physical attractiveness and performance

Previous papers have shown that physical attractiveness has a positive impact on student performance. However, the past studies tend to not control for other characteristics that may be highly correlated with attractiveness, including personality and grooming. In a recent paper in Labour Economics, Michael French, Philip Robins, Jenny Homer, and Lauren Tapsell (all at U Miami) conclude:

Including personality and grooming, the effect of physical attractiveness turns negative for both groups, but is only statistically significant for males. For male and female students, being very well groomed is associated with a statistically significant GPA premium. While grooming has the largest effect on GPA for male students, having a very attractive personality is most important for female students.

Link to the paper here. Or read about it here.

domestic violence and football

David Card (Berkeley) and Gordon Dahl (Rochester) study family violence during football season, and show that (from the abstract):

Controlling for location and time fixed effects, weather factors, the pre-game point spread, and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses by the home team (losses in games that the home team was predicted to win by more than 3 points) lead to an 8 percent increase in police reports of at-home male-on-female intimate partner violence. There is no corresponding effect on female-on-male violence... We also find that unexpected losses in highly salient or frustrating games have a 50% to 100% larger impact on rates of family violence.

This is interesting, but isn't a big surprise. If Bubba beats his wife when he is frustrated, and if Bubba gets frustrated when his team loses in an upset, then an upset loss results in a beaten up wife. Card and Dahl argue that their evidence supports the hypothesis among analysts that domestic violence tends to result from a loss of control, rather than a more rational choice in an effort to shape "intra-family incentives."

Download it here, or here.

did no child left behind work?

Thomas Dee (Swarthmore) and Brian Jacob (Harvard) empirically consider the impact of No Child Left Behind legislation in the U.S. From the abstract:

Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in either 4th or 8th grade.

From the introduction:

The lack of any effect in reading, and the fact that NCLB appears to have generated only modestly larger impacts among disadvantaged subgroups in math (and thus only made minimal headway in closing achievement gaps), suggests that, to date, the impact of NCLB has fallen short of its ambitious “moon-shot rhetoric”

Download it here, or here.

gender differences in competition go away with experience

A number of papers present evidence that males tend to perform better during competitions than females. This is true, even if we compare the performance of a male and female who both perform equally well at the task when there is no competition involved. However, the papers that find gender differences use data from one-round competitions. In a recent working paper, Christopher Cotton (this is me; U Miami), Frank McIntyre, and Joseph Price (both at BYU) test for the gender differences in a series of five-round math competitions.

From our abstract:

Past research finds that males outperform females in competitive situations. Using data from multiple-round math tournaments, we verify this finding during the initial round of competition. The performance gap between males and females, however, disappears after the first round. In later rounds, only math ability (not gender) serves as a significant predictor of performance.

The gender difference is not robust to multiple rounds of competition. The evidence supports the argument that exposing females to competition (e.g., Title IX) may eliminate performance differences.

Link to the paper here.

biased NBA referees, again

Last year I posted on a paper by Joseph Price (BYU) and Justin Wolfers (Penn) that showed that NBA referees were racially biased. Price is again identifying biases amongst NBA refs, this time with coauthors Marc Remer (Johns Hopkins) and Daniel Stone (Oregon State).

The new working paper finds evidence that NBA referees are more likely to call fouls in favor of (1) home teams, (2) teams that are losing, and (3) teams that are down in the number of playoff games won. To account for the possibility that the three types of biases may be due to players playing differently when they are at home or behind, the authors look at play-by-play data which allows them to distinguish between discretionary turnovers (e.g., shooting fouls, charging) and non-discretionary turnovers (e.g., steals and bad passes). They show that the biases are due to the referees, not players.

The authors argue that each of these biases may increase league profits by (1) making home games more exciting, (2) making games more exciting in general, and (3) extending the number of games in the season. However, they find no evidence that the biases are explicit, and conclude that they are likely implicit.

high school sports and teen pregnancy

Females who participate in sports are less likely to get pregnant than ones who do not. This has largely been used to insinuate that by participating in sports, a girl decreases her chances of getting pregnant. In a recent working paper, Joseph Price (BYU), Daniel Simon (Cornell), and Betsey Stevenson (Penn) find the flaw in this logic.

The authors point out that girls who decide to participate in sports may be significantly different from the typical girl who does not participate. They are likely more confidence, for example. We observe that sports participants are less likely to get pregnant; this is different from saying that a girl who plays sports is less likely to get pregnant than the same girl if she was not on a sports team.

