Category: Data Source
Which countries are best for creating and encouraging women chess players?
Via David Smerdon, here is the picture:
To oversimplify only a wee bit, it is the countries with less gender equality which have more female chess players, relative to male chess players. Here is some description:
Denmark is the worst country in our list of participation, with only one female player to roughly 50 males, while the rest of Scandinavia as well as most of western Europe also languish at the bottom.
On the other hand, some of the best countries show evidence of the effect of female role models, and would be no surprise to players familiar with women’s chess history. Georgia (ranked 5th) and China (ranked 4th) both featured multiple women’s World Champions. There are also some high rates from a few unexpected sources: Vietnam (1st), the United Arab Emirates (2nd), Indonesia (8th), and even Kenya (12th) really buck the trend. Interestingly, a lot of the best countries for female chess players are in Asia. Besides Vietnam, there are five other countries in the best ten, and if I am a little more lenient with the chess population cut-offs, Mongolia and Tajikistan would also be in there.
Here is one cited hypothesis:
Could it be that, deep down, women just don’t like chess as much as men?
I consider that to be possible, but unconfirmed. In any case, the lesson is that gender imbalance in a particular field can be correlated with greater equality of opportunity overall.
Dept. of Uh-Oh, college and mobility edition
Intergenerational mobility is higher among college graduates than among people with lower levels of education. In light of this finding, researchers have characterized a college degree as a great equalizer leveling the playing field, and proposed that expanding higher education would promote mobility. This line of reasoning rests on the implicit assumption that the relatively high mobility observed among college graduates reflects a causal effect of college completion on intergenerational mobility, an assumption that has rarely been rigorously evaluated. This article bridges this gap. Using a novel reweighting technique, I estimate the degree of intergenerational income mobility among college graduates purged of selection processes that may drive up observed mobility in this subpopulation. Analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find that once selection processes are adjusted for, intergenerational income mobility among college graduates is very close to that among non-graduates. This finding suggests that expanding the pool of college graduates per se is unlikely to boost intergenerational income mobility in the United States. To promote mobility, public investments in higher education (e.g., federal and state student aid programs) should be targeted at low-income youth.
That is from new research by Xiang Zhou, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Do sexual attitudes cause religious behavior?
…contrary to long-held assumptions that religious upbringing causes sexually restrictive attitudes and behaviors, several large data sets now suggest a reverse causal arrow—people’s preferred mating strategies determining their attraction toward, or repulsion from, religion. Second, other recent findings suggest that distrust of nonreligious individuals is almost completely erased by knowledge that they are following a restricted monogamous lifestyle. Thus, reproductive strategies often underlie apparently sacred concerns. We close with a consideration of ways in which reproductive interests might underlie a broad range of benefits associated with religious affiliation.
Here is the article, via the excellent K.
Measurement for everything
One of the most widely used screenplay programs in Hollywood has a new tool to help with gender equality and inclusion.
In an update announced Thursday, Final Draft — software that writers use to format scripts — said it will now include a proprietary “Inclusivity Analysis” feature, allowing filmmakers “to quickly assign and measure the ethnicity, gender, age, disability or any other definable trait of the characters,” including race, the company said in a statement.
It also will enable users to determine if a project passes the Bechdel Test, measuring whether two female characters speak to each other about anything other than a man. The Final Draft tool, a free add-on, was developed in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, which has been at the forefront of studying the underrepresentation of women on screen.
Here is the full Melena Ryzik NYT story.
Do Experts Listen to Other Experts?
