Category: Data Source
Twentieth-century cousin marriage rates explain more than 50 percent of variation in democracy across countries today.
That is the last sentence of the abstract in this job market paper, from Jonathan F. Schulz:
Political institutions vary widely around the world, yet the origin of this variation is not well understood. This study tests the hypothesis that the Catholic Church’s medieval marriage policies dissolved extended kin networks and thereby fostered inclusive institutions. In a difference-in-difference setting, I demonstrate that exposure to the Church predicts the formation of inclusive, self-governed commune cities before the year 1500CE. Moreover, within medieval Christian Europe,stricter regional and temporal cousin marriage prohibitions are likewise positively associated with communes. Strengthening this finding, I show that longer Church exposure predicts lower cousin marriage rates; in turn, lower cousin marriage rates predict higher civicness and more inclusive institutions today. These associations hold at the regional, ethnicity and country level. Twentieth-century cousin marriage rates explain more than 50 percent of variation in democracy across countries today.
Here is Jonathan’s (co-authored) working paper on “The origins of WEIRD psychology.“
Propaganda, Nation Building and Identity in Rwanda
The lead title is “Erasing Ethnicity,” the authors are Arthur Blouin and Sharun W. Mukand, and the paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy:
This paper examines whether propaganda broadcast over radio helped to change inter-ethnic attitudes in post-genocide Rwanda. We exploit variation in exposure to the government’s radio propaganda due to the mountainous topography of Rwanda. Results of lab-in-the-field experiments show that individuals exposed to government propaganda have lower salience of ethnicity, increased inter-ethnic trust and show more willingness to interact face-to-face with members of another ethnic group. Our results suggest that the observed improvement in inter-ethnic behavior is not cosmetic, and reflects a deeper change in inter-ethnic attitudes. The findings provide some of the first quantitative evidence that the salience of ethnic identity can be manipulated by governments.
Propaganda works.
The sex recession
From Kate Julian at The Atlantic:
Gen Xers and Baby Boomers may also be having less sex today than previous generations did at the same age. From the late 1990s to 2014, Twenge found, drawing on data from the General Social Survey, the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year to 54 times. A given person might not notice this decrease, but nationally, it adds up to a lot of missing sex. Twenge recently took a look at the latest General Social Survey data, from 2016, and told me that in the two years following her study, sexual frequency fell even further.
Some social scientists take issue with aspects of Twenge’s analysis; others say that her data source, although highly regarded, is not ideally suited to sex research. And yet none of the many experts I interviewed for this piece seriously challenged the idea that the average young adult circa 2018 is having less sex than his or her counterparts of decades past. Nor did anyone doubt that this reality is out of step with public perception—most of us still think that other people are having a lot more sex than they actually are.
I enjoyed this sentence:
In a famous 2007 study, people supplied researchers with 237 distinct reasons for having sex, ranging from mystical (“I wanted to feel closer to God”) to lame (“I wanted to change the topic of conversation”). The number of reasons not to have sex must be at least as high.
This is interesting too:
“Millennials don’t like to get naked—if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift,” Jonah Disend, the founder of the branding consultancy Redscout, told Bloomberg last year. He said that designs for master-bedroom suites were evolving for much the same reason: “They want their own changing rooms and bathrooms, even in a couple.” The article concluded that however “digitally nonchalant” Millennials might seem—an allusion, maybe, to sexting—“they’re prudish in person.”
The sex recession remains a puzzle. Here is my much earlier blog post on why people don’t have more sex.
Depression and religion in adolescence
Depression is the leading cause of illness and disability in adolescence. Many studies show a correlation between religiosity and mental health, yet the question remains whether the relationship is causal. We exploit within-school variation in adolescents’ peers to deal with selection into religiosity. We find robust effects of religiosity on depression that are stronger for the most depressed. These effects are not driven by the school social context; depression spreads among close friends rather than through broader peer groups that affect religiosity. Exploration of mechanisms suggests that religiosity buffers against stressors in ways that school activities and friendships do not.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, Sriya Iyer, and Anwen Zhang, forthcoming in the JPE. I find this to be one of the most underemphasized benefits of religion, perhaps because religious people themselves do not wish to come off as overly neurotic. And the effect seems to be large:
…a one standard deviation increase in religiosity decreases the probability of being depressed by 11 percent. By comparison, increasing mother’s education from no high school degree to a high school degree or more only decreases the probability of being depressed by about 5 percent.
