Friday, November 20, 2009

Academic Etiquette

Via Gary King's page, this guide to academic etiquette from the Chronicle of Higher Education has some gems

link here

While we're on the topic...

It should be noted that Wednesday's match was played in Saint-Denis, France. I admit it is unlikely that Swedish referee Martin Hansson was aware of the social-science literature (for example here and here) indicating that he may be biased in favour of the home team.

In that case it may benefit the man to draw his attention to some research closer to home.

The current crisis in Ireland: will we get a replay?

This paper reports experimental results on how to predict football results, a talent we could have done with recently.
Dijksterhuis A, Bos MW, van der Leij A, & van Baaren RB (2009). Predicting Soccer Matches After Unconscious and Conscious Thought as a Function of Expertise. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19818044

Thursday, November 19, 2009

CSO Releases

Thanks to Michael E. and others for pointing out a number of important CSO releases including the Statistical Year Book for 2009 and the results of the 2008 SILC survey. The major changes in construction, prices and employment mark the Year Book out as a historic document though the figures refer to 2008 mostly so do not encapsulate the stark collapses witnessed throughout this year. Even so, ample proof that we are living in interesting times.

link here

A Message From Thierry

Hello, Irish Behavioural Economics Blog. I am doubtful that your PhD students will finish their theses on time and I laugh at their prospects of publishing in good journals. Ha ha ha!

The Technology Safety Net

We're constantly told that the SmartEconomy is the key to getting Ireland out of the doldrums. I generally agree with the idea, but not with the bulk of the documents associated with it. The facts about the smart economy, innovation and technology in Ireland would suggest that we have a long way to go to realise progression. For one, we have a relatively low level of broadband penetration in Ireland. The most recent figures show that about 58% of Irish households have access. The debate about the government doing more to help with the roll out is well advanced but to little avail in terms of action or policies. No doubt much progress is required on the demand side but the part of the 'build it they will come' nonchalance that is conveniently overlooked is the issue of price (As i recall that event was free). It's generally agreed that more needs to be done on broadband at this level.

Related to this is the issue of dissemination is household technology. CSO figures tell us that about 35% of households in the country don't have a computer! Imagine. With computing technology experiencing huge reductions in price it might be worth considering the feasibility of a tax-initiative to bolster demand among these households. If we can do a 'bikes to work' scheme then why not a 'computers to learn, connect, search, explore, find' scheme. The bike idea is capped at 1,000 euro (aside: surprising how many 800 euro imported bikes are being bought at the moment, given recessionary times!) and offered over five years, as i understand. It is available at both the higher and lower tax bands. The computer scheme might be targeted best at the lower band. Understandably, tax expenditures are not the flavour of the month but one has to wonder... if we're serious about the SmartEconomy and technology/information lead recovery then we need to be proactive and have national policy guide the way in practical ways. I don't think we need to read about the benefits of having a computer with internet access but it might be worth considering some for a moment - information, training, education, job-search, social connection. Even a basic-user level it's utility is clear and potential enormous. I think in any CBA it would look quite good against tax relief on a car scrappage scheme, to mention one wonderful idea thats out there at the moment.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, good, bad, or indifferent.

Finally, to declare a particular interest, one associated benefit that you may not be thinking of is the ability to participate in National Household Panel Surveys which are the backbone of statistics gathering in the 20 most developed countries internationally. Or should I say 21. Go Geary, go!

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Economists for Cancelling Christmas

The papers on the deadweight loss of christmas are very well known including featuring on the odd december blog post. Now you can read the book!

link here

Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

Further to the post below, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, MI produces lots of useful work on employment, unemployment & related matters.
http://www.upjohninst.org/

Irish Economic Association Conference: Belfast 2010

The twenty-fourth annual conference of the Irish Economic Association will be held from 23rd to 25th April 2010 at the Stormont Hotel, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Association invites submissions of papers to be considered for inclusion in the conference programme. Papers may be on any subject in Economics, Finance and Econometrics. The deadline for submissions is Friday 15th January; the full call for papers is available here.

