Results for “cohort” 216 found
Progresa after 20 Years
Remember the Mexican cash transfer program, sometimes used to support education? Some new results are in, and the program is looking pretty good:
In 1997, the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the
worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation
and poverty reduction. A large literature has documented the short and medium-term impacts of the Mexican
program and its successors in other countries. Using Progresa’s experimental evaluation design originally rolled out in 1997-2000, and a tracking survey conducted 20 years later, this paper studies the differential long-termimpacts of exposure to Progresa. We focus on two cohorts of children: i) those that during the period of differential exposure were in-utero or in the first years of life, and ii) those who during the period of differential exposure were transitioning from primary to secondary school. Results for the early childhood cohort, 18–20-year-old at endline, shows that differential exposure to Progresa during the early years led to positive impacts on educational attainment and labor income expectations. This constitutes unique long-term evidence on the returns of an at-scale intervention on investments in human capital during the first 1000 days of life. Results for the school cohort – in their early 30s at endline – show that the short-term impacts of differential exposure to Progresa on schooling were sustained in the long-run and manifested themselves in larger labor incomes, more geographical mobility including through international migration, and later family formation.
Here is the full paper by M. Caridad Araujo and Karen Macours from Poverty Action Lab.
Is Marriage A Normal Good? Evidence from NBA drafts
Little is known about the causal link between male economic status and marriage outcomes, owing to lack of data on unanticipated permanent income shocks for men. I tackle this by exploiting a natural experiment surrounding NBA drafts, an annual event where NBA teams draft college and international basketball players from 1st to 60th. Given high-quality expert predictions of player draft order and well-defined initial salaries decreasing monotonically by draft rank, I show that disparities between actual and predicted draft rank generate exogenous income shocks. This setup contributes novel income treatments that are not only large and individual-specific but also opportunely occurring early in both career and adult life, when marriage decisions are particularly salient. I additionally construct a new dataset tracking players’ major family decisions and am the first to show that marriage is indeed a normal good for men. All else equal, a 10% increase in initial five-year salary raises likelihood of marriage by 7.9% for the 2004-2013 draft cohorts. I argue my results constitute lower-bound estimates for general population men, as effect sizes are larger and more significant for lower expected salaries.
That is from Jiaqi Zou, who is on the job market from University of Toronto. I like her statement of purpose: “I am particularly interested in identifying barriers and limiting beliefs that constrain individuals from their life’s pursuits.”
David Card on the return to schooling
Card is best known amongst intellectuals for his minimum wage work, but he also has been central in estimating the returns to higher education, using superior methods. In particular, he has induced many economists to downgrade the import of the signaling model of education. Here is one excerpt from his Econometrica paper, appropriately entitled “Estimating the Return to Schooling: Progress on Some Persistent Econometric Problems:
A review of studies that have used compulsory schooling laws, differences in the accessibility of schools, and similar features as instrumental variables for completed education, reveals that the resulting estimates of the return to schooling are typically as
big or bigger than the corresponding ordinary least squares estimates. One interpretation of this finding is that marginal returns to education among the low-education subgroups typically affected by supply-side innovations tend to be relatively high, reflecting their high marginal costs of schooling, rather than low ability that limits their return to education.
The empirical problem arises of course because intrinsic talent and degree of schooling are highly correlated, so the investigator needs some recourse to superior identification. How can you tell if apparent returns to schooling simply reflect a higher talented cohort in the first place? So you might for instance look for an exogenous change to compulsory schooling laws that affects some children but not others (a few of those have come in the Nordic countries). That likely will be uncorrelated with child talent, and so it will help you separate out the true causal return to additional schooling, because you can measure whether the kids with that extra year end up earning more, controlling for other relevant variables of course. And see Alex’s discussion of the Angrist and Card paper on similar questions.
See also Card’s survey of this entire field, written for Handbook of Labor Economics. One impressive feature of these pieces is they show how many disparate methods of measurement all point toward a broadly common conclusion. Whether or not you agree, these papers have been extremely influential, and they are one reason why Claudia Goldin, in my recent CWT with her, asserted that very little of higher education was about the signaling premium.
