The Rug Rat Race

Via Freakonomics blog, an explanation for why parents in America have been spending a lot more time with their children is provided in the following working paper in the form of demonstrating that increasing competition for college places is providing an incentive.

link here


After three decades of decline, the amount of time spent by parents on childcare in the U.S. began to rise dramatically in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the rise in childcare time was particularly pronounced among college-educated parents. Why would highly educated parents increase the amount of time they allocate to childcare at the same time that their own market
returns have skyrocketed? After finding no empirical support for standard explanations, such as selection or income effects, we offer a new explanation. We argue that increased competition for college admissions may be an important source of these trends. The number of college-bound students has surged in recent years, coincident with the rise in time spent on childcare. The resulting “cohort crowding” has led parents to compete more aggressively for college slots by spending increasing amounts of time on college preparation. Our theoretical model shows that, since college-educated parents have a comparative advantage in college preparation, rivalry leads them to increase preparation time by a greater amount than less-educated parents. We provide empirical support for our explanation with a comparison of the U.S. to Canada.

Unemployment in Ireland

A good post by Sean O'Rian on the Irish Economy blog details the heavy effects of unemployment on the young and less skilled, something that is characterising this recession in many countries around the globe and something that we all need to start getting our heads around very quickly

O'Rian post

Household Debt Restructuring

Via the Irish Economy Blog, below is a recent paper from the IMF on government's role in household debt restructuring. I commented on the IE Blog that the Irish case has a number of structural features that merit further discussion. Another feature of the document is the fairly minor extent to which evidence from microeconometrics and behavioural economics is used. This is not neccesarily a criticism but it would be worth looking at the issue of household debt restructuring from a behavioural perspective including examining issues like mental accounting, cognitive complexity and procrastination. In general, including a few papers like this on the internal journal club schedule with a view to discussing the extent to which behavioural and microeconometric research should shape mortgage and related policies would be worthwhile.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/spn/2009/spn0915.pdf

Teaching Economics to Undergraduates

Many of the people who read and post on this blog teach economics both to graduates and undergraduates either as lecturers or teaching assistants. I want to open up a thread where people feel free to post on ideas and literature for teaching. On the left side-bar I include a list of useful opening links. It would be good if people began to make some suggestions for reading and thinking about teaching in economics, and undergraduate teaching more generally. I think this will be particularly useful for postgraduate students who are starting to do some teaching assistant work or people who are putting together their first lecture series.

Posts on the motivations and determinants of success among undergraduate economics students would also be interesting as would posts on the psychology of learning in an economics context. I think there will be at least some papers on things like the role of numerical ability and class attendance on economics success. But it would also be good to examine things like the role of spatial ability, real-world orientation and others in determining the learning style, preferences and outcomes of economics students. It would also be good to examine the literature on post-graduate outcomes and retrospective assessments of alumni. Martin and myself have already posted a lot of material demonstrating good post-graduate matching for economics PhD students. It would be interesting to examine the extent to which people develop from an economics degree other than through post-grad.

Vox: Calvo and Roo-King on Bubbles

How bad are bubbles for welfare is the question asked by Calvo and Roo-King in a recent Vox post. "This column weighs the costs and benefits of financial deregulation that spurs temporarily high growth that then collapse and suggests that bubbles may be socially efficient." They suggest that sometimes the benefits from creating a bubble that subsequently bursts may be higher than not having finance-led growth in the first place.

link here

Taller People Live Better Lives?

This is according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the United States population, as reported on the NYT Economix Blog. Taller people evaluate their lives more favourably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions. They are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry.

Misery Index

The good people at Status Ireland have kindly added the "The Misery Index", the sum of the inflation rate & unemployment rate (an idea due to Okun). The recent fall is presumably due to inflation.

Age & time discounting

This seems like an obvious question but one I had never thought of before: does time discounting vary with age? If yes, could this explain time inconsistent behaviour and can we see any neural correlates of this? Introspection suggests that one discounts more as one ages. After all, why put off to tomorrow when it is increasingly likely that there will not be a tomorrow or, as Dylan Thomas put it, "Do not go gently into that good night"?

For some evidence: Time discounting over the lifespan, D Read & N.L. Read. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes Volume 94, Issue 1, May 2004, Pages 22-32

Frederick on Time Discounting

Have the Frederick lecture on in the background as I am working here. Given the interest of people who read this blog, I think it deserves to be bumped up. I particularly like the idea of what would happen if drinking gave you an immediate hangover but made you feel great in the morning!