The Centre of Full Employment and Equity

I heard about the The Centre of Full Employment and Equity (at Newcastle, Australia) via Colm's Twitter page (linked at the top left hand-side of the blog). Lots of interesting stuff for labour economists.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Ferdinand on Open Access

A big one for anyone working in research - its hard to see the massive subscription model lasting well into the future given that inexpensive alternatives are proliferating so widely

link here

Experiments

Experiments play an important role in behavioural economics but they are often criticized for a variety of reasons. This paper defneds their role.
Lab Experiments Are a Major Source of Knowledge in the Social Sciences
Armin Falk, James Heckman
Laboratory experiments are a widely used methodology for advancing causal knowledge in the physical and life sciences. With the exception of psychology, the adoption of laboratory experiments has been much slower in the social sciences, although during the last two decades, the use of lab experiments has accelerated. Nonetheless, there remains considerable resistance among social scientists who argue that lab experiments lack "realism" and "generalizability". In this article we discuss the advantages and limitations of laboratory social science experiments by comparing them to research based on non-experimental data and to field experiments. We argue that many recent objections against lab experiments are misguided and that even more lab experiments should be conducted.

Paying People to Work Shorter Hours

Take a business with say forty employees. The company is offered 5 per cent salary directly paid to them provided they shorten the working week of their existing employees and continue to pay them the same salary. This reduces the incentive to lay workers off and may lead to hiring. A short article by Dean Baker proposing this is linked below. It has got some traction including being mentioned in the NYT by Krugman and even made a brief appearance on the hallowed irisheconomy.ie stage. It would be good if people can think about this. If there is any result that has emerged from the linkage of economics and psychology that is robust, it is that unemployment is destructive of human potential in every wage imaginable, damaging health, psychological well-being, creativity and creating intergenerational effects that are likely very large even if we don't fully account for network and wider social effects. More debate about how society should handle labour market fluctuations is needed. This is one idea and hopefully we can start discussing properly many more, informed by what we are starting to learn about the interaction of psychology and the labour market.

link here

"Germany has used this policy to keep its unemployment rate at 7.6 percent, about the same as it was before the recession. Imagine if workers in the United States, like workers in Germany, were dealing with the recession by putting in four-day weeks (while getting paid for five) or getting an extra two weeks of paid vacation. This sure beats being unemployed."

Does Competition Affect Giving?

Duffy and Kornienko (2009) ask Does Competition Affect Giving?
Charities often devise fund-raising strategies that exploit natural human competitiveness in combination with the desire for public recognition. We explore whether institutions promoting competition can affect altruistic giving - even when possibilities for public acclaim are minimal. In a controlled laboratory experiment based on a sequential “dictator game”, we find that subjects tend to give more when placed in a generosity tournament, and tend to give less when placed in an earnings tournament - even if there is no award whatsoever for winning the tournament. Further we find that subjects’ experimental behavior correlates with their responses to a post-experiment questionnaire, particularly questions addressing altruistic and rivalrous behavior. Based on this evidence, we argue that behavior in our experiment is driven, in part, by innate competitive motives.

Oxytocin & empathy

The role of oxytocin in influencing trust has been explored by behavioural economists. This study shows how a polymorphism in a gene that encodes for the oxytocin receptor predicts empathy. This is related to work on a genetic basis for autism which is characterized by low empathy.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1116/3?rss=1

A Healthy Recovery

IT article today indicates that an additional 10,000 full medical (GMS) cards are being issued per month. I would estimate that the number of people with voluntary PHI is currently falling at a third of this rate, i.e., ~ 3,000 per month. It's worth taking stock of these numbers and the effect they will be having on service demand and quality.

All public sectors are facing considerable funding cuts next month but I would urge caution in what is done in the public health sector. It's vital to recognise that this current trend in GMS coverage when budgets and labour remain fixed means a heavier work-load for each individual public health worker. When labour is fixed and funding is falling, as is widely expected in the near future, the situation is exacerbated. We need to think carefully about what broad brush-stokes will really mean. In other public sectors we might expect an increase in demand - more people might choose to finish school, there might be an increase in theft and property crime. But public education and justice are fundamentally different; their services are both less labour-intensive and less sensitive to demand (there aren't an additional 10,000 criminals being reprimanded or school-aged kids showing up each month!). Forthcoming policy needs to consider these facts and design an appropriate response that will ensure quality of service to the patient and fair conditions for staff.

