Smoking and drinking while pregnant

Smoking and drinking while pregnant is generally acknowledged to be a bad for the child's health depending, of course, on the extent of it. So how common is it and what are some of the predictors?
Using Growing Up in Ireland data I graph the mothers response to a question which asked about this. About 60% never drank and less than 40% said occasionally. For smoking about 75% never smoked though about 13% smoked daily.
These questions were asked 9 years after the child was born and are probably under-estimates. One is less likely, I think, to overstate one's drinking or smoking.
If one does some simple multivariate (ordered probit) analysis it is striking that there are some very different patterns:
Older mothers are more likely to have consumed alcohol than younger mothers while pregnant but young mothers are more likely to smoke than the older ones. Income also has opposite effects being positively associated with drinking and negatively associated with smoking. The same is true for mothers education. Likewise medical card holders are more (less) likely to smoke (drink). So there seems to be a clear class divide. These effects are simultaneous, remember.
The one factor I found which had a consistent effect (& there are many other possible factors which I didn't look at) was a question that asked the respondent "Would you describe yourself as religious/spiritual?". Those that answered in the higher categories ("very much so" or "extremely") were significantly less likely to have smoked or drank alcohol while pregnant.
It is interesting to speculate whether this has something to do with an association between religiousity and discount rates. It seems there may be positive externalities from religion/spirituality.

Drop-out in Irish Higher Education

Today on his blog, Ferdinand von-Prondzynski discusses a new Higher Education Authority publication: Study of Progression in Irish Higher Education. The study looks at data on student drop-outs broken down by institution and by subject. The Irish Times covered the release of the study yesterday. According to Ferdinand, the study "tells us that there is no significant difference in attrition between those from a better-off background and the less well off (though the latter are much less likely to get to university in the first place)."

Irish Policy Options for New Student Contributions in Higher Education

Readers may or may not be aware of this report to the Irish Minister for Education and Science: "Policy Options for New Student Contributions in Higher Education". The report dates from July 2009 but I have just found it on the website of the recently re-branded Department of Education and Skills. It is not clear whether this report is connected to the National Strategy for Higher Education in Ireland, recently discussed by Kevin on this blog.

In any event, the report outlines a number of issues in it summary, which are relevant to the potential introduction of a student contribution in Ireland. These include:

(i) Affordability considerations: "It is proposed that the level of any new student contribution should be related to current fee levels for Irish/EU students who do not qualify for free fees."

(ii) Top-up Fees: "Consideration could also be given to providing for a premium or ‘top-up’ range within which individual institutions would be free to increase charges for particular programmes. This would allow individual institutions to incentivise participation on particular programmes or to generate additional revenue according to their ability to compete for students. Such an arrangement could have the benefits of promoting competition and quality within the system."

(iii) Transition: "In transitioning to new fee arrangements, it would be important to avoid any potential for immediate shortfalls in institutional budgets by pitching fees at levels that do not match current ‘free fee’ contribution rates."

(iv) Collection of loan repayments: "The involvement of the national tax collection agency has been identified as being a critical success factor for a number of income contingent student loan facility models that operate internationally... It is recognised, however, that there are significant operational pressures on the Revenue Commissioners in the current Irish context which would limit their capacity to take on a role of direct collection agent for an income contingent loan scheme."

(v) Public finance: "In the current economic circumstances, it would be important that the introduction of a student loan facility would be designed to minimise any impact on the General Government Balance (GGB) or on General Government Debt (GGD)."

(vi) Upfront payment and tax relief: "In the context of any introduction of a loan system, continuing tax relief for students who pay fees upfront would amount to a form of discount for upfront payment. From an equity perspective, this would need to be factored into any consideration of the appropriate rate of surcharge on those availing of a loan rather than paying upfront."

(vii) Communicating complex issues: "Any policy change in this area will impact on significant numbers of students or potential students. A number of the options being considered are complex in nature and would give rise to very significant demands for information and clarification. An information strategy will need to be in place to communicate the details of any changes and to provide user friendly access to relevant detail on how the changes impact on individuals."

Behavioural Economics Song: Sheryl Crow - If it makes you happy

If it makes you happy, then it can't be that bad. But if it makes you happy, then why are you so sad?

Immigrants and accents

Immigrants tend to underperform in the labour market i.e. they are paid less than one might expect. This could be for several reasons. Prejudice is a possibility or their human capital may not be sufficiently valued if there is uncertainty about the quality of their education. The paper below documents another angle, namely that their accent may put them at a disadvantage. After all, foreigners talk funny, y'all know what I mean?

Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility
S Levi-Ari, B.Keysar
Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don't sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correct when the accent was mild but not when it was heavy. This effect was not due to stereotypes of prejudice against foreigners because it occurred even though speakers were merely reciting statements provided by a native speaker. Such reduction of credibility may have an insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46(6), 2010, 1093-1096

Thaler Lecture at Yale

A video of a recent lecture given by Richard Thaler on the "Behavioral Economics of Swindling and Sellin" is available on the Yale website. 

Optimal tax theory & Wayne Rooney

This paper in a leading theoretical public finance journal argues cogently that "superstars" like Wayne Rooney earn rents which can and should be taxed away by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, m'lud. An interesting proposition indeed, although whether this has any implications for tax policy in Ireland where, happily, there are not many superstars is doubtful.

Dublin Man Collects 16.4million euro winning

RTE reports on the Dublin winner of Saturday's 16 million euro lottery jackpot. Will it make him more happy? Everything in the fiber of my being tells me that I would be happier for a long time if I suddenly had an extra sixteen million euro. But the literature really doesn't back this up in a general sense. I am sure we would get a lot of volunteers if we set out to do a randomised trial on this effect. The most famous paper on this area is from 1978 and showed that people who won the lottery and people who were rendered paraplegic by an accident initially experienced big changes in well-being in the expected direction and then converged back to their base levels. This is in line with a big literature arguing that well-being is set to a fixed point determined by genetics, upbringing, disposition etc., and that it is not very malleable to changes in external factors like income. People like Kahneman and others have argued that the focusing illusion effect might come into play when we think of what life would be like after some external change. For example, the linked paper shows that people think they would be happier if they lived in California (nice weather etc.,) but, in fact, Californian's are no happier than New Yorkers (same working stresses etc.,). We think it would be nicer to live in California because we focus on the nice weather. A more recent paper asks the question "would you be happier if you were richer?" again arguing that people overfocus on the benefits of money when making counterfactual judgments. People like Daniel Gilbert have talked about affective misforecasting where we mispredict how good or bad we will feel consequent on life changes, in particular that we will overestimate how long we will have a change in well-being consequent on a change in circumstances (see a TED Talk here). Mark linked to a recent paper by Kahneman and Deaton using the global Gallup data, showing that income has a much bigger effect on life satisfaction than emotional well-being. So in other words, if we ask the man in a year's time how satisfied he is with his life, we might expect him to be more satisfied but if we look at how he feels on a day-to-day basis then we might not see much change. Of course, most of the papers in the literature deal with levels of income rather than sudden once-off increases in income. It might be the case that the exertions that a helicopter drop of money place on the self-control of the winners may reduce well-being effects, particularly if the people have no experience of managing the various complexities both social and financial that accompany their new-found wealth.

One thing that should certainly be explored is whether rollover jackpots should be split using some mechanism. For example, why not 16 prizes of one million? One for another post.

Class Size in Higher Education

The role of class-size in primary education has between discussed before on this blog. Earlier this year Kevin and Mark both posted interesting comments on the analysis of secondary data. In addition, I recently mentioned that data on primary-school class sizes in Ireland are available for the last four years by primary-school and class-room. Those looking for an introduction to how economists view the importance of class size in primary education could do worse than investigate this debate between Alan Krueger, Eric Hanushek and Jennifer King Rice.

"Alan Krueger maintains that smaller class sizes can improve students’ performance and future earnings prospects. He challenges Prof. Hanushek’s widely cited analysis of the class size literature, arguing that it gives disproportionate weight to single studies that include a large number of estimates... Jennifer King Rice brings a third-party perspective to the debate. She addresses each author’s arguments and focuses on the policy implications of the class size literature."

As educational achievement in higher education is often discussed on this blog, it seems salient to ask what we know about the importance of class size in higher education. To begin, it is helpful to point out that much of the work using education production functions has concentrated on the educational attainment of pupils in compulsory schooling, with less attention paid to higher education (Arulampalam, Naylor and Smith, 2009). The common inputs in education production functions are things like school resources, teacher quality, and family attributes, and the outcome is student achievement (Hanushek, 2007). However, there is a precedent for the theoretical consideration of higher education production functions (Freire and Silva, 1975; Johnson, 1978; Hopkins, 1990; Douglas and Sulock, 1995). There is also a much wider empirical literature on higher education production functions, in which researchers give attention to student inputs, in particular: lecture attendance and additional hours of study.

Looking at the evidence on class size in higher education, one result is that smaller classes do not translate into gains in achievement (Martins and Walker, 2006). Looking at economics students only, Kennedy and Siegfried (1997) find the same result i.e. that class size does not affect student achievement. Other work by Gleason shows that the same holds for mathematics students.