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/477

Economic and Social Review Policy Section

A recently announced addition to the Irish policy debate is linked below

announcement

Education Convergence over 1870-2010

Nice paper, via Andrew Leigh's blog, on educational convergence.

http://andrewleigh.com/?p=2138

Christian Morrisson & Fabrice Murtin
This paper presents a historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870–2010, using perpetual inventory methods before 1960 and then the Cohen and Soto database. We use a measurement error framework to merge the two databases, while correcting for a systematic measurement bias in Cohen and Soto’s study linked to differential mortality across educational groups. Descriptive statistics show a continuous spread of education that has accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century. We find evidence of fast convergence in years of schooling for a subsample of advanced countries during the 1870–1914 globalization period and of modest convergence since 1980. Less advanced countries have been excluded from the convergence club in both cases.

Randy Pausch Lecture on Time Management

From the Carnegie Mellon site a lecture from the late Randy Pausch on time management. Particularly good for PhD students to watch but a great lecture for anyone. Common sense but worth a reminder.

link here

Stata 11

The latest version of Stata, 11, is to be released shortly. Lots of new features. I particularly like the inclusion of GMM both linear & non-linear. There is also a new suite of marginal effects and unit root tests for panel data.
Time series types will enjoy the state space models,dynamic factor models & more GARCH stuff.

http://www.stata.com/stata11/

Visualisation of the Live Register Gender Gap in Ireland

Here is a visualistion of the gender gap in the Live Register (right up to May '09), courtesy of Status Ireland. Males are shown as the blue line, coming onto the register at a much faster pace than females since last summer.

QNHS Employment Figures for Ireland

Figures released today in the Central Statistics Office's Quarterly National Household Survey show that the unemployment rate increased from 4.9% to 10.2% over the last year.

Nine out of the fourteen NACE sectors showed a decrease in employment over
the year. The largest decline in employment was recorded in the Construction
sector where the numbers employed fell by 72,200 (-28.6%) over the year.

Which NACE sectors had an increase in employment over the year?
(i) Information and Communication: 1,000 more employed
(ii) Financial, Insurance and Real Estate: 200 more employed
(iii) Public administration and defence; compulsory social security: 3,000 more employed
(iv) Education: 10,600 more employed
(v) Human health and social work activities: 2,100 more employed

However, Brendan Walsh has noted that while the QHNS is based on more economically meaningful (ILO) definitions (compared to the Live Register), it too needs to be handled with care. (For example, anyone working for pay or profit for one hour a week or more is classified as employed.)

IMF Report on Ireland

Perhaps the most widely read IMF Article IV Consultation on the Irish Economy in recent memory is available below:

link here

Jobs That Are Hard to Fill, Right Now

Some jobs are currently hard to fill in the United States, according to the New York Times (earlier this week):

Welder is one, employers report. Critical care nurse is another. Electrical lineman is yet another, particularly those skilled in stringing high-voltage wires across the landscape. Special education teachers are in demand. So are geotechnical engineers, trained in geology as well as engineering, a combination sought for oil field work. Respiratory therapists, who help the ill breathe, are not easily found, at least not by the Permanente Medical Group, which employs more than 30,000 health professionals. And with infrastructure spending now on the rise, civil engineers are in demand to supervise the work.

"MIT World": Merton Lecture on Derivatives

There will be a time “beyond crisis,” asserts Robert C. Merton (in this video lecture). "He delves into the dense science of derivatives -- a field he has fundamentally shaped -- to explain how the vast global economic collapse has come about, and how financial innovations at the heart of the collapse could also be tools for reconstruction."

A whole range of "MIT World" videos are available to browse through here. There is one by Drazen Prelec on Neuroeconomics, one by Jonathan Gruber on Healthcare, and one by Bill Gates on Innovation.

Naming and Labelling in Stata

Two very useful programmes are labutil and renvars. Examples of what can be done with these are reversing the labelling on a variable with a single command (e.g. 1=Excellent to 5=Excellent), and renaming common parts of multiple variables at the same time.

Capitalism 3.0: Rodrik

LSE makes available a good set of talks. A recent one by Rodrik looking at institutional change in capitalism is certainly worth a listen

link here

Events related to Behavioural Research Groups

Over the last three years, we have had a very active seminar programme among this group. For those outside, the Institute has a number of different research groups and the people who post and read on this blog are largely part of one of them - namely an interdisciplinary behavioural research group consisting of research assistants, some UCD and non-UCD faculty, PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and undergraduate interns from UCD and outside.

Our seminar activity revolves around:

- A Tuesday seminar that takes place all during term (with less frequent summer sittings).

- Twice-weekly journal clubs.

- Informal Econometric training including group learning, videos and so on.

- An Interdisciplinary series that hasnt run in 2009 but was quite frequent throughout 2008. This is gradually being subsumed by a more informal in-house Monday morning session and a more formal public policy series.

- An informal Monday morning series hosting in-house 10 to 15 minute presentations.

- One day conferences including recently one-day conferences on health economics, education, health research and behavioural economics.