Along with considered measures it now makes increasing sense to seriously revisit the issue of average length of in-patient stay. According to the ESRI's most recent 2007 national report, GMS medical card holders were discharged after an average of 7 days; about 3 days longer than non-GMS discharges. Of course there are a number of reasons why this is the case but to date we have no evidence on the matter.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Robert Shiller: Bubbles Forever

Robert Shiller's short new article from Economists Voice on why bubbles in property will happen again

link here

Marcel Das - LISS Panel

Below is the video of Marcel Das presenting the Liss Panel at our recent Economics and Psychology event. This is quite simply fantastic. A fully representative panel of the Dutch population surveyed monthly. All data is fully available to scientific researchers. And you can apply to place your questions. It is one of the finest resources ever made available to social scientists and I really strongly encourage everyone to look at the LISS website, and to register yourself to use the data and to think about whether your work would fit in terms of an application to host questions on the panel.

As Marcel notes in the talk, the Tilburg team and their colleagues and funders have gone to great lengths to make this available. If you are using the data, please register. Otherwise, they do not have evidence to present on the usage of the resource.

Economic Psychology Ireland - marcel das

International Workshop on Applied Economics of Education

The Department of Economics, Lancaster University and the Department DOPES, Universita' Magna Graecia are jointly organizing a workshop in Applied Economics of Education. The workshop will be held at the Universita’ Magna Graecia, Germaneto Campus Edificio delle Scienze Giuridiche e Sociali (Italy) from Monday 14th to Tuesday 15th June 2010. Keynote lectures will be given by:

* Christian Belzil (École Polytechnique, Paris)

* Hessel Oosterbeek (Universitet van Amsterdam)

* Ian Walker (Lancaster University)

Submissions to the conference can be made until March 1st. More details are available here.

Research by Susan Dynarski

In advance of Susan Dynarski's visit to UCD on December 3rd, it is worth looking at her research publications (here and here). Some recent work by Dynarski is as follows:

(i) Complexity and Targeting in Federal Student Aid: "Puzzlingly, there is little compelling evidence that Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, the primary federal student aid programs, are effective in achieving this goal (increasing college enrolment)."

(ii) Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor: "Even with the offer of free tuition,
many students continue to drop out, suggesting tuition costs are not the only
impediment to college completion."

(iii) The Lengthening of Childhood: "Almost every state has increased the age at which children are allowed to start primary school. This change is remarkable given the strong evidence that, in the United States, starting school later decreases educational attainment."

I would be willing to facilitate one of these papers in a journal club before December 3rd.

Beyond Diabolic Governance in Hyperbolic Ireland

An incisive article in the SBP by Prof. Ed Walsh that tackles head-on one of the biggest and most blatant problems in the country - effective governance. The current dismal economic situation is expressed as a result of mismanagement and it is made clear that without constitutional reform we're unlikely to be headed anywhere better.

The specific reform proposed is changing the electoral process to a List System:

"whereby members of parliament are elected partially from local constituencies and partially from party lists of individuals who have proven records of distinguished national and international achievement: many from business and the professions"

Such a system would increase the pool of management talent and their ability to govern by quelling incentives for the all too common and clearly retrogressive process of myopic pandering to local constituents for re-election. I fully agree that Ministers need to focus on the major national issues and plan strategically for a better future - difficult and unpalatable decisions need to be made in the next few months and years to steady the county and secure prosperity for the future. Walsh essentially makes the point that if our constitution is preventing this, we need to change it.


Some interesting points in the article:

"Our system ... deters the government from moving swiftly and taking difficult decisions.... the pool from which a Taoiseach draws when forming a government is limited indeed, because in effect it bypasses leaders of enterprise and the professions with the necessary strategic management skills and experience...”

“Our system … draws over 80 per cent of the Oireachtas from a group of some 1,000 people: the members of local authorities. While a county or city council would certainly be a source of pleasant and well-intentioned people it would be an unlikely source of the experienced talent required to strategically guide national policy and effectively manage a multibillion budget"

"The Oireachtas has not risen to the occasion by conveying a new seriousness appropriate to these dangerous times; rather it has continued the pursuit of trivia and political bloodsports in a raucous way that has not enhanced its standing."

".... the quality of national governance can not exceed the quality of those who govern."