The opposite result (that class size matters) is found in a study examining peer effects and class size in higher education; Machado and Vera-Hernandez (2010) find that class size negatively influences medium ability college students. Dillon and Kokkelenberg (2002) show that class size "has a negative logarithmic relationship to grades and that the effect on class size on grades differs across different category of student."

In a recent Vox article, Bandiera, Larcinese and Rasul (2010) state that the effect of increasing class size in tertiary education is not yet well understood. Drawing on their article forthcoming in the Economic Journal, Bandiera, Larcinese and Rasul describe how they estimate the effects of class size on students’ exam performance by comparing the same student’s performance to her own performance in courses with small and large class sizes. "Going from the average class of 56 to a class size of 89 would decrease the mark by 9% of the observed variation in marks within a given student. The effect is almost four times larger for students in the top 10%."

It seems that the debate on class size in higher education is just as lively as the debate on class size in primary education.

Some Irish boys are better at maths than girls

Differences between the sexes in educational attainment are of interest to many people. In Ireland, as elsewhere, males are being left behind by females in key exams and university entrance. So where does it all start and is it the same for everyone?
Using the Growing up in Ireland data I look at differences in maths score: I estimate quantile regressions controlling for a bunch of chararacteristics (SES, birthweight, maternal smoking, income and more). These show the effect of being male on the maths score at different points of the conditional distribution : so high quantiles are not "high test scores" but "high test scores conditional on the covariates one has included". I interpret this as proxying unobserved ability, this could be cognitive ability but not necessarily. The outcome is scaled to have a mean of 100 and a std deviation of 15.
The results are striking. Boys do better on average so a linear regression gives a coefficient of about 1.2. By comparison, being right-handed or having been breastfed is worth an extra 1.4 points. But at lower quantiles the effects are smaller and are not statistically significant. At higher quantiles the effect is around 4 points.
So I interpret this as saying that at low levels of unobserved ability it doesn't matter if the child is a boy or girl. But for "smarter" children being a boy is an advantage i.e. being male and being "smart" are complements.

Bonus points for maths

The Irish Independent has an interesting article on bonus points & not just because they quote me.

Handedness and ability at maths: evidence from Ireland

There is a great deal of interest both popularly and amongst scholars about whether cognitive ability is predicted by handedness. The literature contains many findings which cannot be simply summarized and there are many many myths. Evidence for Ireland has been non-existent, as far as I am aware, until now with the release of the Growing Up in Ireland data.
So what can we say? Below I plot the density of attainment at a maths test that the 8 year olds in GUI sat.
Sadly, if you are a ciotóg, you can see the distribution is shifted to the left - but not by much. The good news is that when you look at the distribution of reading ability, there is no difference at all.
In numerical terms, left-handers are about 8% of a standard deviation lower. By comparison girls are about 11.5% of one standard deviation lower.

Where do good ideas come from? - RSA Animate and Steven Johnson

Another gem from RSA Animate - Steven Johnson (science writer) on where good ideas come from.

Doing Surveys Online

Various ways of doing surveys online were discussed earlier this year on this blog. MMIC, Survey Gizmo and Lime Survey were all mentioned. MMIC™ (Multimode Interviewing Capability) is a comprehensive information system developed by the RAND Corporation. Survey Gizmo is similar to its competitor Survey Monkey, a package which people are most likely to be familar with. What makes Lime Survey different is that it is open-source, in other words completely free.

Recently, myself and Peter have been doing further research into different possibilities for doing surveys online. In particular, we wanted a package that would allow us to present feedback at the end of the survey, in a dashboard-type format, based on the answers provided by the survey repondent. We played around with various options, including:
(i) http://www.instantsurvey.com
(ii) http://www.vovici.com
(iii) http://www.mineful.com
(iv) http://www.keysurvey.com
(v) http://www.premiersurvey.com
(vi) http://www.zoomerang.com
(vii) http://www.unipark.info

However, our search came to an end when we found Qualtrics. As well as allowing a sophisticated feedback mechanism, Qualtrics has really useful "display option", "skip option" and randomisation features that can be used in the survey design. In the current survey-project that we have developed, we use the "display option" to ensure that a certain question only gets displayed if the respondent answers "Yes" to a previous (corresponding) question. In their own words, Qualtrics describe themselves as "easy enough for an intern and sophisticated enough for a Ph.D."

Draft Programme for November 23rd Session

Economics, Psychology and Neuroscience Third Annual One Day Session: UCD Research Building

10.00am - 10.30am

Martin Ryan (UCD)  "The Role of Economic Psychology and Non-Cognitive Skill in Students' Lecture Attendance and Academic Achievement"

10.30am - 11am

Liam Delaney (UCD)  "Automatic Enrollment and the Irish Pension System"

11am - 11.20am: Coffee

11.30am - 12pm

Cormac O'Dea (IFS and UCL). "Cognitive Ability and Retirement Savings"

12pm - 12.30pm

Marie Briguglio (University of Malta). "Voluntary Pro-Environmental Behaviour".