And for the most depressed individuals, religiosity seems to be more effective than cognitive-based therapy “one of the most recommended forms of treatment.”
How much do the experts wish to discount the future by?
…we find that expert opinion is particularly varied on the rate of time preference. The modal value is zero, in line with many prominent opinions. But with a median (mean) of 0.5 percent (1.1 percent)…
And:
…while we find that experts recommend placing greater weight on normative than positive issues when determining the SDR, most believe that the SDR should be informed by both.
That is from the latest issue of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, “Discounting Disentangled” by Drupp, Freeman, Groom, and Nesje. You will of course find a lengthy discussion of these issues in my own Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.
How does paid maternity leave affect children?
Abstract: This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of a U.S. paid maternity leave policy on the long-run outcomes of children. I exploit variation in access to paid leave that was created by long-standing state differences in short-term disability insurance coverage and the state-level roll-out of laws banning discrimination against pregnant workers in the 1960s and 1970s. While the availability of these benefits sparked a substantial expansion of leave-taking by new mothers, it also came with a cost. The enactment of paid leave led to shifts in labor supply and demand that decreased wages and family income among women of child-bearing age. In addition, the first generation of children born to mothers with access to maternity leave benefits were 1.9 percent less likely to attend college and 3.1 percent less likely to earn a four-year college degree.
That is the job market paper of Brenden Timpe, a brave man from the University of Michigan.
Why do women earn less than men? Evidence from train and bus operators
Even in a unionized environment, where work tasks are similar, hourly wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions, female workers earn $0.89 on the male-worker dollar (weekly earnings). We use confidential administrative data on bus and train operators from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to show that the weekly earnings gap can be explained entirely by the workplace choices that women and men make. Women value time and flexibility more than men. Women take more unpaid time off using the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and work fewer overtime hours than men. Men and women plan to work similar overtime hours when they are scheduled three months in advance, but men actually work nearly 50% more overtime hours than women. Women with dependents value time away from work more than do men with dependents. When selecting work schedules, women try to avoid weekend, holiday, and split shifts more than men. To avoid unfavorable work times, women prioritize their schedules over route safety and select routes with a higher probability of accidents. Women are less likely than men to game the scheduling system by trading off work hours at regular wages for overtime hours at premium wages. Conditional on seniority, which dictates choice sets, the weekly earnings gap can be explained entirely by differences in operator choices of hours, schedules, and routes.
That is the Harvard job market paper of Valentin Bolotnyy, co-authored with Natalia Emanuel.
Do female department chairs matter?
Appointing female managers is a common proposal to improve women’s representation and outcomes in the workplace, but it is unclear how well such policies accomplish these goals. Using newly-collected panel data on academic departments, I exploit variation in the timing of transitions between department chairs of different genders with a difference-in-differences research design. For faculty, I find female department chairs reduce gender gaps in publications and tenure for assistant professors and shrink the gender pay gap. Replacing a male chair with a female chair increases the number of female students among incoming graduate cohorts by ten percent with no evidence of a change in ability correlates for the average student.
That is from a new paper by Andrew Langan, who is a job market candidate from Princeton this year. He has another paper with Leah Boustan, here is an excerpt from the abstract:
We find that schools with better outcomes for women also hire more women faculty, facilitate advisor-student contact, provide collegial research seminars, and are notable for senior faculty with awareness of gender issues.
In yet another piece he estimates the value of unpaid cooking time in Mexico, always higher than you think I would say.
Young “stars” in economics
We use a novel dataset of job flyouts for junior economists to investigate three aspects of the market for “stars”. First, what is the background of students who become stars? Second, what type of research does the top of the market demand? Third, where do these students take jobs? Among other results, we show that stars are more international and less female than PhDs overall, that theoretical and semi-theoretical approaches remain dominant, that American programs both produce the most stars and hire even more, that the private sector is largely uncompetitive, and that there is a strong shift toward stars having pre-PhD full-time academic research jobs.
That is the abstract of a new paper from Kevin A. Bryan, also known as A Fine Theorem. Via Beth Popp Berman.
And here is a point on the stickiness of academic rankings over time:
In economics, among the 13 programs with the most published pages in a Top 5 journal by their faculty between 2002 and 2009, all 13 were among the top 18 in the same ranking for publications between 1974 and 1978 (McPherson [2012])!
“!” is right! And this:
…almost 80% of the faculty at a top 10 economics department did their PhD in a top 10, compared to 58% in mathematics and 63% in literature.
