Population Association of America Conference

Papers and sessions from this event to take place in late March are up on the following website. There is an immense amount of interesting material up here including drafts of papers. One session that will be of interest to people looking at early conditions and later health is linked here. The usual caveat that conference papers represent earlier stage work than published peer review papers should apply but this is a provocative finding worth looking at in the context of the natural experiment literature.

The 1918 U.S. Influenza Pandemic as a Natural Experiment, Revisited

Ryan P. Brown, Duke University

Douglas Almond's use of the 1918 U.S. influenza pandemic as a natural experiment led to the seminal works on the subject of in utero health's impact on later life outcomes. The identification strength of his work, though, is driven by the inherent natural experiment supposition of random assignment. By using data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Censuses, this study investigates this keystone assumption and shows that the families of the "treatment" cohort were significantly less literate and economically prosperous than the families of the "control" group. Additionally, when proxies for childhood environment are added to Almond’s analyses, his findings are appreciably reduced in magnitude and significance. This research implies that failing to control for the first order effect of parent's education and wealth on a child's long-run outcomes, eliminates Almond's ability to use the 1918 U.S. influenza pandemic to make direct inferences regarding fetal health's impact on long-term wellbeing.

Brooks on the Great Stagnation

Stagnation is what occurs when all the low-hanging fruit of economic development has been picked. David Brooks gives a pithy account of Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation. In the Irish case, we had two decades of huge improvement in childhood conditions in the 1940s and 1950s, which were low-hanging fruit to some extent, and two decades of substantial increases in the educational attainment at secondary school level following that. We also had rapid infrastructural improvement and increases in college attendance throughout the 1990s, combined with many tax advantages to encourage investment in Ireland. We probably had the equivalent of Cowen's Great Stagnation by the beginning of the century. Our solution to arresting the decline, unfortunately, turned out a little pear-shaped.

Glaeser Interview on Improving Cities

The always-good Economix blog has an interview with Ed Glaeser on the nature of differences between cities and how to improve living standards and innovation in cities. Glaeser's book is on my reading list for whenever I can get my hands on it, which will be soon. Below is a decontextualised teaser from the interview but hopefully enough to motivate you to read on.

I believe that the best local economic development strategy, at whatever time frame, is to work on attracting smart, entrepreneurial people and then, more or less, get out of their way.

Killing Research: Employment Control Framework

Colm Harmon, Director of Geary, has a good post on Ferdinand's blog on his views on the increasingly difficult situation relating to hiring researchers in Irish universities. We are in the land of anecdotal impressions but for a lot of the people I work with, salary reductions were mostly taken on the chin. If you want to see people blue with anger or just purely despondent around here then put stupid self-defeating obstacles in the way of doing serious research, obstacles that as Colm points out can lead to serious delays in projects, reputational damage, funding having to be turned down etc.,.

Verbal Paradata: How Voice Pitch Can Predict if People Will Answer Survey Questions

From Wikipedia: "The paradata of a survey are data about the process by which the survey data were collected. Example paradata... include the times of day interviews were conducted, how long the interviews took, how many times there were contacts with each interviewee or attempts to contact the interviewee, the reluctance of the interviewee, and the mode of communication (such as phone, Web, email, or in person). Thus there are paradata about each observation in the survey. These attributes affect the costs and management of a survey, the findings of a survey, evaluations of interviewers, and inferences one might make about non-respondents."

This paper by Adam Safir, Tamara Black and Rebecca Steinbach notes that paradata is not always made available to data-analysts; therefore, having it to hand is a considerable advantage. This study by Dirk Heerwegh shows that respondents with less stable attitudes need more time to respond to an attitudinal question. Active Management is an initiative at Statistics Canada to use paradata to improve the data collection process in surveys. Jim O’Reilly from Westat reviews recent uses of paradata here. He discusses the U.S. Census Bureau's Performance and Data Analysis (PANDA) system that has been implemented for the 2007 American Housing Survey. Key goals of the system are to provide early warnings of interviewer difficulty with key survey concepts and possible falsification.

This dissertation by Matthew Jans (University of Michigan) goes one step further. "Exchanges between interviewers and respondents were transcribed and coded for respondent speech and question-answering behavior. Voice pitch was extracted mechanically using the Praat software. Speech, voice, and question-answering behaviors are used as verbal paradata... Results show that verbal paradata can distinguish between income nonrespondents and respondents, even when only using verbal paradata that occur before the income question. Income nonrespondents have lower affective involvement and express more negativity before the income question... There are... potential extensions to interviewer training and design of interventions that could produce more complete income data." Matthew Jan's dissertation "Verbal Paradata and Survey Error: Respondent Speech, Voice, and Question-Answering Behavior Can Predict Income Item Nonresponse" is available here.

Tiger, Tiger burning bright?

Even if, like me, you are not that interested in golf you may be aware of Tiger Woods' stuttering return to form after his recent break from the game. Rory McIlroy caused something of a stir because of remarks to the effect that players aren't so intimidated by the once all conquering player. A catty remark? Well, it turns out that there is econometric evidence to support this. It would be interesting to know whether this result generalizes to other domains. For example, in academia, does the presense of a "superstar" cause people to raise or lower their game?

Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars
Jennifer Brown
Managers use internal competition to motivate worker effort, yet economic theory suggests that the benefits of competition may depend critically on workers relative abilities- large differences in skill may reduce competitors efforts. This paper uses panel data from professional golfers and finds that the presence of a superstar in a rank-order tournament is associated with lower competitor performance. On average, higher- skill PGA golfers first-round scores are approximately 0.2 strokes higher when Tiger Woods participates, relative to when Woods is absent. The overall superstar effect for tournaments is approximately 0.8 strokes.
The adverse superstar effect increases when Woods is playing well and disappears during Woods' weaker periods. There is no evidence that reduced performance is due to "riskier" play.