Evaluating the Impact of the UCD New ERA Widening Participation Initiative

This is the title of a half-day conference to be held in UCD on December 3rd. Full details (including where to RSVP) are available here. The study examines the performance of the New ERA programme across 3 domains: increased access from disadvantaged school, retention rates and overall exam performance. Kevin Denny will present the results. Susan Dynarski, (Professor of Education and Public Policy, University of Michigan, USA) will deliver the keynote address.

Measuring International Technology Spillovers and Progress Towards the European Research Area

This is the title of a new ESRI WP by Iulia Siedschlag. "The objective of this paper is to contribute to the development of an evidence-based system to monitor progress towards the European Research Area (ERA) and a knowledge-based economy."

Behavioural Economics and Business

Am in early stages of planning a new year event on the implications of ideas from behavioural economics for the private sector in Ireland. If anyone would like to help on this, leave comments or preferably email. I will post more details as the idea becomes better formed. We are currently working here both with Gallup Europe and with Amarach. We would like to see more companies at least thinking about behavioural economics and what it implies for them.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

World Bank Working Paper: Commitment Devices for Smoking Cessation

Put your money where your butt is : a commitment contract for smoking cessation

Gine, Xavier
Karlan, Dean
Zinman, Jonathan

Abstract

The authors designed and tested a voluntary commitment product to help smokers quit smoking. The product (CARES) offered smokers a savings account in which they deposit funds for six months, after which they take a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. If they pass, their money is returned; otherwise, their money is forfeited to charity. Eleven percent of smokers offered CARES tookup, and smokers randomly offered CARES were 3 percentage points more likely to pass the 6-month test than the control group. More importantly, this effect persisted in surprise tests at 12 months, indicating that CARES produced lasting smoking cessation.

World Bank Working Paper: Diasporas

Diasporas

Author Info
Beine, Michel
Docquier, Frederic
Ozden, Caglar

Abstract

Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set on international migration by educational attainment from 195 countries to 30 developed countries in 1990 and 2000. Based on simple micro-foundations and controlling for various determinants of migration, the analysis finds that diasporas increase migration flows, lower the average educational level and lead to higher concentration of low-skill migrants. Interestingly, diasporas explain the majority of the variability of migration flows and selection. This suggests that, without changing the generosity of family reunion programs, education-based selection rules are likely to have a moderate impact. The results are highly robust to the econometric techniques, accounting for the large proportion of zeros and endogeneity problems.

Obama Retirement Policies

Again via Nudge, the New York Times outlines Obama's Retirment Initiatives. For any students in the behavioural economics class, or people interested more generally, this is one of the clearest uses to date of the literature in behavioural economics in shaping an important public policy.

The option of allowing people to take their tax refunds in the form of government bonds simply by ticking a box is really clever and should be looked at in Ireland, though would be quantitatively less significant over here.

link here

Marshmallow Experiments

Anyone around here either physically or online will have heard of the famous Mischel Marshmallow experiments that examined the patience of children, measured by their ability to delay consumption of a marshmallow in exchange for getting two marshmallows later on. We tried to replicate them here but we kept eating the marshmallows before we could recruit the participants.

Nudge blog has a description of the famous experiments along with some video - link here

Melbourne Conference

Via Colm, below is a link to a recent conference at Melbourne on the economic situation in Australia. I am listening to the recordings in the background as I work here. This is a very well themed conference in terms of the balance between short-run and long-run policy. Includes sessions on innovation, education and getting people back to the work.

link here

IZA Paper - Public Health Consequences of Job Loss

The Public Health Costs of Job Loss

Author info | Abstract | Publisher info | Download info | Related research | Statistics
Author Info
Kuhn, Andreas (kuhn@iew.uzh.ch) (University of Zurich)
Lalive, Rafael (Rafael.Lalive@unil.ch) (University of Lausanne)
Zweimüller, Josef (zweim@iew.unizh.ch) (University of Zurich)
Abstract

We study the short-run effect of involuntary job loss on comprehensive measures of public health costs. We focus on job loss induced by plant closure, thereby addressing the reverse causality problem of deteriorating health leading to job loss as job displacements due to plant closure are unlikely caused by workers' health status, but potentially have important effects on individual workers' health and associated public health costs. Our empirical analysis is based on a rich data set from Austria providing comprehensive information on various types of health care costs and day-by-day work history at the individual level. Our central findings are: (i) overall expenditures on medical treatments (hospitalizations, drug prescriptions, doctor visits) are not strongly affected by job displacement; (ii) job loss increases expenditures for antidepressants and related drugs, as well as for hospitalizations due to mental health problems for men (but not for women); and (iii) sickness benefits strongly increase due to job loss.

