(Perceived) Returns to Schooling and the SES gradient

Robert Jensen from Brown has an interesting paper in the latest QJE. An ungated version can be found here. It finds that students' perception of the returns to schooling is biased downwards. The key result is that providing more accurate information significantly lowers the drop-out rate for wealthier students, but not for those less well-off.

Social Status and Health

This is a tricky area due to various concerns about endogeneity etc, but there are some papers which provide experimental evidence for the relationship between social status and susceptibility to illness. In each of the following participants were exposed to the cold virus and tracked to examine which individuals developed symptoms. The first, Sociability and Susceptibility to the Common Cold (Cohen et al 2003), found that sociability was negatively associated with the probability of developing a cold following infection. The second, Objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Susceptibility to the Common Cold (Cohen et al 2008), found that subjective SES was negatively associated with the development of symptoms. Particularly interesting was the fact that this was independent of objective SES. There was some evidence that the relationship was mediated by sleeping patterns. You still have to wonder exactly what “sociability” and socioeconomic status are measuring, but interesting all the same.

Social Emotions and Intertemporal Choice

David DeSteno outlines theory and evidence suggesting that ‘‘Hot’’ emotional mechanisms build social and economic capital. In this interesting and sensible social interpretation of decision making over time he reviews evidence demonstrating the ability of "specific, socially oriented emotions to facilitate behaviors designed to build social and economic capital in the long run".

There are a few gems in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science actually link here

The article by Linda Gallo and colleagues on the Reserve Capacity Model and Socioeconomic Status and Health is the first time this promising model has started to come together, from my reading anyway.

From a practical standpoint for anyone interested in research with older populations, the uptake of biomedical devices, and future technologies, the article by Charness and Boot on barriers to technology usage in the elderly is also worth a read.

The article on alternatives to randomized experiments by Stephen West is another interesting one.

Socioeconomic Status and Health

From the NBER Website

New Paper Reviewing Socioeconomic Status and Health by Cutler, Lleras-Muney, and Vogl

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w14333

---- Abstract -----

This paper reviews the evidence on the well-known positive association between socioeconomic status and health. We focus on four dimensions of socioeconomic status -- education, financial resources, rank, and race and ethnicity -- paying particular attention to how the mechanisms linking health to each of these dimensions diverge and coincide. The extent to which socioeconomic advantage causes good health varies, both across these four dimensions and across the phases of the lifecycle. Circumstances in early life play a crucial role in determining the co-evolution of socioeconomic status and health throughout adulthood. In adulthood, a considerable part of the association runs from health to socioeconomic status, at least in the case of wealth. The diversity of pathways casts doubt upon theories that treat socioeconomic status as a unified concept.