Penalty points and road safety: is there really a link

According to the Irish Independent, drivers in Ireland face a raft of new penalty offences – to be introduced by the end of 2012. In the article the minister, Leo Varadkar justified the clampdown, saying: “Each measure we take to advance road safety increases the likelihood that lives will be saved.” The article also quotes Conor Faughnan of the AA as saying that the penalty points system had changed driver behaviour.

So it is true? Road safety is a big topic on which there is a fair of research internationally and there have been a few papers on the Irish experience – penalty points were introduced in 2002. Here is a quick summary of a few papers I found.

Hussain et al. (British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery 2006) look at maxillofacial injuries. They simply compare the number of various injuries in the year before and after the 2002 reform. They assert that “The introduction of legislation led to a 61% reduction in the need for emergency maxillofacial operations.” Clearly the design does not support such an assertion and subsequently in the paper they seem to acknowledge that a causal link cannot be firmly established. Yes indeed. Just comparing means before and after tells you nothing. Maybe the series just goes up and down a lot. Maybe something else happened. Lots of the other outcomes they consider don’t change at all. And of course if you look at enough outcomes you are bound to find some differences (though the paper does not appear to contain a single p-value or confidence interval).

At least two other papers were generated by this reform.

Healy et al. (Injury 2004) look at spinal injuries. This paper follows a similar methodology as the previous one but at least does some inference “In the first 6 months of the new speed penalty system the number of RTA (road traffic accident) related spinal injuries was 17. This was significantly lower then the same period in the previous 4 years when on average of 33 admissions occurred (P < 0:05, Chi-sq=3:96, d:f: =1)”. The same issue arises ‘though: how can one attribute the change to the reform? Interestingly in the second 6-month period after the reform, the number of RTA related injuries rose again so it looks, to me at least, that any effect was shortlived. Looking at their Table 2 it is far from clear the reform had any effect. Again, simply comparing means before and after is uninformative.

Butler et al. (Irish Journal of Medical Science 2006) also looks at spinal injuries (the authorship of the two papers overlap) and seem to report much the same result: an initial fall in RTA related spinal injuries that were not sustained.

Based on these 3 papers (there are others which I haven’t looked at) the evidence that the introduction of penalty points in 2002 was effective seems pretty underwhelming although a casual reading of these papers would not leave you with that impression. As the system changed in 2003, with additional offences introduced, it would be difficult to estimate the long run effect of the reform.

The possibility that such a reform had a temporary effect with people regressing to their usual driving standards quite quickly is plausible to me. I came across a paper that looked at whether conviction for driving offences lowered risk of death subsequently (Redelmeier et al. The Lancet 2003). They find it reduces the risk of death sharply in the immediate aftermath of a conviction but the effect was much smaller after 2 months and not significant after 3-4 months.I wonder is this a general finding.

Road safety is an emotive topic and it is essential that policy is based not on anecdote or gut instinct but on good evidence. Inferring whether the points system improved road safety is probably difficult or impossible given the data available. That does not mean one shouldn’t consider such policies – my guess is that the loss function is asymmetric: introducing penalty points probably can’t do any harm. But exaggerated claims of efficacy are never justified.

Economics and Psychology Research Group

Over 2012, we will be building up a group working on economics and psychology in Stirling as part of wider networks such as SIRE. Funding proposals are being developed or are currently under review. A number of PhD studentships will be advertised in the New Year. The main topics to be begin with will be (i) Measurement of well-being (ii) Unemployment and well-being (iii) Psychological and biological foundations of time discounting (iv) Personality and economic outcomes across the life-cycle (v) Effect of information provision on key life choices (vi) Behavioural economics and public policy.

Anyone interested should get in contact. Further details will be made available in the New Year. In general, there are a number of funding opportunities for PhD students and postdocs including through the Marie Curie programmes and the Doctoral Training Centers.

Does our low corporate tax rate attract foreign direct invesment?

