Framework for Unification of Behavioural Sciences

A paper from a few years back by Herbert Gintnis

"Each of the behavioral disciplines contributes strongly to understanding human behavior. Taken separately and at face value, however, they offer partial, conflicting, and incompatible models. >From a scientific point of view, it is scandalous that this situation was tolerated throughout most of the Twentieth Century. Fortunately, there is currently a strong current of
unification based on both mathematical models and common methodological principles for gathering empirical data on human behavior and human nature."

Women and Men in Ireland

A recent CSO release - women are underrepresented in positions of authority. Men drop out of school at much higher rates and die a lot younger.

http://www.cso.ie/newsevents/pr_womenandmen2008.htm

TalentTank.ie provides free workers to firms

According to this news story, dozens of Irish companies have registered with TalentTank.ie, a new website that provides employers with direct access to hundreds of professionals offering their services free of charge. The founders of the website believe that it could help to get Ireland's struggling economy back on track.

Commenting on the initiative, one of the founders explains that "Individuals have the opportunity to network with potential employers while employers benefit from higher productivity without incurring the labour costs. This initiative will allow Irish businesses to become more competitive and begin to set the foundation for future growth. As these businesses grow, so too will the need for new employees."

Among the professionals already registered with TalentTank.ie to provide services free of charge are Accountants, Engineers, Architects, Sales and Marketing Consultants, Graphic and Web Designers, IT Consultants, Electricians, and Hotel and Catering workers.

Irish women less optimistic on economy?

Irish women are less optimistic about the general state of the economy and living conditions in Ireland than males, according to a survey carried out by Dublin-based digital research agency Sponge It. (Sponge It has a consumer panel of 3,000). More detail on the story is available here.

The survey shows that 65pc of males think Ireland is a better place to live than 10 years ago, compared to 56pc of females. Females are also less likely to make a major purchase in the next three months at 17pc, in comparison to 23pc of males. The are a number of possible motivations behind these answers; so what I can see from the research so far does not strictly indicate that Irish women are less optimistic on the economy.

Sarah A Gubbins will present on gender differences in the Irish Universities Study on Friday at Geary, and the findings may shed more light on gender differences in college students' optimism about the economy.

Missing Values Analysis with Solas

Further to my most recent post on missing values, I have read about another software package for dealing with missing values, called Solas. Solas was developed in conjunction with Prof. Donald B. Rubin from Harvard University, and features 6 different imputation techniques.

Anyone interested in this area might enjoy reading this memo by Rubin about using software for multiple imputation. There's lots of references. Also, there's an interesting case study here about the use of Solas at Statistics Denmark.

Biases in Self-Rated Heights

The purpose of this post is to alert researchers towards biases that arise when people self-report their height. I will contrast the way height is reported between two different surveys, the Health Survey for England and The British Household Panel Survey. The 2005 Health Survey for England reports heights objectively – as measured by a visiting nurse using specifically designed apparatus. Wave 14 of the British Household Panel Survey asks participants their heights subjectively. Both surveys specifically want measured height from participants not wearing shoes. In addition, both surveys are nationally representative when compared to the UK census. For the purposes I only look at adults aged over twenty born in England of white race or “British,” ethnicity. Results are split by gender and into year of birth cohorts.

Table 1.

Table 1 and the accompanying graphs display the degree of biases which take place when people self report their heights. In almost all cases individuals have higher self reported heights in comparison to their subjective heights. There are a number of potential reasons for this. Firstly, people may be rounding their heights. Subjective height from the 2005 BHPS is mostly measured in feet and inches (although participants were given the option to answer in centimeters). The results displayed above are consistent with the hypothesis that people round their heights up.

Examining the frequency distributions of both samples and sexes illustrate this “rounding,” effect. Objectively measured height from the Health Survey for England clearly follows a more normal distribution. The BHPS data is quite staggered and is more discrete than continuous. It also appear that males are more likely to round than females.

The rounding up hypothesis does not explain why the heights diverge for the later year of birth cohorts. This effect seems indicate that the over 60 age category systematically mis-remember their heights. It is widely known and observed that people shrink with age (Diacinti et al. (1995)). The results in table one are consistent with this hypothesis. They also suggest that the divergence between subjective and objective measures of heights are caused by older age cohorts recalling their heights from the early adult years and not taking into account that they may have shrunk over time.

The implications of this post are clear. Self-reported height is biased and researchers should be extremely careful in their analyses and interpretation of it.

Reference:
Diacinti, D., Acca, M., D'Erasmo, E., Tomei, E., Mazzuoli, G.F, “Aging Changes in Vertebral Morphometry,” Calcified Tissue International, 57 (1995), 426—429.

Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland

If anyone is interested, tomorrow evening there is a meeting of the Statistical & Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, starting at 6 pm, at the Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2.

The President, Dr Donal de Buitleir, will be in the chair when Mr Mark Turner (HSE) will present a paper titled "HealthStat: supporting high performance in the health system." More details here:

http://www.esri.ie/news_events/events/forthcoming_events/event_details/index.xml?id=219

Also, a note for your diaries: on the 13th May, Dr. Liam Delaney will be awarded with the Society's Barrington medal.

Again, the venue is the Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2. And the time will be 6pm. More details available here:

http://www.ssisi.ie/meeting.php

Spending money on others promotes happiness

Spending money on others promotes happiness
from Science

Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton

Although much research has examined the effect of income on happiness, we suggest that
how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn.
Specifically, we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive
impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this
hypothesis, we found that spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater
happiness both cross-sectionally (in a nationally representative survey study) and longitudinally
(in a field study of windfall spending). Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to
spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money
on themselves.

Causality and Econometrics

There have been various lectures and discussions on causality here over the last while, the culmination being Professor Heckman's session. Below are some background readings.

The starting point for discussion is a recent paper by Angus Deaton. This paper
was delivered as the Keynes lecture. Deaton argues strongly against the use of RCT and LATE methods on their own as useful tools for development analysis. A similar theme is picked up in the Heckman
Urzua paper below that.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/14690.html

http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp3980.html

Professor Heckman's ideas on causality are expressed in a recent International Statistical Review paper that is available below.


http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/13934.html

His work on Treatment effects with Vytlacil is developed in a number of handbook of econometrics articles available on his IDEAS page. A good paper is below:

http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v88y2006i3p389-432.html

The use of LATE is defended in the paper below by Guido Imbens, who along with Josh Angrist was a key figure in the development of these methods.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14896

Also, the work of Esther Duflo should be consulted in this regarded as a strong proponent of randomised trials in development analysis.

http://ideas.repec.org/e/pdu166.html

Emmanuel Saez

Worth thinking of some of these papers for the journal clubs.


This years Bates Clarke medal was awarded to Emmanuel Saez. Details of the award are below. Below that is his IDEAS page. The work that Saez is doing across areas like tax, social interactions, information provision and so on provides many good ideas that have relevance to policy. The award committee cite his contributions to areas of public economics like optimal tax theory, measurement of income distributions, field experiments in financial behaviour among other areas.

