BMI and Health Status

The flaws of using body mass index as a measure for overall health status are apparent. It is a 19th century technique which ignores the distribution of both muscle mass and bone in the body. In addition, the relationship between and health status is likely to be non-monotonic, most likely quadratic.

However, the use of BMI in research does have some advantages. It is very quick and inexpensive to measure. In addition, it is plausible that BMI is a strong indicator of individual's health preferences and behaviours. Also, BMI is a continuous metric. Therefore, if we choose to use BMI as a proxy for health status we do not have to constrict ourselves to discrete choice statistics when estimating the conditional distribution for 'health'.

The way in which BMI is used in estimation strategies needs to be redefined. BMI's definition of 'overweight' is outdated, and does not recognise that the population has become bigger, stronger and healthier in the last 150 years. Bone structures with greater density and increased muscle mass are not the same as body-fat increases. They are health promoting, not health deterring. Obesity is rising, and the negative health effects are undeniable. However, the shift from 'normal' BMI to 'over-weight' BMI and the negative health outcomes are dubious. For example, Romero-Corral et al. show how coronary deaths amongst 'over-weight' BMI cases are lower those individual's defined as having 'normal' BMI.

So how should the eager researcher approach this issue? In my opinion, we should accept that the bounds defined by the BMI scale are now invalid and have no basis acting as a proxy for overall health. The mean of health and BMI has shifted in over the last century, however I would argue that the new mean indicates improvements in health - strongly supported by life-expectancy increases, height increases, etc. - and that it is the deviations away from this mean which give a more precise measure of overall health status. One estimation strategy which maintains the continuous properties of this metric would be to measure BMI in z-scores (deviations from the mean controlling for the size of the standard deviation) or the z-score squared.

Genetic Adverse Selection

Healthcare Economist also links to a new NBER paper by Emily Oster, Ira Shoulson, Kimberly Quaid and E. Ray Dorsey on "Genetic Adverse Selection".

Excerpt from Abstract:

Individual, personalized genetic information is increasingly available, leading to the possibility of greater adverse selection over time, particularly in individual-payer insurance markets; ...individuals who carry the HD (Huntington's Disease) genetic mutation are up to 5 times as likely as the general population to own long-term care insurance... even relatively limited increases in genetic information may threaten the viability of private long-term care insurance.

Sample Selection vs. Two-Part Model

Healthcare Economist provides a discussion (here) about Prof. David Madden's recent paper: “Sample selection versus two-part models revisited: The case of female smoking and drinking” (Journal of Health Economics, 27,2: 300-307).

Abstract of the Madden Paper:

There is a well-established debate between Heckman sample selection and two-part models in health econometrics, particularly when no obvious exclusion restrictions are available. Most of this debate has focussed on the application of these models to health care expenditure. This paper revisits the debate in the context of female smoking and drinking, and evaluates the two approaches on three grounds: theoretical, practical and statistical. The two-part model is generally favoured but it is stressed that this comparison should be carried out on a case-by-case basis.

QSS Blog on Physics and Political Science

Interesting blogpost on the interaction between physics and political science. We've had a number of discussions about econophysics here. I can remember during one relatively tense interaction someone shouting that they hardly understand half the symbols that the theoretical economists use without physics guys getting involved. More fundamentally, it may simply be the case that physicists are interested in a wholly different level of explanation, particularly when compared to political scientists.

link here

Casey Mulligan on Incentives and Sick Leave

A topical debate in Ireland now also

link here

Further to Liam's post below. This is a graph of happiness (on a 1 - 10 scale) from one wave of ESS for Ireland by household income category. Looks pretty flat.

No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund

Several researchers in Geary are working on early influences on cognitive ability. Jim Heckman's work is well known in this area. This, from the NY Times, is interesting in that regard:

Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses. They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect. “We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years. Baby Einstein, founded in 1997, was one of the earliest players in what became a huge electronic media market for babies and toddlers. The videos — simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.
Tamar Lewin, NY Times

Seminar on Introduction to LaTeX

Here is a link to a talk I gave last Friday on how to get started using LaTeX. In case anyone is interested.

Depression and Income

nice post on depression and income on the Economix blog, and the potential difficulties in analysing this relationship.

link here

November 6th

post on november 6th event on Irish Economy

important to start debating more fully what the modern literature has to say about the development of policy nationally. Internationally, the debate is farthest advanced in the US.

Perhaps having mass industrial action going on around us on the day might help to focus people's minds!

The joy of macroeconomics

Apropos of nothing here is a great quote from Willem Buiter (& not just for the allusion to Winnie the Pooh):
"Never mind that anyone providing point forecasts of anything without also offering at least some information about of the rest of the probability distribution of future outcomes (variance, skewness, kurtosis, single-peakedness etc) is either a fool, a knave (or both) or caters to an audience consisting of bears of very little brain."
I wonder is there any chance that some of our local macroeconomic experts ( & the hacks who lap up these forecasts) like to take this on board?

http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/10/another-quarter-of-negative-gdp-growth-in-the-uk-situation-hopeless-but-not-serious/

Kilkenny

Went on a fascinating tour of Dublin with the well-known Dublin expert and guide, Pat Liddy recently. Want to do something similar in Kilkenny in late November/early December. If anyone's interested email me. We will also do another one in Dublin in the near future.

University league tables

There is an interesting article by John Walshe, the Irish education journalist, on the increasing obsession with university league tables & an OECD report on the subject, link below. Personally, I am pretty skeptical about these tables in terms of how they are constructed, how they are interpreted & the uses to which they are put. It never ceases to amaze me that academics who are highly trained at sniffing out nonsense and in carefully investigating arguments and evidence are quite uncritical when faced with a table with lots of university names. I guess we are human after all.
History is written by the winners of course & universities who do well out of them tend to be quite positive about them. Those who don't tend to keep quiet, lest they be accused of "cribbing and moaning".