Some Christmas cheer:
The dark forces behind the Great Plan to Save The Euro would clearly like to get their hands on our low corporate tax rates. This would be the end of the world as we know it.
Or would it? This paper suggests otherwise. However it is highly unlikely that mere evidence will be sufficient to cause people to re-examine their views about this particular sacred cow.

Fiscal Policy and the Firm: Do Low Corporate Tax Rates Attract Multinational Corporations?

Nathan Jensen
Abstract:
In this paper, I explore the relationship between corporate tax rates and multinational production in the OECD from 1980-2000. I utilize a time-series-cross-sectional general error correction model to explore the impact of corporate taxation rates and FDI inflows in 19 OECD economies from 1990-2000. I find that there is no relationship between corporate taxation and the investments of multinational corporations.

STATA Net Courses

For those making a new year's resolution to get better at STATA, these net-courses may be useful.

Nominal Wage Rigidity in Village Labor Markets

Via Marginal Revolution, fascinating new paper on nominal wage rigidity.

Nominal Wage Rigidity in Village Labor Markets

Supreet Kaur

Abstract
Wage and employment responses to rainfall shocks in 500 Indian districts from 1956-2008 provide evidence for downward nominal wage rigidity in markets for casual daily agricultural labor. First, nominal wages rise in response to positive labor demand shocks but do not fall during droughts. Second, after transitory positive shocks have dissipated, nominal wages do not return to their previous levels—they remain high in future years. Third, inflation moderates these effects: when inflation is higher, real wages are more likely to be lower during droughts and after transitory positive shocks. Fourth, wage distortions generate employment distortions: employment is lower in the year after a transitory positive shock than if the positive shock had not occurred. Those with less land, who must sell their labor to other farms, are considerably more likely to face rationing. Landless laborers experience a 7% reduction in employment—twice as large as the employment decrease during a drought. Fifth, there is some evidence that wages are less rigid in areas where rigidity is likely to cause larger profit losses due to crop characteristics. Finally, data from a new survey I conducted in two Indian states suggests that agricultural workers and employers: view nominal wage cuts as unfair; are considerably less likely to regard real wage cuts as unfair if they are achieved through inflation rather than nominal cuts; and believe that nominal wage cuts cause effort reductions

More Nominal Wage Rigidity

Liam recently posted a Paul Krugman graph showing nominal wage rigidity in Ireland over the last few years. As both noted, this isn’t exactly a shock but the deeper one goes into the data, the wider your eyes are opened.

The relevant are data the Earnings, Hours and Employment Costs Survey (EHECS). Krugman’s figure showed indexed earnings per hour in manufacturing since 2005 Q4. The following shows indexed nominal hourly earnings (excluding irregular bonuses) along with an index of these earnings deflated by the CPI and the indexed number of employees, as per the QNHS. 2008 Q1 is the base for all three.

What I find most interesting is that if we examine sectors which have experienced particularly high levels of job loss, such as construction, there appears to be no softening of this rigidity.

For convenience, figures for other NACE economic sectors are here (pdf).

On a related note, via Marginal Revolution, an interesting paper on wage rigidity in rural Indian labour markets. Abstract:

"Wage and employment responses to rainfall shocks in 500 Indian districts from 1956-2008 provide evidence for downward nominal wage rigidity in markets for casual daily agricultural labor. First, nominal wages rise in response to positive labor demand shocks but do not fall during droughts. Second, after transitory positive shocks have dissipated, nominal wages do not return to their previous levels—they remain high in future years. Third, inflation moderates these effects: when inflation is higher, real wages are more likely to be lower during droughts and after transitory positive shocks. Fourth, wage distortions generate employment distortions: employment is lower in the year after a transitory positive shock than if the positive shock had not occurred. Those with less land, who must sell their labor to other farms, are considerably more likely to face rationing. Landless laborers experience a 7% reduction in employment—twice as large as the employment decrease during a drought. Fifth, there is some evidence that wages are less rigid in areas where rigidity is likely to cause larger profit losses due to crop characteristics. Finally, data from a new survey I conducted in two Indian states suggests that agricultural workers and employers: view nominal wage cuts as unfair; are considerably less likely to regard real wage cuts as unfair if they are achieved through inflation rather than nominal cuts; and believe that nominal wage cuts cause effort reductions."