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA/clark_medal.htm

http://ideas.repec.org/e/psa117.html

The Labour Market in Recession

The ESRI is holding a conference this Thursday the 30th of April entitled “The Labour Market in Recession”. The speakers at the conference will discuss the latest evidence from research on how best to tackle the labour market implications of the current recession. Details are available at

http://www.esri.ie/news_events/events/forthcoming_events/event_details/index.xml?id=218

Stephen Kinsella on Matching in Labour Markets

Here is a theoretical (working) paper by Dr. Stephen Kinsella (from the University of Limerick) on matching in labour markets. Dr. Kinsella presented this paper yesterday at the Irish Economics Association. The matching process described can also be thought of as a mate choice problem, as discussed in the paper. We discussed the geographic distribution of single females to males in Ireland on the blog before, here.

For the love of God

A while back there were blog entry by me about a report released by the Iona Institute & written by Patricia Casey regarding the association between well-being and religiousity. I was quite critical since I think the literature surveyed (which tends to find a positive association if any) was essentially a correlation but appeared to be interpreted as causal i.e that religion made one better off. To paraphrase the great theologian, Fr Jack, "That would be an empirical matter". In the absence of some form of exogenous assignment of religion I don't see how these epidemiological analyses can tell us anything causal.
In the spirit of methodological ecumenism & in a moment of idleness I thought to consider the question of whether particular denominations are associated with greater happiness. Using the ESS (rounds 1 to 3) I regress happiness (on a 0 to 10 scale) on denomination, a measure of religiousity and a bunch of controls (which all behave sensibly, details on request).
Relative to the non-religious, Protestants are the big winners, in fact the only winners. Catholics and Jews are no better off. Orthodox Christians & Muslims are worse off. However there is a positive gradient to (self-reported) religiousity. Frequency of prayer doesn't kick-in & is not included.
The results are robust to choice of estimator: using ordered probit or a Tobit doesn't change things.

(1) happy (0 - 10) (robust t statistic in parentheses)
Roman Catholic 0.0190 (1.08)
Protestant 0.0902*** (5.19)
Orthodox -0.195** (3.26)
Other Christian -0.0492 (1.13)
Jewish -0.288 (1.41)
Muslim -0.349*** (5.48)
Eastern -0.171 (1.64)
Other non Christian -0.118 (0.96)
Religiousity 0.0603*** (23.62)

controls:age, living alone, health, disability, sex, education, whether foreign, country dummies.

Regional and Economic Distribution of Cancer

Report available from link at RTE Website below:

http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0424/cancer.html

BBC Article on Financiers Going Back to School

Good article from the BBC interviewing some banking and finance people from New York involved in programmes to retrain them to use their mathematical ability in developing start-up firms

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8006768.stm

Negative idea?

In a recent article in the New York Times Havard Professor Gregory Mankiw proposes the US Federal Reserve cut interest rates below zero. In essence a -3% interest rate means that one could take out a loan of $100 and only have to pay back $97 dollars in a years time. I have some bad news to those rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of getting "free" money - Prof. Mankiw also outlines a mechanism that ensures this won't happen. Take every dollar bill - in a years time the Fed pick a random number from 0-9 and if that number appears first on the note it would be made redundant.

The idea is purely tongue in cheek (and the kind of extraordinary outside the box thinking that we need in these extraordinary times), but it does raise the issue of why 0% is considered the lower bound for interest rates.

Personally speaking I'm quite concerned about the drive towards low (even negative interest rates). Do we (developed countries) really need to be stimulating short term spending in this way to get back to our former level of long-term growth rates? Under-capitalised banks have been a symptom of our the current global economic malaise. Long story short - people borrowed too much and didn't save enough. Banking simply doesn't work unless the lender has the capital (savings) to finance their lending practices. In summary, people need to borrow money from other people's savings. This has to happen in the long-term regardless, so why are policy makers trying to squeeze every last consumption drop out of their respective populations? Surely if there wasn't some kind of paradox of thrift effect then the banks would become fully capitalised and start lending again, enabling us to move away from bank guarantee schemes, government re-capitalisation and nationalisation.

Surely we've learned that encouraging people to spend money for instant gratification is not a good thing. I'm not sure the need for balance is being addressed properly.

RTE Graphic Design: The Psycho Economy

The team at RTE Graphic Design are playing their part to help us understand recent economic developments in Ireland. The animation below featured on Prime Time (an Irish current affairs program) and was inspired by Saul Bass. Bass was an American graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker who worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, and the disjointed text that raced together and was pulled apart for Psycho.

The animation can also be accessed by clicking on http://www.rte.ie/graphicdesign/, then selecting 'work', 'recent work' and 'Economy in Numbers', the title of the video.

Hyman Minsky and the Frisco Fed

The Mostly Economics Blog points to a speech by Janet Yellen from the Federal Reserve on Hyman Minsky and the "Minsky Moment", ongoing at present. Given that folks at the Frisco Fed are reading Minsky now, maybe this would be a good time to take Liam's sugggestion on this for the next book club? One month from now, perhaps?

Central to Minsky’s view of how financial meltdowns occur, of course, are “asset price bubbles.” This evening I will revisit the ongoing debate over whether central banks should act to counter such bubbles and discuss “lessons learned.” This issue seems especially compelling now that it’s evident that episodes of exuberance, like the ones that led to our bond and house price bubbles, can be time bombs that cause catastrophic damage to the economy when they explode. Indeed, in view of the financial mess we’re living through, I found it fascinating to read Minsky again and reexamine my own views about central bank responses to speculative financial booms. My thoughts on this have changed somewhat, as I will explain.

How To Improve Econometric Analysis Using Data from Google Trends - They Can Predict The Flu

In the current edition of the Economist, there is an article on how data from Google Trends can help predict economic statistics before they become available. For example, using data on searches for trucks and SUVs to predict the monthly sales of motor vehicles reduces the average error by up to 18% compared with the predictions from a model that did not incorporate the search data. These findings are from a new economics paper written Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google, with Hyunyoung Choi, also at Google. (There is a link to the Google working paper here on the Google Research Blog).

The authors argue that fluctuations in the frequency with which people search for certain words or phrases online can improve the accuracy of the econometric models used to predict, for example, retail-sales figures or house sales. "Actual numbers for such things are usually available only with a lag. But Google’s search data are updated every day, so they can in theory capture shifts in consumer behaviour before official numbers are released."

These data are available through a site called Google Trends; this software has been discussed on the blog quite a few times: here in relation to predicting economic sentiment from search engine behaviour.