1230pm - 1pm

Michael Daly(TCD) "How income relates to life satisfaction and daily emotional experience: Evidence from the American Life Panel"

LUNCH

2pm - 2.30pm

Mick O'Connell (UCD) "Variation in 'Returns to Education' and academic performance by country in OECD's PISA science scores"

2.30pm to 3pm 

Robert Metcalfe (Oxford) "Behavioural Economics TBA"

3pm - 3.30pm

Peter Lunn (ESRI) "What Can I Get For It? A theoretical and empirical re-analysis of the endowment effect."

3.30pm - 4pm Coffee

4pm - 5.30pm: Keynote Speaker. 

David Laibson (Harvard) "Natural Expectations and Economic Behavior"

Long Weekend Links

1. TED Interview from a few months back with Julian Assange, explaining the philosophy behind Wikileaks. There has been a lot of discussion about the implication of the development of volunteer-driven mass collaborative enterprises for standard economics. But it is arguable that the development of wikileaks is a more profound development than previous collaborative exercises. This is a global information resource driven by volunteers and donations, with some of the providers taking enormous risks to make information available.

2. On the theme of global developments driven by non-standard preferences, this TED talk from the founder of kiva.org is well worth watching (warning: contains a lot of emotional pleas that may be unsuitable for an older and more cynical audience).

3. DG Sanco Conference on "Behavioural Economics. So What: Should PolicyMakers Care". This will be livestreamed is worth tuning in to.

"At European level, behavioural economics is implicitly starting to be incorporated in policymaking and this has led to some cases of debiasing through law. The cooling-off period, found in much of EU consumer acquis, and the health claims proposal are two significant examples. In addition, an in-depth review of the behavioural literature provided evidence for the inclusion of a ban on pre-checked boxes in the recent proposal for a Consumer Rights Directive. Finally, the useful contribution of behavioural economics has explicitly been recognised by DG Competition as part of the solution in a recent Microsoft case, when designing the browser ballot box. Similarly, Regulatory bodies across of the world (e.g., US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), UK Office for Fair Trading, OECD, Australian Productivity Commission) have already started to take behavioural economics into serious consideration and have already carried out behavioural studies to inform some of their regulatory policies."

4. Programme for AEA 2011 is available on this link

5. Meier and Springer - Discounting and Defaulting: Evidence from Choice Experiments Matched to Administrative Credit Data

6. Brigitte Madrian NBER summary of savings and investment behaviour 

Behavioural Economics in Song - Nick Cave

"Oh My Lord" by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds is going in the vaults. A classic in general (live youtube version here) it contains the following, which might simply refer to life containing unknown risks but I also think basically means we are overconfident and unaware, and blinded by temporary success.

"The ladders of life we scale merrily move mysteriously around. So that when you think you're climbing up, man, in fact you're climbing down"

Having lived through a bubble, where we were ploughing headlong into a bloated finance and construction industry and using our new found financial windfall to accumulate large scale debt, the lyric rings very true.

Weekend Links

1. Economics, Psychology and the history of consumer choice theory Hands (2010). Cambridge Journal of Economics. 

This paper examines elements of the complex place/role/influence of psychology in the history of consumer choice theory. The paper reviews, and then challenges, the standard narrative that psychology was ‘in’ consumer choice theory early in the neoclassical revolution, then strictly ‘out’ during the ordinal and revealed preference revolutions, now (possibly) back in with recent developments in experimental, behavioural and neuroeconomics. The paper uses the work of three particular economic theorists to challenge this standard narrative and then provides an alternative interpretation of the history of the relationship between psychology and consumer choice theory.

2.  Zizzo (2010). Experimental Demand Effects in Economics

3. Harrison and Ross (2010). "The Methodologies of Neuroeconomics"- really interesting critique of aspects of neuroeconomic methodologies

4. Workplace Wellness Programmes Can Generate Savings - Health Affairs (2010)

Katherine Baicker^1,*, David Cutler² and Zirui Song^3
1 Katherine Baicker (Kbaicker@hsph.harvard.edu) is a professor of health economics at the School of Public Health, Harvard University, in Boston, Massachusetts.
² David Cutler is a professor of economics at Harvard University.
³ Zirui Song is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Medical School.
*Corresponding author
Amid soaring health spending, there is growing interest in workplace disease prevention and wellness programs to improve health and lower costs. In a critical meta-analysis of the literature on costs and savings associated with such programs, we found that medical costs fall by about $3.27 for every dollar spent on wellness programs and that absenteeism costs fall by about $2.73 for every dollar spent. Although further exploration of the mechanisms at work and broader applicability of the findings is needed, this return on investment suggests that the wider adoption of such programs could prove beneficial for budgets and productivity as well as health outcomes.