Cross-posted.

Laws and Norms

Bénabou and Tirole (2011) Laws and Norms:

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals’ behaviors and inferences, and how they interact with material incentives. It then characterizes optimal incentive-setting in the presence of norms, deriving in particular appropriately modified versions of Pigou and Ramsey taxation. Incorporating agents’ imperfect knowledge of the distribution of preferences opens up to analysis several new questions. The first is social psychologists’ practice of norms-based interventions, namely campaigns and messages that seek to alter people’s perceptions of what constitutes normal behavior or values among their peers. The model makes clear how such interventions operate, but also how their effectiveness is limited by a credibility problem, particularly when the descriptive and prescriptive norms conflict. The next main question is the expressive role of law. The choices of legislators and other principals naturally reflect their knowledge of societal preferences, and these same community standards are also what shapes social judgements and moral sentiments. Setting law thus means both imposing material incentives and sending a message about society’s values, and hence about the norms that different behaviors are likely to encounter. The analysis, combining an informed principal with individually signaling agents, makes precise the notion of expressive law, determining in particular when a weakening or a strengthening of incentives is called for. Pushing further this logic, the paper also sheds light on why societies are often resistant to the message of economists, as well as on why they renounce certain policies, such as "cruel and unusual punishments", irrespective of effectiveness considerations, in order to express their being "civilized".

(Cross-posted.)

Seminar in Geary: Wednesday December 14th

Professor Patrick Walsh has circulated details about a seminar in the UCD Geary Institute tomorrow (Wednesday 14th December) at 1pm. The title of the talk is "Civic Awareness: Intergenerational Transmission of Civic Attitudes or just Schooling". And the speaker is Daniel Miles Touya from Universidad de Vigo, Spain.

Health talks on December 19th

This is intended as a catch-up session for some people working on projects at the Geary Institute or who have recently moved. Happy to include others if interested. Let me know via email. Venue will be seminar room of Geary Institute. Below is very provisional including me having just made up some titles and I will use this post to update.

Geary Institute Health Presentations, December 19th

9.15 Liam Delaney: Intro and "Childhood mental health, scarring and unemployment"

10.00 Eimear Crowe: "Diurnal self-esteem, social interaction, depressive symptoms and the inflammatory response in MDD."

10.45 Sarah Gibney: "Childlessness and Wellbeing in a European Context"

11.30: Alan Fernihough: "The Demographic Transition and Childhood Health"

2pm: Eibhlin Hudson "Childhood determinants of health perceptions"

2.45pm: Michael Daly: "SES, Rank and Health"

3.30pm: Clare Delargy: "Organ Donation Consent Systems"

Infant Mortality Database

A very important resource for cross country research on early life conditions (and economic development in general) is the following infant mortality database. The authors deserve a huge amount of credit for compiling this important dataset.

Abouharb, M. Rodwan; Kimball, Anessa L.

A new dataset on infant mortality rates, 1816-2002

Source: JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH 44 (6): 743-754

Abstract:

Systematic data on annual infant mortality rates are of use to a variety of social science research programs in demography, economics, sociology, and political science. Infant mortality rates may be used both as a proxy measure for economic development, in lieu of energy consumption or GDP-per-capita measures, and as an indicator of the extent to which governments provide for the economic and social welfare of their citizens. Until recently, data were available for only a limited number of countries based on regional or country-level studies and time periods for years after 1950. Here, the authors introduce a new dataset reporting annual infant mortality rates for all states in the world, based on the Correlates of War state system list between 1816 and 2002. They discuss past research programs using infant mortality rates in conflict studies and describe the dataset by exploring its geographic and temporal coverage. Next, they explain some of the limitations of the dataset as well as issues associated with the data themselves. Finally, they suggest some research areas that might benefit from the use of this dataset. This
new dataset is the most comprehensive source on infant mortality rates currently available to social science researchers.

