Cowen: house price slump is not unwelcome

Finance Minister Brian Cowen has said that the current turmoil in the property market is "neither unwelcome nor surprising" despite plummeting house prices around the country. The comments were reported in a story from today's Irish Independent:

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/cowen-house-slump-is-not-unwelcome-1070012.html

House prices have fallen by more than E9,000 or 3pc since the start of the year, according to the latest edition of the Permanent TSB / ESRI house price index.

The average price paid for a house in Ireland in July now stands at E301,267 - down 0.7pc since the end of July last year.

Niall O'Grady, Head of Marketing at Permanent TSB bank said the overall picture is one of a housing market "marking time" after a decade of phenomenal growth.

http://www.fxcentre.com/news.asp?1824288

The story in the Independent also says that: "The difficulties in the Irish property market were highlighted last week at a new housing development in Delgany, Co Wicklow, where people who bought houses for €700,000 have been shocked to learn that new houses of similar design on the same estate are now being sold for €595,000 -- a drop of €105,000".

The Causal Effect of Studying on Academic Performance

A new NBER paper by Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner, "The Causal Effect of Studying on Academic Performance", examines the causal effect of studying on grade performance using an Instrumental Variable estimator. Their approach takes advantage of a unique natural experiment - they have collected unique longitudinal data that provides detailed information about all aspects of this experiment. The results suggest that human capital accumulation is not predetermined at the time of college entrance.

Some Talks This Week at the Centre

Tuesday 4th September 2pm - Wen Zhang, UCD Geary Institute, "Friend or Foe: A latent structural equation model of non-cooperative strategic behaviour with evidence from game-show data"

Thursday 6th September 3pm - Alex Gillespie, Stirling University, 'Intersubjectivity: Searching for a methodology'.

Friday: Irish Society of New Economists.

All events are in the UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room.

spotting the end of a housing boom

the recent paper below by Robert Shiller of Yale examines historical housing booms and busts

http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d16a/d1610.pdf

webographic questions

One of the most interesting papers at the MESS conference was this one below by Schonlau, Kapteyn and Van Soest. Webographic Questions were discussed quite a bit in general throughout the event.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR506/

Abstract

Inference from Web surveys may be affected by non-random selection of Web survey participants. One approach to reduce selection bias is to use propensity scores and a parallel phone survey. This approach uses demographic and additional so-called Webographic or lifestyle variables to balance observed differences between Web survey respondents and phone survey respondents. Here the authors investigate some of the Webographic questions used by Harris Interactive, a commercial company specializing in Web surveys. Their Webographic questions include choice of activities such as reading, sports and traveling and perceptions about what would constitute a violation of privacy. They use data from an existing probability sample of respondents over 40 who are interviewed over the phone, and a corresponding sample of respondents interviewed over the Web. They find that Webographic questions differentiate between on and offline populations differently than demographic questions. In general, propensity score adjustment of variables in the Web survey works quite well for a number of variables of interest (including home ownership and labor force participation). For two outcomes, (having emotional problems and often experiencing pain) the process of adjusting for demographic variables leads to the discovery of an instance of Simpson’s paradox, implying a differential mode effect or differential selection. They interpret this mainly as the result of a mode effect, where sensitive questions are more likely to receive a positive response over the Internet than over the phone.

The Economic Value of Teeth

Sherry Glied - Columbia University and NBER
Matthew Neidell - Columbia University

http://www.bu.edu/econ/seminars/health/spg07/teeth_wages_glied_neidell.pdf

January 2007

Abstract: Healthy teeth are a vital and visible component of general well-being, but there is little systematic evidence to demonstrate its effect on labor market outcomes. In this paper, we examine the nature and magnitude of the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes by exploiting variation in access to fluoridated water during childhood. The politics surrounding the adoption of water fluoridation by local water districts suggests exposure to fluoride during childhood is arguably exogenous to other factors affecting earnings. We find that children who grew up in communities with fluoridated water earn approximately 4% more as adults than children who did not. The effect is larger for women than men, and is almost exclusively concentrated amongst those from families of low socioeconomic status (SES). We find that occupational sorting and consumer discrimination explains the mean impact of oral health on earnings, but employer discrimination explains the impact for low SES individuals.