Key Words: Cost of Health Care • Health Promotion/Disease Prevention

5. Simolean Sense blog does a very nice weekly roundup of behavioural topic. In general, this blog is doing a very good job at harvesting relevant behavioural links from round the web. 

6. Dan Gilbert NYT article on the psychology of numbers

Berg and Gigernenzer - Behavioral Economics: Neoclassical Economics in Disguise

As-If Behavioral Economics: Neoclassical Economics in Disguise?

Nathan Berg
University of Texas at Dallas - School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences

Gerd Gigerenzer
Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences - Max Planck Institute for Human Development


January 1, 2010

History of Economic Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 133-166, 2010

Abstract:     
For a research program that counts improved empirical realism among its primary goals, it is surprising that behavioral economics appears indistinguishable from neoclassical economics in its reliance on “as-if” arguments. “As-if” arguments are frequently put forward in behavioral economics to justify “psychological” models that add new parameters to fit decision outcome data rather than specifying more realistic or empirically supported psychological processes that genuinely explain these data. Another striking similarity is that both behavioral and neoclassical research programs refer to a common set of axiomatic norms without subjecting them to empirical investigation. Notably missing is investigation of whether people who deviate from axiomatic rationality face economically significant losses. Despite producing prolific documentation of deviations from neoclassical norms, behavioral economics has produced almost no evidence that deviations are correlated with lower earnings, lower happiness, impaired health, inaccurate beliefs, or shorter lives. We argue for an alternative non-axiomatic approach to normative analysis focused on veridical descriptions of decision process and a matching principle – between behavioral strategies and the environments in which they are used – referred to as ecological rationality. To make behavioral economics, or psychology and economics, a more rigorously empirical science will require less effort spent extending “as-if” utility theory to account for biases and deviations, and substantially more careful observation of successful decision makers in their respective domains.
Keywords: bounded rationality, ecological rationality, as-if, fit, prediction, decision, process
JEL Classifications: D03, B1, B4

The negative effect of height on well-being: a tall story?

Height and well-being amongst older Europeans
Kevin Denny

This paper uses a cross-country representative sample of Europeans over the age of 50 to analyse whether individuals’ height is associated with higher or lower levels of well-being. Two outcomes are used: a measure of depression symptoms reported by individuals and a categorical measure of life satisfaction. It is shown that there is a concave relationship between height and symptoms of depression. These results are sensitive to the inclusion of several sets of controls reflecting demographics, human capital and health status. While parsimonious models suggest that height is protective against depression, the addition of controls, particularly related to health, suggests the reverse effect: tall people are predicted to have slightly more symptoms of depression. Height has no significant association with life satisfaction in models with controls for health and human capital.

Here also

How would you like it done Sir? Harsh or Severe?

The UK government announced its austerity package today; it’s harsh. But how does it size-up to Irelands plans-in-the-making? Opposition members in the HOC were quick to point to Ireland and our governments belief that we could cut our way out of the economic problem; Brian Lenihan’s we’ve turned a corner speech last year was the focal point of their ridicule.

Such ridicule, if heeded, may be good for Ireland; it is becoming clear now that Ireland's "misguided austerity" could actually be a key thing that helps Ireland grow! albeit indirectly via less severe global austerity. In any event, I think it is interesting to place the newly announced UK austerity plan in an Irish perspective. In simple capita terms the UK is just shy of being 14 times bigger than Ireland. We can compute some basic figures off this fact to make some quick comparisons. I also think doing so will help put the fairly animated debates in the UK over their cuts into some perspective for us here.

I’ll just run some of today’s headline figures –

UK Public sector four-year austerity package in Irish terms: €7bn

UK Public sector job cuts in Irish terms: 35,000 jobs

UK Welfare cuts in Irish terms: €575m

UK Extra social care in schools in Irish terms: €165m

UK Axing quangos in business, innovation and skills sector in Irish terms: ~ 2 quangos; €30m

Applications of set theory

While the use of mathematics in economics has been criticized by many it is hard to see how the discipline could advance without the use of at least some calculus, algebra and statistics. Set theory, on the other hand, would bore the pants off you. So it is nice to see a Venn Diagram being used for something interesting: a corn dog.
















I am indebted to another colleague (who shall remain nameless but it is not me) for this further contribution to applied mathematics:


Note that one cannot draw causal inferences from the negative correlation between being truly happy and wearing pants. Clearly one needs some good instrumental variables.