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20071108145803689

Nudge nudge, wink wink

The whole "Nudge" train always bothered me as being paternalistic. But if it was about helping people make better decisions (by their own criteria) as opposed to some policy maker's, maybe thats not so bad. Although we have had "sin taxes" - a less than subtle nudge- for years. This paper investigates non-pateralistic nudging & not a reference to Monty Python in sight.

The Choice Architecture of Choice Architecture: Toward a Nonpaternalistic Nudge Policy
David Colander, Andrew Qi Lin Chong

The goal of nudge policy is generally presented as assisting people in finding their “true” preferences. Supporters argue that nudge policies meet a libertarian paternalism criterion. This claim has provoked complaints that nudge policies are unacceptably paternalistic. This paper suggests that by changing the explicit goal of nudge policy to a goal of making the choice of choice mechanism an explicit decision variable of the subgroup being affected by the nudge one can have a non-paternalistic nudge policy that better fits with the values inherent in Classical liberalism. The goal of non-paternalistic nudge policy is not to achieve a better result as seen by government or by behavioral economists. The goal of non-paternalistic nudge policy is to achieve a better result as seen by the agents being nudged as revealed through their choices of choice mechanisms.

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mdl:mdlpap:0916&r=cbe

Bankers compensation

The issue of the appropriate compensation/incentives for bankers is a hot topic given the financial crisis in Ireland and elsewhere. Many people, I suspect, just to want to string 'em up. On a more constructive note it is worth asking what behavioural economics & psychology can tell us about how bankers respond to incentives. This paper is a contribution to addressing that question.

Banker compensation and confirmation bias.
Sabourian, H. Sibert, A.C.
Confirmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one's own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where rational behaviour leads to outcomes that are observationally equivalent to different types of conformation bias. As an application, the model provides an explanation for how the reward structure in the financial services industry led to the seemingly irrational behaviour of bankers and other employees of financial institutions prior to the credit crisis of that erupted in the summer of 2007.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cam:camdae:0940&r=cbe

Applia

Ronan Lyons tweets that he wishes he had known about this website when he was a student. We have featured it before I think but the link to applia is here. This reminds me of my promise to start including things on this blog that will be of interest to undergraduates in economics. More to follow..

Award for TaxBack.com

One of the main challenges to the idea that the government should intervene to frame choices to counteract lack of information and procrastination is the existence of competitive markets for doing the same. Sure, it might be very difficult to understand, for example, how to claim back tax if you have worked abroad and even if there might be a lot of money to be got, people may still not bother due to poor information and/or procrastination.

Anybody who did a J1 as a student in the States will remember the nice warm glow of getting your tax back sometime in the months after coming back, usually at time when it was direly needed. Most of us would have arranged this through a cool company called taxback.com. The bright guys behind this recently won the main Irish entrepreneurship award for bringing the concept across the world and developing it across a number of other domains. They deserve a lot of credit for observing a basic feature of human nature and developing a simple business model for developing this insight into a service that many people have now benefited from.

link here

If anyone wants to pick the brains of behavioural economists to think about how people make decisions such as applying for tax refunds, then please join us on November 6th.

DEW Conference

Event: Third DEW Policy Conference

Venue: Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin (http://www.radissonblu.ie/royalhotel-dublin/location)

Date and Time: November 2nd, 1.30pm to 5.30pm

RSVP. geary@ucd.ie

Session 1
Chair and Discussant - John Fitzgerald (ESRI)

1330-1415 David Blanchflower (Dartmouth)
What Can Be Done About Rising Unemployment?

1415-1445 Colm Harmon (UCD)
Education and Innovation Strategies

1445-1515 Discussion and Q&A

1515-1530 Coffee Break

Session 2
Chair and Discussant - Colm McCarthy (UCD)

1530-1600 John McHale (NUIG)
The Other Crisis: Whither Irish Pensions?

1600-1630 Philip Lane (TCD)
Fiscal Policy and Macroeconomic Adjustment in Ireland

1630-1700 DIscussion and Q&A

IRCHSS Applications

IRCHSS Postgraduate Scholarships 2010 Call Open

GOVERNMENT OF IRELAND POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
&
DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS IN CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Scholarships are valued at up to €16,000 per annum. They will be awarded initially for one year, but subject to terms and conditions, are renewable for up to two additional years. Fees will also be covered for the period of the Scholarship. Those who are undertaking taught programmes, or degrees where a thesis is a minor part of the programme, are not eligible.

In the 20010/2011 Scheme, the Conflict Resolution Unit of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has commissioned the IRCHSS to fund and manage a number of scholarships in thematic areas related to Conflict Resolution (http://www.dfa.ie/).

Deadline: Monday 11th January 2010 by 4pm
Weblink: http://www.irchss.ie/schemes/scheme01/index.html

ESRI Report on Future HealthCare Needs

The ESRI released a volume of papers on the future of healthcare in Ireland.

link here

Philip Lane on the Taxation Commission Report

Philip Lane provides an overview of the recent report from the Commission on Taxation. The Commission discuss the behavioural economics aspects of pension reform and taxation in a number of places. In particular, the Commission talk a good deal about soft-mandatory pensions, which have been one of the most discussed policy vehicles in the literature on behavioural economics.

Professor James P Smith Ulysses Lecture

Full details of Professor Smith's Lecture are available at this link

A video of the lecture is available here - highly recommended for anyone interested in health economics, economics of early childhood, irish economic history.

Elster - Excessive Ambitions

New Article in Capitalism and Society by Jon Elster

The current financial crisis has brought out a fatal flaw in the foundations of the economic theories that guided economic agents and regulators: the unwarranted claim to precision and robustness. In this article I try to diagnose this flaw and discuss possible remedies. I argue that actual agents are intrinsically less sophisticated than the models assume they are, and that the various proposals to sustain the models by appealing to "as-if rationality" all fail. I next consider behavioral economics as an alternative to the standard models, claiming that while they may allow for successful retrodiction, they do not hold out much promise for prediction. I also discuss the use of statistical models, arguing that they are subject to so many traps and pitfalls that only a handful of elite practitioners can be trusted to use them well. Finally, I offer some speculations to explain the persistence in the economic profession and elsewhere of these useless or harmful models.

