natural disasters and corruption

Another paper out in the most recent Journal of Law and Economics studies the impact of natural disasters on corruption. Sort of. When a natural disaster hits a community in the US, the federal government transfers money to the local areas to help with recovery. The availability of federal funds might increase the return to being a corrupt government official in one of these communities.

Peter Leeson (George Mason) and Russell Sobel (WVU) find a connection between the likelihood of a natural disaster and reported corruption. From their abstract:

Each additional $100 per capita in FEMA relief increases the average state's corruption by nearly 102 percent. Our findings suggest notoriously corrupt regions of the United States, such as the Gulf Coast, are in part notoriously corrupt because natural disasters frequently strike them. They attract more disaster relief, which makes them more corrupt.

Read the article. If that doesn't work, try here.

do fast food ads result in fat kids?

In a new paper out in The Journal of Law and Economics, Shin-Yi Chou (Lehigh), Inas Rashad (Georgia State), and Michael Grossman (CUNY) study the effects that fast-food advertising on TV has on overweight children. They estimate that banning advertisements would decrease the number of overweight children by 14 to 18 percent. A ban might not be optimal, however, since it may also reduce the amount of information available to consumers. (For example, being informed that it is Monopoly time at McDonalds could arguably make you better off.)

The authors go on to show that eliminating the "tax deductability of would produce smaller declines of between 5 and 7 percent in these outcomes but would impose lower costs on children and adults who consume fast food in moderation because positive information about restaurants that supply this type of food would not be completely banned from television."

Read the article. If that doesn't work, try here.

the logic of life

As you may imagine, I enjoy reading the popular press books and articles describing new economic research. Some are better than others. Most recently, I finished Tim Hartford's The Logic of Life, which is amongst the best popular press economics books (also amongst the best are Freakonomics and Super Crunchers). Some of the topics include game theory and poker, the market for marriage and divorce, the job market (and why your lazy boss is paid so much), rational racism (rational not good), and why subsidizing city living would be good for the environment. It's worth a read.

Read some reviews here. Buy it here.

pro-girl teacher biases

Victor Lavy (Hebrew U) looks for gender biases held by high school teachers in Israel. His results suggest that girls benefit from teacher biases, which is largely contrary to popular beliefs that teacher biases may harm girls. The abstract:

Schools and teachers are often said to be a source of stereotypes that harm girls. This paper tests for the existence of gender stereotyping and discrimination by public high-school teachers in Israel. It uses a natural experiment based on blind and non-blind scores that students receive on matriculation exams in their senior year. Using data on test results in several subjects in the humanities and sciences, I found, contrary to expectations, that male students face discrimination in each subject. These biases widen the female–male achievement difference because girls outperform boys in all subjects, except English, and at all levels of the curriculum. The bias is evident in all segments of the ability and performance distribution and is robust to various individual controls. Several explanations based on differential behavior between boys and girls are not supported empirically. However, the size of the difference is very sensitive to teachers' characteristics, suggesting that the bias against male students is the result of teachers', and not students', behavior.

The paper is recently published in the Journal of Public Economics. Download it here.

does merit based aid increase college attendance? nope

Jashua Goodman (Columbia) considers the impact of Massachusetts' Adam Scholarship on college attendance decisions. The Adam Scholarship is a state-funded, merit-based financial aid program similar to those found in most other states. His findings are interesting, mostly because the program appears to have little effect on college attendance decisions.

From the abstract: "most funds flowed to students who would have enrolled in public colleges absent the scholarship and the aid had no effect on winners' overall college enrollment rate, which already exceeded 90%." He also finds that the scholarship "induced 6% of winners to choose four-year public colleges instead of four-year private colleges;" an effect which does not increase overall college attainment. He concludes,

The Adams Scholarship would annually add 80 college-educated workers to the state's workforce, at an annual cost of $50,000 per added worker. It seems implausible that the benefits to the state in additional tax revenue would exceed this amount, or that the proportion of college-educated workers would rise enough to induce the [previously claimed benefits].

Download the paper, which was recently published in the Journal of Public Economics.

can a hurricane make you pregnant?

Being in Miami, I found this paper rather interesting. Richard Evans (BYU), Yingyao Hu (Johns Hopkins), and Zhong Zhao (IZA) test whether hurricanes can make you pregnant. Sort of. The idea is that a natural disaster might encourage people to stay put in doors, and with nothing else to do people may use that opportunity to make babies.

For all US counties on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, they have data on tropical storm watches, tropical storm warnings, hurricane watches, and hurricane warnings. These are listed in order of their expected severity. Basically, if your community is under a tropical storm watch, its raining pretty heavily outside. If your community is under a hurricane warning, its not just wet, but you're also worried about your house blowing away. Compared to the case without any watches or warnings, the authors find that being under a tropical storm watch significantly increases the number of births in your community 9 months later (consistent with the idea that since it's misserable outside, we might as well keep warm inside). However, a hurricane warning significantly decreases the birth rate 9 months later. I guess that people are too worried about their house blowing for any romance to take place. (For the intermediate storm advisories: A tropical storm watch has a positive but insignificant effect on the birth rate, while a hurricane watch has a negative but insignificant effect.)

The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Population Economics. Download it here.

information availability and school choice program participation

It has been shown that low-income families put less weight on academic quality when choosing schools. They are less likely to take part in school-choice programs, in which they can apply for their children to attend a different school than originally assigned based on geography. This implies that school-choice programs may not have as large of a benefit for low-income families than may be possible, if they were more likely to take advantage of such programs.

In a recent QJE article, Justine S. Hastings (Yale) and Jeffrey M. Weinstein (Syracuse) consider show that providing low-income families with data on school performance increases the probability that they participate in a school-choice program. They find "that school choice will most effectively increase academic achievement for disadvantaged students when parents have easy access to test score information and good options from which to choose."

Download the article.