I am keen to get some feedback either in the comments or through email/in person on how to develop some of the research interactions. In particular, I think we have a very solid academic seminar and events infrastructure among the team and would like to think about developing better some of the links to policy and related real-world applications. For example, a session where people who are applying behavioural ideas in their business, community programme, policy or so on, could present followed by a discussion would be very useful. We have had talks from people like Gerard O'Neill this year and the interaction with people working on real-world programmes is a positive one in my view. While we talk to people in policy and business all the time here in various channels and capacities, a more active session I think would energise some of the things we do here.

I will be developing this as we go. In the meantime, if you have any ideas let me know. If you read this from a business, community or policy background and you have some ideas for interaction also let me know.

Recessions and Sexually Transmitted Infections

A piece in today's Irish Times covers the issue of whether STI's might decline during a recession. We have talked a lot about this type of work on the blog including the Ruhm work indicating that acute health indicators improve during recessions. Certainly, friday and saturday nights (to the extent that I am actually out-and-about) seem quieter in Dublin. I am aware that one of our students is looking at this issue in a broad sense supervised by Kevin. Would be interesting to do a brief tracking study for the last 18 month in Ireland of key acute health indicators.

link here

Data.gov

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the U.S. Federal Government. Data.gov includes searchable data catalogs providing access to data in three ways: through the "raw" data catalog, the tool catalog and the geodata catalog.

Drudy, P. J. : 'Housing in Ireland: philosophy, affordability and access'

Read before the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland,
1 February 2007:

"This paper argues that Ireland’s housing problems stem in part from a particular philosophical orientation which supports the “commodification” of housing and gives strong encouragement to private market provision of housing for sale, for rent and capital gain and less attention to housing need. The paper examines the extent and causes of house price increases over the last decade, it draws comparisons with a number of other indices and concludes that housing in Ireland is over-valued/over-priced. A number of other indicators suggest that many new and aspiring house buyers are experiencing problems of affordability and other difficulties..."

Reminder - Dibek Study

The first reminder to take Ayse Dibek's study on risk and trust. We will close this on Friday.

Click Here to take survey

Almost Last Email on Blog Revamp

While professional web and blog designers are probably horrified, I am mostly happy now with blog revamp. Some recent changes include

- changing the colour scheme

- making the middle column more prominent

- leaving more of a space under the heading

- pushing the bloglist down further

I am now going to focus the small blogging time I have to adding widgets such as STATA tutorial widgets and other things that will be useful to the wider research group that read the blog. Suggestions, as always, for additions to the widget, blogrolls, weblinks and so on would be very useful. We dont need to condense the entire internet but I would like to have sections that are relevant to the different types of people who work with us including undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as faculty, particularly in economics and psychology.

IDEAS Ranking Based on Aggregate Scores

An IDEAS Ranking based on pooling separate parts of a given institution is available below.

http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.toplevel.html

Genetic Variation in Giving and Risk Taking

An earlier version of a paper in this month's QJE is available below

Link Here

Suggestions for Blogs

Sorry - the blog revamp posts will cease pretty soon. What I would like now is some suggestions for blogs to add to the blog list. I think I have got all the main ones that are relevant to behavioural economics. Other suggestions welcome.

Why economists failed to predict the financial crisis

Thia is a nice piece, via the excellent Arts & Science Daily (http://www.aldaily.com/), on why economists messed up in not forseeing the current crisis:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2234.
Behavioural explanations get a mention.

Andrew Leigh - In Praise of Renters

Its good that Andrew Leigh's blog is back in circulation - he combines neatly the nerd-stuff with good policy applications.

Below is linked his recent op-ed in praise of renting over home-ownership. This idea has, for obvious reasons, been circulating a lot in Ireland recently also.

link here

Suggestions for Top Link

Ok - so the blog revamp is getting there slowly but surely. Suggestions for the top four links now would be good. Kevin has already suggested a link that would link on to a section with longer posts. A link to "biographies" is currently default but not sure about this.

Ariely on Cheating

Ariely describes his work on cheating. In particular, he examines the effects of priming moral codes and being exposed to ingroup cheating behaviour. Makes some interesting links to the stock market

TED Talk

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow

A great TED talk below by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the concept of flow.

link here

A number of TED talks posted up in the last year are worth checking out including talks by Gilbert on affect and Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice.

Samuelson Interview

A terrific interview with Paul Samuelson is available at the link below. In particular, read part two for some good questions from the interviewer on Samuelson's view of behavioural economics.

interview

Dibek Study of Trust and Risk

One of our MA Students Ayse Dibek is conducting a study of trust and risk preferences. Part of the study involves a short questionnaire. This is 18 questions and takes less than five minutes. We would be very grateful if people could fill this out.

Click Here to take survey

Taxing Height Again

Professor Mankiw and Dr. Weinzierl continue their campaign.

