voting for Buchanan, when you ment to vote for Gore

Kelly Shue and Erzo Luttmer (both at Harvard) consider the role of "misvoting" in elections. Apparantly, not everyone is capable of going into the voting booth and casting a vote for the candidate they intend to support. The study uses data from the 2003 California recall election, in which there was "quasi-random variation in candidate name placement on ballots." The authors show that "minor candidate's vote shares almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates."

This is evidence that voters routinely make mistakes when submitting their ballots. What's more, the authors find evidence that these mistakes are larger is precincts with more poorly educated and poor voters. Therefore, "a major candidate that disproportionally attracts voters from such [undereducation or poor] preceincts faces an electoral disadvantage."

The article is forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Policy. Read the article.

deer hunting regulations and safety externalities

State governments often place limits on the types of game that may be hunted. For example, to limit the averse affects that hunting can have on deer population, hunters may only be allowed to shoot adult male deer. Such regulations can help protect the deer population, and as Michael Conlin (Michigan State), Stacy Dickert-Conlin (Michigan State), and John Pepper (Virginia) show in a recent working paper, they can also impact hunter safety.

Why is this? Because the regulations require the a hunter excercise more caution when pulling the trigger, to make sure that he is about to shoot a buck, rather than a doe. This added caution also makes it less likely that someone mistakes his hunting buddy for a deer.

Read the paper.

money and happiness

It turns out that money can buy happiness, but you get more of a bang for your buck if you spend your money when you're young -- before your health deteriorates and you become less able to enjoy that night on the town or that barefoot cruise through the Caribbean. These are the findings of a new working paper by Amy Finkelstein (MIT), Erzo Luttmer (Harvard) and Matthew Notowidigdo (MIT). Finally, some evidence in favor of spending our money now, rather than investing it until retirement.

Read the article in Slate.

Download the paper.

foster care and adult crime

Joseph Doyle (MIT) studies the impact of foster care on child outcomes -- namely whether they commit crimes as adults. To do so, Doyle first shows that whether a child ends up in foster care often depends on the identity of his or her case worker. Some case workers are more likely than others to place children in foster care. Because case workers are randomly assigned to cases, whether a child ends up in foster care (for marginal cases) is random. This randomness can be used to measure the effects of foster care. Do children assigned to a foster-care prone case worker tend to have different outcomes than children assigned to a case worker that is less likely to place them in foster care?

From the abstract:

Children on the margin of placement are found to be two to three times more likely to enter the criminal justice system as adults if they were placed in foster care. One innovation describes the types of children on the margin of placement, a group that is more likely to include African Americans, girls, and young adolescents.

Read the paper

does movie violence increase violent crime?

In a forthcoming QJE paper, Gordon Dahl (UCSD) and Stefano DellaVigna (Berkeley) test whether violence in the movies influence violence in real life. Using data on cinema releases and attendance, the authors look for correlation between violent-movie attendance and violent crime.

Intuitively, we might imagine that violent movies spur violence. When one leaves the a movie with a lot of fighting, that person might go looking for a fight, right? Surprisingly, the paper finds that violent movie attendance actually causes violent crime to decrease. This may be because those who commit violent crimes like to watch violent movies. When a new movie comes out, they go to the cinema instead of on their "crime spree" (or instead of going to the bar, which otherwise would result in them getting drunk which makes them more likely to commit a violent crime).

They estimate that a violent movie results in 1000 fewer assaults on any given weekend. Admittedly, however, the authors are unable to test for long-run affects of violent movies. Although a violent movie results in less crime in the short run, could increased violence on the big screen result in a more violent society over the course of many years?

Link to the paper on the NBER site
Or, try to download a PDF directly

impact of universal child care

In a recent Journal of Political Economy paper, Michael Baker (Toronto), Jonathan Gruber (MIT), and Kevin Milligan (British Columbia) study the effects of a universal child care program in Quebec. Unsurprisingly, they find that the program significantly increases maternal labor supply--more moms return to work and/or work more after the birth of a child. What's surprising is that the program appears to make children worse off on a variety of dimensions.

...the evidence suggests that children are worse off by measures ranging from aggression to motor and social skills to illness. We also uncover evidence that the new child care program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.