I mentioned Gord Hotchkiss from searchengineland.com, who asked in the middle of 2008 "what if our mood turns to anxiety about the future? We still search, but we search for different things. We search for information needed to help us weather the storm. Or, we search out of a desperate desire need to know just how bad things are." To illustrate, Hotchkiss presents the following Google Trend graph which shows the relative search volume and news coverage volume of "house plans" (blue line) and "foreclosures" (red line) in America over the last few years:




The Varian and Choi paper discusses how for some things, like retail sales, the categories into which Google classifies its search-trend data correspond closely to what people may want to predict, such as the sales of a particular brand of car. For others, like sales of houses, things are less clear. It appears that searches for estate agents work better than those for home financing.

Some experimentation that I have done with with the Trends software has convinced me that the selection of the keyword is a crucial consideration when trying to analyse search volume. For example, the use of "Bush", "George Bush" and "George Bush Jr" produces very different results. So how can this issue be addressed? The answer may be to find the most popular keywords related to a core question, and to aggregate these for analysis. I have yet to find an aggregation function for keywords in Google Trends, but I have discovered a website that provides information about the most popular keywords used in web searches: www.Sitepsych.com

A list of the top 200 search terms that people use, week by week or month by month, is available for free from Sitepsych. A casual inspection of the top 200 list over a 90 day period, quickly tells you that the most popular things that people are looking for on the web are sex, music, games, dogs, golf, the weather and map-directions. Sex and music dominate.

Getting back to the Google Trends software, I noted before that Google lets users get their hands dirty with the secondary data. In fact, Varian and Choi write on the Google Research Blog that they want forecasting wannabes to download some Google Trends data and try to relate it to other economic time series. If you find an interesting pattern, they invite you to post your findings on a website and send a link to econ-forecast@google.com. They will report on the most interesting results in a later blog post.

I'm thinking of putting together something on when the recession entered the public consciousness, with particular reference to Ireland. Was this a slow-burning process or where there shocks? I suspect it was largely the former but with a preliminary shock in August 2007, a subsequent shock in August 2008 and a critical threshold in November 2008. Did it come through media reference first or through search volume? Again, I suspect that it was largely the former but that there was convergence over time. If the temporal evolution is distinct, can I show that one affected the other? This seems tricky. Should I expect non-stationarity in both series? I definitely think so.

For a list of links to all the software mentioned above, and a discussion of how online search statistics may help drive Irish economic recovery, see this post from earlier on the blog: Web-based Technology and the Recovery - What Do Irish Consumers Want?

Finally, below is a video from Google.org which shows that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems. There was an article published about this in Nature during February: Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data.

Does Facebook Hurt Your Grades? Can Twitter Make You Smarter? What About YouTube?

Does Facebook hurt your grades? This may be the question that parents everywhere will soon be asking their children. There is the argument that students cannot blame Facebook because if Facebook did not exist, they would find another distraction. However, Facebook users under parental supervision will probably have scant praise for the researchers from Ohio State University who have shown that the majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade, compared with those who shun the site. See the story in the Times here.

The researchers discovered that students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work. “It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B,” said one of the researchers, Karpinski. Of course, this does not account for selection bias and unobserved characteristics. Also, the researchers have not yet analysed whether a student’s grades continue to deteriorate the longer he or she spends on Facebook. So the same individuals have not been tracked over time.

A new YouTube offering may take up as much of students' time as a Facebook account, though it may help their grades. "YouTube University" has gathered together all the video channels of the universities and colleges it's partnered with over the years and put them under the YouTube EDU banner. One of the videos (below) is from the University of Minnesoata and is about using Twitter, Wikis and instant messaging in the classroom.

Educational researcher Cynthia Lewis says that the use of social media in the classroom serves two purposes. The first is catching the attention of students and increasing their participation in the classroom. The second is preparing them for communicating in tomorrow's new media landscape. She says that "21st century literacies are all about digital media".





While it may be the case that too much Facebook can hurt your grades, doing the right amount of social networking through online platforms can help your career and is also a lot of fun. Plus, it may help learning in the classroom.

Some Like It Hot

Paul Gottemoller and Randolph Burnside from the Department of Political Science at Southern Illinois University have written a paper entitled "Are They Still Hot?: Utilizing Feeling Thermometers and Anchoring Vignettes to Measure Affect". Paper available here. Abstract here.

The authors recount how "feeling thermometers" have been used in survey research since the beginnings of modern survey research - this is a way to ascertain individual feelings in a multitude of settings. They emphasise that it is difficult to compare one respondent’s self-ranking to another respondent’s self-ranking, because different respondents may be using different criteria to evaluate their feelings towards the group.

The authors describe how using anchoring vignettes corrects for these problems by providing respondents with 5 vignettes representing different areas of the 101 degree thermometer scale. Respondents are asked to place each vignette on the feeling thermometer and also rank themselves.

It is suggested that an added value of using anchoring vignettes for feeling thermometers is that socially undesirable feeling will be easier to detect. The use of anchoring vignettes in this study provides preliminary evidence of their effectiveness when examining feelings towards African Americans and homosexuals.

Anchoring Vignettes and the International Comparison of Public Sector Performance

Nigel Rice, Silvana Robone, and Peter C. Smith (from the Centre for Health Economics, University of York) have written a paper on the use of anchoring vignettes to enhance the international comparability of public sector performance.

Using data on health systems responsiveness across 18 OECD countries (contained within the World Health Survey), the authors outline the issues that arise in comparative inference that relies on respondent self-reports. The problem of reporting bias is described and illustrated together with potential solutions brought about through the use of anchoring vignettes. The utility of vignettes to aid cross-country analyses and its implications for comparative inference of health system performance are discussed.

390,000 Jedi in the UK

According to the last UK Census - they are recoded as atheists!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8003067.stm

Anchoring Vignettes: Sample Selection Issues and Longitudinal Aspects

Omar Paccagnella from the Dept. of Economics at the University of Padua has a working paper on "Anchoring Vignettes with Sample Selection". The paper aims at extending the standard (hopit) model for estimating vignettes in order to allow the specification of some selection variables.

The concern about sample selection arises from when a respondent in the SHARE (ageing) study completes the main CAPI questionnaire, but does not fill in the extra questions that they have been randomly assigned to - which are anchoring vignettes. Paccagnella states that fitting models to the observed sample ignoring potential selection bias may lead to inconsistent estimates. His findings show that there is evidence of sample selection effects even in the case of high rates of collected vignettes (higher than 85%), but in such cases the bias induced by the selection mechanism is negligible.

Paccagnella also has a working paper in presentation format: on using anchoring vignettes in a longitudinal context, examining work disability reporting from SHARE. This work concludes that when moving from one wave of the SHARE study to the other, that individual thresholds shift upwards and that respondents assess a work limitation less easily in 2006 than in 2004. Also, variations over time in work disability reporting are reported to be much stronger than variations across countries.

Paccagnella has also written on using vignettes to enhance the comparability of self-rated life satisfaction, using the SHARE data. And a paper on voluntary private health insurance for the over-50's, also using the SHARE data.

Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences

Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) is an NSF infrastructure project that offers researchers opportunities to test their experimental ideas on large, diverse, randomly-selected subject populations. Investigators submit proposals for experimental studies, and TESS fields selected proposals on a random sample of the United States population using the Internet.

Dan Hopkins and Gary King have successfully submitted an experiment: "Priming to Improve Survey Measurement through Anchoring Vignettes". Their experimental module employed vignettes placed before or after a self-assessment question to determine whether answering vignettes first improved respondents’ capacities to provide meaningful responses. They find that: 1) asking individuals to assess themselves immediately after hearing the vignettes produced responses that were more closely related to key covariates; and 2) inconsistent responses were more likely when individuals were asked to compare themselves directly to hypothetical individuals.

Liam mentioned the relevant paper on the blog before (here). Interestingly, TESS data will be made available to other investigators one year after they are first made available to the authors of successful proposals. The data from the King and Hopkins experiment (and accompanying documentation) is available for download (data in SPSS .sav format).

Geary researchers may also be interseted to know that Howard Schuman (University of Michigan) successfully submitted an experiment entitled: "Recall vs. Judgment: Open-Closed Question Differences in Studying Collective Memory".
Eric Oliver (University of Chicago) and Taeku Lee (UC Berkeley) successfully submitted an experiment entitled "Measuring Perceptions and Attitudes about Overweight and Obesity".

Discrimination Against Irish Female Primary Teachers?

Ok, some basic questions.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0416/teachers.html



Are female primary school teachers being discriminated against? To answer this, we should bear at least a couple of things in mind.

- One, I cant find the report on the web and am relying on media coverage stating that the INTO have supplied figures to the Department of Education. Therefore the following are general consideration that should be borne in mind before anyone leaps to conclusions on the basis of the media coverage.

- On a basic level, has age and experience been controlled for? Is the reason males earn more because they have been there longer, have more experience, are higher on the progression ladder and so on. There may be unobservable reasons for pay difference also. It is a little much to expect that a basic report would go into this but it would be good to know at least whether this is a like-for-like comparison for people at different career stages. Even basic things like taking out regional effects would be worth thinking of.

- How is pay set for primary teachers? what is the mechanism whereby outright discrimination could occur? The tone of the reporting suggests that equally talented and experienced men and women apply for pay increases through a similar mechanism and men are given preferential treatment because they are men. Is this the case? If so, should somebody be held to account for this?

Should RTE and related media sites ask these questions before reporting those types of numbers? If there is outright discrimination against women, this is a bad thing - its unfair and inefficient and should be stopped. If this is just a poorly controlled correlation then it would be a waste of time to start setting up policies to counteract it, and might be damaging. In general, the culture of reporting uncontrolled gender differences (if this is what these are) needs to be looked at. If there are real causal effects of discrimination against men and women, these are really important. But raw correlations are a lousy way of uncovering these.

Skill Upgrading and Wages in Appalachia

Next Wednesday 22th April (3pm), Prof. James Ziliak from the University of Kentucky will present in the UCD School of Economics seminar series on "Down from the Mountain: Skill Upgrading and Wages in Appalachia". Prof. Ziliak is director of the University of Kentucky Centre for Poverty Research. He has written on a range of topics (papers available here), including tax-induced behavioural responses, food stamps and mental health, human capital and poverty, and life-cycle consumption and the age-adjusted value of life.

Decision Analysis Student Paper Award

The Student Paper Award is given annually to the best decision analysis paper by a student author, as judged by a panel of the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS. Students who did not complete their Ph.D. prior to May 1, 2008 are eligible for this year's competition.

The award is accompanied by a plaque and a $500 honorarium. The award will be presented and the winner will also be invited to present his or her paper at the DAS Awards Session at the INFORMS Annual Meeting to be held in San Diego, CA, October 11-14, 2009.

All students doing work in or related to decision analysis (e.g., decision methodologies, experimental studies, and applications) are encouraged to submit a paper. The work must be predominately that of the student, though faculty members or other mentors can be co-authors if appropriate. The paper should be 30 pages or less (double spaced and 12 point font) and in the standard format of Management Science or Operations Research.

If you are a faculty member who is supervising students, please inform them of this opportunity. If you are a student reading this, please encourage your classmates to submit a paper and to join the society. While we encourage applicants to join DAS, students do not need to be members to be eligible for the competition.

To be considered for this year's competition, please submit an electronic version of your paper (either MS Word file or PDF format) to the committee co-chairs at the address given below. The deadline for submission is June 15.

Erin Baker
e-mail: edbaker@ecs.umass.edu

Karen Jenni
kjenni@insightdecisons.com

Climate Change and Birth Weight

Interesting paper on the role of extreme climate conditions in determining birthweight

http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~olivier/DGG_09.pdf

Are we Human or are we Sheep?

Looking at the picture and story here led to this question


http://www.ucd.ie/news/2009/15APR09/150409_high_gi_foods.html

imbens on IV

Guido Imbens responds to Heckman and Urzua (2009) and Deaton (2009). These three papers together are worth doing a session on.

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/imbens/files/bltn_09apr10.pdf

Stata output

I have recently been exploring different ways of producing nice tables from Stata output. The early mover in the field was outreg. This is a bit clunky. An alternative approach is to use Stata's own estimate table command. While the output looks nice there are some restrictive features like showing the marginal effects. A user written command esttab seems to be an improvement but also has its limitations. I think the best available so far is outreg2 : this is not an update on outreg but a separate application: lots of bells & whistles to be mastered but that's the price you pay.

RAND on Five Key Education Priorities for Obama

Interesting one from RAND

here

Crazy title

This paper must have the weirdest/most pretentious title I have come across :
"On the Problem of Breathing, Eating, & Drinking Poison: An introduction to problem solving, nobility of purpose under adverse circumstances, and the search for truth with Sir Karl Popper on Prince Edward Island"

Funk, Matt
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:14483&r=cbe

Deaton - Limits of Experiments

Instruments of development: Randomization in the tropics, and the search for the elusive keys to economic development
Follow the link through to Princeton Working Papers


Abstract
There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues, or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In response, there is movement in development economics towards the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to accumulate credible knowledge of what works, without over-reliance on questionable theory or statistical methods. When RCTs are not possible, this movement advocates quasi-randomization through instrumental variable (IV) techniques or natural experiments. I argue that many of these applications are unlikely to recover quantities that are useful for policy or understanding: two key issues are the misunderstanding of exogeneity, and the handling of heterogeneity. I illustrate from the literature on aid and growth. Actual randomization faces similar problems as quasi-randomization, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary. I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority. I illustrate using prominent experiments in development. As with IV methods, RCT-based evaluation of projects is unlikely to lead to scientific progress in the understanding of economic development. I welcome recent trends in development experimentation away from the evaluation of projects and towards the evaluation of theoretical mechanisms.

Addendum: The Economic Logic blog is discussing this also.