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3651

public perception of irish dioxin scare

a new geary working paper available below

link here

NBER Paper on Medical Advancement and Mortality

A new paper on the development of sulfa drugs in the 20th century

link here

My Cunning Choice Architecture Will Soon Have Homer Eating Healthy

So says Apu in this "Nudge" illustraion by Mrs. Blogs Blogs. "Apu knows that Homer is just a little bit lazy and has cleverly placed the donuts further away than the healthy fruit in the hope and knowledge based on research that Homer may well choose the healthy option."

Call for proposals: Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences

Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) is seeking proposals. TESS is an NSF-funded project designed to increase opportunity for conducting innovative, Internet-based experiments on the general United States population. Investigators submit brief (5 page) proposals to TESS; these proposals are peer reviewed; successful proposals are fielded with a nationally representative survey panel at no cost to the investigators. Information about TESS, its new guidelines, and how to submit a proposal can all be found at http://tess.experimentcentral.org/

Blog Revamp - Update

Ok - so we are making some progress. A lot done.....

General consensus on:

Need to widen the middle column and distinguish the colour

Need to work on font colours

Kevin had a good suggestion for a "notes" section that would house longer pieces as on the Irish Economy blog.

Some suggestions in for the image including one for images of famous economists. Am thinking of some alternatives.

Any other suggestions???

Early Life Conditions and the Black-White Achievement Gap

A recent NBER working paper (Birth Cohort and the Black-White Achievement Gap: The Roles of Access and Health Soon After Birth, by Chay, Guryan & Mazmuder) argues that convergence in black-white achievement test scores (including the military’s AFQT) observed in the US in the 1980s had its origins in the improvements in early life conditions of black infants in the 1960s. Almond Chay and Greenstone (2008) have previously argued that the removal of segregation in Southern hospitals was a major factor in these health improvements.

In this paper the authors use regional and temporal variation in post neonatal mortality rates, and conclude that “investments in health through increased access at very early ages have large, long-term effects on achievement, and that the integration of hospitals in the 1960s affected the test performance of black teenagers in the 1980s”.

Link

Rats play the odds in gambling task

Rats are able to play the odds in a "gambling task" designed by scientists to test the biology of addiction.

In the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, researchers describe how the rodents developed a "strategy" in a timed task where they make choices to earn treats. The rodents avoided high-reward options because these carried high risks of punishment - their sugar pellet supply being cut off for a period.

To further test their model, the team looked at how the rats' performance was affected by drugs that altered levels of two neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin.

These are signalling chemicals in the brain that are both thought to play an important role in addiction.

Researchers hope to develop treatments for "pathological gambling"

The rats were given a drug that reduced the amount of serotonin circulating in their brains. This impaired their ability to make good decisions, and to successfully play the odds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8105963.stm

Consequences of Early Life Rainfall

A recent paper in the AER looks at the effect of early life rainfall on later outcomes for kids born in Indonesia. T

link here

Statistical Potential of Administrative Records

The CSO have released a relatively new document in the series on the Statistical Potential of Administrative Records. This one was published in February of this year, and examines the statistical potential of taxation, duty and trade data collected by the Revenue Commissioners.

Blog Revamp - Comments Requested

We will add all the sidebar stuff once we have completed the template. Comments requested on:

(i) Colour Scheme (work to do here). General sense is that the red is too bright.

(ii) Font

(iii) Column Format (the current version is the one I want but open to suggestions. Lots of comments to the extent that filling out the screen is a big improvement on the old format.

(iv) Suggestions for watermark images for the title bar.

(v) Suggestions for the permanent links.

(vi) Suggestions for website html name. Something like www.gearybehavioural.com is the default. Certainly gearybehaviourcentre is not good.

The Billion Prices Project

The goal of the MIT Billion Prices Project is to collect daily prices from retailers around the world. It is estimated that the project is downloading 40 million prices a day - hence, a billion a month. The project also collects item descriptions and information about whether the item is on sale or not, as well as information for “green”, “fair trade”, or any other “social conscious” indicator. Finally, if available, the project collects information about whether the prices are controlled by the government or not, and some information about the stocks (usually high, low, and out-of-stock).

Impact of economic downturn on college access

The impact of the economic downturn in the United States on low- and moderate-income students was the topic of an all-day national roundtable discussion on June 13 2008 at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of education and human development. The video is below.

Image for Blog Front Page

Ideas requested for an image for the top menu screen. Overcoming Bias uses a great sketch of Ulysses tied to the mast so he has beaten us to that one. Answers by email or in the comments please.

Blog Revamp

We will be putting the blog back together over the next week.

Suggestions welcome.