Elster, Jon (2009) "Excessive Ambitions," Capitalism and Society: Vol. 4 : Iss. 2, Article 1.
DOI: 10.2202/1932-0213.1055
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/cas/vol4/iss2/art1

Both Chiappori and David Hendry respond - link here .


Hendry: "Notwithstanding ‘pitfalls and fallacies in statistical data analysis,' heterogeneous, high-dimensional objects like economies, which are subject to large, intermittent, and usually unanticipated, shifts, require ambitious approaches to characterize their behavior."

November 6th

I hope there will be a lot of interest in our conference on November 6th.

The programme is being slightly revised to incorporate some new speakers. In Ireland now, there is quite a lot of research and activity that crosses between economics, psychology and neuroscience at various segments of the Venn Diagram. Professor John O'Doherty's lab on decision-making in TCD is the major addition of recent times. In Geary, we have a number of different projects including projects on intertemporal decision-making, expenditure measurement, well-being and so on that integrate psychology and economics in attempting to understand important questions. A number of people at the Institute will be presenting on November 6th. We have also started undergraduate courses in behavioural economics in both Trinity and UCD that I taught and in general it was the best teaching experience in my career so far with lots of very interesting class discussions.

Stephen Kinsella in UL has set up an experimental economics lab since the last conference and will be presenting the first experimental results from this lab on the 6th. Richard Roche and Jonathan Murphy from NUIM will be presenting findings from EEG studies of decision making. Peter Lunn from ESRI will be presenting findings from an IRCHSS-funded study on loss aversion. Rowena Pecchenino will be presenting on economics and identity. Gerard O'Neill, of Amarach Research will present on findings from a monthly study of well-being and expectations being conducted in the Irish population.

Marcel Das, head of CentER in Tilburg will present on the MESS project, which is one of the world's largest social science projects based around the Dutch LISS panel. It is one of the best examples of real interaction between economics and psychology in the world and is leading to a large increase in the amount and quality of data available to social scientists. Arie Kapteyn is the Director of the Labour and Population Division at the RAND Corporation. He is a legend within Economics, and a pioneer in the development and use of subjective data in economic applications. He is also a very good and clear speaker and always someone who teaches a lot to the audience in his talks.

I hope anyone who reads this blog feels very welcome to attend this event even if only for part of it. We hope that as well as the talks there will be a lot of discussion among all the participants about where the interactions between Economics and Psychology might go both nationally and internationally. From a national perspective, it is important to ask whether this now huge global literature should be having more of an influence on how policy is formed in areas such as health, financial regulation and others core areas of policy. We hope this event will help further this discussion.

The effects of school uniforms?

This paper investigates an interesting question, namely whether requiring students to wear uniforms has an effect on student academic outcomes - although this is not usually the rational for uniforms. The effect is zero at elementary level but positive at high school. One hesitates to extrapolate this trend to higher education..

Dressed for Success: Do School Uniforms Improve Student Behavior, Attendance, and Achievement?
Scott Imberman & Elisabetta Gentile

Concerns about safety in urban schools has led many school districts to require uniforms for their students. However, we know very little about what impact school uniforms have had on the educational environment. In this paper we use a unique dataset to assess how uniform adoption affects student achievement and behavior in a large urban school district in the southwest. Since each school in the district could decide independently about whether or not to adopt uniforms, we are able to use variation across schools and over time to identify the effects of uniforms. Using student and school fixed-effects along with school-specific linear time trends to address selection of students and schools into uniform adoption, we find that uniforms had little impact on student outcomes in elementary grades but provided modest improvements in language scores and attendance rates in middle and high school grades.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hou:wpaper:2009-03&r=edu

IBEC GradLink

Here is a link to IBEC's GradLink page. The website "provides a facility for companies to post details of available placements and offers advice on designing an internship that will provide a positive experience for both parties. It enables graduates to register their interest, keep up-to-date on new internships on offer and ensure that they will get the maximum benefit from the internship."

Here is the announcement from IBEC that they would develop a graduate internship programme, and here is a link to their 'Education and Training' page.

Does A "Gap Year" Have Benefits?

Several employers are calling for the introduction of a compulsory gap year after the Leaving Cert, it has been reported. The report also says that a review compiled by the Irish Business and Employers Confederation suggests that pupils could develop their skills by working on a voluntary basis in the community for a year. While this is a classic case of self-selection (for now, at least), it could be worth asking about gap-years in future surveys of Irish college students.

_______________________

More from the Irish Independent: "A year out is one of the key recommendations in a submission from employers' group IBEC to a review body headed by Dr Colin Hunt reporting to Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe on a strategy for higher education... Other recommendations from IBEC include allowing third-level students manage their own subject choice rather than having it imposed by the college, making all post-graduate courses part-time, and providing more online teaching."

NBER Paper: Traffic Congestion and Infant Health

Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-ZPass

Janet Currie, Reed Walker
NBER Working Paper No. 15413*
Issued in October 2009

This paper provides evidence of the significant negative health externalities of traffic congestion. We exploit the introduction of electronic toll collection, or E-ZPass, which greatly reduced traffic congestion and emissions from motor vehicles in the vicinity of highway toll plazas. Specifically, we compare infants born to mothers living near toll plazas to infants born to mothers living near busy roadways but away from toll plazas with the idea that mothers living away from toll plazas did not experience significant reductions in local traffic congestion. We also examine differences in the health of infants born to the same mother, but who differ in terms of whether or not they were “exposed” to E-ZPass. We find that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8% respectively. Estimates from mother fixed effects models are very similar. There were no immediate changes in the characteristics of mothers or in housing prices in the vicinity of toll plazas that could explain these changes, and the results are robust to many changes in specification. The results suggest that traffic congestion is a significant contributor to poor health in affected infants. Estimates of the costs of traffic congestion should account for these important health externalities.