Warriors Against Rational Choice - Kangaroo Edition

Every once in a while, something appears on the scene that really makes you stop and wonder what on earth could have gotten into someone to do something like that. Most people in Ireland will have seen the story at this stage of the kangaroo let loose in a Dublin nightclub as "Skippy" plays on the sound system. This is just baffling. Like the recent incident of the people who stole a penguin from Dublin Zoo and released it in O'Connell street, it looks very much like something that people thought of as funny while stoned. However, particularly in the case of the Kangaroo, they would have had to follow up and execute the plan. Think of the possible chain of events. Some guy is sitting staring vacantly into space when his eyes light up and he starts to laugh. The basic germ of an idea has been established. "I will steal a kangaroo and let it loose in a nightclub". I can see at first glance why this fleeting thought might be humorous for a minute but surely then it must just pass off into the realm where all such ideas usually dwell. It is very unlikely that the person could have executed this idea alone. So the person formulates the idea in a little more detail and then explains it to someone else. This is when the amazing thing happens - the other person (possibly people) agrees that this is a good idea. They then have to actually precure a kangaroo, which I know is not as impossible at it first appears as it seems we do have some kangaroos in Ireland. But surely it is not completely trivial both to find one and to devise a method of claiming it, transporting it and so on - it is trickier than letting the neighborhood dog loose. All of this process must have taken sufficient time for at least some doubts to be raised about whether this was a sensible thing to do e.g. its cruel to the animal, the animal might go mental and really hurt someone, its illegal and we might get arrested, its a lot of bloody hassle and its not that funny a joke. Yet still they bring the full plan to fruition, culminating in the release of an unfortunate animal into a Dublin nightclub, which are disturbing enough places to be for humans never mind the poor kangaroo. The serious side of the story is that it appears from reports to RTE that the animal died afterwards and it is plainly bloody stupid on an amount of levels to do something like that. Whoever they are, perhaps we are fulfilling their wishes by even focusing on them but they have definitely earned a place in the WARC archives.

Suicide in Ireland: The Influence of Alcohol and Unemployment

Brendan Walsh, Dermot Walsh
In this paper we model the behaviour of the Irish suicide rate over the period 1968‐2009 using the unemployment rate and the level of alcohol consumption as explanatory variables. It is found that these variables have significant positive effects on suicide mortality in several demographic groups. Alcohol consumption is a significant influence on the male suicide rate up to age 64. Its influence on the female suicide rate is not as well‐established, although there is evidence that it is important in the 15‐24 and 25‐34 age groups. The unemployment rate is also a significant influence on the male suicide rate in the younger age groups. The behaviour of suicide rates among males aged 55 and over and females aged 25 and over is largely unaccounted for by our model. These broad conclusions hold when account is taken of a structural break in the 1980s, with the response to unemployment being greater in the earlier period and that to alcohol greater in the later period. The findings suggest that higher alcohol consumption played a major role in the increase in suicide mortality among young Irish males between the late 1960s and the end of the century. In the early twenty first century a combination of falling alcohol consumption and low unemployment led to a marked reduction in suicide rates, although there is some evidence that the suicide rate is being increasingly under‐reported in recent years. The recent rise in the suicide rate may be attributed to the sharp increase in unemployment, especially among males, but it has been moderated by the continuing fall in alcohol consumption. Some policy implications of the findings are discussed.

ERC Starting Grants Funding

The European Research Council starting investigator grants are probably the most prestigious grants that can be won by researchers in the first half of their career in Europe. Some details on this years winners are provided on the Nature blog here. Those who read the blog and are in the beginnings of a research career (e.g. starting a PhD) in Europe should have a look at this scheme and the people who win it to provide themselves with a high anchor.

Secrets and lies: is a lot of medical research bunk?

Social scientists & certainly economists tend to look up to medical research, partly because its where the money is, and also because one of its key methods, the randomized control trial, is seen by many as providing a "gold standard" when it comes to measuring treatment effects - though Deaton, Heckman and others have questioned whether RCTs in economics should enjoy this privileged status.
The public generally tend to hold medical research in even higher respect. Medical researchers are good people, passionately if objectively, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge to help make us better.
So how worrying would it be if much medical research was actually wrong? This conclusion has been emerging from the work of a Greek medical researcher, John Ioannidis, and his team. The causes of this problem are various, including publication bias, and are well known but the scale of the problem is probably not. This article may make you distinctly uneasy.
Part of the problem, that key studies have not been replicated and may be wrong, is not peculiar to medicine. It may well plague the social and behavioural sciences too. This article on the subject won't make you feel any better.

Boys Live Dangerously in the Womb

American Journal of Human Biology, 2010 May-Jun;22(3):330-5.