Losers from the Recession

As mentioned before on this blog and by Gerard in his talk on Psychology and Recovery, a bulk of the Irish population has yet to be fully affected by this recession, in the sense that their financial position is substantially worse up to the point where they risk not being able to remain solvent. However, there are clearly a number of groups that are particularly feeling this one. Below is intended to be as obvious at it sounds.

- Upcoming graduates: There is currently an embargo on public sector recruitment and very little signs that private sector employers are going to be doing anything other than trying to maintain staff for the next couple of years. Upcoming graduates are losing big time and have not been helped by any recent budgetary measures. As an academic here, I have to admit this has taken up a disproportionate amount of my thinking. We should be propelling graduates into the world with a feeling that they can do anything. At present, we are not doing anything to address this situation. I will post on this in more detail in the coming weeks.

- Those who bought their homes in the last number of years: In particular, people who purchased since 2005, particularly if their job is on the ropes. I do not know how the banks are dealing on an individual basis with households who simply cannot meet repayments due to one or both of the partners losing their jobs. This is clearly much more frequent than the number of repossessions so there must be a lot of deals being made but the sustainability of this type of arrangment is something that is questionable.

- Those who have been made redundant: This is obviously not something that most people would wish for. There is, of course, some differences in how bad this is depending, for example, on redundancy amounts, likelihood of reemployment and so on. The time to reemployment is a key question here as redundancy payments may be able to smooth people through. How people adapt during the period where they are redundant may be key in shaping their outcomes both during and after this recession.

- Those depending on certain front-line services: The recent budget and the tone of the discussion arising from Bord Snip indicates that while pay rises are unlikely, pay cuts are also not on the agenda to a huge degree despite deflation. Thus, moves to reduce public sector expenditure will more likely be achieved by a cut in actual services provided or numbers of people. Depending on how this plays out, this could have strong ramifications for older people dependent (either psychologically or financially) on different types of publicly provided services.

- People running small businesses: Not being able to meet commitments to staff might just be part of the business cycle for a lot of businesspeople but I suspect that particularly for small businesses where developing and trusting one's staff is key, that there is a strong psychological cost involved in not being able to maintain commitments to staff. I dont know whether this extra psychological burden should have any impact on policy but it is something worth discussing as I think we often assume that words like business-owner and entrepreneur are somehow the opposite of emotional whereas in fact many of the best are driven by a desire to develop their teams and be respected by them. The feeling of not being able to continue to be a leader in the eyes of one's employees is disempowering and may be particularly bad for people who have achieved success by sacrificing other aspects of their life.

- People heavily invested in equities: In essence, a wealth wipe-out of the Irish middle-class that Gerard has been speaking about on Turbulence Ahead. Again, the distinction between financial and psychological loss needs to be drawn out. People who have lost from stocks purchased at peak values to finance retirement are clearly in a position that seems to me as psychologically painful as the market can dish out in a developed economy.

- Migrants living in Ireland: As well as the first-order effects on their economic position, there is evidence that scapegoating of migrants is one unforunate consequence of recession. I havent seen recent papers on this for Ireland but I have certainly noticed anecdotally an increase in the number of people using bizarre arguments about the extent to which our migration policies are weakening the economic position. A combination of economic choppy-waters with increasing hostility might be making it tougher for visible migrant groups in Ireland. Though in the abscence of specific evidence for this time period, I wouldnt rule out the view that common-sense is prevailing or that the creation of a larger foe (bankers and politicians) might be distracting people who would usually focus on migrants in times of need to vent anger.

Apologies - Comment Moderation

Apologies to a few of you who left comments in the last couple of days. I did the equivalent of a delete-all. If you can summon up the energy please post again and I will approve them.

Economists & the recession

One of the consequences (co-morbidities perhaps..) of the recession is the rise to prominence of economics & economists in Irish public life. Normally we enjoy a distinct obscurity but economists are now front page stuff, the subject of media profiles, a slightly higher role in government and the source of numerous quotes. One might take a certain pride that economists are the new rock stars. It is perhaps opportune to reflect on this new found status. For that reason it is worth reading an interesting piece in last Tuesday's Irish Times by Fintan O'Toole censuring stockbroker economists in Ireland for their conduct particularly in the last days of the "Celtic Tiger" [link below].
It is, in my view, a fair criticism. My only problem is that he doesn't go far enough.

The same point could be made of most, or all, of the economists working in financial institutions and the property sector here like the banks, building societies and estate agents. They all, it seemed to me, queued up to serve as cheerleaders for the property bubble. Whether they are fools or knaves is an interesting, albeit moot, point. What it is particularly galling is to see some of these so-called "leading economists" re-inventing (or re-deeming?) themselves as experts on health, taxation and anything else. Hopefully policy makers and the public generally will realise what their credability is (zero).
Independent economists, you may remember, who pointed out that the property market was a bubble & was going to burst were derided of course (I was not one incidentally).

link to article here

Nina Simone on Appreciating What You Have

Lecture on Global Democracy

From Jurgen De Wispelaere


Dear Colleagues

A reminder that Bob Goodin (ANU) will deliver the 2009 Burke Lecture in Practical Philosophy on Wed. 22 April, 6-8pm in the J.M. Synge Lecture Theatre, Trinity College Dublin. The title of his lecture is "Global Democracy: In the Beginning". Poster can be downloaded at http://www.tcd.ie/Philosophy/Files/Poster_Goodin_BurkeLecture2009.pdf. All welcome

Goodin will also give an informal research seminar in the TCD Philosophy Colloquium on "Epistemic Aspects of Representative Democracy" on Wed 22 April, 1-3pm in Room 5012 (TCD, Arts Building), which might be of interest to some of you (or your postgrads).

cheers, Jurgen

Becker's Quantity/Quality Model and Child Health

Is the Quantity-Quality Trade-off a Trade-off for All, None, or Some?
(Daniel L. Millimet & Le Wang)

Abstract:

Although the theoretical trade-off between the quantity and quality of children is well-established, empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship − particularly on child health − is limited. We use two measures of child health to asses the quantity-quality trade-off across the entire distribution. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and controlling for the potential endogeneity of child quantity, we find evidence of a causal trade-off only for some and only in the short-run.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp4078.pdf

Feeling the recession & the wind chill factor

As anyone who has gone for a bracing walk in the Wicklow Mountains knows, when there is a stiff breeze, it feels colder than it actually is. The wind chill factor is well documented and obeys a simple non-linear equation see below.
Something similar seems to be happening vis-a-vis the recession. Lets say living standards (i.e. GNP per capita) have fallen 5% in the last 6 months. Maybe they will fall 10% in the next year. That only gets us back to where we were in say, 2007, when the mood was pretty good. Most people would cheerfully swap our present situation to be back in 2007. So why does it feel worse? The obvious answer would seem to be loss aversion: we feel losses more than gains at the margin, about twice as much on average.
But this would only get us back to 2004/05 when again the mood was pretty good. So I think something else is going on; perhaps its the anticipation of further losses or maybe people care not just about levels but about slopes i.e. the time derivatives so that it is painful when things are getting worse (as distinct from being worse).

http://www.weather.gov/om/windchill/index.shtml

Where are the Jobs for PhD graduates?