The American Academy of Pediatrics Tells the FDA to Speed Up and Stop Endangering Patients
The American Academy of Pediatrics has written a stunning letter to the FDA:
We understand that the FDA has recently worked with Pfizer and Moderna to double the number of children ages 5-11 years included in clinical trials of their COVID-19 vaccines. While we appreciate this prudent step to gather more safety data, we urge FDA to carefully consider the impact of this decision on the timeline for authorizing a vaccine for this age group. In our view, the rise of the Delta variant changes the risk-benefit analysis for authorizing vaccines in children. The FDA should strongly consider authorizing these vaccines for children ages 5-11 years based on data from the initial enrolled cohort, which are already available, while continuing to follow safety data from the expanded cohort in the post-market setting. This approach would not slow down the time to authorization of these critically needed vaccines in the 5–11-year age group.
In addition, as FDA continues to evaluate clinical trial requirements for children under 5 years, we similarly urge FDA to carefully consider the impact of its regulatory decisions on further delays in the availability of vaccines for this age group. Based on scientific data currently available on COVID-19 vaccines, as well as on 70 years of vaccinology knowledge in the pediatric population, the Academy believes that clinical trials in these children can be safely conducted with a 2-month safety follow-up for participants. Assuming that the 2-month safety data does not raise any new safety concerns and that immunogenicity data are supportive of use, we believe that this is sufficient for authorization in this and any other age group. Waiting on a 6-month follow-up will significantly hinder the ability to reduce the spread of the hyper infectious COVID-19 Delta variant among this age group, since it would add 4 additional months before an authorization decision can be considered. Based on the evidence from the over 340 million doses of COVID-19 doses administered to adults and adolescents aged 12-17,as well as among adults 18 and older, there is no biological plausibility for serious adverse immunological or inflammatory events to occur more than two months after COVID-19 vaccine administration.
In my many years of writing about the FDA, I can’t recall a single instance in which a major medical organization told the FDA to use a smaller trial and speed up the process because FDA delay was endangering the safety of their patients. Wow.
The invisible graveyard is invisible no more.
Sports are good for student athletes
The recent Supreme Court decision NCAA vs Alston (June 2021) has heightened interest in the benefits and costs of participation in sports for student athletes. Anecdotes about the exploitation of student athletes were cited in the opinion. This paper uses panel data for two different cohorts that follow students from high school through college and into their post-school pursuits to examine the generality of these anecdotes. On average, student athletes’ benefit—often substantially so—in terms of graduation, post-collegiate employment, and earnings. Benefits in terms of social mobility for disadvantaged and minority students are substantial, contrary to the anecdotes in play in the media and in the courts.
Here is more from James J. Heckman and Colleen P. Loughlin. Maybe ten year olds are wasting too much time trying to be the next Lebron James rather than doing their homework, but at higher levels this does not seem to be the case.
Why has the Indian diaspora been so successful?
Dwarkesh writes to me:
Why do you think the Indian diaspora has been so successful? Just selection of the best immigrants from a large pool of candidates or something else too?
Yes, there are plenty of Indians, and surely that matters, but I see several others factors at work:
1. The Indian diaspora itself is large, estimated at 18 million and the single largest diaspora in the world.
2. A significant portion of the better-educated Indians are hooked into English-language networks early on, including through the internet. The value of this connection has been rising due to the rising value of the internet itself. That is a big reason to be bullish on the Indian diaspora.
3. India has been growing rapidly enough so that people understand the nature and value of progress, yet the country remains poor enough that further progress seems urgent.
4. Many Indian parents seem intent on expecting a great deal from their children. The value of this cannot be overemphasized. This effect seems to be stronger in India than in say Indonesia.
5. There is especially positive selection for Indians coming to America. You can’t just run across a border, instead many of the ways of getting here involve some specialization in education and also technical abilities. Virtually all migrated in legal manners, and here is some interesting data on how the various cohorts of Indians arriving in America differed by wave.