Current Sidebar Items Planned:

Things we like (unsponsored links)

Upcoming Geary Events

Upcoming Conferences

Funding Agencies and Calls

Blogroll

Other Sites of Major Interest

Top Tags on Blog

Testorone and risk preferences

This might be of interest to risky-behaviour types:

Testosterone and financial risk preferences
Many human behaviors, from mating to food acquisition and aggressiveness, entail some degree of risk. Testosterone, a steroid hormone, has been implicated in a wide range of such behaviors in men. However, little is known about the specific relationship between testosterone and risk preferences. In this article, we explore the relationship between prenatal and pubertal testosterone exposure, current testosterone, and financial risk preferences in men. Using a sample of 98 men, we find that risk-taking in an investment game with potential for real monetary payoffs correlates positively with salivary testosterone levels and facial masculinity, with the latter being a proxy of pubertal hormone exposure. 2D:4D, which has been proposed as a proxy for prenatal hormone exposure, did not correlate significantly with risk preferences.
Apicella C.L. et al Evolution and Human Behavior 29 (2008) 384–390

The Arctic Monkeys on Behavioural Economics

The Arctic Monkeys’ third single, Leave Before The Lights Come On, was released as a music video in August 2006, only months after the band’s debut album. The video, filmed in Sheffield’s Cultural Industries quarter, features English actors Kate Ashfield and Paddy Considine, shown below (HT: The Inspiration Room).

Ashfield’s character opens the music video standing on the edge of a tall building, apparently preparing to jump. On the pavement below Considine’s character is halted in his tracks by a shoe falling from above. He races up the stairs to coax the woman back from the edge. There's more to the story than this, but the premise is that Ashfield is about to engage in irrational behaviour. Or is she? Alex Turner has the following to say on the matter - the opening lines from the song:

Well this is a good idea,
You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t,
You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t one?

Watch the video here.

Smile Like You Mean It

Thanks to Eoin McL for giving me a new insight into what we consider to be non-cognitive ability (or non-cognitive skill). I've discussed this concept before in relation to labour market earnings, graduate education, life expectancy and development of cognitive skill.

Eoin pointed me towards the author Samuel Smiles, who according to Wikipedia, was editor of the Leeds Times from 1838-1845. In this role, he advocated radical causes ranging from women's suffrage to free trade to parliamentary reform. Wikipedia reports that in the 1850s he seems to have completely given up on parliamentary reform and other structural changes as a means of social advance. For the rest of his career, he advocated individual self improvement. This is the link to what we think of now as non-cognitive skills. Smiles is best known as the writer of what can be considered as self-help books, some of which are listed below:

Self-Help (with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance), London, 1859
Character, London, 1871
Thrift, London, 1875
Duty, London, 1880
Life and Labour, London 1887

I'm currently reading the first book; electronic copies of this and many others are available here on the Project Gutenberg website. The Smilesian view on the importance of education is provided here by James Stansfield.

Being Fat is Your Own Fault

Interesting debate on obesity. I like the way the Professor makes the distinction between over-fat and overweight.

Hanushek on Education

One of the Econtalk podcasts is given by Erik Hanushek. The best thing to do is to listen to the podcast itself but he makes a number of points that are worth debating in the Irish context.

- Some schools are being under-resourced. One approach to this in the US has been to take law suits to force states to invest in these schools. This sounds good from a justice perspective. But Hanushek makes the point that this then leaves decisions on school spending allocation in the hands of judges rather than education policy makers and leads to unpredictable patterns of reallocation from other budgets to finance the binding expenditure constraints created.

- He argues that greater transparency on school spending is needed to ensure that public budgets are used more effectively to develop children. In particular, he argues that teachers unions have too much lobbying power and that education policy is too focused on teacher conditions rather than on student conditions.

- Related to this, he argues for greater focus on the actual causal effect of spending on different inputs into the school system.

We have approximately 700 second-level schools in Ireland and 3,000 or so primary schools. The literature on the actual impact of government spending in these institutions is remarkably flimsy. We are also facing very tight budget constraints. More hard analysis of what we are spending money on in these areas is badly needed as well as greater economic input into the education debate in Ireland.

Why Researchers Should Always Check for Outliers, and What To Do About Them

"Researchers rarely report checking for outliers of any sort. This inference is supported empirically by Osborne, Christiansen, and Gunter (2001), who found that authors reported testing assumptions of the statistical procedure(s) used in their studies--including checking for the presence of outliers--only 8% of the time. Given what we know of the importance of assumptions to accuracy of estimates and error rates, this in itself is alarming. There is no reason to believe that the situation is different in other social science disciplines."

This quote is taken from a peer-reviewed electronic journal article on outliers by Osborne and Overbay (2004), both based at North Carolina State University.

Why do we care? The presence of outliers can lead to inflated error rates and substantial distortions of parameter estimates (e.g., Zimmerman, 1994, 1995, 1998). If non-randomly distributed (which is vert possible with survey data), they can decrease normality (and in multivariate analyses, violate assumptions of sphericity and multivariate normality), altering the odds of making both Type I and Type II errors. They can seriously bias or influence estimates that may be of substantive interest (for more information on these issues, see Rasmussen, 1988; Schwager & Margolin, 1982; Zimmerman, 1994).