http://www.anessakimball.com/docs/research/InfantMortalityRate_articlemanuscript.pdf

Using the Internet to Predict the Future

I blogged recently about the predictive power (or not) of Twitter: from marketing to finance; and X-Factor to elections. While there may be skepticism about the predictive power of social networks; (perhaps more so for finance than for marketing/elections/popular culture); even when using an ostensibly professional network such as Twitter; there is no doubt that the medium produces a lot of user-generated information. However, Twitter-users are a select sample: a point emphasised in a recent study by Yahoo! Research. Nonetheless, the production, flow, and consumption of information will undoubtedly be an interesting area of economic research to follow in the future. Indeed, such information is not confined to networks such as Twitter; the whole internet is a veritable goldmine of potentially predictive data.

This possibility has been tapped into before by researchers using Google Trends. I posted on the old Geary blog about a comparison of Google Trends data with polls, bookmakers' odds and prediction markets (based on the British Election): which showed that it is important to be careful when interpreting search data. In particular, I noted before that it is important to distinguish between "interest" and "intent". It is clear that understanding more about search is a big challenge: for the search-engine based advertising business, and for social scientists. Search data is (or should be) interesting to academics; principally because we don't ask people for the information that they provide in search queries. No matter how well-designed surveys are, there will always be things in the ether, trends in society, that will potentially appear in search data first.

Of course, anyone interested in predicting the future should be poring over search data, social-network data, and whatever else they can find on the internet. That is exactly what a company called Recorded Future does. A recent article in the New York Times says:

"A company called Recorded Future looks at 100,000 Web pages an hour, scanning across 50,000 sources that include everything from Securities and Exchange Commission filings to Twitter comments. The idea is to look for statements about the future, like notice of an annual meeting or predictions about when a product might be released, look at past developments and then create a temporal index that suggests trends... its clients have included government agencies and banks. Its products include a $9,000-a-month service for hedge funds that plugs Recorded Future’s insights into their trading networks... (it) also started offering a Web-based version of its product on a subscription basis for $149 a month."

According to the NYT article: "two... key competitors in the Web-based predictions business (are) Palantir Technologies and Quid. Aside from those companies, the open-source statistical programming language known as R is being used as a cheap way to make statistical inference in our data-drenched world; a company called Revolution Analytics sells a commercial version to financial companies and manufacturers, among others."

Wired Magazine ran a piece on Recorded Future last month; saying:

"They aren't traders... but if you'd started using Recorded Future's predictions to buy US stocks on January 1, 2009, you would have made an annual return of 56.69 per cent. (The S&P 500 had an annualised return of 17.22 per cent over the same period.) Between May 13 and August 5 this year, as markets behaved with vertiginous abandon, their strategy returned 10.4 per cent; in contrast, the S&P 500 lost 9.9 per cent of its value. They're data experts: computer scientists, statisticians and experts in linguistics. And in the data, they think, lies the future."

As the promos say: "unleash all that mankind knows about the future". It's what they used to call "the wisdom of crowds".

Postscript: The Salfordian reports that: "the Living Earth Simulator Project (LES) aims to ‘simulate everything’ on the planet, using anything from tweets to government statistics to map out social trends and predict the next economic crisis... The European Commission has... put the Living Earth Simulator at the top of its shortlist for £900m in funding." Also, DCU PhD graduate Adam Bermingham won this year's Irish Software Association award for a student project with the greatest commercial potential. Adam researched, designed and implemented a real-time sentiment monitoring system, SentiSense, to determine how people value different types of opinion when they are monitoring real-time social media content.

Nominal Wage Rigidity

This is a staggering graph, taken from Krugman's recent article on lessons from Europe for economic theory. I am not surprised by nominal wage rigidity but to see it so starkly really makes one think.

