Australian Economic Review - Behavioural Economics

The Australian Economic Review has a number of nice features including a student's section.

A recent issue includes a review of behavioural economics "for the student"

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119881675/issue

thanks to Colm for pointing this out

Economics and Psychology Course: UCD and TCD

Below is a link to the course I will be giving in UCD and TCD next years. This website is evolving rapidly and I am currently in the process of linking to readings, updating lectures and so. Anyone who is interested or wants to comment on some of this, please feel free to get in contact

http://geary.ucd.ie/econpsych/

Do Blogs Have Personalities?

According to http://www.typealyzer.com/ they do. Apparently this blog is of the type - ISTJ (The Duty Fulfillers): "The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever. The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it."

The diagram below shows what parts of the brain are dominant during writing on this blog, according to Typealyzer. However, I take all of this with some caution. According to a similar engine (GenderAnalyzer), it is 63% likely that this blog is written by women. That is incorrect. However, some trials with other blogs predict gender correctly.

Do Younger Students Do Better?

In a recent IZA working paper, Billari and Pellizzari show that the youngest students in an Italian university perform better compared to their oldest peers, particularly in the most technical subjects. They also find that the youngest students perform slightly better in cognitive tests and also appear to have less active social lives: they are less likely to do sports, go to discos and have romantic relationships. Based on this, Billari and Pellizzari suggest:

(i) a profile of cognitive development that might be decreasing already around age 20; (ii) psychological relative age effects that lead the youngest in a cohort to develop social skills (self-esteem, leadership) at a slower pace

Their conclusion is that younger students have less active social lives and devote more time to studying (which they say is backed up by additional evidence from the PISA study).

Where Would You Live in London?

Would it depend on the price? Or the distance to work? Or both? You would probably find these travel-time maps very useful. They were developed by Chris Lightfoot at MySociety.Org after the UK Department of Transport approached MySociety about experimenting with novel ways of re-using public sector data. One particular set of intearctive maps allows users to set both the maximum time they’re willing to commute, and the median house price they’re willing or able to pay. Slide the sliders on the last link to see constrained minimisation at work --- with the BBC Television Centre and Olympic Stadium as the focal points.

On the main page, the same can be done with the Department of Transport close to the centre of London. Try setting a maximum travel time here of one hour, and a maximum price of £500,000. You'll see that Chelsea/Kensington is blacked out, as is Hampstead Heath. (House prices are based on house sales recorded in the Land Registry for a large random sample of London postcodes, inflation adjusted to be the price as at December 2006. Journey times to work are for a week day in 2007. They were generated by screen scraping the Transport for London and Transport Direct journey planner websites.)

MySociety makes open source software, so you can get the source code for the scripts that made these maps, and MySociety will provide copies of the OpenStreetMap base mapping. (Other data requires permission from the owners). MySociety is a non-profit with a community of volunteers and (paid) open source coders. It runs most of the best-known democracy and transparency websites in the UK. One of its initiatives that blog readers may find interesting is PledgeBank. This allows people to set up a campaign or a committed behaviour where they say "I’ll do something, but only IF other people will too."

Heckman on Irish Education Policy

James Heckman speaking on Irish radio on Irish education and theories of child development

here