suicide? Do they really reduce suicide or do they come precisely as society develops an awareness of the problem and has begun to adjust in other ways also?

Life Expectancy:
We talked about whether it would be possible to examine the extent to which preference parameters such as time preferences are conditioned by long run changes in life expectancy brought about by technological changes.

Information Seeking:
We talked about the exploratory phase of the Iowa Gambling task and various models that have been put forward to explain behaviour here. In a later session, there is going to be a demonstration of this task and the implications of different models.

Identity Chip in Your Wrist?

Would you allow an identity chip to be surgically implanted in your hand? This could allow you to make banking, credit, library and other membership transactions with enhanced security. Furthermore, the hassle of carrying a wallet or a purse would no longer exist, as all your "cards" would be coded into a chip that you would never be able to lose. As for myself, I'd be a bit fearful of somebody ripping the implant out of my flesh...

None of the above is as far-fetched as it seems, as I read on Ray Poynter's blog tonight that "patrons of the Baja Club in Barcelona have the choice of easy entry and of paying by having an RFID chip embedded in their arm". According to Wikipedia, "radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders".

Wikipedia also has a full section on human implants, where it is stated that: "An early experiment with RFID implants was conducted by British professor of cybernetics Kevin Warwick, who implanted a chip in his arm in 1998. Night clubs in Barcelona, Spain and in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, use an implantable chip to identify their VIP customers, who in turn use it to pay for drinks".

EU taxpayers to fund $306m Google rival

Mike Butcher writes on Techcrunch.com that "twenty-three European private firms led by electronics firm Thomson are about to get EUR99m ($152m) from the French government to develop a European rival to Google. The European Commission approved the funding because it thinks the research and cultural benefits of the Quaero project will offset the fact that they just handed a ton of cash to Thomson to give it a head start".

Fire Eagle: GPS Tracking Software

Fire Eagle is is a Yahoo-driven platform forlocation information, according to a post by Mike Butcher on Techcrunch.com. According to Butcher, you can tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Users with GPS phones could some day set it to periodically update FireEagle with their location information".

However, the Fire Eagle beta currently has next to no functionality - "it’s waiting for an eco-system of applications to be developed around it" - and its invitation only. However, Butcher has 10 invitations to give away. According to Michael Arrington on Techcrunch.com, "you’ll be able to send a text message with your location, or use ZoneTags on Nokia 60 phones to broadcast your location automatically".

Why Do People Provide Personal Data?

In a post on his blog, Ray Poynter mantions that the BBC have a detailed article about the sort of data that is being held on ordinary citizens.

"Researcher Niamh Gallagher estimates that the average economically active person is on 700 databases. At present there seems to be two trends. The first is a growing .. risk of identify fraud. The second ... is that people are handing over every larger amounts of personal information in oder to receive more tailored and personalised services".

Auckland Library Database

Karen Blakeman recommends the Auckland Library Official Statistics Database.

This is a "starting point for statistical sources by country, topic or subject. This service includes sources offering free and easily accessible social, economic and general data from official or similar “quotable” sources, especially those that provide both current data and time series".

NationMaster.com

In a post on his blog, Ray Poynter recommends NationMaster.com as a "resource for all sorts of data from around the globe. NationMaster pulls data from a wide range of sources such as CIA World FactBook (itself a collection of other data sources)".

Doing Web Surveys Off-line

One of the biggest drawbacks of online surveys is that most of them can only be used when there is an internet connection. But according to Emiel Van Wegen there are tools that would allow web surveys to be conducted without any "internet access selection bias". Three new technologies were introduced in 2007: Google Gears, Adobe's Air and Microsoft's Silverlight.

"For example Adobe has shown off an Ebay desktop application built using Air that would allow users to do much of the legwork required in setting up auctions offline. The next time the user connects to the internet the listing would be posted to the website".

Many Eyes

"Many Eyes", is one of IBM'S alphaWorks Services, a collection of emerging software services from IBM research and development labs.

With Many Eyes, users can upload any data set, and use tools for visualizing and graphing. The visualisation options include country maps, line, stack, pie, and bar charts, block histograms, bubble diagrams, scatter plots, network diagrams etc.