So asks the Irish Times

here

Australian National Internships Programme

For Australian students but why not for this year's graduates?

linked here

National Internship Scheme UK

We have spoken a number of times on the blog about the potential for internships and the fact that the UK is going to roll out a national programme. Below is a website that gives a brief guide to the thing. This is certainly not a fully blown plan and its not entirely clear from the site what exactly it is and whether it has significant government backing. It also does not look like there is much research examining the types of factors that may affect success here.

But you have to say that at least its a start. It gives us something to at least track in the Irish context and look to see if we can develop a workable model.

http://www.nationalinternshipscheme.co.uk/

Both in the UK and Ireland, we need to give a lot more thought to what is going to happen to graduates coming out in the next couple of years.

Addendum:

A parliamentary note essentially saying that nothing has been decided on this is available here

Budget Measures on Employment

Would strongly encourage everyone who reads this blog, who is working on education, labour, behavioural and so on, to look at this document closely. It outlines a range of measures for addressing unemployment. The total budget allocated for these measures is 128 million. The packages are essentially a combination of back-to-work incentives, training schemes, incentives for training, extra third level places and so on.

linked here

One part that we should follow closely is the provision for 2,000 work experience places.

"Work Experience Scheme: Provide 2,000 places on a new Work Experience Scheme on a cost neutral basis where the State’s payment will be equivalent to social welfare Job Seeker Benefit/Assistance weekly rates. The details of this scheme will be finalised between the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and the Department of Social and Family Affairs with a view to early implementation."

Paying People to Exercise

A paper highlighted on the Economic Logic blog by Charness and Gneezy examines the effects of paying people to exercise.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/ucsbec/11-08.html



Abstract
Can incentives be effective when trying to encourage the development of good habits? We investigate the effect of paying people a non-trivial amount of money to attend an exercise facility a number of times during a one-month period. In two separate studies, we find that doing so leads to a large and significant increase in the average post-intervention attendance level relative to the control group. This result is entirely driven by the impact on people who did not previously attend the gym on a regular basis, as the average attendance rates for people who had already been using the gym regularly are either unchanged or diminished. In our second study, we also obtain biometric evidence that this intervention improves important health indicators such as weight, waist size, and pulse rate. Thus, even though personal incentives to exercise are already in place, it appears that providing financial incentive to attend the gym regularly for a month serves as a catalyst to get some people past the threshold of actually getting started with an exercise regimen. We argue that there is scope for financial intervention in habit formation, particularly in the area of health.

Geary Institute Podcasts

Geary Institute Podcasts now available!

feed://geary.ucd.ie/podcast/podcast.rss

Electronic Health Library

The All Ireland Electronic Health Library looks like a useful resource:
http://www.aiehl.org/

Recessions in the Long Run

The paper by Christopher Ruhm (Are Recessions Good For Your Health?) has been mentioned several times on this blog. However, this analysis deals with short run outcomes. Many of the researchers in Geary would argue that the effects of adverse shocks can only be evaluated over the course of a life span.

Two papers by van den Berg et al argue this point.

Economic Conditions Early in Life and Individual Mortality [AER, 2006]: van den Berg , Lindeboom & Portrait

Being born under adverse economic conditions leads to a higher cardiovascular mortality rate later in life – evidence based on individuals born at different stages of the business cycle: van den Berg, Doblhammer-Reiter & Christensen

In each case the authors find significant negative effects of being born into a recession. This raises concerns about focusing on the short run. It would be interesting to fast forward and examine the outcomes of the Irish babies born in 2007 v 2009, especially given the speed of the downturn in this country. Time machine anyone?

Benefits of Religious Practice

The report referred to by Kevin in an earlier post is linked below. The report provides a substantial body of evidence on the potential benefits of religion. I agree with Kevin's view of the need for rigorous causal thinking. I am, however, swayed by the argument in the report that religion and related issues are not given enough coverage in papers on well-being and psychological health.

http://www.ionainstitute.ie/pdfs/Religious_practice.pdf

Academic Earth

The statistical modelling blog raises the question as to whether websites like the ones below herald the end for the traditional lecturing format - if the top people in the world in their fields are willing to make their videos available then it would be foolish not to integrate them into training of students in other institutions. It would certainly be worthwhile for institutions and individual academics to develop strategies to maximise the potential of these types of resources.

I don't see irresolvable problems with students being able to take use these types of courses in the context of a normal set of modules leading to a qualification. In some areas, these could eventually be the lecture content with the lecturer being freed up to offer advanced tuition to the student, guidance on projects and so on, and also free some resources for the universities to develop their own specialised modules.

There would obviously be issues to resolve in terms of pricing, quality control and salary and so on, but to view resources like these as a threat would be a negative view.

http://academicearth.org/

What is Good About Recessions?

I risk being hung for raising this question. I would like to point out that I have been blogging more or less continuously about potentially negative psychological consequences of economic downturn in terms of things like: the psychological costs of unemployment, psychological costs of home repossession and so on. I am not posting this question on some whimsical idea that everything is rosy for everybody and that nothing serious is happening. However, several people have either emailed a version of this question to me or mentioned it in our discussions, and Gerard and Kevin's comments were the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of making me want to just come out and ask the question.

In terms of actual evidence about the effects of recessions, you would have to give me a lot of drugs before I would accept the argument that losing your job, business or home does not have negative psychological effects (at the very least short-term), even if we do accept that people do have some trouble in predicting emotions (perhaps I am overestimating the negative effects due to my own biases). Kevin's point (made in the context of religion) about the difficulty of demonstrating a pure causal effect of any variable on well-being is well-taken. But the degree to which the unemployment literature has been tested seems to pass Kevin's bar for proof and, while I still think some questions remain about the pure causal magnitude of the effect, I would be genuinely stunned if unemployment shocks were found to be only spuriously related to well-being.

All the above caveats aside, some potentially positive effects of recession for individuals include the ones listed below. There are perhaps other potential upsides in terms of fundamental reevaluation of institutions and government spending. I see more intuitive sense in the latter than the former, but here goes anyway.

- Improved patterns of health due to less stress and more positive health behaviours. This has been shown in some papers by Christopher Ruhm. These were mentioned on the blog,

here

- Recessions may lower the pressure with respect to maintaining consumption to keep up to the reference levels of one's peers. This seems plausible to me but I dont know of any paper that explicitly tests this.

- Recessions may provide more time with family. Again, this may not be positive, particularly if a person is stressed due to financial considerations but worth looking at whether this helps.

- Recessions may provide more social solidarity and a feeling of "we are all in the same boat". Coupled with more time, this may lead to greater amounts of volunteering and so on. Again, dont know if this is true but testing it would be interesting.