6. More speculatively, I see a kind of conceptual emphasis and also a mental flexibility resulting from India’s past as a mixing ground for many cultures. Perhaps some of this comes from the nature of Hinduism as well, even for non-Hindu Indians (just as American Jews are somewhat “Protestant”). Indians who move into leadership roles in U.S. companies seem to do quite well making a very significant cultural leap. I cannot think of any other emerging economy where the same is true to a comparable extent. In any case, the intellectual capital embedded in Indian culture is immense.
7. Those Indians who leave seem to retain strong ties to the home country, which in turn helps others with their subsequent upward mobility, whether in India or abroad. In contrast, Russians who leave Russia seem to cut their ties to a higher degree.
8. I feel one of the hypotheses should involve caste, but I don’t have a ready claim at hand.
Here is the take of Stephen Manallack. Here is Times of India. (And by the way, here is Shruti’s piece on India’s 1991 reforms, not irrelevant to the diaspora.)
What else?
Are Americans getting worse?
Maybe so:
Morbidity and mortality have been increasing among middle-aged and young-old Americans since the turn of the century. We investigate whether these unfavorable trends extend to younger cohorts and their underlying physiological, psychological, and behavioral mechanisms. Applying generalized linear mixed effects models to 62,833 adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (1988-2016) and 625,221 adults from the National Health Interview Surveys (1997-2018), we find that for all gender and racial groups, physiological dysregulation has increased continuously from Baby Boomers through late-Gen X and Gen Y. The magnitude of the increase is higher for White men than other groups, while Black men have a steepest increase in low urinary albumin (a marker of chronic inflammation). In addition, Whites undergo distinctive increases in anxiety, depression, and heavy drinking, and have a higher level than Blacks and Hispanics of smoking and drug use in recent cohorts. Smoking is not responsible for the increasing physiological dysregulation across cohorts. The obesity epidemic contributes to the increase in metabolic syndrome, but not in low urinary albumin. The worsening physiological and mental health profiles among younger generations imply a challenging morbidity and mortality prospect for the United States, one that may be particularly inauspicious for Whites.
Here is the full article, via an excellent loyal MR reader.
Half Doses of Moderna Produce Neutralizing Antibodies
A new phase II study from Moderna shows that half-doses (50 μg) appear to be as good as full doses (100 ug) at generating correlates of protection such as neutralizing antibodies.
In this randomized, controlled phase 2 trial, the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273, administered as a two-dose vaccination regimen at 50 and 100 μg, exhibited robust immune responses and an acceptable safety profile in healthy adults aged 18 years and older. Local and systemic adverse reactions were mostly mild-to-moderate in severity, were ≤4 days of median duration and were less commonly reported in older compared with younger adults. Anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike binding and neutralizing antibodies were induced by both doses of mRNA-1273 within 28 days after the first vaccination, and rose substantially to peak titers by 14 days after the second vaccination, exceeding levels of convalescent sera from COVID-19 patients. The antibodies remained elevated through the last time point assessed at 57 days. Neutralizing responses met criteria for seroconversion within 28 days after the first vaccination in the majority of participants, with rates of 100% observed at 14 and 28 days after the second vaccination. While no formal statistical testing was done, binding and neutralizing antibody responses were generally comparable in participants who received the 100 μg mRNA-1273 and the 50 μg dose at all time points and across both age groups. Overall, the results of this randomized, placebo-controlled trial extend previous immunogenicity and safety results for mRNA-1273 in the phase 1 study in an expanded cohort including participants older than 55 years of age [16, 19].
[These data] confirm that a robust immune response is generated at both 50 and 100 ug dose levels.
As I wrote earlier, halving the dose is equivalent to instantly doubling the output of every Moderna factory.
See my piece in the Washington Post on getting to V-day sooner for an overview of dose stretching strategies.
Addendum: France says one dose is sufficient for previously COVID infected.