Why would this be? Does this mean that childcare in general could be causing these affects? Not necessarily. First, they cannot rule out that these negative aspects result from a short-term adjustment process, as families adjust to using childcare. Second, I speculate that universal childcare likely changes the composition of children at daycare centers, which may have similar results as changing the composition of inmates at a juvenile detention center (see the earlier post).

Read the paper

blonde and brunette fundraisers

When someone shows up on our doorstep looking for a charitable donation, does our potential donation depend on how attractive the fundraiser is? Does it depend on their hair color?

In a cute little paper published in Economics Letters, Michael Price shows that donations do depend on these factors. The better looking the fundraiser, the more we are likely to contribute. (That result isn't so surprising, given that a number of other papers have found a correlation between earnings and beauty.) He also shows that blondes bring in more than brunettes--even controlling for one's physical attractiveness. This means that the benefits of being beautiful are more significant for blondes than for brunettes. This blonde advantage is driven entirely from the donations of Caucasian households (non-white households display no blond preference).

Download the paper

teacher testing & teaching quality

By requiring teachers to pass tests or receive certifications, we can ensure that public school teachers obtain some minimum level of education and knowledge. Does imposing such requirements increase student performance?

Joshua D. Angrista (MIT) and Jonathan Guryanb (U Chicago) find no evidence that increasing teacher requirements increases teacher quality. This may be because the increased requirements makes it more difficult to become a teacher, which likely affects the types of students who choose to become teachers. It also forces schools to hire along this one-dimension, even if the school believes that an uncertified teacher would make the better teacher.

What's more, the authors show that the increase in requirements increases teacher wages (without increasing teacher quality). This is unsurprising since increasing teacher requirments likely decrease the supply of teachers--in the labor market this means higher wages. This article suggests that increasing teacher teasting and certification requirments increases the cost of education without increasing the quality of education.

link to the article

racial bias among NBA referees

Although this article made headlines a while back, I still want to include it on this blog. Joseph Price (BYU) and Justin Wolfers (Penn) find evidence of racial bias among NBA referees. They show that the number of expected fouls given to a player during a game depends on the player's race and the racial mix of the refereeing crew. They identify a own-race bias amongst the referees. A white refereeing crew, compared to a black refereeing crew, calls relatively fewer fouls on white players than on black players; and vice versa. Although the bias is small--small enough that it would not be noticed just by watching the games--it is large-enough to affect the outcome of a close game.

Why is this interesting? Because NBA referees are amongst the people we would expect to be least biased. If race influences the split-second decisions of the referees, then it probably also influences the split-second decisions of almost everyone else, even it we don't intend for it to.

read the article

pay peanuts, get monkeys

In American academics, professors in certain fields make significantly more than professors in other fields. Here salaries are usually correlated with the salaries paid in the private (non-academic) sector. Outside of America, on the other hand, it is often the case that all assistant professors are paid (roughly) the same, and all full professors are paid (roughly) the same, independent of one's field. That's only fair, right? If the history prof and the engineering prof both have to teach and conduct research, why should the engineering prof earn more?

New Zealand is one such country in which academic salaries are independent of one's field. Using data from New Zealand universities, Glenn Boyle shows that if you don't pay the engineering prof more, the quality of engineering research will fall. This is because the best engineers will find it more attractive to accept high-paying private sector jobs. Academic research productivity in different fields depends the how a field's academic salary compares to salaries outside of academia. This suggests that if academic economists earn the same as English professors, the best economists will find it even more attractive to accept a high-paying job on Wall Street, and the quality of economics research will fall. A similar effect isn't present for English professors because they don't have as high-paying of outside options.

read the article

what you should know about politics

Ok, so this isn't a research paper. It isn't even written by a Ph.D. academic. But it is a good book, and gives a well-balanced overview of the issues.

What you should know about politics... but don't

do political parties matter?

Does it matter if we elect a democrat or a republican to local office? If we elect a republican, will government be smaller? Do democrats allocate the budget differently than republicans? Which party is better at fighting crime? These are the questions asked in a careful analysis by Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko (both at the Wharton School). Their surprising result: the political party doesn't matter.

This result is in contrast to state and national politics, where the party matters. How to explain this difference? The authors suggest that it comes from the relative homogeneity of cities, which "appears to provide the proper incentives for local politicians to be able to credibly commit to moderation and discourages strategic extremism."