Philip Glass: Statistical Control

From the film "Fog of War".

Lawyers and Economic Growth

Certain aspects of the legal profession get a lot of stick, some would say rightly so. While reading Robert Frank's Luxury Fever recently I came across this paper which suggests that this prejudice has an empirical basis, more lawyers reduce growth.

The Allocation of Talent: Implications for Growth

Kevin M. Murphy, Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny

Abstract

A country's most talented people typically organize production by others, so they can spread their ability advantage over a larger scale. When they start firms, they innovate and foster growth, but when they become rent seekers, they only redistribute wealth and reduce growth. Occupational choice depends on returns to ability and to scale in each sector, on market size, and on compensation contracts. In most countries, rent seeking rewards talent more than entrepreneurship does, leading to stagnation. Our evidence shows that countries with a higher proportion of engineering college majors grow faster; whereas countries with a higher proportion of law concentrators grow more slowly.

Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1991, Volume106, Issue2, Pp. 503-530

Ensuring the Data Rich Future of the Social Sciences

Ensuring the Data Rich Future of the Social Sciences

Citation:

King, Gary. "Ensuring the Data Rich Future of the Social Sciences." Science 331, no. 11 February (2011): 719-721. copy at http://j.mp/mw64M8

Export

Abstract:

Massive increases in the availability of informative social science data are making dramatic progress possible in analyzing, understanding, and addressing many major societal problems. Yet the same forces pose severe challenges to the scientific infrastructure supporting data sharing, data management, informatics, statistical methodology, and research ethics and policy, and these are collectively holding back progress. I address these changes and challenges and suggest what can be done.

Publisher's copy:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/719.full

Misunderstandings Among Experimentalists and Observationalists about Causal Inference

Misunderstandings Among Experimentalists and Observationalists about Causal Inference

Citation:

Imai, Kosuke, Gary King, and Elizabeth Stuart. "Misunderstandings Among Experimentalists and Observationalists about Causal Inference." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 171, part 2 (2008): 481-502. copy at http://j.mp/mlSzFA

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Abstract:

We attempt to clarify, and suggest how to avoid, several serious misunderstandings about and fallacies of causal inference in experimental and observational research. These issues concern some of the most basic advantages and disadvantages of each basic research design. Problems include improper use of hypothesis tests for covariate balance between the treated and control groups, and the consequences of using randomization, blocking before randomization, and matching after treatment assignment to achieve covariate balance. Applied researchers in a wide range of scientific disciplines seem to fall prey to one or more of these fallacies, and as a result make suboptimal design or analysis choices. To clarify these points, we derive a new four-part decomposition of the key estimation errors in making causal inferences. We then show how this decomposition can help scholars from different experimental and observational research traditions better understand each other’s inferential problems and attempted solutions.

Brendan Walsh on happiness and the Irish economy

Well-being and Economic Conditions in Ireland
Brendan Walsh*
School of Economics, University College, Dublin
(E-mail: Brendan.m.walsh@ucd.ie)
Date of draft: December 2011

Abstract: By European standards Ireland ranks high on many non-economic indicators of well-being. This paper explores how macroeconomic conditions have affected a range of these indicators. Time series data are used to explore the association between unemployment, inflation, and the level and growth rate of real income on the one hand and measures of subjective well-being and markers of mental health on the other. Over the longer term, 1975-2011, there was no upward trend in self-reported life satisfaction despite the secular improvement in living standards. While higher unemployment reduced life satisfaction over the first half of this period, its effect was weaker in later years. The rate of inflation has not had a significant effect on life satisfaction. There is no evidence that admission rates to psychiatric hospitals are affected by changes in economic conditions. However, higher unemployment is linked to higher suicide rates among younger males, although its effect appears to have weakened during the current recession. Finally, the recent rise in unemployment has had a much smaller impact on the birth rate than that due to the recession of the early 1980s. Overall, the impact of the current recession on the well-being indicators studied here has been surprisingly small.