What are outliers? An outlier is generally considered to be a data point that is far outside the "norm" for a variable or population (e.g., Jarrell, 1994; Rasmussen, 1988; Stevens, 1984). Hawkins described an outlier as an observation that “deviates so much from other observations as to arouse suspicions that it was generated by a different mechanism” (Hawkins, 1980). Outliers have also been defined as values that are “dubious in the eyes of the researcher” (Dixon, 1950).

Where do outliers come from? All of the below are described in detail in the Osborne and Overbay paper:

(i) Outliers from data errors
(ii) Outliers from intentional or motivated mis-reporting
(iii) Outliers from sampling error
(iv) Outliers from standardization failure
(v) Outliers from faulty distributional assumptions
(vi) Outliers as legitimate cases sampled from the correct population
(vii) Outliers as potential focus of inquiry

How do we identify them? Simple rules of thumb (e.g., data points three or more standard deviations from the mean) are good starting points. Some researchers prefer visual inspection of the data.

How do we deal with them? What to do depends in large part on why an outlier is in the data in the first place. Where outliers are illegitimately included in the data, it is only common sense that those data points should be removed. One means of accommodating outliers is the use of transformations. By using transformations, extreme scores can be kept in the data set, and the relative ranking of scores remains, yet the skew and error variance present in the variable(s) can be reduced (Hamilton, 1992). One alternative to transformation is truncation, wherein extreme scores are recoded to the highest (or lowest) reasonable score.

Instead of transformations or truncation, researchers sometimes use various “robust” procedures to protect their data from being distorted by the presence of outliers. These techniques “accommodate the outliers at no serious inconvenience—or are robust against the presence of outliers” (Barnett & Lewis, 1994). A common robust estimation method for univariate distributions involves the use of a trimmed mean, which is calculated by temporarily eliminating extreme observations at both ends of the sample (Anscombe, 1960). Alternatively, researchers may choose to compute a Windsorized mean, for which the highest and lowest observations are temporarily censored, and replaced with adjacent values from the remaining data (Barnett & Lewis, 1994).

All the references to the articles mentioned above are available in the Osborne and Overbay paper.

Marginal Effects with Heteroskedastic Probit Models

Obtaining marginal effects after running Stata's hetprob command can be very slow, a much quicker approach is the user written command mehetprob, by Thomas Cornelissen. Results are the same as with mfx, however mehetprob saves over 10 minutes for large datasets with Stata 9, and hours with Stata 8.

Present Biased Preferences and Credit Card Borrowing

A new IZA Working Paper linked here

NBER Papers

Two of this weeks NBER papers used random characteristic assignment experiments to examine discrimination.

Canadian Immigrant Discrimination

Indian Education Discrimination

Reith Lectures - Markets and Morals

This years Reith Lectures focus on citizenship including the topic of Markets and Morals and will be given by Michael Sandel of Harvard. The BBC also archive previous sessions including things like Giddens on globalisation and Ramachandran on Mind. Combined with the "In Our Time" Archive, there is probably no better background noise if you are fighting the deadline demons late at night.

link here

Reminder: ISNE Conference Deadline for Abstracts - June 26th

This a reminder that the Irish Society of New Economists (ISNE) has announced a call for papers for its sixth annual conference. The conference will be held at the Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick on Friday 2nd October 2009. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 26th June. Full details about the event are available on the following website: http://sites.google.com/site/isne2009/

Height, happiness and all that

Angus Deaton has a nice recent piece on height & well being.
http://www.princeton.edu/~deaton/downloads/life_at_the_top_benefits_of_height_final_june_2009.pdf

As an exercise I plot, from SHARE, the relationship between Depression (the EUROD scale) and height (in cm.) for men & women separately. The gradient is noticeably steeper for females and is flat at high levels.

PhD Studentships in Queens

Dear Sir or Madam

I would like to draw your attention to 12 Full-time PhD Studentships in Interdisciplinary Childhood Research available at Queen’s University, Belfast.

As part of a major strategic investment by Queen’s into childhood research, the University is currently advertising 12 full-time PhD studentships. 6 of these are being provided through the Improving Children’s Lives research initiative and 6 through the Research Forum for the Child.

The 6 studentships associated with Improving Children’s Lives project are open to home and EU applicants. The studentships relate to specific projects that will be jointly supervised across various Schools within Queen’s. For more information on the initiative as well as on eligibility criteria, potential projects, guidance notes on how to apply and who to contact for informal enquiries please visitwww.improvingchildrenslives.org.