Not so much:
Organizations in science and elsewhere often rely on committees of experts to make important decisions, such as evaluating early-stage projects and ideas. However, very little is known about how experts influence each others’ opinions, and how that influence affects final evaluations. Here, we use a field experiment in scientific peer review to examine experts’ susceptibility to the opinions of others. We recruited 277 faculty members at seven US medical schools to evaluate 47 early stage research proposals in biomedicine. In our experiment, evaluators: (1) completed independent reviews of research ideas, (2) received (artificial) scores attributed to anonymous “other reviewers” from the same or a different discipline, and (3) decided whether to update their initial scores. Evaluators did not meet in person and were not otherwise aware of each other. We find that, even in a completely anonymous setting and controlling for a range of career factors, women updated their scores 13% more often than men, while very highly cited “superstar” reviewers updated 24% less often than others. Women in male-dominated subfields were particularly likely to update, updating 8% more for every 10% decrease in subfield representation. Very low scores were particularly “sticky” and seldom updated upward, suggesting a possible source of conservatism in evaluation. These systematic differences in how world-class experts respond to external opinions can lead to substantial gender and status disparities in whose opinion ultimately matters in collective expert judgment.
That is from a new working paper by Misha Teplitskiy, Hardeep Ranu, Gary Gray, Michael Menietti, Eva Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Average annual change in total factor productivity between 1990 and 2014
Here are the estimates from Penn World Tables, only selected countries are presented:
Sri Lanka 2.48
China 2.40
Poland 1.70
Uruguay 1.61
Romania 1.61
United States 0.89
Brazil -0.12
South Africa -0.53
Mexico -0.82
Ukraine -1.20
A few points. First, I still believe Sri Lanka is an undervalued development story, in spite of recent developments. Second, the economy of Poland is not discussed enough. Third, other sources confirm similar numbers for Mexico, arguably because misallocations of capital and labor have increased due to the growing size of the informal sector. Fourth, there are far too many other nations in the negative column.
Those numbers are reproduced in “Productivity in Emerging-Market Economies: Slowdown or Stagnation?”, by José de Gregorio, in the new and interesting volume Facing Up To Low Productivity Growth, edited by Adam S. Posen and Jeromin Zettelmeyer.
Gender and the confidence gap
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
The first new study focuses on performance in high school, and the startling result is this: Girls with more exposure to high-achieving boys (as proxied by parental education) have a smaller chance of receiving a bachelor’s degree. Furthermore, they do worse in math and science, are less likely to join the labor force, and more likely to have more children, which in turn may limit their later career prospects.
Those are disturbing results. Exposure to high-achieving peers is normally expected to be a plus, not a minus. It is what parents are trying to do when they place their children into better schools, or when school systems work hard to attract better students.
And:
A second new study finds that even blind review does not avoid gender bias in the processing of grant proposal applications, drawn from data from the Gates Foundation. It turns out that women and men have different communications styles, with the women more likely to use narrow words, and the men more likely to use broader ones. And reviewers, it turns out, favor broad words, which are more commonly associated with more sweeping claims, and disfavor the use of too many narrow words.
The net result is that “even in an anonymous review process, there is a robust negative relationship between female applicants and the scores assigned by reviewers.” This discrepancy persists even after controlling for subject matter and other variables. Notably, however, it disappears when controlling for different rhetorical styles.
These two studies probably are connected to each other. While the two sets of researchers do not address each other’s claims, it is not a huge leap to think of broader, more sweeping language as reflecting a kind of confidence, whether merited or not. Narrow words, on the other hand, may reflect a lower level of confidence or a greater sense of rhetorical modesty. Not only might lower confidence hurt many women in life, but a greater unwillingness to signal confidence — regardless of whether it’s genuine — might hurt them too.
There is much more at the link, recommended.
Frank Lichtenberg and the cost of saving lives through pharmaceuticals
Humans are living longer, better lives thanks to innovations in prescription drugs over the past three decades, according to several new studies by Frank Lichtenberg, the Courtney C. Brown Professor of Business.
Every year, according to Lichtenberg’s research, drugs launched since 1982 are adding 150 million life-years to the lifespans of people in 22 countries that he analyzed. He calculated the average pharmaceutical expenditure per life-year saved at $2,837 — a bargain, he says.
“According to most health economists and policymakers, if you could extend someone’s life by a year for less than $3,000, that is highly cost effective,” says Lichtenberg, who gathered new data for these studies to cast a never-before seen view of the econometrics of prescription drugs. “People might be surprised by how cost-effective drugs appear to be in general.”