- Recessions may provide a break on habitual behaviours and cause people to think more clearly about where they can maximise their talents. Once again, no idea if there is evidence for this. In general, the literature suggests to me that on average a painful recession has long term effects on people's wages and well-being even beyond the actual downturn if they are unlucky enough to lose their job or to be graduating at the time. It is plausible that a sub-group of the population may experience the opposite effect, whereby being removed by force from a badly matched position leads them to reevaluate and come back in a better post. What percentage of the population this would occur for is open to speculation.

- In the long-run, living through a recession might give you a lower reference point for evaluating later outcomes. The fact that we are going through this one now might inoculate people against later shocks. Again, plausible but I am not aware of an inoculation literature along these lines.

Is less always more? Testing the limits of the choice paradox

When traditional economics claimed that consumers can only gain from having more choice, the supermarkets listened - just look at the explosion in breakfast cereal offerings! But psychology has gone and complicated things by showing that more choice can often leave people feeling less satisfied and less likely to make a purchase.

Consider the seminal paper by Iyengar and Lepper that showed 30 per cent of participants offered a choice of 6 jams bought one, compared with just 3 per cent of participants offered 24 different jams. It seems we can be paralysed by having too much choice, perhaps because feeling you've made the wrong choice is unpleasant, and the more options there are, the more likely it is that we'll choose the wrong one.

But now Benjamin Scheibehenne and colleagues have waded into the topic with the claim that the "too-much-choice effect" has in fact failed to appear in many experiments, and with the real-life observation that shops that offer more consumer choice tend to be more successful.
In a series of experiments, Scheibehenne's team tested 598 participants who were asked to choose from among restaurants, charities and music downloads.
Throughout, they varied factors that they hoped might explain why the too-much-choice effect sometimes occurs and sometimes doesn't.
Examples of these factors included the need to justify one's choice; the perceived variety of choice, as opposed to actual amount of choice; the mean attractiveness of a range of choices; cultural differences (they tested German and US students); and individual differences such as people's tendency to maximise - that is, their consistent desire to find the perfect option.
For most of the experiments, the too-much-choice effect wasn't actually observed and when it did, the only relevant factor which increased the effect was the need to justify one's choice.
Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P. (2009). What moderates the too-much-choice effect? Psychology and Marketing, 26 (3), 229-253 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mar.20271

The Matching of Educational and Occupational Structures

This study is described here as a replication of the study of the occupational structure of education in Ireland and the Netherlands (Borghans, Hughes & Smits 1997). It is suggested that there are "four types of factors accounting for the differences in the occupational profiles of basically similar educational programs":

1. Supply and demand in the labor market

2. Possibilities for substitution of qualifications and skills

3. Professional and governmental interests and regulations

4. Individual preferences and interpretations of the match

Computing Careers and Irish Higher Education: A Labour Market Anomaly

Simon Stephens
Letterkenny Institute of Technology

David O'Donnell
Intellectual Capital Research Institute of Ireland

Paul McCusker
Letterkenny Institute of Technology

Industry & Higher Education, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2007

Abstract:
This paper explores the impact of developments in the Irish economy and labour market on computing course development in the Irish Higher Education (HE) sector. Extant computing courses change, or new courses are introduced, in attempts to match labour market demands. The conclusion reached here, however, is that Irish HE is producing insufficient numbers of computing graduates notwithstanding the anomalous fact that the capacity to produce them is available in the Irish HE sector. Manpower planning is inefficient and IT skill shortages remain not as a result of poor industry/HE relations but because of a lack of understanding of Irish student perceptions, preferences and expectations. Pressures for radical institutional change are probably unlikely to emerge as skill gaps are being filled by immigrants with the requisite skills.

Keywords: computing, Irish higher education, manpower planning, skills shortages, student perceptions

Article here.

Correlation, causation & God

The statement that "Correlation does not imply causation" is hardly uncontroversial or, indeed, particularly deep. Nonetheless it is a matter of concern that people who should know better commit the fallacy that one implies the other. In this context you may have come across recent media attention to a report, released by the Iona Institute, which claims that religion makes you happier. It is written by Patricia Casey , Professor of Psychiatry at UCD.
I cannot find the report but the press release below makes clear that the claim is that religion is beneficial i.e. there is a causal link to people's well-being. However it is hard to imagine a research design that would allow one to interrogate this question to a standard that would be considered satisfactory in any scientific (including medical) journal. Finding a correlation is not surprising: maybe happy people see their happiness as evidence of God or the disillusioned turn away from religion or there is some other common unobserved factor. Any empirical economist hardly needs to see the arguments rehearsed. In the absence of randomization or some quasi-experimental design there is no reason, a priori, to think of the correlation as being any more than just that.

http://www.ionainstitute.ie/

Emotions, Rationality and Investments - Bird and Fortune

Someone emailed this to me - makes me wish Yes Minister was still around

Kahneman Lectures

Kahneman has a nice set of links to videos on his site that are worth looking at for the behaviourally inclined

http://www.princeton.edu/~kahneman/multimedia.htm

Political Economy of Emotions

The idea that powerful emotions have their own political economy is explored in the paper below by Glaeser on hatred

http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v120y2005i1p45-86.html

Why do Recessions feel bad?

Given the continuous media and social coverage of the recession, it is worth asking the question again as to why it matters. The answer lies in the emotions we feel about different types of possessions. Without emotions, recessions would not have a human welfare component. Therefore, a good place to start in thinking about the negative effects of recession lies in these types of emotions. Fear, Sadness and Anger are three emotions that may be heightened in the context of economic loss. We need to understand further how these emotions are triggered in the context of recessions and whether they may "overshoot".

- Fear of the future. Some of this is rational concern about future reductions. A key question is the extent to which brain centres responsible for fear can "overshoot" in the context of continuous presentation of negative stimuli. In particular, it is worth considering whether continuous threatening images can lead to patterns of inertia. We do not have statistical evidence for this in Ireland but I think its plausible and worth testing that at least part of the negative effects of recession comes from a fear overshoot that inhibits search and active attempts to improve one's position.

- Sadness due to the loss of possessions. This is a key one. What types of possessions loss make us feel most sad? The reduction in consumption of various goods is one consequence of a recession. Do we really believe though that this is the main driver of increased unhappiness during recessions? Sadness may also be triggered by the lost of one's job. The relation between unemployment and well-being has spawned a very large literature. My interpretation of this literature is that the loss of income is only one small component of the overall emotional loss from unemployment and that factors such as the loss of the social work environment and a loss of one's work identity are at least as important. Another loss that has been discussed in the literature is the loss of one's home security or home value. The feeling of seeing one's home values reduced is likely to affect people emotionally but we do not know enough about the factors at play here. It seems intuitive to me that people who purchased in different years will have different reference points and that a reduction may be less painful from a psychological perspective if its coming from an asset that inflated from a low base. Also, the emotional cost of home repossession has not been examined in depth though I have blogged before on some good papers in the UK context.