Why U.S. Immigration Barriers Matter for the Global Advancement of Science
From Ruchir Agarwal, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, and Geoff Smith:
This paper studies the impact of U.S. immigration barriers on global knowledge production. We present four key findings. First, among Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists, migrants to the U.S. play a central role in the global knowledge network— representing 20-33% of the frontier knowledge producers. Second, using novel survey data and hand-curated life-histories of International Math Olympiad (IMO) medalists, we show that migrants to the U.S. are up to six times more productive than migrants to other countries—even after accounting for talent during one’s teenage years. Third, financing costs are a key factor preventing foreign talent from migrating abroad to pursue their dream careers, particularly talent from developing countries. Fourth, certain ‘push’ incentives that reduce immigration barriers – by addressing financing constraints for top foreign talent – could increase the global scientific output of future cohorts by 42% percent. We conclude by discussing policy options for the U.S. and the global scientific community.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
One marginal Covid-19 and Fast Grants update
A number of scientists (including, but not only, those funded by Fast Grants) have reported some interesting findings related to fluvoxamine, SSRIs and sigma-1 receptor (S1R) agonists more broadly.
- A small RCT at Washington University (n=152) published in JAMA found that patients receiving fluvoxamine had a 0% hospitalization rate (vs. 8.3% for placebo). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2773108
- Another group reported (data not yet published but reported here with permission) a 0% hospitalization rate in a fluvoxamine-treated cohort compared to 11% in the non-treated group. (n=146)
- A large observational analysis (n=7345) of hospitalized French patients found that those on SSRIs (of which fluvoxamine is one) had a very substantially reduced risk of death. (n=257, HR = 0.56.). SSRIs with the highest Sigma1 activation showed the greatest protection. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20143339v2
- Fluvoxamine is a potent sigma-1 receptor agonist. Following their initial report on the role of S1R in SARS-CoV2 – host interaction, Nevan Krogan’s group found that patients receiving another sigma-1 agonist (indomethacin) had a materially reduced likelihood of requiring hospitalization compared to those receiving celecoxib, which doesn’t activate sigma-1. This work was supported by Fast Grants. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6521/eabe9403.full
- Lastly, a genetic screen by a Fast Grants-funded lab (not yet published but reported here with permission) has found that genes upregulated by fluvoxamine significantly inhibit SARS-CoV2 mediated cell death.
On the off chance there is something here, fluvoxamine is relatively safe, cheap, and widely available. We are very open to both positive and negative data in this area, and have funded a further effort. Do let us know if you hear anything on this topic!
Mental health and Covid — correction
Earlier I had reported incorrectly that one in five Covid patients developed subsequently mental health problems. Here is the original paper, and a more accurate rendering of the result is this:
“In the period between 14 and 90 days after COVID-19 diagnosis, 5.8% COVID-19 survivors had their first recorded diagnosis of psychiatric illness (F20–F48), compared with 2.5–3.4% of patients in the comparison cohorts. Thus, adults have an approximately doubled risk of being newly diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder after COVID-19 diagnosis.”
That is still a lot of mental health problems, but much smaller than the original claim.
For a pointer on the econometrics I thank Patrick Collison.
And here is a new paper Discussion of Mental Illness and Mental Health by NBA Players on Twitter.
Graduating in a Recession Can Be Rough
Graduating in a recession can be rough. Wages start lower and advance more slowly. It’s hard to get hired at a top firm which means it takes longer to get on a rapid ascent career path. As Till von Wachter notes in a review of the long-term consequences of initial labor market conditions, failure to takeoff leads to choices which often makes things worse.
…initial labor market conditions persistently increases excessive alcohol consumption (Maclean 2015) and leads to higher obesity and more smoking and drinking in middle age (Cutler, Huang, and Lleras-Muney 2015)…College graduates entering during the 1980s recession experience higher incidence of heart attacks in middle age (Maclean 2013). Following all labor market entrants from these cohorts, Schwandt and von Wachter (2020) find that starting in their late 30s, unlucky entrants begin experiencing a gap in mortality compared to luckier peers that keeps increasing in their 40s, driven by higher rates of heart disease, liver disease, lung cancer, and drug overdoses.
…Marital patterns of unlucky cohorts are affected from the time they enter the labor market up into middle age, when these cohorts have fewer children (Currie and Schwandt 2014), are more likely to have experienced a divorce, and are more likely to live on their own (Schwandt and von Wachter 2020). Initial labor market conditions also have been found to have effects on attitudes towards economic success and the role of the government (Giuliano and Spilimbergo 2014) and to lead to increasingly lowering individuals’ self esteem (Maclean and Hill 2015).