The paper will appear in an upcoming issue of the QJE. Download it here (or here).

missing women and the price of tea in china

In developing countries, there are often more male children than female children, and male children often achieve a higher level of education. Nancy Qian (Brown University) considers whether increasing female income may affect these gender differences. To do so properly, she uses a creative data source to consider exogenous changes in income that tend to affect women differently than men. From the abstract:

This paper uses exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total income and sex-specific income on sex-differential survival of children. Increasing female income, holding male income constant, improves survival rates for girls, whereas increasing male income, holding female income constant, worsens survival rates for girls. Increasing female income increases educational attainment of all children, whereas increasing male income decreases educational attainment for girls and has no effect on boys' educational attainment.

Read the article.

women's suffrage and child health

Are women more concerned than men about the wellbeing of children? If that is true--or if politicians perceive it to be true--then increasing female participation in politics could lead to more policies that benefit children. Grant Miller (Stanford) tests this hypothesis in a new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He finds evidence suggesting that giving women the right to vote led to higher child wellbeing. From the paper abstract:

...Suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. ... Suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, and child mortality declined by 8–15% (or 20,000 annual child deaths nationwide)...

Read the article

building criminal capital behind bars

If you hang out with a bunch of a talented chefs, you may learn something about cooking during the time together. If you hang out with car thieves, you may learn a thing or two about stealing cars.

Patrick Bayer, Randi Hjalmarsson, and David Pozen apply this logic to their analysis of juvenile detention centers. They show that future criminal behavior of detention center residents depends, at least somewhat, on the criminal background of the other detention center residents. From their abstract:

We find strong evidence of peer effects for burglary, petty larceny, felony and misdemeanor drug offenses, aggravated assault, and felony sex offenses; the influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category.

If you have access to NBER, download there paper here. Otherwise, google scholar.

lottery tickets and lucky stores

Jonathan Guryan (Chicago) and Melissa Kearney (Maryland) point out that stores that sell a large-prize winning lottery tickets experience a significant upturn in lottery sales in the following weeks. They show that this upturn is largest in poorer areas. Why is this? The authors test two explanations. First, having a lottery winner in the local area may help advertise the lottery, which could increase demand for tickets. Second, people may believe in the "lucky-store effect".

They find evidence in support of the lucky-store effect and not in support of the advertising story. Because lottery winners are determined randomly, such a lucky store effect does not exist, and their paper provides evidence of irrational behavior.

The paper was published in the AER. Gambling at Lucky Stores

diplomats, corruption, and NYC parking tickets

United Nations officials had diplomatic immunity from parking tickets until 2002. Ray Fisman (Columbia) and Edward Miguel (Berkeley) look at the number of unpaid parking tickets held by diplomats from various countries. They find that diplomats from countries with high corruption indexes had a significantly higher number of unpaid parking tickets compared with diplomats from less corrupt countries. This suggests that in corrupt countries, breaking the law by public officials is seen as more acceptable behavior. The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy.

Download the paper

casket regulation and price of funerals

Some states regulate the sale of caskets, only allowing funeral homes to sell them. Other states allow casket sales by other retailers (e.g., Costco). My initial impression: the cost of caskets (and thus the overall cost of funeral services) will be lower in unregulated states. This makes sense: increased competition reduces prices. In their recent Journal of Law and Economics paper, Judith Chevalier and Fiona M. Scott Morton (Yale) show why my initial intuition is wrong.

Although increasing casket competition decreases the price of caskets, that doesn't mean a drop in the overall price of a funeral. This is because you still need to hire someone to organize the funeral and bury the casket, services for which funeral homes do not face competition. To offset the lower price of caskets, funeral homes increase the price of other services, keeping their revenue and the end price of a funeral roughly the same. Since people buy caskets and funeral services together, increasing competition on only one of the dimensions doesn't reduce the market power of funeral homes overall.

Download the article

pirate economics

Peter Leeson (George Mason University) studies pirates. How can you beat that for interesting economics? He hopes that by better understanding pirate organizations, we can better understand other criminal enterprises.

His abstract:

This article investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. Pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.

The paper will be published in a future issue of the Journal of Political Economy.

download the paper

the press release

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.