It turns out that sports participation actually increases the pregnancy rate among girls. To show this, the study looks at the effect of Title XI, and the introduction of additional female sports participation, on pregnancy rates. From the paper's abstract:

We find that a 10 percentage point increase in the fraction of girls playing sports in a state increases the teen birth rate by 0.3 percentage points (about a 10% increase). However, there are racial differences in the effect of sports participation. The increase in the teen birth rate is most pronounced for white young women with some suggestive evidence that sports decreases teen birth rates among black young women.

Download it here.

should we tax or cap political contributions?

In the spirit of unabashed self-promotion, here is a summary of some of my own research, as it appeared in the University of Miami B-School Buzz:

With the U.S. Supreme Court expected to address campaign finance reform in its next term, new research from Christopher Cotton, an assistant professor of economics, offers fresh insight on the issue. The study uses game theory to compare two reform options: contribution limits and taxing campaign contributions. His conclusion? Taxing campaign contributions is the better solution. The research is published in the August issue of the Journal of Public Economics.

Link to working paper version or final version on journal website.

why are divorce rates higher in urban areas?

The divorce rate is higher in urban areas than in rural areas. Why is this? It could be that the abundance of potential partners in urban areas cause people to "trade up" more often, or to cheat on their spouses more often. Or maybe, people in rural areas are more likely to think of divorce as a non-option.

In a new paper, appearing in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Pieter Gautier (Vrije Universiteit), Michael Svarer (Aarhus University), and Coen Teulings (Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis) propose another possibility. Maybe couples who are more content with their relationships are more likely to move out of the city, while those who are less content are more likely to stay in the city. This makes a lot of sense. People often leave the city to focus more on family life, something you are more likely to do when you are happy with your spouse. The research shows that once your control for this sorting effect, there is no distinguishable difference in divorce rate.

Link to the paper here.

longer school days and student performance

In the current issue of Economics of Education Review, Cristián Bellei (U Chile) considers whether lengthening the school day increases student achievement. Looking at a change in the length of a school day in Chile, the paper shows that more classroom time increases achievement in mathematics and language. This impact is larger for public school, rural, and high-achieving students.

Link to the paper here.

prisons and AIDS rates

Rucker Johnson and Steven Raphael (Berkeley) show that differences in male incarceration rates can explain much of the difference in acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) between different demographic segments in the U.S. From the abstract:

[They] find strong effects of male incarceration rates on male and female AIDS rates. ... The results reveal that higher incarceration rates among black males over this period [1982-96] explain the lion's share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection among women.

The paper was recently published in the Journal of Law and Economics. Download it here or here.

landlord discrimination against homosexuals

Ali Ahmed and Mats Hammarstedt (Växjö University, Sweden) conduct a straight-forward, but interesting field experiment in which they test for housing market discrimination against homosexuals. The paper appears in a recent version of Economica. The abstract:

This paper presents the first field experiment studying discrimination against homosexuals on the housing market. The study is conducted on the rental housing market in Sweden using the internet as a research platform. Two fictitious couples, one heterosexual and one male homosexual, apply for vacant rental apartments advertised by landlords on the internet. Our findings show that homosexual males are discriminated against on the Swedish housing market, since the homosexual couple gets far fewer call-backs and fewer invitations to further contacts and to showings of apartments than the heterosexual couple.

parents, child self confidence, and child performance

In a recent paper, Rajeev Darolia (George Washington) and Bruce Wydick (U San Francisco) test how parents can affect the academic effort and performance of a child through "signals," such as praise or financial rewards. From the abstract:

Our results show that some complementary actions before college, such as parental praise, foster academic achievement above what natural ability would predict. Conversely, we find that some substitutionary actions before college, e.g. providing cars as gifts, are associated with lower effort in college and underachievement.

I was particularly amused by the car-buying result. The article is forthcoming in Economica. Link to it here, or here.

how siblings affect labor market mobility

Helmut Rainer, Elmut Rainer (both St Andrews), and Thomas Siedler (Essex) develop a model of labor market mobility in which whether or not you have siblings affects your decisions to move. The paper appears in a recent issue of Economica. The abstract:

This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children's mobility characteristics. Our main result is that the mobility of young adults crucially depends on the presence of a sibling. Siblings compete in location and employment decisions to direct parental care decisions towards their preferred outcome. Only children are not exposed to this kind of competition. This causes an equilibrium in which siblings exhibit higher mobility than only children, and also have better labour market outcomes. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find evidence that confirms these patterns.