- Anger and indignation, related to a perception that we are being treated unfairly by those with power over our lives. Such emotions may be genuine reactions to economic circumstances or strategic mechanisms used (perhaps unknowingly) by groups to influence political outcomes. For example, Brian Lenihan would not feel too nervous about cutting public pay on Wednesday if it was widely known that public workers dont really care about pay. In the face of a group that feel strong indignation about pay cuts, his task in doing this becomes harder. Knowing this, any group should ensure that its members are sufficiently susceptible to anger consequent on their position being reduced. Over time though, people may forget that this was the purpose of the emotion and actually begin to feel them. Its hard to act a part without taking some of it in, and others never know its an act.

As Michael and others have talked about on the blog, the presence of negative emotions can make it difficult to exercise self-control in other domains. As far as I am aware, there has not been a lot of work on self-control and recessions. But if the general results in the self-control literature hold, then the heigthening of these types of emotions may lead to increased incidences of hurtful behaviour towards others, anti-immigrant sentiment, destructive thoughts about self and so on. The continuous priming of people with negative images may heighten these tendencies thus exacerbating the initial emotional reaction.

Journal Club - 2nd April 2009

It was suggested in this week's journal club to post an overview of the discussion on the Geary blog. The hope is that this will encourage further discussion and participation.

This week's paper was:

Shetty, K.D., DeLeire, T., White, C. and Bhattacharya, J. (2009). "Changes in U.S. Hospitalization and Mortality Rates Following the Smoking Bans" NBER Working Paper, WP14790

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14790



This paper used nationwide data for the first time to analyse whether smoking bans had a short time effect on mortality and hospitalization rates. "In contrast with smaller regional studies, 'we' find that workplace bans are not associated with statistically significant short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for myocardial infarction or other diseases".

Their empirical strategy was as follows: they "compared trends in regions where smoking bans were implemented to those in control regions where smoking restrictions were not imposed". They used a fixed effects model, specification below:


OUTCOMEit = Ai + Yt +BsSMOKINGBANit + Eit


OUTCOMEit represents the number of AMI deaths or hospitalisations in region i and time t. Bs is the indicator of interest which was tested for significance to test for a structural break. They also tested for admissions in other diseases across different age groups. (0-17, 18-64, 65+)


Their results found that that "workplace smoking restrictions are unrelated to changes in all-cause mortality or mortality due to other AMI in all age groups". These results are contrasted with the results found by previous research; (Sargent, Shepard et al. 2004; Bartecchi, Alsever et al. 2006; Cesaroni, Forastiere et al. 2008). The authors suggest possible explanations for this including publication bias and small sample comparisons may have led to atypical findings due to large year to year variation in myocardial infarction death and admission rates.


In their conclusion, the authors also highlighted the importance of further research into non-health related benefits of these bans to non-smokers, the impact on smoking rates as well as research into the long term health benefits of smoking bans.


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*
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*


Conversation from the journal club revealed different opinions on the paper. Some participants believed the paper was well-written and made an important contribution to the literature. Examples of the importance included policy makers who might incorrectly use the previously suggested reduction in myocardial infarction rates due to the smoking ban as evidence for the short term benefits of a smoking ban. The paper was also applauded for highlighting the potential pitfall of publication bias.


Other participants believed that this paper placed too much of an emphasis on myocardial infarcation as the primary short-term benefit of a smoking ban. The paper refers to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2006) report on the health consequences of second hand smoke to back this position up. However, in this report very little discussion is given to myocardial infarction and there doesn't appear to be a clear cut relationship in the medical literature for this association. This report does conclude that there are causal relationships between second hand smoke exposure and sudden infant death syndrome, low birth rate and respiratory illnesses (which could be examined in the short term) as well as middle ear syndrome, asthma in children, wheeze illnesses, impaired child lung function, lung cancer and coronary heart disease.


I was of the second opinion. I also thought there were potential methodological issues including


1) Most workplaces had already implemented workplace bans prior to the legislation. This would result in a downward bias on the Bs estimate.

2) There is wide year to year variation in myocardial infarction rates. This could lead to imprecise and varying Bs coefficients which might lead you to fallaciously reject the null.

3) If there is a big lag between legislation and enforcement this could also result in a downward bias on the Bs estimate.

4) If you are using a fixed effects model where you are including a time trend, and a large proportion of the country brought in a smoking ban in the same year, then some of the impact of the smoking ban might be captured by a decrease in the average yearly rate resulting in a downward bias on the Bs estimate.

5) The authors state they tested for changes in admissions in other diseases. However these other diseases aren't specified. The medical literature suggests short term benefits such as reduction in sudden infant death syndrom and low birth rate, however using their age bands of 0-17, 18-64 and 65+ and only hospital admission data you would not capture these reductions.

Please leave comments or correct me on any of the above.

ESRI Policy Conference: The Labour Market in Recession

ESRI Policy Conference, 2009: The Labour Market in Recession
Date: Thursday April 30th 2009.
Time: 8.30 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.
Venue: The ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson's Quay, D 2.

The Irish labour market is in crisis, with employment contracting and unemployment growing at an alarming rate. This conference will examine key issues to be addressed in framing an appropriate policy response to the crisis. The Policy Conference is targeted at policy-makers and others with an interest in the labour market.

Programme
8.30 Registration and coffee

09.10 Opening Address, Frances Ruane, Director ESRI

Session 1: Learning from Experience

09.20 Presentation of OECD Report: Activation Policies in Ireland, David Grubb, OECD

10.00 What Works? Applying Lessons from the 1990s, Philip O'Connell, ESRI

10.30 From Debt-crisis to Recovery: Finland in the 1990s, Jaakko Kiander, Director, Labour Institute for Economic Research, Helsinki.

11.10 Discussion and 11.20 Tea/Coffee

Session 2: Labour Market Behaviour

11.40 What do Migrants do in a Recession? Alan Barrett (ESRI)

12.10 Profiling the Unemployed in Ireland: Predicting Stayers and Leavers, Philip O'Connell, Seamus McGuinness and Elish Kelly, ESRI.

12.40 Discussion

01:00 Close


Registration is free but places are limited. Please visit our website at www.esri.ie for further details and to book online. Alternatively please email conference@esri.ie or phone 353 1 8632000 with the name, organisation, and contact phone number and email address of the person who wishes to attend.

Backing up gmail

Apologies, this post isn't related to behavioural economics, however I found it useful and hope some other people who use gmail might also. I was worried about the conficker.c "April Fool's worm" so I backed up everything I have been working on. I was also worried about the amount of info I have stored in emails on Gmail so I wanted to find a way to back this up.

You can download an application called Mozilla Thunderbird http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

and direct it to download directly from your gmail account. The set up process only takes about 2 minutes. This application will download all emails currently in your gmail account and save them as txt files in a folder on your computer's hard drive. From there you can also create a back up on an external drive by copying the folder across.