Category: Data Source

Facts about Europe

by  Tyler Cowen in

The country in Europe with the biggest untaxed, or “shadow,” economy as a proportion of GDP is Greece. Next is (gulp) Italy. Then Portugal and Spain. On the chart below, in fact, the bars look unsettlingly like dominoes.

There is more information and a good chart here.  There is this too:

Massive tax evasion helps produce large public-sector deficits. Let’s make some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations: if the shadow economy is adding 25 percent to GDP, with income going untaxed, and if the average tax rate on such income is a conservative 20 percent, recovering such tax revenues would imply an additional 5 percent of GDP in tax revenues, which would bring down the Italian 2009 deficit to zero. As deficits cumulate into debt, prolonged tax evasion could explain – by itself – the whole of the Italian public debt, now projected at 118.4 percent of GDP.

China (India) fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

China alone loses between 100 million and 200 million tons of coal each year to mine fires, as much as 20 percent of their annual production, according to the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, based in Enschede, Netherlands. The Institute estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from these fires are as high as 1.1 billion metric tons, more than the total carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles in the United States. Second to China is India, where 10 million tons of coal burns annually in mine fires, contributing a further 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The full article is here and I thank Jim Ward for the pointer.

Are girls now worse drivers than boys?

by  Tyler Cowen in

This was only one study, but it fits into some broader social trends:

In a survey of teenage drivers, Allstate Insurance Co. found that 48% of girls said they are likely to drive 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. By comparison, 36% of the boys admitted to speeding. Of the girls, 16% characterized their own driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005. And just over half of the girls said they are likely to drive while talking on a phone or texting, compared to 38% of the boys.

Nor are these teens meta-rational:

The study found that 65% of the respondents, male and female, said they are confident in their own driving skills, but 77% said they had felt unsafe when another teen was driving. Only 23% of teens agree that most teens are good drivers.

College students are working less hard, it seems

by  Tyler Cowen in

Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report:

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.

An earlier, different and ungated version is here.  A closely related paper, by the same authors, is here.

Which Americans are “best off”?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I know that is a tricky concept, and I wouldn't personally use those words, but if you consult human development indices the answer is Asians living in New Jersey.  The standard is:

The index factors in life expectancy at birth, educational degree attainment among adults 25-years or older, school enrollment for people at least three years old and median annual gross personal earnings.

What does New Jersey do right?  How much of that is selection?:

Across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, Asian Americans were worst off in Louisiana. Their New Jersey counterparts lived an average of nine years longer and earned more than twice that of Asian Americans in Louisiana.

Overall Asian-American life expectancy is 86.6 years.  Here's a scary sentence:

Washington, D.C. offered the highest level of human development among whites.

African-Americans fare best in Maryland, which also may be a DC effect.  There is this too:

Latinos outlive whites, on average, by over four years, and in all but four states

The full blog post is here and for the pointer I thank DavidMWessel.

Tolerating male homosexuals lowers HIV

by  Tyler Cowen in

Andy Francis and Hugo Mialon, both at Emory, report their latest research:

We empirically investigate the effect of tolerance for gays on the spread of HIV in the United States. Using a state-level panel dataset spanning the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, we find that tolerance is negatively associated with the HIV rate. We then investigate the causal mechanisms potentially underlying this relationship. We find evidence consistent with the theory that tolerance for homosexuals causes low-risk men to enter the pool of homosexual partners, as well as causes sexually active men to substitute away from underground, anonymous, and risky behaviors, both of which lower the HIV rate.

That piece has recently come out in the Journal of Health Economics.

How politically segregated are the networks of the internet?

by  Tyler Cowen in

For all the complaints you hear, internet reading is much less segregated than the networks of our work, family, and friends (all given formal measurements in the paper).  Jesse Shapiro and Matt Gentzkow report:

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.

Here are some details:

The average Internet news consumer’s exposure to conservatives is 57 percent, slightly to the left of the US adult population. The average conservative’s exposure is 60.6 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from usatoday.com. The average liberal’s exposure is 53.1 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from cnn.com. The isolation index for the Internet is 7.5 percentage points, the difference between the average conservative’s exposure and the average liberal’s exposure.

News consumers with extremely high or low exposure are rare. A consumer who got news exclusively from nytimes.com would have a more liberal news diet than 95 percent of Internet news users, and a consumer who got news exclusively from foxnews.com would have a more conservative news diet than 99 percent of Internet news users.

…Visitors of extreme conservative sites such as rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited nytimes.com.

This is one of the best papers on on-line media.

The gender gap in math is weak in Muslim countries

by  Tyler Cowen in

Moving to cross-country comparisons, we find earlier results linking the gender gap in math to measures of gender equality are sensitive to the inclusion of Muslim countries, where, in spite of women’s low status, there is little or no gender gap in math.

That is for students, not mathematicians, and it is from a new paper by Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt, hat tip goes to Chris Blattman.  Overall they conclude that the standard variables do not very well explain changes in the gender gap in math over time.

A non-gated version of the paper is here and it seems to be different.  Here is another version.