The 6 studentships associated with the Research Forum for the Child are open to home, EU and international applicants. These studentships are open to any area of interdisciplinary research on childhood. For more information on eligibility criteria, guidance notes on how to apply and who to contact for informal enquiries please visitwww.qub.ac.uk/child.

All of these studentships are available from October 2009, and cover University fees and a maintenance allowance of £13,290 per annum, for three years.

I would be most grateful if you would circulate these details – and the attached posters - to interested parties.

Many thanks and best wishes

David


David Piekaar
Project Administrator
Improving Children’s Lives
Centre for Effective Education
School of Education
Queen’s University Belfast
69-71 University Street
Belfast BT7 1HL
Northern Ireland

Inflation: bah humbug

These are the Google trends for inflation & unemployment. There is a curious dip for inflation at the end of each year. I wonder is this because at Christmas people are spending like crazy & don't want to be bothered about tiresome stuff like inflation.

The Man-Cession and U.S. Unemployment

Gerard O'Neill mentioned the idea of the "man-cession" recently. Brendan Walsh has documented the Irish case and shows that "female participation in the Irish labour market held up well in 2008, but male unemployment has risen, and participation fallen, faster".

A recent post from the Economist Blog notes the 2.5% difference between the male unemployment rate (10.5%) and female unemployment (8%) in the U.S. during May (the BLS figures came out last Friday). This is the highest male-female jobless rate gap in the history of BLS data back to 1948. Overall, the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 9.4 percent on Friday, its highest point in a quarter-century. On the Economix blog, Catherine Rampell compares job losses in recent U.S. recessions as a share of employment.

However, some commentators suggest that Friday's jobs report qualifies as good news. According to David Leonhardt on the Economix blog, the unemployment rate is "known as a lagging indicator, because it continues to worsen for months even after the economy starts to improve. A better indicator is the monthly change in overall employment, and it suggests the worst job losses of the Great Recession may now be over". However, he also cautions that "the economy remains in very bad shape. A broader measure of job-market distress than the unemployment rate — one that counts, among others, part-time workers who want to be working full time — shows a rate of 16.4 percent." More on broad measures of job-market distress is available here.

Finally, it is also worth noting that 21 percent of those who are unemployed have been out of work for at least 15 weeks. That figure exceeds the 19.6 percent proportion in this category that was last seen during the 1958 recession. According to Floyd Norris on his NYT blog, the long-term unemployment rate shows that there is still a major problem in finding employment for people. Returning to the theme of the "man-cession", Catherine Rampell commented recently that women are now surpassing men in degrees attained in every major category in U.S. higher education: associate, bachelor’s, master’s, professional and doctorate. This may go some way to explaining why more women are holding on to their jobs in the U.S.

More on Google Trends: Searching for the Jolly Green Giant?

The Economist Blog reported in April that Google Trends showed a decline in news reference volume for all three of the terms “Great Depression,” “credit crisis,” and “layoffs.” They asked whether this suggests that the worst is behind us, and whether we can expect a pending economic recovery?

Experimenting with these keywords now shows that the decline in news reference (and search) volume has continued. However, it is possible that media operators could provide less coverage of a recession, even though it continues (the question may be: what sells newspapers?). Also, people may not search for information about a recession, even though it is happening around them (sticking one's head in the sand?).

Another approach is to experiment with keywords like "recovery" and "economic recovery". The latter has a spike in search (and news reference) volume on February 10th, when the U.S. Senate passed President Obama's economic recovery plan. The former has been trending upward in news reference volume since the start of the year.

It's difficult to say anything about so-called "green shoots" using this data; at the very least we know that Obama harnessed a lot of attention at the start of February with his plan for economic revival.

Images of Research Competition

If any UCD reader has any STATA graphs that they think look particularly interesting for some reason, then consider the UCD Images of Research Competition linked here

Using Google Search Patterns to Forecast Unemployment

Google search patterns are increasingly been analysed and developed as early warning systems in emerging infections literatures. As Martin has posted on, they are also being explored in economics forecasting. A new IZA paper looks at their predictive use for unemployment

link here

Was there really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne plant - Levitt and List

NBER Working Paper

The "Hawthorne effect," a concept familiar to all students of social science, has had a profound influence both on the direction and design of research over the past 75 years. The Hawthorne effect is named after a landmark set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s. The first and most influential of these studies is known as the "Illumination Experiment." Both academics and popular writers commonly summarize the results as showing that every change in light, even those that made the room dimmer, had the effect of increasing productivity. The data from the illumination experiments, however, were never formally analyzed and were thought to have been destroyed. Our research has uncovered these data. We find that existing descriptions of supposedly remarkable data patterns prove to be entirely fictional. There are, however, hints of more subtle manifestations of a Hawthorne effect in the original data.

Framing on Seinfeld

The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being

This new book by Daniel M. Haybron (Oxford University Press, 2008) is reviewed here on MetaPsychology by Daniel O'Brien.