…To tease out the answer, the professor gathered data on drug launches and the age-standardized premature mortality rate by country, disease, and year. Drawing on data from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, consulting company IQVIA, and French database Theriaque, Lichtenberg was able to identify the role that pharmaceutical innovation played in reducing the number of years of life lost due to 66 diseases in 27 countries. (“Years of life lost” is an estimate of the average years a person would have lived if he or she had not died prematurely.)
Between 1982 and 2015, for example, the US saw the launch of 719 new drugs, the most of any country in the sample; Israel had about half as many launches. By looking at the resultant change in each country between mortality and disease, Lichtenberg calculated that the years of life lost before the age of 85 in 2013 would have been 2.16 times as high if no new drugs had been launched after 1981. For a subset of 22 countries with more full data, the number of life-years gained in 2013 from drugs launched after 1981 was 148.7 million.
Here is more from Stephen Kurczy, and here is previous MR coverage of Lichtenberg and his work. Given these estimates, do you really think we should be spending less on pharmaceuticals?
China fact of the day
China’s major commercial banks have a funding issue outside Beijing’s control: They’re running low on the U.S. dollars they need for activities both at home and abroad.
The combined dollar liabilities at the big four commercial banks exceeded their dollar assets at the end of 2018, their annual results show—a sharp reversal from just a few years ago. Back in 2013, the four together had around $125 billion more dollar assets than liabilities, but now they owe more dollars to creditors and customers than are owed to them.
Bank of China BACHY -0.66% is by far the greatest contributor to the shift. Once the holder of more net assets in dollars than any other Chinese lender, it ended 2018 owing about $70 billion more in dollar liabilities than it booked in dollar assets. The other three lenders actually finished the year with more dollar assets than liabilities, though Industrial & Commercial Bank of China IDCBY -0.33% had a deficit at the end of 2017.
In its annual report, Bank of China says that its asset-liability imbalance is more than addressed by dollar funding that doesn’t sit on its balance sheet. Instruments like currency swaps and forwards are accounted for elsewhere.
But such off-balance-sheet lending can be flighty. As the Bank for International Settlements notes, the vast majority of currency derivatives mature in under one year, meaning they are up for constant renewal and could evaporate during times of pressure.
Here is the full WSJ piece, via Christopher Balding.
Intergenerational mobility in Canada and the United States
Southern Ontario — the most populous part of Canada lying north of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie — displays a similar bottom to top quintile mobility as adjacent regions in Michigan, Ohio, and New York State, most regions being categorized in the 0.05 to 0.10 range. This said, some areas of Quebec adjacent to New York State, Vermont, and New Hampshire display a lower probability than their counterparts in Ontario and New England. Regions with rather high chances of escaping low income and rising to the very top quintile cover the American midwest, where in most Commuting Zones the probability is more than 20 percent, similar probabilities being experienced in the adjacent regions of western Canada.
That is from a new paper by Marie Connolly, Miles Corak, and Catherine Haeck. I take that to be fairly strong evidence for the “culture matters” view of mobility, rather than the “policy is everything” view.
To the extent the United States has lower mobility than Canada, it is largely because so many people here live in the low-mobility regions of the American South.
Families and social networks don’t always help stroke victims
A recent study in Nature Communications shows that when stroke patients are surrounded by close connections like their immediate family, they are less likely to get to the hospital in time for treatment, compared to patients with looser social connections.
Amar Dhand is a neurologist at Harvard Medical School with a PhD in sociology from Oxford who studies the relationship between social connections and health. His team surveyed 175 stroke patients in Boston and St. Louis, and mapped their social networks against the time it took them to arrive at the hospital. The 67 patients who took more than six hours to arrive had both smaller and tighter-knit social networks than the 108 who arrived in under six hours…
“This is the biggest problem in stroke therapy today,” Dhand says. “The delay that is caused by patients and the caregivers. The social context is the largest part of the delay, hands down, in stroke patients arriving in hospital in time.” There’s a predictable sequence of events for stroke patients in close networks, he notes. Initially, a patient may delay telling their family about their symptoms, not wanting them to worry. “Secondly, they [the family] over-negotiate the symptoms, and perhaps even argue about them,” Dhand says. “Then they all validate each others opinion to watch and wait.”
