All the financial crisis blather is making economics reading boring…
We need more challenging and entertaining stuff like these (mostly from the recent AEA conference):
Dwight R Lee’s article entitled Should Government Reduce Inequality in Life Spans? with such swell quotes as:
Government transfers to reduce the gender gap in life expectancy would do little more than reduce improvements in both women’s and men’s life expectancies. For similar reasons, government transfers have done little more than reduce the income growth of both the rich and the poor.
Scott Hankins, Mark Hoestra and Paige Marta Skiba in their paper The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery, show:
Our results show that while recipients of $50,000 to $150,000 are less likely to file for bankruptcy immediately following the receipt of the cash prize, this reduction represents a mere postponing of bankruptcy as it is followed by an increase in bankruptcy rates three to ve years after winning. Consequently, we nd no di¤erence between the overall bankruptcy rates of small winners versus large winners in the 6 years after winning the lottery.
Michael Anderson and David A. Matsa determine the causality direction of restaurant availability and obesity, in their paper Are Restaurants Really Supersizing America? finding:
Well-established cross-sectional and time-series correlations between average body weight and eating out have convinced many researchers and policymakers that restaurants are a leading cause of obesity in the United States. … The results find no evidence of a causal link between restaurants and obesity, and the estimates are precise enough to rule out any meaningful effect.
C. Kirabo Jackson and Emily Greene Owens do research on the correlation between DUIs and availability of public transit in a paper entitled One for the Road: Public Transportation, Alcohol Consumption, and Intoxicated Driving, showing:
We find that each additional hour of late-night operation reduced the total number of DUIs in Washington DC by 9%, and this effect was concentrated in areas where alcohol venders are located close to Metro stations. In contrast, we find evidence that alcohol consumption increased with the service expansion as the number of alcohol-related arrests went up by as much as 14% in certain neighborhoods.
Mark Duggan in his paper The Effect of Gun Shows on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from California and Texas finds that there is:
…no evidence that gun shows lead to substantial increases in either gun homicides or suicides. In addition, tighter regulation of gun shows does not appear to reduce the number of firearms-related deaths.
Shawn Cole and Gauri Kartini Shastry determine the following in their paper If You Are So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? The Effects of Education, Financial Literacy and Cognitive Ability on Financial Market Participation:
Individuals with one more year of schooling are 7.6% more likely to report positive investment income. Similarly, those graduating from high school are signi cantly more likely to report income from retirement savings than those not graduating. … because education affects fi nancial market participation, studies that focus on wage earnings may in fact underestimate the returns to investment in human capital; this suggests adjusting earlier cost-bene t analyses of educational programs.
Dan Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, and Lowell J. Taylor have some interesting data points on womens’ participication in the labour force found in their paper Why Do So Few Women Work in New York (and So Many in Minneapolis)? Labor Supply of Married Women Across US Cities. They suggest:
We find a negative association between commuting time and women’s labor force participation rates… …metropolitan areas which experienced relatively large increases in average commuting times between 1980 and 2000 experienced slower growth of labor force participation of married women. … we see that a 10 minute increase in an MSA’s commute time is associated with about a 3 percentage point decline in participation. …we must in the end be cautious about make statements concerning causality… …households in which the woman chooses not to work are less likely to locate into (presumably expensive) locations that have good work opportunities and short commuting times.
In their, now reasonably famous, paper The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution, Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl challenge readers on their ideas of societal utility optimization through the use of height as a clear proxy for acheivement. They state:
A tax on height follows inexorably from a well-established empirical regularity and the standard approach to the optimal design of tax policy. If the conclusion is rejected, the assumptions must be reconsidered. Our results, therefore, leave readers with a menu of conclusions. You must either advocate a tax on height, or you must reject, or at least signi cantly amend, the conventional Utilitarian approach to optimal taxation. The choice is yours, but the choice cannot be avoided.
Anything here rankle you? Feeling overly perturbed or elated? Leave a comment below. or subscribe to the Sauce Captain feed.
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