TASC

The annual TASC lecture took place last night, featuring Professor James Galbraith (University of Texas at Austin) and Professor Maria Rodrigues (Institute of European Studies (ELB), Brussels University). This was a very interesting discussion on the current economic crisis. Both argued strongly in favour of Keynesian intervention.

Professor Galbraith (son of John Kenneth Galbraith) later appeared on Vincent Browne's excellent programme on TV3, which can be replayed here.

TASC define themselves as an "independent think-thank working from a progressive perspective" and define their core beliefs as the following:

-Ireland faces policy choices which require public debate and well researched alternatives to the establishment consensus
-Equality will be crucial to economic development in the knowledge-centred economies of the 21st century
-Growth for growth's sake is neither environmentally nor socially desirable
-An innovative, dynamic and equal society can only be built on the foundations of a healthy democracy

Their blog can be found at www.progressive-economy.ie

Impact of Financial Support on Study Duration and Success

The Economic Logic blog links to research on the impact of financial support on study duration and success. Daniela Glocker (DIW Berlin) uses German data and finds that the source of support matters. Institutional student aid leads to shorter study duration than, say, support by parents. The amount of financial support has no impact on duration, but improves the probability of successful completion of studies.

Secondary School Financing Debate

Sean Byrne from the Business Faculty at Dublin Institute of Technology discusses the secondary school financing debate in today's Irish Times.

CSO puts historical census figures online

Great news for all people interested in historical census figures. The CSO are now hosting PDF's containing the published 1926 to 1991 census of population reports. More here.

Four weddings and a discount rate

At the recent Canadian Economic Association meetings in Toronto, David Laibson have a nice overview of recent work by himself and others on hyberbolic discounting. He reported an interesting experiment, which 'though clearly similar to the sort that's reported in the literature, is different. Participants were offered the choice of watching a high-brow movie or a low brow movie.I can't remember the name of the former, the latter was Four Weddings and a Funeral. When the movie was to be watched that night, about 60% chose the low-brow movie but when the time horizon was a week, the proportions were roughly reversed.
I guess there are implications for those of you who like to "nudge" people into good behaviour.My own choices would not be so time inconsistent, that's all I will say.

Data on Discussions and Social Networks from the Last 10 Years

Ten years of discussions from the Irish forum site boards.ie are available in SIOC format; more details are available here. The FOAF files link to each other, describing a social network based on the users' buddy lists.

The data in total (over 10 years) is around 9 million documents and takes about 50 gigabytes of disk space - it's all in RDF/XML file format. This resource is supported by Science Foundation Ireland under grant number SFI/02/CE1/I131 at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway.

Seminar on Health Inequalities

Following on from Kevin's post:

'The Spirit Level: why more equal societies almost always do better' Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett Seminar, Dublin

4 June 2009, Dublin

The Institute of Public Health in Ireland (IPH) are hosting a seminar with authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket to discuss their new book, The Spirit Level.

The Spirit Level shows that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone - rich as well as poor. This ground-breaking book, based on thirty years research, opens up a major new approach to improving our health, happiness and environmental sustainability. It demonstrates that achieving greater income equality is the key to addressing our social ills and improving quality of life for everyone.

Hear the evidence and make up your own mind!

Richard Wilkinson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham Medical School, and Kate Pickett is a Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology at the University of York.

5.00 – 6.30pm on Thursday 4 June, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Kildare Street,
Dublin 2

As places are limited they will be allocated on a first come first served basis. Please reply to sharon.brennan@publichealth.ie to attend the Belfast event or aisling.oconnor@publichealth.ie to attend the Dublin event.

Annual TASC Lecture

Thanks to Michael Egan for sending this on.

The Annual TASC lecture will be held in the Royal Irish Academy on June 4th

TASC is pleased to announce that the annual TASC lecture will be held in the Royal Irish Academy on June 4th. The event will start at 6.30 p.m. and will be followed by a wine reception.

Professor James Galbraith (University of Texas at Austin) and Professor Maria Rodrigues (Institute of European Studies (ELB), Brussels University) will be speaking, and the event will be chaired by Dr. James Browne, President of NUI Galway.

“There are no quick fixes, no easy return to “normal,” no going back to a world run by bankers, and no alternative to taking the long view” – James Galbraith

“This is a systemic and global crisis requiring key reforms in the capitalist system and a new global governance order, necessary for the emergence of a new development model” – Maria Rodrigues

We believe that this event will provide a stimulating analysis of where we are – and how we got here.

RSVP to contact@tascnet.ie.

Health reform can boost economy - Obama aide

Christina Romer, White House economic adviser, says overhauling health care may juice GDP and boost labor. More on this story from CNN.

Irish Economy Notes

An interesting new initiative being run through the Irish Economy Blog.

http://www.irisheconomy.ie/Notes/Notes.htm