Geary Institute on Twitter

will largely be used to distribute information about upcoming GI events.

link here

Time preferences: a role for birth order effects?

There are zillions of papers on birth order effects. A possible effect on time preference is an interesting possibility:

Sibling and birth-order effects on time-preferences and real-life decisions Lampi, Elina & Nordblom, Katarina

Survey data is used to investigate whether siblings and birth order can explain differences in stated time preferences and in some real-life decisions of intertemporal nature, namely whether one obtains a university education, whether one moves in with a partner at an early age, and when one has children. We also study earnings. Middleborns are found to be the least patient in terms of stated time preferences. First-borns, on the other hand, are more patient in real-life decisions than later-borns: they are more likely to obtain a university education and have higher earnings. Interestingly, those who have siblings but did not grow up with them are the least patient in family related real-life decisions. We also find that the more siblings one grew up with, the more impatient one is in the studied real-life decisions.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0388&r=cbe

Are academics messy?

In the light of the conclusive research reported below, I will be carrying out random spot-checks of the Geary Institute common room. Violaters of established social norms will be summarily punished, forced to read a paper by myself or Liam Delaney.

Are Academics Messy? Testing the Broken Windows Theory with a Field Experiment in the Work Environment João Ramos, Benno Torgler
We study the broken windows theory with a field experiment in a shared area of a workplace in academia (department common room). We explore academics' and postgraduate students' behaviour under an order condition (clean environment) and a disorder condition (messy environment). We find strong support that signs of disorderly behaviour triggers littering. In the disorder treatment 59% of the subjects litter compared to 18% in the order condition. The results remain robust when controlling compared to previous studies for a large set of factors in a multivariate analysis. When academic staff members and postgraduate students observe that others violated the social norm of keeping the common room clean the probability of littering increases ceteris paribus by around 40 percent.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cra:wpaper:2009-21&r=cbe

blog development

if anyone has suggestions for more journals, seminars, academic audio and video etc., that I should link to on the sidebars let me know. In general, the blog could use another push in terms of keeping the format and content useful for everyone.

Life Satisfaction Approach to Environmental Valuation

New IZA Paper

The Life Satisfaction Approach to Environmental Valuation
by Bruno S. Frey, Simon Luechinger, Alois Stutzer
(October 2009)

Abstract:
In many countries environmental policies and regulations are implemented to improve environmental quality and thus individuals' well-being. However, how do individuals value the environment? In this paper, we review the Life Satisfaction Approach (LSA) representing a new non-market valuation technique. The LSA builds on the recent development of subjective well-being research in economics and takes measures of reported life satisfaction as an empirical approximation to individual welfare. Micro-econometric life satisfaction functions are estimated taking into account environmental conditions along with income and other covariates. The estimated coefficients for the environmental good and income can then be used to calculate the implicit willingness-to-pay for the environmental good.

DeLong's Economic History

Brad DeLong makes his economic history lectures available now on his blog. I have one of them on in the background here in the middle of going through some dreary work. Stimulating stuff.

link here

link here

Superfreakonomics

Levitt and Dubner will likely make a lot of money from this book. It has attracted a high degree of controversy and comment already. The initial exchanges between Levitt and Krugman give a feel for where this might go - link here (via Mankiw). Tyler Cowen gives it a qualified thumbs-up

Economy May Screw You but God Wont

An interesting take on the religion as insurance theme in the Irish Independent newspaper

link here

Blogs

When Denis O'Brien attacked blogging economists during the week, I have a feeling he wasn't thinking about our regular posts about IZA/NBER working papers and developments in microeconometrics. But having said that, it is worth defending why blogging is actual something that some of us bother to do despite the potential reputational risks that can result from too rapid and exposed communication.

For me, blogging serves a good function for communicating to wider audiences including students, colleagues and people outside of research who might actually want to apply some insights coming from the academic literature. It also provides a way of people outside of academia to question what's going on in the literature. Blogs help build communities of interest around the topics being discussed and are a really useful way of keeping people up-to-date with seminars and so on in a way that is non-intrusive. We have debated this here before but I lean toward the view that blogs are starting to have a very important democratic function including in Ireland, more important than during the initial bubble where millions of them proliferated. Some blogs and related forums now like the IrishEconomy and Politics blogs are actually important components of our public sphere and may actually be directly influencing public policy. More specialist blogs like this one I think are starting to provide a model for how research groups can keep information flowing and with very rare exceptions, nothing but good has come out of this.

As Richard Tol said in the comments in the IE blog, blogging is not a substitute for academic work. It is part and parcel of an approach to the development and communication of academic ideas.

Leigh's Posts on Charter Cities

Good coverage by Andrew Leigh of the Charter City idea being promoted by Paul Romer. Romer's new ideas get a mixed reaction depending on what part of the internet you land on. There is very little dispute that the guy is a genius though and a likely Nobel winner. We can't do a bookclub on this idea because there isn't yet a book but people should keep watching that space as even as a thought experiment it is leading to really interesting discussions about how one should regulate and govern cities.

http://andrewleigh.com/?p=2326

Economics and Psychology Event: Dublin November 6th

Economics and Psychology Conference: Ireland

The 2009 conference will take place at the Institute of Bankers in Ireland (IFSC, Dublin) on Friday November 6th 2009. The Institute of Bankers in Ireland is located at 1 North Wall Quay, Dublin 1.

The purpose of this conference is to provide a forum for the discussion of work at the interface of economics, psychology and cognate disciplines such as neuroscience.

In particular, the event aims to complement existing international forums by providing a platform for discussion among people working in these areas in Irish universities. We welcome applications from Ph.D. students working in this area.