There are also many existing data sets on the website, some of which are visualised, such as this chart showing on-time departures at American airports.

An example mentioned by Emiel Van Wegen is one produced by Stanford University with Yahoo! Research Labs and MIT. The paper is here. The authors developed a set of interactive visualisation tools and used them on 2.5 million Yahoo! user ratings of 9,276 music artists.

Statpages.org

Statpages.org is a collection of web pages that "comprise a powerful, conveniently-accessible, multi-platform statistical software package. There are also links to online statistics books, tutorials, downloadable software, and related resources".

http://statpages.org/

Future visions for wearable physiological monitoring systems and biofeedback devices

Physiological monitoring via wearable devices and personal feedback through mobile computers
with a view to improving health and well-being is soon to become big business.

In the Economist it is argued that heart rate variability derived from the interbeat interval of the hear provides a view into the impact of stress on the body which is predictive of risk of cardiovascular outcomes. Several companies have mass marketed products tailored to assess individual's levels of HRV and provide feedback so as to assist the person in manipulating their own physiological reactivity. The possibilities this programming opens up have attracted a quarter of a million customers to invest in HeartMath's emWave PC linked biofeedback device. Other companies are leaping in on the stress-battle field with Nokia, Motorola, and medical device maker Omron all investing heavily in such devices.

Some links:
Heartmath device: http://www.heartmathstore.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=6005&type=store
The research base: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9737736?dopt=AbstractPlus
Their patent:http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en&lr=&vid=USPAT7163512&id=abN-AAAAEBAJ&oi=fnd&dq=heartmath+patent

This is quite similar to the physiological monitoring in our ongoing Day Reconstruction study:
http://www.fitsense.com/SystemDevice.aspx :ActiHealth Monitoring System from Fitsense:

Sex and Music

The novelty of the Google Trends software has been discussed on this blog before, in relation to how it can be used to look at data on search volume and news reference volume.

Recent experimentation with keywords has convinced me that the selection of the keyword is a crucial consideration when trying to analyse search volume. For example, the use of "Bush", "George Bush" and "George Bush Jr" produces very different results. So how can this issue be addressed?

The answer may be to find the most popular keywords related to a core question, and to aggregate these for analysis. I have yet to find an aggregation function for keywords in Google Trends, but I have discovered a website that provides information about the most popular keywords used in web searches. Sitepsych.com is described by Max Sutherland in one of his columns.

A list of the top 200 search terms that people use, week by week or month by month, is available for free from Sitepsych. Sutherland says that: "A casual inspection of the top 200 list over a 90 day period, quickly tells you that the most popular things that people are looking for on the web are sex, music, games, dogs, golf, the weather and map-directions. Sex and music dominate".

It would be interesting to see how the propensity to search for sex and music on the internet can be explained by age, gender, religion and nationality, notwithstanding potential selection bias in internet usage, and how this may change in the future due to government schemes along the lines of "fast track to information technology".

Online health check initiative for Royal Mail staff

Royal Mail has launched two schemes to improve the health and wellbeing of its 180,000-strong employees.

An online health checking and assessment service will let staff analyse their lifestyles and design improvement plans by accessing information on a range of areas, from nutrition to stress and exercise.

More here.

Porno, Beer, Bible - Share MIT Economist's Toolbox

"One moment author Dan Ariely is observing how sexually aroused male college students answer questions; the next he's observing how the Ten Commandments affect the propensity to cheat or watching unsuspecting taste testers happily guzzle vinegar-spiked beer".

This is how a Bloomberg review describes Ariely's new book: "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions".

Drawing Lots for Health Care

In Oregon, 91,000 residents have signed up for a lottery that provides health insurance to low-income adults who are uncovered but do not qualify for Medicaid or Medicare.

The lottery was born out of a consensus among state officials and advocacy groups that small steps can help. As part of the state’s Medicaid program, known as the Oregon Health Plan, the lottery is intended for low-income adults who lack private insurance and do not qualify for Medicaid or Medicare.