Eriksson JG, Kajantie E, Osmond C, Thornburg K, Barker DJ.

Abstract

The growth of every human fetus is constrained by the limited capacity of the mother and placenta to deliver nutrients to it. At birth, boys tend to be longer than girls at any placental weight. Boy's placentas may therefore be more efficient than girls, but may have less reserve capacity. In the womb boys grow faster than girls and are therefore at greater risk of becoming undernourished. Fetal undernutrition leads to small size at birth and cardiovascular disorders, including hypertension, in later life. We studied 2003 men and women aged around 62 years who were born in Helsinki, Finland, of whom 644 had hypertension: we examined their body and placental size at birth. In both sexes, hypertension was associated with low birth weight. In men, hypertension was also associated with a long minor diameter of the placental surface. The dangerous growth strategy of boys may be compounded by the costs of compensatory placental enlargement in late gestation. In women, hypertension was associated with a small placental area, which may reduce nutrient delivery to the fetus. In men, hypertension was linked to the mothers' socioeconomic status, an indicator of their diets: in women it was linked to the mothers' heights, an indicator of their protein metabolism. Boys' greater dependence on their mothers' diets may enable them to capitalize on an improving food supply, but it makes them vulnerable to food shortages. The ultimate manifestation of their dangerous strategies may be that men have higher blood pressures and shorter lives than women.

5000 pounds offered to students who fail A-levels

One school in the UK is so confident of its success rate that it is offering 5k to any student who doesn't pass their A-levels, conditional on them having good attendance and assignment submission records. The BBC reports "It is the latest example of cash or gift incentives being used in schools - either to encourage good behaviour or to discourage bad." At first glance, offering teenagers money to fail seems counterintuitive as an incentive for performance. But as a signal of the school's confidence in its quality, it clearly has some advantages. However, they should be careful. If I were the type of teenager who valued 5k over my education or if I was pretty sure I was going to fail anyway, then this school would look pretty appealing! Also, marginal teenagers might think that 5k is a lot of money and might also be discounting the future at a very high rate.

Upcoming Talks on Science, Innovation and the Economy

10th November: Panel Discussion: What's Smart about Ireland's Smart Economy in 2010?
A panel discussion with Dick Ahlstrom (chairman), Science Editor of the Irish Times; Professor John FitzGerald, ESRI; Dr Brian Kelly, CEO of Celtic Catalysts; Karlin Lillington, Technology journalist, Sean O’Driscoll (CEO Glen Dimplex) and Ferdinand von Prondzynski, former President of Dublin City University.

Organisers: Royal Irish Academy and the Irish Times
Admission is free but booking is essential.

11th November: The Long Debate: Debate on the Innovation Taskforce Report
Taking place in the NDRC on the 11th of November, the debate will draw on the findings of the Innovation Taskforce report.

Launched in March 2010, the report sets out recommendations for developing Ireland into an International Innovation Hub. Members of the Taskforce, including some of Ireland’s leading economic commentators, industry and government members, academics, creatives and entrepreneurs will be in attendance to discuss the nature of innovation within Ireland.

Organisers: Inventorium
Debate: 19.00-22.00
NDRC, Crane St, Digital Hub, Dublin 8
Registration for this event is essential.

17th November: Panel Discussion: Can Science be a Business?
A panel discussion with Dick Ahlstrom (chairman), Science Editor of the Irish Times; Professor Luke O’Neill, TCD; Dr Ena Prosser, Fountain Healthcare Partners; Professor Mark O’Malley, UCD; Professor Emmeline Hill (UCD).

Organisers: Royal Irish Academy and the Irish Times
Admission is free but booking is essential.

RIP: the old order changeth...

Several influential researchers have died just recently, the economic theorists Maurice Allais and Lionel McKenzie and Benoît Mandelbrot, best known for his work on fractals but who made important contributions to numerous disciplines including statistics and economics.
Some beautiful pictures of Mandelbrot sets are here. This is just a taster:

The psychology of our bankers

The extensive analysis of the banking and economic crisis has been dominated by economic and finance experts. But on the surface anyway much of the explanation lies in psychology. So it is timely that the Irish Times carries a piece today by Vicky Menzies and Ken McKenzie providing a psychological analysis of bankers behaviour in the run up to the crisis.

