boys educational outcomes

A few papers that we have looked at in the last few months have indicated that boys tend to respond to immediate incentives to a greater extent than girls. i was re-reading the paper "Patience among children" by Bettinger and Slonim. They show that boys are markedly more impatient than girls, as measured by choice behaviour in a field experiment involving incentives. In particular, young boys may need educational incentives that give immediate rewards (rewards that they actually like!). The literature on domain specific discounting indicates that money itself may or may not be the incentive but it strikes me that if it is case that boys are falling behind, one hypothesis is that the immediate cost that they get from studying very hard is relatively higher than the discounted benefit. The benefit itself may be roughly the same and I haven't seen much evidence that returns to education are lower for boys than for girls. However, the discounting process may be different. In terms of the feminisation of teaching argument, i suppose this could be seen as different costs of study, with the idea being that a more feminised subject matter would impose a higher study cost on the boys in terms of them having to contend with subject matter less interesting to them. One argument for the role of gender composition is that it is more plausible to suggest that this has varied over the last few years than it is to suggest that relative discounting processes have varied. as with all this discussion though, it should be borne in mind that outcomes for males are improving in almost every conceivable domain and therefore, looking for reasons why "boys are failing" etc., is not the correct language. The relative changes in gender performance in school exams is an interesting question though.

Recent RAND paper on advertising's effect on adolescents

RAND have recently published a paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health showing very large effects of alcohol advertising on adolescent alcohol consumption. The news release is below. This builds on earlier work that they did looking at effective exposure to alcohol advertising. An Irish paper looked at this using qualitative analysis and showed very high degrees of brand awareness among 13 year olds. Proponents of total alcohol advertising bans cite this type of evidence to further their argument. The current code in Ireland prohibits any marketing to children but clearly if you are marketing constantly to adults, it is difficult to see how children are not going to pick up the message, particularly given that they look to their older peers for role models. Once again, we have little causal information in Ireland but apriori the case must be seen as strong and worth investigation.
http://www.rand.org/news/press.07/05.03.html

nba referees and the irish public sector

A paper that is generating a lot of debate at the moment in the US is linked below. It looks at racial biases in NBA refereeing decisions. The Freakonomics blog has some interesting discussion about it and Levitt and O'Donohue have written a similar paper about racial biases in arrests.

http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/Papers/NBARace.pdf

It would be interesting to think of rigorous ways of looking at such biases in the Irish context. As well as race, gender is of course an interesting area. There is a lot of work done in Ireland on gender discrimination. Perhaps someone can correct me if Im wrong but i have never seen a gender paper in Ireland that has anything approaching causal inference and I strongly suspect that we have made a lot of policy on the basis of correlations and ideological preferences dressed up as science. Based on what i have been reading (admittedly just for the last ten minutes to get me psyched to go back to my real work!), a couple of issues come to mind:

(a) does the gender composition of decision makers (e.g. police giving tickets, lecturers marking scripts, committees hiring staff etc.,) have an effect on the gender distribution of outcomes? In what domains of activity is this particularly relevant in Ireland.

In the abscence of further information, it is clearly non-sense to say that the reason there are more female nurses is that women discriminate against men or that the reason there are more men in finance is that men discriminate against women. We need something more causal.

(b) continuing from a previous post, how will the occupational segregation by gender affect welfare outcomes. Will a predominately female teaching profession produce worse outcomes for boys. We have already argued that simply observing a correlation between feminisation of teaching and declining relative position of boys in education is completetly unrigorous. We would need more to go on before we could even begin to claim that. Looking from the other side, does the fact that the Dail is mostly male have negative implications for women? can we find clear differences in the decisions made by political representatives as a function of gender. The gender quota system introduced by some of the parties might be a (albeit fairly noisy) way to look at some of this.

(c) Can we find clear causal effects of the imposition of public sector gender reforms in Ireland on gender composition of hiring and promotion? Can we find any evidence that this either improved or detracted from the performance of the agencies involved. My unfounded hunch would be that they (almost by definition) do have an effect on gender composition of hiring but i dont believe either the story that women are somehow better at certain jobs and thus productivity improves or that women have multiple objectives outside work and thus productivity worsens. My (again unfounded) hunch is that public sector employment by and large attracts more skilled applicants than is needed because of the extra benefits in terms of job security and conditions. You would have to go very far down the distribution to have a marked negative effect on productivity. The reforms probably represent a redistribution of "cushy jobs" from men to women. Given that us men probably dont do our fair share outside the job market, maybe this is fair enough. The big losers are the altruistic men at the margins of good public sector employment who just fail to get in. My other suspicion here is that focusing men's minds on gender quotas can lead to an exagerration of their effect.

smoking cessation

an interesting new report on demand for smoking cessation products on the RWJF website. We still have over 20% of adults puffing away. It would be interesting to think how the new behavioural economics literature would have insights in to these types of interventions.

I am working on a note about the linkage between the leisure sector in Ireland (including tourism, sport, pubs etc.,), time preferences, social capital and public policy. It builds on a lot of the policy work i did in the ESRI where we effectively did an audit on a lot of this but examines all of this within the framework of discounting and behavioural economics. I will send it to B+F in the next few weeks but would be good to chat about some of this in terms of potential research hypotheses.

here

"Get out of my way!" - Rage

The pace of life in cities around the world is literally getting faster, a study has shown. Psychologists have measured the speed at which people walk and discovered a 10% increase in the last decade. Singapore is the busiest city apparently.

Here.

Your Round, Make Mine a Low Strength!

Here is a story about how lower strength beers (3.5% alc) are being launched in Australia. I also heard about a similar launch in the UK when listening to a UK radio station last week. I think the UK product is actually going to be a 2% alcohol content beer.

It would be interesting to assess the behaviour of the people who switch over to these beers. Will they drink less alcohol, or will they drink just as much alcohol as before and develop obesity problems? Or might they start to drink more frequently given that their perceptions of a lower strength beer might be different?