Key words: Well-being indicators, Mental health, Suicide, Birth rate, Unemployment, Inflation.

New IZA Working Paper: Family Background, Self-Confidence and Economic Outcomes

IZA DP No. 6117

Antonio Filippin, Marco Paccagnella:

Family Background, Self-Confidence and Economic Outcomes

Abstract:
In this paper we analyze the role played by self-confidence, modeled as beliefs about one's ability, in shaping task choices. We propose a model in which fully rational agents exploit all the available information to update their beliefs using Bayes' rule, eventually learning their true type. We show that when the learning process does not convergence quickly to the true ability level, even small differences in initial confidence can result in diverging patterns of human capital accumulation between otherwise identical individuals. As long as initial differences in the level of self-confidence are correlated with the socioeconomic background (as a large body of empirical evidence suggests), self-confidence turns out to be a channel through which education and earnings inequalities are transmitted across generations. Our theory suggests that cognitive tests should take place as early as possible, in order to avoid that systematic differences in self-confidence among equally talented people lead to the emergence of gaps in the accumulation of human capital.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp6117.pdf

SIRE WORK AND WELL-BEING WORKSHOP

SIRE WORK AND WELL-BEING WORKSHOP 
University of Stirling, Venue: the Court Room
Friday 9 December 2011

12:30-5.15pm, followed by reception
Rapporteur: David Blanchflower

12.30 – 1.30 Lunch
1:30 – 3.00   Presentations on the theme of ‘subjective well-being’:
Felix Fitzroy and David Ulph (St Andrews):  “So far so Good:  Age, Happiness, and
Relative Income”
Liam Delaney (Stirling): “Day Reconstruction Methods: Stress and Decision Making”
David Bell (Stirling): “Well-being and Place”

3.00 – 3.30 Coffee

3.30 – 5.00   Presentations on the theme of ‘poverty, health and inequality’:
Anikó Biró (Edinburgh): “Poverty of Widows in Europe”
R. McQuaid and R. Raeside (Napier): “Health and Wellbeing of Employees In Employee-Owned Businesses”
Paul Allinson (Dundee): “The Longitudinal Analysis of Health Inequalities”

5.00-5.15 Closing remarks by David Blanchflower, followed by a short talk on “The Pulse of the Nation”

5.15 Reception

Format
In order to allow the maximum amount of time for discussion, presentations will be limited to a maximum of 25 minutes, and presenters will be asked to limit their remarks to the key questions and issues; an outline of the methodology;  and the key conclusions.  Copies of papers will be available for those wishing to pursue the details.

Registration
If you wish to attend the workshop, please send an e-mail to Lennie Jing (lennie.jing@stir.ac.uk) including details of any special diet requirements. Participants will receive a confirmation and further details on travel. SIRE shall reimburse travel expenses (limited to a second class rail and bus fare) for academics affiliated with a Scottish University Economics Department. Car pooling for a minimum of 2 people is also acceptable. A claim form will be provided on arrival.

Further information is available from the organisers David Bell (d.n.f.bell@stir.ac.uk) or David Ulph
(du1@st-andrews.ac.uk)

Call for Paper: Behavioral Health Economics

Health Psychology has a call for papers for a special issue of Health Psychology on behavioral health economics.

Immigration in Ireland: just how tolerant are we?

The recent comments by the (now former) Mayor of Naas brought to the fore the issue of racism in Ireland. There was an understandable furore over the remarks and the media was alive with responses and reactions, much of it anecdotal.

So what do we actually know? There is actually some quite good data on Irish people’s attitudes to immigrants and immigration generally courtesy of the European Social Survey (ESS), a population representative survey carried out every two years since 2002. There are 4 waves currently available – the 2010 data for Ireland should be available soon.