Euro Beautiful

On the Amarach Research Blog, there is a post about new research which "shows that beautiful applicants are 1.41% more likely to get loans - and to add insult to injury (for the 'aesthetically challenged' amongst us) they pay 81 basis points less in interest".

Behavioral Finance Forum

"The Behavioral Finance Forum is a collective of academic, financial and government leaders fostering cutting edge behavioral research for practical application".

http://www.behavioralfinanceforum.com/

The Economic Child

"For over 200 hundred years economics has never considered children as economic agents, as it has always focused on the world and activities of adults (possibly young, western, and with a disposition to play lotteries)".

The conference “The economic child” will examine this issue.

seminars at the Centre this week

March 10th, (11am). Dr Paul Dockree, Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. 'Monitoring and enhancing cognitive function in the elderly: current and future research in the TRIL project'.

Monday 10th March 2008, 4pm: Christopher Ruhm (UNCG): "Age, Socioeconomic Status and Obesity Growth"

Tuesday 11th March 2008: Marcel Zeelenberg (Tilburg University). "Regret and Decision Making"

Wednesday 12th March (2pm) Dr Hannah Hale, UCD Geary Institute, Social Representations of Food and Health: A Gendered Concern

Reading Group

Last weeks session went through the following:

Suicide and ecological inference.
We talked again about gary king's work on ecological inference and potential applicability to regional determinants of suicide. We also talked about the role of spending on suicide services in determining the suicide rate

Child Welfare
We talked about philosophical perspectives on child welfare. The argument that children are time inconsistent is one of the most interesting economic perspective on childhood.
The development of the pre-frontal cortex is children is implicated in the development of a range of constructs that seem analgous to economic concepts of time preferences, risk aversion etc., With colleagues, i am currently working on a paper on the development of risk and time preferences in children and there is some recent literature on the topic.

Lisa farrell's paper on child expenditure is available below.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp388.html

Abstract

"This paper uses detailed diary information from the British Family Expenditure Survey (FES) to investigate the expenditure patterns of school-age children. We estimate a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System, and find that, whilst most commodities are normal goods, sweets and toys are luxury items for children. Children of lone parents have lower budget shares for expenditure on soft drinks, leisure, personal goods and books/magazines, but higher budget shares for expenditure on sweets and vice products (alcohol, cigarettes and gambling). Having a working mother increases child expenditure on food products and toys. A higher parental budget share, on any given commodity, is generally associated with an increased child budget share suggesting that children mimic their parent’s expenditure patterns."

Life Expectancy:
We talked a lot about the work of robert fogel. A recent article about him is available at the site below:

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0726/features/human.shtml

His nobel lecture is available at the site below:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1993/fogel-autobio.html

His ideas page is below:

http://ideas.repec.org/e/pfo15.html

As far as I am aware there is not much literature on the determinants of rising life expectancy in ireland. The completion of the SHARE project combined with the infant mortality data-base being constructed here in Geary will provide one opportunity to examine some of the ideas in Fogel's work.

Regrets, What Do They Do?

Next Tuesday 11th March (at 1pm) Marcel Zeelenberg (Tilburg University) will give a talk in the Geary Behavioural Seminar Series on "Regret and Decision Making".

In last week's Science, there is an article on "Learning With Regret". It describes how Marchiori and Warglien used neural network models that incorporate “regret” to understand how humans learn as they make economic decisions.

Did You Get Enough to Sleep?

"In the first neural investigation into what happens to the emotional brain without sleep, results from a brain imaging study suggest that while a good night's rest can regulate your mood and help you cope with the next day's emotional challenges, sleep deprivation does the opposite by excessively boosting the part of the brain most closely connected to depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders".

Read more here on Eurakalert.org

Biblical Psychology

American Thinker has an interesting post on "biblical psychology" today:

"Several studies for example, have found that over 90% of patients believe in a transcendent God, compared to only about 40% of clinical psychologists. This is a huge disconnect! Most mental health professionals avoid reference to, or recognition of their patients' religious beliefs and the deep influence of these beliefs on patients' lives".