Session1: 10:00-11:20
Chair: Dr. Richard Roche

Martin Ryan, UCD, The Psychology of Survey Responses on Skills-Matching
David Comerford, UCD, Experimental Tests of Survey Expenditure Measures
Eibhlin Hudson, UCD, Measuring Socioeconomic Differences in Child Health
Michael Daly, TCD, Cortisol, Morningness and Well-Being

Session2: 11:40-1:00
Chair: Prof. Rowena Pecchenino

Dr. Richard Roche, NUIM, Neuroeconomics of Time Discounting
Dr. Pete Lunn, ESRI, What's In It For Me? A Computational Theory of Economic Exchange
Dr. Stephen Kinsella, UL, Electricity Price Auctions: An Experimental Analysis

1:00 – 2:00: Lunch

Session3: 2:00-3:20
Chair: Dr. Liam Delaney

Katherine Carman, Tilburg, Health Risks and the Perception of Probabilities
Prof. Rowena Pecchenino, NUIM, TBC
Dr. Marcel Das, Tilburg, The Dutch MESS Panel

4:00: Keynote – Arie Kapteyn, Director, RAND Labor and Population

Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology

The CHAT Database looks very useful, particularly for those of you who like instruments (you know who you are!) :

This note accompanies the Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset. CHAT is an unbalanced panel dataset with information on the adoption of over 100 technologies in more than 150 countries since 1800. The data is available for download at: http://www.nber.org/data/chat We discuss the main aim of CHAT, its scope and limitations, as well as several ways in which we have used the data so far and ways to potentially use the data for other research.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15319

The Empirics of Baseball Strategy

Standard game-theoretic utility maximisation assumes that in a competitive game where somebody is trying to predict your actions, the rational thing to do is to completely randomise your strategy: be entirely unpredictable. An implication of this is that there should be no correlation through-time (positive or negative) between your tactics. Results from behavioural experiments question the notion that people actually behave this way.

In the fine tradition of economists testing utility maximisation using data from professional sports, Kovash and Levitt have a new working paper based on "high stakes, real world settings that are data rich: choice of pitch type in Major League Baseball and whether to run or pass in the National Football League."

We observe more than three million pitches in baseball and 125,000 play choices for football. We find systematic deviations from minimax play in both data sets. Pitchers appear to throw too many fastballs; football teams pass less than they should. In both sports, there is negative serial correlation in play calling. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that correcting these decision making errors could be worth as many as two additional victories a year to a Major League Baseball franchise, and more than a half win per season for a professional football team.

Harvard Justice Course

Another example of the major colleges making their courses available for anyone on the web. This time it's Michael Sandel's lectures on Justice in Harvard. Absolutely superb production with a really good feature of allowing online comments. Bravo!

link here

GREP Conference in Quantitative Social Sciences

This post-graduate conference will take place on Friday in Trinity College Dublin. Link available here.

The Ph.D. Completion Project

Thanks to Michael Egan for flagging this upcoming conference for me: THE EVOLVING LANDSCAPE OF IRISH GRADUATE EDUCATION (IUA Fourth Level Network Annual Conference 2009). At the conference, Prof. Jon Butler will discuss Yale's participation in the US Council for Graduate Schools 'Ph.D. Completion Project'. More information on the Ph.D. Completion Project is available from http://www.phdcompletion.org/. "The Ph.D. Completion Project aims to produce the most comprehensive and useful data on attrition from doctoral study and completion of Ph.D. programs yet available." Some publications fom the project are available here.

On the subject of "graduate student attrition", I was recently reading some comments from a keynote address given by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean of Graduate Division, University of California, Los Angeles) to an NSF workshop on graduate student attrition in the United States. Here's an excerpt: "Finally, let me address the cohort that offers the most difficulty for those of us interested in attrition. The students who drift away after being advanced to candidacy are often considered to be the most problematic. When these students leave, they leave at the greatest personal and societal cost." Here is a link to the entire summary of the NSF Workshop on Graduate Attrition.

Finally, related research by Stock, Finegan and Siegfried (AER, 2009) was mentioned on the blog before. It shows that finishing an economics Ph.D. within the designated time is affected by an array of factors, which I won't relay now. The authors conclude that "many considerations unique to individual students and faculty that we cannot measure—such as ambition, motivation, persistence, organizational skills, the creativity of students, and interest in students’ success as well as mentoring and motivational skills among graduate faculty — matter more than the myriad characteristics we were able to measure, which collectively account for less than 15 percent of the variation in completion among students." This suggests that non-cognitive ability plays an important role in Ph.D. completion.

King on Anchoring Vignettes

from a twitter post by Gary King (see - it is useful), below is a nice talk on vignettes given by King recently

link here

The Work Placement Programme (WPP)

The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan, together with the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mary Hanafin, announced details of the Work Placement Programme (and a pilot Short Time Working Training Programme) on Wednesday 27 May 2009. A press release is available here, from the website of the Department of Social and Family Afafirs. The summary of the plans from the press release is below.

The Work Placement Programme is a six-month work experience programme for an initial 2,000 individuals who are currently unemployed. Under this programme there will be two streams each consisting of an initial 1,000 places. The first stream is for graduates who before this year have attained a full award at level 7 or above on the National Framework of Qualifications and who have been receiving Job Seeker’s Allowance for the last six months.

The second stream will be open to all other individuals who have been receiving Job Seeker’s Allowance for the last six months. Under this stream 250 places are being ring fenced for those under 25 years of age.

Participants on both streams of the Work Placement Programme will continue to receive their existing social welfare entitlements from the Department of Social and Family Affairs for their duration on the programme.

The pilot Short Time Working Training Programme will provide two days training a week for 277 workers over a 52-week period. Under this scheme, workers who are on systematic short time working for 3-days a week and receiving social welfare payments for the two days they are not working will receive training for these two days. Participants on this programme will continue to receive their existing social welfare entitlements from the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

Nobel in Economics

Kevin didn't fall for my ringing his home at 4am this morning and talking in a muppets-show Swedish accent.

