Reading Group

In the last reading group we went through

Suicide and the Economy:

(i) the Ecological Fallacy is something that needs to be guarded against in explaining regional rates. See the work below by Gary King

http://gking.harvard.edu/projects/ecinf.shtml

(ii) the role of psychological services and policy reforms in generating suicide rates was discussed

Welfare and Well-Being

(i) We talked about child consumption and well-being. Time inconsistency is one reason why children's consumption may not be a valid marker of well-being. We discussed issues with constructing measures of child well-being. We also discussed the determinants of child well-being including the extent to which child well-being is determined by factors outside of the market.

(ii) I mentioned the work of Partha Dasgupta who writes on the limitations of traditional economic welfare analysis

http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/dasgupta/

(iii) Amartya Sen's critique of welfare economics was also discussed.

(iv) The idea of multiple identities over time is discussed in the philosophical work of Derek Parfit. The article "reasons and persons" is worth reading if you are interested in these types of argument

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball2568/parfit/bibliography.htm

Life Expectancy and Wealth

(i) David Cutler's paper on the role of medical advances in improving life expectancy is below

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/cutler/files/cutler_miller_cities.pdf

(ii) Some other papers of Cutlers and of David Canning well worth reading in this vein include

"The Determinants of Mortality", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(3), Summer 2006, 97-120 (with Angus Deaton and Adriana Lleras-Muney).

David Canning, 2007. "Valuing Lives Equally and Welfare Economics," PGDA Working Papers 2707, Program on the Global Demography of Aging, revised

(iii) it would be incredibly interesting to examine the long run determinants of mortality in Ireland (say from 1860 to 2005). One project i am work on here does this for infant mortality but doing it more generally for life expectancy would also be fascinating.