Irish History Online

For those interested in history, this may be useful:

"Irish History Online is an authoritative guide (in progress) to what has been written about Irish history from earliest times to the present. It was established in association with the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History (of which it is now the Irish component) and London's Past Online."

N.B. Particular attention is being paid to enhancing coverage of the Irish abroad: during 2008 over 500 new records on the Irish abroad were added, including many references collected in libraries in the U.S.A. and Canada.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Choosing Industry or Academia

A nice piece in PlOS Computational Biology

link here

Structural versus Atheoretical Econometrics

John Rust's take on the debate is available on the website below.

link here

comments are a response to a paper by Michael Keane. the Keane paper makes points that are similar to the Deaton "randomisation in the tropics" article that created so much debate earlier this year. The Keane paper contains some interesting discussions of the role of quasi-experiments in economics, the extent to which "atheoretical" exploration of relationships has led to progress in other sciences, the importance of validation and related issues.

link here

Day of the Week Again

A new IZA working paper. Weekends are worse. The findings in this paper are very counter-intuitive. The findings are not the result of something funny going on in the specifications. Figure 1 on page 39 is a straight descriptive graph showing well-being by day of the week. Wellbeing in Germany is lowest on Friday, Saturday and in particular Sunday, which is different to the USA and different to the Irish findings Gerard produced. The German sample is certainly large and well sampled. The authors point out that their data allow them to put forward a range of controls but the findings are robust to these. I think the most important issue is that the simple descriptive stats are so out of line with what one would expect. Initially, I wondered whether there was a simple miscoding of the satisfaction variable but its average value is what you would expect, and it reacts to unemployment and so on in the manner one would expect (and the authors are both experienced published analysts).

I prefer weekdays to weekends myself for the most part but I had assumed (and many people agree) that was due to me being weird. Perhaps Germanic is a better description.

link here

PDF organiser

Mendeley

I spent some time trying to find a PC equivalent to papers for mac- Mendeley is a great way of organising PDFs you have stored on your computer. It works similarily to how itunes works... you have pdf's stored somewhere and it links to it. It also can create bibliographies in word similarily to endnote, and although I haven't used this function yet I imagine it's pretty user friendly.

At the moment it's a beta version and free can be downloaded from:

http://www.mendeley.com/

You download it to your desktop. If you add a Mendeley bookmark to your internet explorer/firefox PDF information can be exported from google scholar amongst others.

Early intervention reduces teenage pregnancy

"Ten controlled trials and five qualitative studies were included. Controlled trials evaluated either early childhood interventions or youth development programmes. The overall pooled effect size showed that teenage pregnancy rates were 39% lower among individuals receiving an intervention than in those receiving standard practice or no intervention (relative risk 0.61; 95% confidence interval 0.48 to 0.77)." from Harden et al. in the BMJ

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Seminar Ouellet-Morin. Early LIfe Stress and Cortisol

Dear Colleagues,

Isabelle Ouellet-Morin (King's College) will be giving a talk "Shaping effects of early life stress on cortisol secretion in childhood" in the Behavioural Seminar Series as follows:

Speaker: Isabelle Ouellet-Morin

Seminar Title: "Shaping effects of early life stress on cortisol secretion in childhood"

Venue: Geary Seminar Room B003/004

Date: Tuesday 17th November

Time: 1pm

All Welcome

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Blog Development

Just a usual reminder that I am happy to keep evolving the blog if people have suggestions.

For example

- Journal Links at the side?

- Seminar Series that I have missed

- Upcoming Conference Deadlines (will update these later)

- Other Blogs we should include on the sidebar

- Other links to audio and visual sites at the side

- As per previous suggestions, we will shortly begin to start including our own audio and video material. The Geary podcasts are already available from the sidebar but we will also start posting material such as videos from last Friday's events.