The real winners are

link here

Are civil servants different?

There is a huge debate about the public/private sector wage premium and the extent to which the public sector should "take the hit" in adjusting public expenditure. This paper asks whether public servants are different in two important domains:

Public Sector Employees: Risk Averse and Altruistic?

Buurman, Margaretha , Dur, Robert , van den Bossche, Seth

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a substantial reward and could choose between a widely redeemable gift certificate, a lottery ticket, or making a donation to a charity. Our analysis shows that public sector employees are significantly less likely to choose the risky option (lottery) and, at the start of their career, significantly more likely to choose the pro-social option (charity). However, when tenure increases, this difference in pro-social inclinations disappears and, later on, even reverses. Our results further suggest that quite a few public sector employees do not contribute to charity because they feel that they already contribute enough to society at work for too little.

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp4401&r=cbe

How beautiful are our politicians?

Since the competence of our politicians is increasingly in doubt, people might like to ask are they good looking? See this paper for the answer, at least for Australia.

Beautiful Politicians
Amy King, Andrew Leigh
Are beautiful politicians more likely to be elected? To test this, we use evidence from Australia, a country in which voting is compulsory, and in which voters are given ‘How to Vote’ cards depicting photos of the major party candidates as they arrive to vote. Using raters chosen to be representative of the electorate, we assess the beauty of political candidates from major political parties, and then estimate the effect of beauty on voteshare for candidates in the 2004 federal election. Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1½ – 2 percentage point increase in voteshare.
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:auu:dpaper:616&r=cbe

Professor James P Smith Ulysses Lecture

Dear Colleagues.

On the 15th of October 2009, UCD will award the Ulysses medal to Professor James Smith, former head of the Labour and Population Centre at RAND and two-time recipient of the National Institute of Aging Merit Award. Professor Smith's lecture will take place in the Conway Lecture Theatre in the UCD Conway Institute at 4pm. The title of the lecture is "Effects of Childhood Mental and Physical Health on Adult Socioeconomic Status". There will be coffee both before and after the lecture. Those wishing to attend, please rsvp to geary@ucd.ie

Further details of Professor's Smiths work are available on the webpages below.

http://www.rand.org/about/people/s/smith_james_p.html

http://ideas.repec.org/e/psm28.html

Statistical challenges in estimating small effects

This is a really nice piece by Gelman & Weakliem which makes important points about the power of tests when estimating small effects with an application to "evolutionary psychology" [or bad science in this case].

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2009/4/of-beauty-sex-and-power

Revised Programme for Government

The RPG is available below. For people interested in Irish policy, it will be useful to read this in order to understand the extent to which evidence and careful analysis plays a central role in the formation of policy in Ireland.

link here.

Labour Market Policy in Ireland

Labour market policy in Ireland is conducted by the Labour Force Development Division of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. As outlined in pillar 2 of the Department’s Strategy Statement 2005-2007, the primary role of the Labour Force Development Division is to:

* Monitor the effectiveness of FÁS expenditure and activities in pursuit of the Department's strategic training and labour market objectives;
* Ensure labour market participation of the unemployed and other margnialised groups through active labour market measures, including the National Employment Action Plan;
* Facilitate the integration of people with disabilities to the labour market through the implementation of agreed Sectoral Plan to meet their employment and training needs.

Labour market policy publications from the Department are available here. These include Employment Action Plan Monthly Reports, Further Measures to Support National Recovery, and an Indecon Review of Active Labour Market Programmes.

Twitter

more or less converted but this is an interim assessment. some potentially useful aspects

- many major organisations now message about seminars, new documents and so on.

- useful way of distributing seminar information to a self-selected audience. in that sense certainly useful for any reasonable size research group who like to get audiences to their seminars or keep people in touch who have a particular interest in what they are doing. for example, i notice some former team members here who are following the tweets and this is a nice way of keeping people in touch who want to be.

- if you pick the sites you wish to follow carefully, you get a neatly filtered overview of important things that have happened during the day or week.

- feel free to defend facebook but twitter is a much less awkward interface for me in that you don't have a lot of private material stored and you dont have to ask people's permission to follow them or vice versa. the twitter market seems a lot smoother in terms of following and dumping contacts as you wish and hard to offend anyone! the emotional investment seems a lot lighter and more appropriate for less personal interactions.


some sites i have found good include Stephen kinsella, Richard Florida, The Economist, Bill Easterly, Brad Delong, New York Times Economix, World Health Organisation. I can do a bigger list at some stage. the ones I follow are on my page below.

link here

Graduate Talent Pool

Thanks to Martin for pointing out the Graduate Talent Pool website partly funded by the Department of Business and Innovation in the UK. It is worth studying this scheme very closely as a model for matching graduates to businesses willing to supply graduate experience opportunities backed up by a relatively flexible social welfare arrangement. The main potential benefits of such a scheme is to prevent the decline in skills and loss of potential among graduates caused by prolonged spells of unemployment. Potential costs include direct substitution of existing employees and decline in labour market standards, as well as taxpayer costs associated with marketing and managing the campaign.

link here

The Federal Work-Study Program

The Federal Work-Study (FWS) Program "provides funds that are earned through part-time employment to assist students in financing the costs of postsecondary education. Students can receive FWS funds at approximately 3,400 participating postsecondary institutions. Institutional financial aid administrators at participating institutions have substantial flexibility in determining the amount of FWS awards to provide to students who are enrolled or accepted for enrollment. Hourly wages must not be less than the federal minimum wage."

This is an interesting program to read about with Ireland in mind, at a time when it is very hard for students to find part-time work. There is also some concern amongst student representatives that the eligibility-criteria for the maintenance grant will become more stringent, and that there will be a cutback on the level of the maintenance grant.

