My estimates imply that 8% of the rise in obesity between 1979 and 2004 can be attributed to the concurrent drop in real gas prices, and that a permanent $1 increase in gasoline prices would reduce overweight and obesity in the United States by 7% and 10%.The paper attributes this relationship between gas prices and weight to the effect that changes in gas prices have on the frequency of walking and restaurant eating.
We find approximately 7% returns for most MBAs but roughly double that for finance and management information systems (MIS). Thus, MBA area of study can matter as much or more than program quality: only attending a top 10, but not 11-25, MBA program trumped studying finance and MIS at a nontop 25 program.
Using a very large sample of matched author-referee pairs, we examine how the gender of referees and authors affects the former’s recommendations. Relying on changing matches of authors and referees, we find no evidence of gender differences among referees in charitableness toward authors; nor do we find any effect of the interaction between the referees’ and authors’ gender. With substantial research showing gender differences in fairness, the results suggest that an ethos of objectivity can overcome tendencies toward same-group favoritism/opposite-group discrimination.Link to the paper here.
Across identification methods and comparison groups, the results consistently suggest that choice significantly reduces the drop-out rate and increases the cognitive achievements of high-school students. It also improves behavioural outcomes such as teacher–student relationships and students' social acclimation and satisfaction at school, and reduces the level of violence and classroom disruption.Across the board, school choice looks like a winning policy. Download the paper here.
Our results suggest that student incentives increase achievement when the rewards are given for inputs to the educational production function, but incentives tied to output are not effective. Relative to popular education reforms of the past few decades, student incentives based on inputs produce similar gains in achievement at lower costs.
Controlling for gender, religion, age, education, and marital status, the proportion of girls [children] significantly increases Republican Party identification in the United States.
An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes fro the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate. The relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
In this paper, we show that child gender affects the marital status, family structure, and fertility of a significant number of American families. Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first-born son. Three factors are important in explaining this gap. First, women with first-born daughters are less likely to marry. Strikingly, we also find evidence that the gender of a child in utero affects shotgun marriages. Among women who have taken an ultrasound test during pregnancy, mothers who have a girl are less likely to be married at delivery than those who have a boy. Second, parents who have first-born girls are significantly more likely to be divorced. Third, after a divorce, fathers are much more likely to obtain custody of sons compared to daughters. These three factors have serious negative income and educational consequences for affected children...We show that the number of children is significantly higher in families with a first-born girl.The paper was recently published in the Review of Economic Studies. View it here. Or here.
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.
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.
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.
We investigate the role of racial group loyalty on generosity in a broadly representative sample of the U.S. adult population. We use an audiovisual presentation to manipulate beliefs about the race, income, and worthiness of Hurricane Katrina victims. Respondents then decide how to divide $100 between themselves and Katrina victims. We find no effects of victims’ race on giving on average. However, respondents who report feeling close to their racial or ethnic group give substantially more when victims are of the same race rather than another race, while respondents who do not feel close to their group give substantially less.This means that race does effect individual donations. However, on average, the effects cancel each other out, and no one is made significantly worse or better off from the biases.
We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions or turnout in post-election survey and voter data. However, receiving either paper led to more support for the Democratic candidate, suggesting that media slant mattered less in this case than media exposure. Some evidence also suggests that receiving either paper led to increased 2006 voter turnout.Read the article.
Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade in order to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. In this paper, we use plausibly exogenous variation in retention generated by a test-based promotion policy to assess the causal impact of grade retention on high school completion. We find that retention among younger students does not affect the likelihood of high school completion, but that retaining low-achieving eighth grade students in elementary school substantially increases the probability that these students will drop out of high school.Download the article.
We examine the presidential opinion ratings of voting-age eligibles and ineligibles two years after the president’s election. We find that eligibles show two to three times greater polarization of opinions than comparable ineligibles. We find smaller effects when we compare polarization in opinions of senators elected during high turnout presidential campaign years with senators elected during nonpresidential campaign years.Read the paper.
We study alumni contributions to an anonymous research university. If alumni believe donations will increase the likelihood of their child’s admission, and if this belief helps motivate their giving, then the pattern of giving should vary systematically with the ages of their children, whether the children ultimately apply to the university, and the admissions outcome. We call this pattern the child cycle of alumni giving. The evidence is consistent with the child-cycle pattern. Thus, while altruism drives some giving, the hope for a reciprocal benefit also plays a role. We compute rough estimates of the proportion of giving due to selfish motives.So, their story only requires that alumni believe that contributions increase the probability of their children being accepted. Now, I would like to see someone determine whether this belief has support in the data.
We present results from a randomized study of a well-defined use of computers in schools: a popular instructional computer program for pre-algebra and algebra. We primarily assess the program using a test designed to target pre-algebra and algebra skills. Students randomly assigned to computer-aided instruction score significantly higher on a pre-algebra and algebra test than students randomly assigned to traditional instruction. We hypothesize that this effectiveness arises from increased individualized instruction as the effects appear larger for students in larger classes and in classes with high student absentee rates.Read the paper.
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.
...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).
