Political competition enhances the quantity and the quality of female legislators (VoxEu)

At VoxEu, by Berta Esteve-Volart (York University Toronto) and Manuel Bagues (Carlos III Madrid),

As women are underrepresented amongst legislators, many governments impose gender quotas on candidate lists. This column examines Spain’s elections and argues that its political parties evade the quota. It claims that parties use female candidates as pawns chosen according to how their presence in the list would affect gender statistics and male candidates’ possibilities of success.

School spending and academic achievement

Apparently, Paul Krugman believes that school resources have an effect on student achievement:

• New York Times column

But academic research since the 1960s has proved otherwise:

• Erik Hanushek, The Failure of Input-Based Schooling Policy, The Economic Journal 113 (February).

And even the Daily show knows that:

• Blog post

 

Edward Glaeser on poverty in cities

In his latest NBER working paper, The Wealth of Cities:

the urban emphasis on mobility implies that local poverty is more likely to reflect something good that an area is providing for the poor than a failure in local labor markets.  Poor people are attracted to big cities because they offer access to public transportation and inexpensive rental housing.  Further attempts to improve the lives of poor people will tend to attract more poor people to places where other low-income people live.

What I’m up to these days

It’s August 7, 2009, and I’m at the London School of Economics, the weather is kind of awful, and I’m looking forward to spending the weekend jogging in Islington, watching a dance show at Sadler’s Wells, and in my favorite low-key Turkish restaurant — called Gem — in Islington.

The summer is a fruitful time for research, playing with data, interacting with people, confronting ideas, and be clearer about the big picture. So here are some of my current research interests:

• Womenomics. Why don’t companies have more high-level female executives? How does women’s traditional involvement in the household affect their professional career? Why are companies losing so many talented women at the junior and middle management levels?
• The non-economic consequences of the real estate bubble.
• Do students think that their teachers are prejudiced? A field experiment in the classroom with 20 schools across England.

Enough to keep me busy for a good chunk of the summer!

African Americans have Higher Blood Pressure: Survival of the Fittest Slaves?

Clarence E. Grim’s theory

In 1987, Dr. Grim, while Professor of Medicine in Residence and director of the Hypertension Research Center at UCLA and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science at the Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital in Watts, was the first to advance the hypothesis that the greater prevalence of high blood pressure in Western Hemisphere Blacks is related to survival of the fittest during slavery for the ability to store salt and survive the killing salt depleting conditions that led to death during slavery.

On his webpage.

And a good discussion of that.

Roland Fryer, from Harvard, is trying to revive this theory.

Ethnic Profiling in the European Union

The Open Society Institute analyzed ethnic profiling in a range of European Countries.

Ethnic Profiling in the European Union: Pervasive, Ineffective, and Discriminatory

In Paris, minorities are 6 to 7 times more likely to be stopped and searched. People without luggage are more likely to be stopped (! terrorism does not seem to be the police’s concern). Police tactics are not effective.

Police et minorités visibles :les contrôles d’identité à Paris

New books in my library

I’ve added a couple of interesting books to my library:

• On game theory: Dixit and Nalebuff’s the Art of Strategy. Brandenburger and Nalebuff’s Co-opetition. Both easy books to teach game theory.
• On Social Networks: Matthew Jackson’s Economic and Social Networks. Fantastic book, goes much further than most of the textbooks I’ve seen.
• On Discrete Choice Modelling: Kenneth Train’s Discrete Choice Models with Simulation.

Sarkozy’s plan: no affirmative action. Ethnic statistics?

Nicolas Sarkozy, in his address to the “Congres” (Parliament, upper and lower houses together) declared (from le Monde):

Intégration. Nicolas Sarkozy a dressé un sombre tableau d’une France qui s’inquiète de l’avenir de ses enfants, estimant que “notre modèle d’intégration ne fonctionne plus”. Il ne “veut pas rouvrir le débat sur le terme discrimination positive”. Aussi, il faudra – et c’est “une priorité” –“donner plus à ceux qui ont moins”,  non sur des critères ethniques, mais sur des critères sociaux.

In brief: the French integration model isn’t working anymore, but it is social (and I guess economic) inequalities that should be corrected, and not ethnic inequalities. Also, affirmative action is not the way forward.

Interestingly, this doesn’t rule out ethnic statistics.

A Roadmap for Bayesian estimation

This is a technical post. Following my previous post on Bayesian econometrics, I’ve devised a roadmap for Bayesian estimation that fits practically all needs;

1. First find the likelihood from the model.
2. Then formulate the prior distribution.
3. From this, the posterior distribution is computable up to a constant (which does not matter).
4. Finally, use Gibbs Sampling or Metropolis-Hastings algorithms to get estimates of the posterior distribution.

This seems highly technical. But the upside is that you can estimate any model (with a lot of controls for heterogeneity) without a huge computational burden. This doesn’t require belief in Bayesian principles, since a flat prior leads to maximum likelihood estimation anyway. Bayesian principles just allow us to draw from the likelihood as a probability distribution.

Stata doesn’t do it, but again, Winbugs does Gibbs Sampling. I’ve also programmed my own little Metropolis estimation with Stata.

Forbidding the burka in France

A commission of French MPs has started drafting a ban on the burka. This is a very smart move politically — who would go against this symbol of oppression? — but any ban would affect fundamental constitutional rights: who draws the line between acceptable and unacceptable clothes? Some congregations of catholic nuns have worn clothes that cover the body for a long time. All sorts of clothing are worn by different cultures and artistic movements. Why should we act now? The number of women wearing the burka is likely to be very small, but a ban on the burka would have wide negative consequences on constitutional rights.

The French approach to diversity has recently taken a new spin: hardliners of the left start talking as the extreme right wingers; this is no surprise, since socialist mayors like Manuel Valls (Evry) target the same audience — working class — as extreme right wing parties.

Recently Manuel Valls (Socialist) declared that Evry should have more “whites” and that ethnic diversity on Evry’s market gives a bad impression. This comes after a series of discriminatory comments by this prominent member of the socialist party.

Since attack is the best defence, Manuel Valls launched a conference on diversity. He argued that his comments mean that there should be more diversity, and that whites and minorities should live in the same neighborhoods. Manuel Valls supports ethnic statistics.