NESC Report on Well-Being

The NESC Well-Being reports are available below. These are lengthy documents with many useful references. I think there needs to be a parallel academic debate in Ireland about the measurement of well-being and an assessment of the public policy factors contributing to well-being and the alleviation of psychological distress. One potential problem with the NESC reports is that they crystallise well-being as a political and social agenda rather than an active and contested area of research. This is perhaps their aim but we should remember that there is still a lot to play for from a research perspective in this field and also well-being doesnt neccesarily imply more government and more regulation.

Volume 1

Volume 2

Some concrete suggestions I would have include:

- presenting aggregate suicide statistics masks the huge heterogeneity in suicide trends among different age-groups. The increase in young suicides over the course of the Celtic Tiger was frightening and still one of the great puzzles of the period from a well-being perspective

- people need to make more and better use of the freely available ESS data. some colleagues and I have written some papers on the well-being and social capital aspects but it is a vastly underutilised data resource.

- as the authors point out, Ireland was not in the first round of SHARE and as such the time-use data for Ireland is not in the current SHARE volumes. But the data is now fully available including for Ireland so pursuing this analysis will be interesting.

- Our most promising line of research has been working on developing the day reconstruction measurement paradigms initiated by Kahneman and colleagues. Some of our papers and references to the wider literature are below

The website for our well-being projects is available below and the link to my lecture series on behavioural economics and public policy is below that. I think behavioural economics is currently providing a potential bridge between economic policy and well-being measurement.

http://geary.ucd.ie/wellbeing
http://geary.ucd.ie/econpsych

NBER Book on Science and Engineering Careers

Many of these papers are available as working papers and so on and overall a really useful collection for people interested in research careers, science and technology policy and so on.

link here.

Random Stata tip

Sometimes you want to compare 2 densities, say for 2 sub-populations. I came across some code years ago for this which was a bit clumsy and then I lost the code so I worked out a better way.

You have a continuous variable Y and a dummy variable male=1,0 . You want to compare the male & female densities

Kdensity Y if male==1, addplot (kdensity Y if male==0)

Of course you knew this already

Will work for Beer

A new study suggests that the cliché of a full-time college student working a low-wage job to pay her tuition and getting lower grades than she’d have if she wasn't working is more fiction than fact.

If the student works fewer than 20 hours a week, she may, in fact, have a higher grade point average than her jobless peers and be spending her paychecks on “beer money” or other non-tuition expenses.

These are findings outlined in “Parental Transfers, Student Achievement and the Labor Supply of College Students,” forthcoming in the Journal of Population Economics, by Charlene Kalenkoski, an associate professor of economics at Ohio University, and Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia, a research economist in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Division of Productivity Research and Program Development. The two economists wanted to learn how work affects students’ academic performance and what might motivate them to take on more hours of work.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/08/work

WASSUP!!!

An interesting one: The Willingly Approached Set of Statistically Unlikely Pursuits (WASSUP) is a measure of the tendency to set implausibly high goals, available here

Catalogue of individual difference measures

I'm very excited to announce that the Decision Making Individual Differences Inventory (DMIDI -- rhymes with "p. diddy") is now live at www.dmidi.net.
Developed at Columbia University, the DMIDI is a database of over 150 individual difference measures commonly used in judgment and decision research. Because it categorizes and provides basic descriptive information for all of these measures, the DMIDI is designed to be a resource for researchers, students, and practitioners.
The website is designed to be user-friendly. We welcome any feedback--additional measure information, new measures to add, corrections, etc. Please direct comments/questions to me at dmidi.net@gmail.com.
We hope that you will find the DMIDI useful!Best,~Kirstin Appelt

Young People, Recession and Debate

The most affected group in Ireland and indeed elsewhere are people entering the labour market yet they are a very tiny squeek of noise in an otherwise roaring debate. If there is anyone who reads this blog who has ideas for getting students and other people around the age of 18-25 involved in the economic debate, feel free to comment here or just email. I don't know in advance whether anything useful could come of this but it seems crazy to be having old stand-by debates around the college campuses when this monster of an issue that directly affects everyone leaving school or graduating college in the next three years at least is roaring ahead without much attention.

Some of the questions that might be worth considering for public debate include:

- How bad is the current economy for people entering the labour market? How worried are school and college leavers?

- What role can and should migration play?

- Are there cultural trends emerging among people leaving school and college that are different from people who left prior to the recession? Are any of these positive? Which are particularly negative?

- What can be done by policymakers to avoid the worst outcomes for school and college leavers?

- Are college leavers interested in low-paid internships as an alternative to further study or unemployment? Are there pitfalls with having these systems?

- Are business start-ups a viable alternative for people leaving college?

- Is the social welfare system flexible enough to allow people to avail of work/study and related pathways?

Professor James P Smith Ulysses Lecture

Dear Colleagues.

On the 15th of October 2009, UCD will award the Ulysses medal to Professor James Smith, former head of the Labour and Population Centre at RAND and two-time recipient of the National Institute of Aging Merit Award. Professor Smith's lecture will take place in the Conway Lecture Theatre in the UCD Conway Institute at 4pm. The title of the lecture is "Effects of Childhood Mental and Physical Health on Adult Socioeconomic Status". There will be coffee both before and after the lecture. Those wishing to attend, please rsvp to geary@ucd.ie

Further details of Professor's Smiths work are available on the webpages below.

http://www.rand.org/about/people/s/smith_james_p.html

http://ideas.repec.org/e/psm28.html

Neuroscience and Politics

Thanks to Nicola for a link to this interesting article

link here

Quantile Regression

For those who want to follow up on the talk yesterday on Quantile Regressions here's a few handy references:

Quantile Regression: Applications and Current Research Areas: Keming Yu, Zudi Lu and Julian Stander, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series D (The Statistician), Vol. 52, No. 3 (2003)
Quantile Regression, R Koenker & K Hallock, J Economic Perspectives, 15(4) 2001
Arias, Omar, Kevin Hallock and Walter Sosa-Escudero. 2001. “Individual Heterogeneity in the Returns to Schooling: Instrumental Variables Quantile Regression Using Twins Data.” Empirical Economics. March, 26:1, pp. 7–40.
Koenker, Roger and Kevin Hallock. 2000. “Quantile Regression: An Introduction.” Available at http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/;roger/research/intro/intro.html&.