The ESS asked respondents six questions about immigrants, three about how many immigrants should be allowed in (depending on race, country of origin etc) and three more general questions about whether the respondents thought immigration were good for the country in different domains. Using these six questions I created an overall measure of whether people were for or against immigrants/ immigration using factor analysis. This ignores variation between questions, of course, but the idea is that there is some underlying latent variable to which the answers to these questions are realizations of. This may not do justice to the complexity of the issues and to people’s attitudes but for the present purposes, it seems a reasonable start.

Using this, one can ask what is the trend in Irish people’s attitudes to immigrants and what sort of people are more or less sympathetic to immigrants. In some cases the answers might be unsurprising (though always good to know) but I was surprised by some.

Technical issue: the measure (let’s call it “xenophobia” for simplicity) is normalized to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. I use linear multiple regression to see what factors predict this variable, holding the other factors constant. Using this large representative sample of nearly 6000 individuals allows us to examine a range of factors with some precision.

First question: what is the trend? There was a significant downward trend with xenophobia lower in 2004 and lower still in 2006. However this was reversed by almost the same degree in 2008. My conjecture is that we will see this reversal continued when the 2010 data becomes available.

Second question: what sort of people are less sympathetic to immigrants? Well women are for start: their “xenophobia” is higher by .17 of a standard deviation – the same size as the rise that was observed in 2008 as it happens. I had no prior about this but I have been told that this is contrary to the conventional wisdom. Let’s hear for the guys. Younger people are also very slightly more xenophobic. The very religious, by contrast, are less xenophobic (by .07 of a standard deviation). Bless ‘em.

Those who are more educated have a lower level of xenophobia (.07 of a standard deviation for each year of education). The same is true of those parents who were more educated, particularly if they were graduates. There are a number of explanations for the first of these two associations: I draw your attention to interesting work on this topic by Kevin O’ Rourke & Richard Sinnott who use trade theory to predict how attitudes to immigrants may depend on skill levels. To the extent that many immigrants are low skilled, one would expect low skilled natives to be less welcoming about the competition. An alternative explanation is that education makes people more liberal or open-minded. I suspect that it is a bit of both.

Further light on this question is thrown by an interesting question in the ESS which asks people how well they are coping financially. Those who report that they are finding it difficult to cope financially, report a higher level of “xenophobia”: by about .2 of a standard deviation. Given that the numbers in this category must have risen dramatically since 2008 it is reasonable to extrapolate that there will be increasing antipathy to immigrants, driven by greater financial anxiety.

This is not an exhaustive investigation of what predicts our attitudes to immigrants. I haven’t reported some of the other factors that I found to be significant – or any of the ones that were not significant. But it shows up, I think, some interesting patterns which deserve more thorough study. One would also need to explore the degree to which “Race” and “immigration” are distinct issues (the data permits this).

Questionable research practises in psychological research: some evidence

The ever interesting British Psychological Society Research Digest discusses here an article forthcoming in Psychological Science which documents questionable research practises in psychology based on an anonymous survey of 2000 academics. It comes on foot of the revelation of serious and persistent fraud by a social psychologist in the Netherlands.

Research in economics differs from psychology in number of ways. In particular, we are much less likely to collect our own data and less likely to do experiments. Nonetheless there are plenty of oportunities for dubious if not outright fraudulent practises. It would be good if someone tried to quantify this.

I suspect that the selective reporting of results, cherry-picking, is the most common form of malpractice. As far as I know, when people try to replicate others’ econometric results the track record is not good.

IEA Call For Papers

THE IRISH ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
Annual Conference
26 - 27 APRIL, 2012.
Institute of Bankers, Dublin.
CALL FOR PAPERS.

The Twenty-sixth annual conference of the Irish Economic Association will be held on 26th and 27th April, 2012 at the Institute of Bankers, North Wall Quay. Dublin. The Association invites submissions of papers to be considered for the conference programme. Papers may be on any area in Economics, Finance and Econometrics.

The 2012 Conference will run over 2 days, starting at 9am on the morning of Thursday 26th, and finishing before 7pm on Friday 27th. As it is not based in a hotel, accommodation arrangements will be separate from the main conference registration.

For the full Call for Papers, click here.