mystery of monogamy

Thus far, all of the papers that I've included on this blog have been empirical papers, in which the authors have used data to answer their questions. Not all papers consider data. Many papers develop mathematical models of behavior to predict how people/institutions behave. This is the field of economics that I specialize in. Admittedly, however, these "theory" papers are usually more interesting to economists than to the general population.

"The Mystery of Monogamy" -- which appeared in the American Economic Review earlier this year -- is one theory paper that may appeal to the general population. Eric Gould, Omer Moav , and Avi Simhon (all three at Hebrew University, Jerusalem) attempt to understand "why developed societies are monogamous while rich men throughout history have typically practiced polygyny." They suggest that in traditional societies, what mattered was the number not the quality of children. In developed societies the opposite is true: quality matters. Therefore, in developed societies women are valued more for the quality (not quantity) of their children. This causes men to prefer attracting one high-quality women, rather than multiple average women.

The Mystery of Monogamy

having daughters might make you more liberal

A recent paper by Ebonya Washington (Yale) in the American Economic Review considers whether congressmen & women who parent daughters tend to vote differently than otherwise similar representatives that father sons instead. Unlike many papers in economics, her abstract is easy to read:

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congressperson's propensity to vote liberally, particularly on reproductive rights issues. The results identify an important (and previously omitted) explanatory variable in the literature on congressional decision making. Additionally the paper highlights the relevance of child-to-parent behavioral influence.

How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers

the church versus the mall

Do some people go to church because they have nothing more exciting to do? Jonathan Gruber (MIT) and Daniel Hungerman (Notre Dame) study the impact that eliminating "blue laws" has on church attendance. Blue laws limit the types of businesses that may operate on Sundays, often prohibiting retail activity. Get rid of a blue law, and you can go shopping on Sunday morning instead of attending church.

When a state repeals a blue law, does church attendance decrease? Yes. Also, church donations and spending also decrease, and there is an increase in drinking and drug use among the initially religious people who were affected by the blue laws. These results were recently published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Link to the paper

explaining differences in ceo pay

Why does a CEO of one company make more than a CEO of another company? Is a million dollar pay difference due to differences in ability? Marko Tervio of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley suggests not. His paper in the most recent American Economic Review suggests that variation in CEO pay is mostly explained by firm characteristics, not differences in ability.

This means that a CEO at a Fortune 100 company probably isn't that much better than a CEO at a Fortune 1000 company. But they earn more because their firms earn more.

Read the article

can television make kids smarter?

In the previous post, we learned that television might cause autism. Before banning television from your house, you should also consider the following article by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, both at the University of Chicago. It appeared in a recent issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores

They find evidence that exposure to television when in preschool may increase average adolescent test scores. Admittedly, the overall the effects are small. However, "the effects are largest for children from households where English is not the primary language, for children whose mothers have less than a high school education, and for nonwhite children."

So, this suggests that tv might not be completely bad. It may provide exposure to knowledge or experiences that are otherwise unavailable. Taken together what do the two television studies imply?

could television cause autism?

This study from some economists at Cornell is interesting. Mike Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov find a link between the rate of television viewing by kids under 3 years old and the rate of autism in the population.

A Summary in Slate Magazine

The Actually Study

Despite this, I'm still looking forward to the day that my wife surprises me with a big-screen HDTV.