Scobit: An Alternative Estimator to Logit and Probit

Jonathan Nagler: American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 38, No. 1. (Feb., 1994), pp. 230-255.

Abstract:

Logit and probit, the two most common techniques for estimation of models with a dichotomous dependent variable, impose the assumption that individuals with a probability of .5 of choosing either of two alternatives are most sensitive to changes in independent variables. This assumption is imposed by the estimation technique because both the logistic and normal density functions are symmetric about zero. Rather than let methodology dictate substantive assumptions, I propose an alternative distribution for the disturbances to the normal or logistic distribution. The resulting estimator developed here, scobit (or skewed-logit), is shown to be appropriate where individuals with any initial probability of choosing either of two alternatives are most sensitive to changes in independent variables. I then demonstrate that voters with initial probability of voting of less than .5 are most sensitive to changes in independent variables. And I examine whether individuals with low levels of education or high levels of education are most sensitive to changes in voting laws with respect to their probability of voting.

FORA.tv: a TEDesque Alternative

FORA.tv is a interesting alternative to TED.com. I'll put a link up in the sidebar too. A sample of talks is below:

(i) Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman: Reflection on a Crisis
(ii) Sean Murphy: The Limits of 'I'll Know It When I See It'
(iii) John Kao: The New Geography of Innovation
(iv) Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Cloud Computing
(v) Jeff Scargle: Optimal Segmentation Analysis of Event Data

New IZA Paper - Bell and Blanchflower

New IZA Discussion Paper.

What Should Be Done About Rising Unemployment in the OECD?
by David N.F. Bell, David G. Blanchflower
(September 2009)

Abstract:
There is a growing belief that the recession has run its course and that the goods market has started a period of slow, but sustainable, recovery. Improvement in the labor market may take some time, but many believe that unemployment will return to its 2007 level in the medium term. In this paper, we argue that recovery is by no means guaranteed and that the consequences for unemployment may be worse than anticipated.

Dublin Economics Seminar

Dublin Economics Seminar
Tuesday October 6, 2009
2:00-6:00 pm
Geary Institute – UCD

link to website (from Ron Davies)

College Costs and College Take Up

New NBER Working Paper by Deming and Dynarski

Fascinating discussion of the interplay between the benefits of targetting programmes and the costs of doing so in terms of administration burden and so on. Also presents some evidence that the type of simplification interventions being actively discussed in the behavioural economics literature may have effects on college enrollment.

NBER Working Paper No. 15387
Issued in September 2009
NBER Program(s): CH ED LS PE
We review the experimental and quasi-experimental research evidence on the causal relationship between college costs and educational attainment, with a particular focus on low-income populations. The weight of the evidence indicates that reducing college costs can increase college entry and persistence. Simple and transparent programs appear to be most effective. Programs that link money to incentives and/or the takeup of academic support services appear to be particularly effective.

This paper is available as PDF (160 K) or via email.

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Twitter

Tyler Cowen started an interesting discussion on the potential utility of Twitter. I am sceptical enough about it's utility for people involved in academic research, but I am going to give it a try again particularly following Cowen's eloquent defence.

My twitter page is now below and I will be using it almost exclusively for communicating on research and related issues. I will post on it if/when I give up and decide it doesn't have much value. Some potential benefits it may have include:

- keeping people uptodate with events that I am involved with or that I hear about that might be useful

- circulating some interesting documents for discussion

- tapping into very current debate on policy issues

- informing lectures with online discussions

link

Emotions and Economics

Jon Elster has written several articles over the years arguing for a greater need to incorporate emotions into economics. I have given a couple of lectures on this in the last year.

The RTE Frontline programme last Monday is a good example of the emotional aspect of bargaining involved here. It is possible that all the participants are super-rational employing their emotions as tools in a subtle bargaining process. You can look at the debates and make your mind up. The placement of the audience separately with one side being the "public" and the other side being the "private" sector help to excarbete some of the tensions. A lot of the audience looked seriously strained and worried, as well as extremely angry in places. Much of the anger is driven by perception of being treated unfairly with regard to an outgroup. The role of such emotions in actually effecting bargaining processes and economic behaviour is something we should think about further, particularly as we enter what is likely to be an emotionally charged debate leading up to the budget.

Flow

The concept of flow has been discussed a number of times on this blog. It comes from the work of Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi and there are a number of components to it. Most commonly discussed include feelings of timelessness, self-control, concentration, full task engagement, relief of anxiety, creativity and so on. "Being in the zone" is perhaps not a bad way of describing it, particularly in a sports context. Csíkszentmihályi conducted several pathbreaking studies on this concept, which among other things did a lot to integrate methodologies such as experience sampling into psychology. He gives a lecture on this here

At the risk of just putting up, things I really like for no apparent reason (!), some of the following seem to me to represent people in full flow. The attainment of these types of states is an important topic to understand for many fields. According to this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, in Arabic countries when people recognised this state in someone they would attribute it to God descending on the person and they would chant "Allah, Allah, Allah" which later morphed into "Ole Ole Ole" as Arabic culture moved through to Spain.

Jake Shimabukuro playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps on Ukele"

Ronnie O'Sullivan fastest 147

Tommy Emmanuel playing Classical Gas

Iggy Pop Playing the Passenger Live

Jimi Hendrix playing "all along the watchtower" live

CEMMAP

I was involved lately in a day-long session in CEMMAP in the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The session examined new measures in economics. Worth looking at the papers to see some of the thinking going on here. For those of you not familiar with CEMMAP, it is really worth looking closely at their website for one of the world's finest and most active programme on microeconometrics.

link to session