He calls it an”echo chamber,” where family members, hoping for the best, minimize the gravity of the situation and conflate it with previous, less severe illnesses.
In contrast, when patients with only loose social networks have a stroke, there isn’t as much dithering. Patients who suffer strokes in a public place may be sent to the emergency room out of an abundance of caution by employees of the mall, store, or restaurant where they are afflicted. In some cases, an ambulance may be called by someone who doesn’t want the responsibility of caring for the sick person.
Here is the full article.
Are volunteers better fighters?
It seems so:
A voluntary army’s quality exceeds or falls below a drafted army’s average quality depending on whether selection is advantageous or adverse. Using a collection of data sets that cover the majority of the US Army soldiers during World War II, we test for adverse selection into the army. Rather, we find advantageous selection: volunteers and drafted men showed no significant difference in fatalities, but volunteers earned distinguished awards at a higher rate than drafted men, particularly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Analyses at the level of units concur with our findings based on enlistment records.
That is from a newly published article by Javier A. Birchenall and Thomas G. Koch, via Robin Hanson.
Baseball umpires are not so great, and older umpires are much worse
This deep-dive analysis demonstrated that MLB umpires make certain incorrect calls at least 20 percent of the time, or one in every five calls. Research results revealed clear two-strike bias and pronounced strike zone blind spots. Less-experienced younger umpires in their prime routinely outperformed veterans, and umpires selected in recent World Series were not the best performers. Results showed a declining but still unacceptably high BCR score, but on a positive note, only a marginal inter-inning call inconsistency.
The most likely mistakes are made at the top of the strike zone. And older umpires really are worse:
Based on the research, professional umpires, similar to professional baseball players, have a standard peak. The study revealed that home plate umpires who made the Top 10 MLB performance list (2008-2018) had an average of 2.7 years of experience, and averaged 33 years of age with a BCR of 8.94 percent. None of these top performers had more than five years of experience or were older than 37…
In contrast to the overall top performers, research uncovered that umpires on the Bottom 10 MLB performance list (2008-2018) had an average experience level of 20.6 years, were 56.1 years of age, and had an average BCR of 13.96 percent. This group’s error rate was a staggering 56 percent higher than the top 10 MLB performers. Umpire Jerry Layne, with 29 years on the job and at age 61, sported the highest BCR, 14.18 percent. This performance research clearly indicates that more experience and age does not necessarily produce the best umpires.
Here is the full story, written by Mark T. Williams, who also did the data work, via the excellent John Chamberlain.
Is the IT Revolution Over? An Asset Pricing View
I develop a method that structures financial market data to forecast economic outcomes. I use it to study the IT sector’s transition to its long-run share in the US economy. The method uses a model which links economy-wide growth with IT’s market valuation to match transition data on macroeconomic quantities, the sector’s life cycle patterns, and, importantly, market valuation ratios. My central estimates indicate that the revolution ends between 2028 and 2034 and that future average labor productivity growth will fall to 1.7 percent from the 2.7 recorded over 1974–2015. I show empirically the IT sector’s price-dividend ratio univariately explains over half of the variation in future productivity growth.
By Colin Ward. Speculative, as they say! Still, interesting to see someone go through the exercise. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The cost of cannabis
Accounting for income endogeneity, our results suggested that being a current cannabis user may cost an individual over £5600 per year, in terms of lost wellbeing, while being a current user of other drugs may cost approximately £4000 per year. While acknowledging possible reverse causality, we estimated the annual population cost of drug use may be as high as £10.7bn in terms of lost wellbeing.
That is from a new paper by Anna Maccagnan, Tim Taylor, and Mathew P. White, via the excellent Rolf Degen.