!!
Hope is not lost
While some say wisdom comes with age, younger Americans are better than their elders at separating factual from opinion statements in the news, according to a new analysis from Pew Research Center.
And the gap is noticeable:
About a third of 18- to 49-year-olds (32%) correctly identified all five of the factual statements as factual, compared with two-in-ten among those ages 50 and older. A similar pattern emerges for the opinion statements. Among 18- to 49-year-olds, 44% correctly identified all five opinion statements as opinions, compared with 26% among those ages 50 and older.
When looking at the 10 statements individually, younger adults were not only better overall at correctly identifying factual and opinion news statements – they could do so regardless of the ideological appeal of the statements.
Maybe social media aren’t so terrible after all. And maybe cable TV is less than perfect?
That is from Jeffrey Gottfried and Elizabeth Grieco, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The television sports audience is aging
Here is the source link, via the excellent Michael Nielsen. And Michael notes: “…the audience for sport is aging less fast than for prime time tv; but faster than the US population as a whole.”
Toward a theory of optimal personality?
If you are too conscientious, you might experience undue stress during a negative performance review. Or being too agreeable is correlated with lower salary levels, especially for men. And surely too much extroversion and too much openness are possible too?
Rolf Degen reproduces a few relevant paragraphs from a new paper. The work is by Nathan T. Carter, Joshua D. Miller, and Thomas A. Widiger, here is one excerpt from their abstract:
…researchers have only recently begun to uncover evidence that extreme standing on “normal” or “desirable” personality traits might be maladaptive…many more people possess optimal personality-trait levels than previously thought…
I don’t quite agree with that, though I wouldn’t, would I? I think they are overrating normality. The notion that “weirdos are bad” seems to me longstanding, and one of the most durable human intuitions, not something that researchers have only started to realize. In a world with growing division of labor, and greater accountability (in the private sector, at least), extreme traits would seem to be rising in social value. And perhaps some of that return can be captured as private value too — Silicon Valley anybody?
Overall, I still think that “falling short” on say either conscientiousness or openness is undesirable for most though not all individuals. How can conscientiousness ever be bad, you might be wondering? Well, if the world is underproducing people with unusual interests and inclinations, more conscientiousness might make “more weirdos” a harder outcome to achieve. For instance, conscientiousness, with respect to obligations toward broader society, might keep many people more conformist. That said, there still are many people who would do better to get up in the morning and go to work, one manifestation of conscientiousness.
Agreeableness is the trait that remains a hard to define black box. Cooperativeness is often good, though simple deference to the opinions of others, without critical examination, is often bad. When I hear “agreeableness” discussed as a formal personality trait, the possible clash between those two (and other) underlying features of agreeableness seems to receive insufficient attention.
Here is a previous MR Post on related issues.
Data mining is not infinitely powerful
To say the least:
Suppose that asset pricing factors are just data mined noise. How much data mining is required to produce the more than 300 factors documented by academics? This short paper shows that, if 10,000 academics generate 1 factor every minute, it takes 15 million years of full-time data mining. This absurd conclusion comes from rigorously pursuing the data mining theory and applying it to data. To fit the fat right tail of published t-stats, a pure data mining model implies that the probability of publishing t-stats < 6.0 is ridiculously small, and thus it takes a ridiculous amount of mining to publish a single t-stat. These results show that the data mining alone cannot explain the zoo of asset pricing factors.
That is from a new paper by Andrew Y. Chen at the Fed.
The culture and polity that is Seattle, Washington
Washington is at the top of “the terrible 10” states with the most regressive state and local tax systems, according to a report released this month by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
“These states ask far more of their lower- and middle-income residents than of their wealthiest taxpayers,” according to the institute.
This isn’t new news. My colleague Gene Balk wrote about the subject in April, highlighting a report from the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute. That report found Washington taxation hardest on the poor, with Seattle the worst offender.
That is from Jon Talton, via Mike Rosenberg.
The Year that Words Were First Used in Print
In the year that I was born, 1966, some words which were used for the first time in print were:
cryonics, art deco, assault weapon, ROM, biocontainment, hot button, kung fu, meth, male-pattern baldness, multitasking, multiorgasmic, Medicaid, number cruncher, paperless, street smarts, ranch dressing, z-score
I would have guessed that many of these terms were older.
New words in recent years are ico, manspreading, utility token and aquafaba (?).
All this is according to the Merriam-Webster Time Traveler.
Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.