Superfreakonomics

Have read Superfreakonomics. Wouldn't change much in Tim Harford's excellent review. The sections on prostitution and terrorism have been criticised as being more obvious than the counterintuitive findings in the first book, but I certainly found them gripping to read and the street prostitution piece in particular is a really good story about how to collect and use a dataset. I am surprised that the ethical issues associated with using things like surnames on bank accounts as data in terrorism profiling have not received more debate. As for the controversial climate change chapter, it really will not be of much interest to people who are interested in Freakonomics for Levitt's ability to assemble and dissect novel data to produce economic findings.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Every day is Saturday

Related to Gerard O'Neill's previous post about Sunday being the happiest day of the week, Cafe Hayek reports that Saturday is the day of the week Gallup has found that consumers spend the most. Based on the latest psychological findings Barack Obama has decided that all days should now be called Saturday, according to the report.

link here

2000 Posts Since January 2007

I wanted to get there before someone else did.

2,000 posts on Geary Behavioural Economics Blog Since January 2007.

In the words of one of our favourite collaborators "have yiz nothing better to do yiz clowns"!!

Articles referenced in Aoife O'Grady's talk

Yesterday Aoife O'Grady from the Department of Transport gave us a very thought-provoking thought on the specific challenges of policy evaluation in the domain of transport.

Here are links to the articles that she cited:

Dept for Transport Social research on Attitudes to Road Pricing, Climate Change and the Role of the Car - see http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/scienceresearch/social/

Blamey and MacKenzie (2007 "Theories of Change and Realistic Evaluation: Peas in a pod or apples and oranges?" in Evaluation, 2007; 13; 439

Connell, J.P., A.C. Kubisch, L.B. Schorr and C.H. Weiss (1995) New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives, vol. 1, Concepts, Methods and Contexts. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute.

Fulbright-Anderson, K., A. Kubisch and J. Connell, eds (1998) New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives, vol. 2, Theory, Measurement, and Analysis. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute.

Pawson, R. and N. Tilley (1997) Realistic Evaluation. London: SAGE
Weiss, C.H. (1998) Evaluation: Methods for Studying Programs and Policies. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Randomised Evaluation of a Parenting Programme

Donal O'Neill presented at the economics seminar on Friday. He has a new working paper on an early childhood intervention in Ireland.



A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Early Childhood Intervention: Evidence from a Randomised Evaluation of a Parenting Programme
by Donal O'Neill (October 2009)

Abstract:
A number of researchers and policy makers have recently argued that the most effective way of dealing with long-run disadvantage and the intergenerational transmission of poverty is through early childhood intervention and in particular policies aimed at supporting the family in early childhood development. In this paper we carry out a randomised evaluation of one such programme aimed at improving the skills and parenting strategies of parents, particularly those who find their child's behaviour difficult or challenging. Our evaluation shows that the treatment significantly reduced behavioural problems in young children when measured 6 months after the intervention. Furthermore our detailed cost analysis, combined with a consideration of the potential long-run benefits associated with the programme, suggest that the long-run rate of return to society from this programme is likely to be relatively high.

More Migration Trends

I've decided to produce some more charts to demonstrate a number of relationships between economic activity and Irish migration patterns.

The first chart is an extension of the figure produced in my previous post. I have extended the data series back to 1958. A similar relationship exists. Figure two does not show a relationship between contemporaneous GDP growth and net migration. However, the key word here is contemporaneous, because this figure fails to take account of lags in Real GDP growth, an important issue no doubt. As I said in the comments, you would be able to net out these effects with appropriate time-series econometrics, something I hope to do soon.

The third figure shows the long-run relationship between the Irish-UK GDP per capita difference. I choose the UK because it has been the primary destination country for Irish migrants in the 20th century. It will be interesting to see how this relationship holds in the near future. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Australia, New Zealand and Canada are now the major destinations for Irish migration. A scatter plot of real GDP growth rate differences and net migration yields a similar result to the second figure. Again, I would highlight the difficulty in drawing inference from this comparison.

The last figure demonstrates the long-run relationship between net migration and unemployment. It is interesting to note that 2009's position in this figure is not an outlier. This would suggest that labor market conditions may provide the clearest pathway through which we can examine the effects of economic trends on demography. However, with issues such as lags, reverse-causality, this issue is very much open to debate.







Nutrition Symposium

Via Colm, videos from the 6th Nestle Nutrition Symposium available at link below. Includes video talks from Heckman and Fogel

link here