How habits are formed: modelling habit formation in the real world

P.Lally,C HM Van Jaarsveld, H W W Potts, J Wardle

To investigate the process of habit formation in everyday life, 96 volunteers chose an eating, drinking or activity behaviour to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks. They completed the self-report habit index (SRHI) each day and recorded whether they carried out the behaviour. The majority (82) of participants provided sufficient data for analysis, and increases in automaticity (calculated with a sub-set of SRHI items) were examined over the study period. Nonlinear regressions fitted an asymptotic curve to each individual's automaticity scores over the 84 days. The model fitted for 62 individuals, of whom 39 showed a good fit. Performing the behaviour more consistently was associated with better model fit. The time it took participants to reach 95% of their asymptote of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days; indicating considerable variation in how long it takes people to reach their limit of automaticity and highlighting that it can take a very long time. Missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process. With repetition of a behaviour in a consistent context, automaticity increases following an asymptotic curve which can be modelled at the individual level.

European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6) 998-1009, 2010

Krugman's universe

Some horrible people say that economists (particularly theory types) suffer from physics-envy. I would not say that, in public anyway, 'though as envies go it could be worse. Not content with suffering such insults, Paul Krugman has just published a paper (though written in 1978) providing the long awaited unification of trade theory and inter-stellar travel.

THE THEORY OF INTERSTELLAR TRADE

PAUL KRUGMAN, Economic Inquiry Volume 48, Issue 4, pages 1119–1123, October 2010

This article extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.

Friday Economics School Seminar

Via Karl Whelan

Eric Bartelsman (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) will present “Employment Protection, Technology Choice, and Worker Allocation” at 3.30 in G214.

The paper can be downloaded here:
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4895.pdf

Abstract: Using a country-industry panel dataset (EUKLEMS) we uncover a robust empirical regularity, namely that high-risk innovative sectors are relatively smaller in countries with strict employment protection legislation (EPL). To understand the mechanism, we develop a two-sector matching model where firms endogenously choose between a safe technology with known productivity and a risky technology with productivity subject to sizeable shocks. Strict EPL makes the risky technology relatively less attractive because it is more costly to shed workers upon receiving a low productivity draw. We calibrate the model using a variety of aggregate, industry and micro-level data sources. We then simulate the model to reflect both the observed differences across countries in EPL and the observed increase since the mid-1990s in the variance of firm performance associated with the adoption of information and communication technology. The simulations produce a differential response to the arrival of risky technology between low- and high-EPL countries that coincides with the findings in the data. The described mechanism can explain a considerable portion of the slowdown in productivity in the EU relative to the US since 1995.

ESRI Budget Perspectives

Today's ESRI Budget Perspectives conference featured a number of talks on the fiscal position and suggestions from reform - presentations and talks available here

Bonus points for maths: the new policy

It has just been reported that the Irish Universities Association have agreed a policy whereby students taking Higher Maths in the Leaving Certificate and getting at least a D will get an extra 25 points.
Aside from concerns about the possible effects on equality of access raised by Kathleen Lynch , I am curious about what incentives this new scheme provides. So the idea is to get more doing Higher Maths and presumably doing better all round. Often "non-linear pricing" generates perverse incentives.
So at the high end there is no additional incentive: an A is worth more than a B by the same amount. I would have thought there was an argument for increasing the bonus as one gets a higher grade. Say a student wants to get a certain amount of points from maths. In the past he could have got it from say a C-. Now a D will do (I'm not sure of the exact numbers). Might he be tempted to put in less effort, settle for a D instead, and re-allocate effort to other subjects? So one might predict a clumping of the distribution around D for this paper.
Take another student who is thinking of taking Higher Maths but is worried about failing. The relative penalty to failing has increased (the E-D gap in points) so a risk averse student might think "no thanks". There might be an argument for encouraging students to take the chance by giving some additional reward for getting an E (i.e. a smaller bonus).
Finally,lets say the policy is successful in attracting more students to doing higher Maths. Presumably these will be the people who are moderately good at maths. So on the lower paper we get fewer A's and B's and more D's on the higher paper. Why is this something to be so pleased about anyway?
When the distribution of grades is published next year, it will be a nice little project to compare before and after.

Fair admissions to university?

The evidence base for fair admissions: can we achieve excellence and social justice?

The University of Manchester
7 - 8 July 2011

A unique conference bringing together theorists, researchers and policy-makers in higher education, working on fair admissions to competitive higher education institutions.

The full programme for the conference will be available from February 2011.

Diamond, Mortenson and Pissarides

This year's Economics Nobel prize was announced this morning - Peter Diamond of MIT, Dale Mortenson of Northwestern and Christopher Pissarides of the LSE for "search frictions for unemployed people in the labour market". Tyler Cowen has a good description of the main contribution that the prize recognised.

The Weirdest People in the World?

Aside from its catchy title, this paper seems pretty relevant for those do experimental psychology and behavioural economics:

The Weirdest People in the World?
Joseph Henrich, Steve J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, selfconcepts and related motivation and the heritability of IQ.