Don Peck had a good popular survey of these effects in The Atlantic in 2010 that remains vital:
Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.
Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility.
Of course, most people who graduate during a recession do just fine in the grand scheme of things.You could have graduated in Sierra Leone. But if you want to be on a rapid ascent career path remember that your first job is not your last job, look for opportunity, and be prepared to take a risk and switch jobs early. Stay off drugs and alcohol.
Uncertainty and the import of norm adherence
The cabinet agreed the measures during an emergency Zoom meeting after being presented with data that showed the NHS would run out of bed capacity by the first week in December.
That is from the London Times, and it is the government’s rationale for a new and very strict lockdown plan. Once you are in this position, there are truly no good choices, nor will you succeed in “protecting the vulnerable” under any of the paths before you.
But let’s turn the clock back a wee bit, shall we say to Liverpool, circa July 2020. At that point, in the “clubby” part of town, drunken youths were walking around, arm-in-arm, serenading each other and singing. Without masks. Barber shops were full, the barbers are wearing plastic visors (often no masks, and it seems the visors are less effective) and many of the patrons were wearing no masks. Overall the mask-wearing rate did not seem to exceed ten percent, if that. People on the (closed window) trains to and from Liverpool often did not have masks, and they were gabbing rather than silent. Few natives were looking aghast at any of this. And unlike in London and parts of southeast England, there was no plausible reason whatsoever to believe in herd immunity for Liverpool.
The recommendation is simply that Liverpool and most or all other parts of England needed stronger norms back then. To stop later severe lockdowns.
And here is Max Roser on testing.
If someone talks about “protecting the vulnerable,” ask a simple follow-up question: how much are they also talking about masks and testing (and biomedical advances)?
You can argue about exactly how effective masks are, or how much the current Covid return is a purely seasonal effect, or what about Peltzman effects (mask wearers will take more risks), and so on. There is typically uncertainty about just how strong norms will be in their final effects, but that is not reason to toss out those norms.
But if people aren’t even trying, you know something is very, very wrong. Blame the elites. Blame the people themselves. Those two alternatives are not nearly as distinct as they might seem.
And I am not asking for the impossible or for the totalitarian. Liverpudlians and the now on the run cohorts of Europeans would be much better off if they had only matched the rather ragged norms and safety record of my own northern Virginia, which is full of immigrants I might add. People here made many mistakes, but on the whole never became altogether negligent.
Europe is seeing a major second wave of its current magnitude because, in so many places, people simply stopped trying. With vaccines on the way, those were indeed grave errors.
Threadhelper, a new method for improving Twitter
Vasco Queirós, from the 7th cohort of Emergent Venture grant winners, has, with Francisco Carvalho, launched ThreadHelper – “A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar”. You can get it here.
ThreadHelper is a browser extension that finds you the tweets you need. It shows as a sidebar on the right hand side of your Twitter timeline and instantly and automatically searches bookmarks, retweets, and your past tweets for tweets that are semantically relevant to the tweet being composed. It can be used as a specific search that’s faster than Twitter’s or as a fuzzy search tool.
Superspreaders data from India
Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, worked with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to track the infection pathways and mortality rate of 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. It is the largest contact tracing study — which is the process of identifying people who came into contact with an infected person — conducted in the world for any disease.
Lead researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar in PEI, said that the paper is the first large study to capture the extraordinary extent to which SARS-CoV-2 hinges on “superspreading,” in which a small percentage of the infected population passes the virus on to more people. The researchers found that 71% of infected individuals did not infect any of their contacts, while a mere 8% of infected individuals accounted for 60% of new infections…
The researchers found that the chances of a person with coronavirus, regardless of their age, passing it on to a close contact ranged from 2.6% in the community to 9% in the household. The researchers found that children and young adults — who made up one-third of COVID cases — were especially key to transmitting the virus in the studied populations.
“Kids are very efficient transmitters in this setting, which is something that hasn’t been firmly established in previous studies,” Laxminarayan said. “We found that reported cases and deaths have been more concentrated in younger cohorts than we expected based on observations in higher-income countries.”
Here is the press release, here is the original research.