Why are women more likely to be obese?

From an NBER study of obesity in Africa:

Three factors explain the greater obesity rates we find among women. Women who were nutritionally deprived as children are significantly more likely to be obese as adults, while men who were deprived as children face no greater risk. In addition, women of higher adult socioeconomic status are significantly more likely to be obese, which is not true for men. These two factors can fully explain the difference in obesity rates we find in our sample.

New house prices down more than old ones

In past blog posts, we have noted that when the real estate market crashes, prices do not adjust; rather quantity does. Now we learn that new house prices have declined by more than old house prices:

And while new construction has declined from its highs of a year or two ago, it has not disappeared. From January to October of this year, Los Angeles County has approved about 17,000 new housing units. Owners of new units planned while prices were at their peak may be loath to chop prices in the wake of the housing downturn, but newly approved units, conceived amid the bad news of the past year, should enter the market priced to move.

Is the writers' strike hurting the networks?

A colleague asks:

Are the networks' actually profiting from the writers strike? Unlike auto worker, longshoreman or California grocery strikes, the networks are not shut down. Viewership is off and so advertising dollars are lower but expenses are also lower. It depends on the elasticity of demand w.r.t. "new programming" versus the elasticity of supply w.r.t. "new programming."

This reminds my of the "advertising game" played by cigarette makers. The story goes that advertising did not increases industry demand as much as it caused customer switching. Producers could not commit to an advertising ban but would have loved one (a classic prisoners dilemma game). The advertising ban as an outcome of the Surgeon Generals report was a blessing since it lowered costs more than it lowered revenues.

For whom should you vote?

A helpful quiz

Are video games substitutes for crime and violence?

Yes, according to Michael Ward:

For six of eight categories of crime, more game stores are associated with significant declines in crime rates.

Prediction Market Problems

My co-blogger is fond of keeping everyone up to date on the latest prices from the political prediction markets. Supposedly, these markets generate accurate predictions by aggregating the opinions of a very diverse set of people with access to different types of information.

Here's an article from Slate Magazine that discusses why prediction markets have performed so poorly of late. The author argues that "the price movement tends to respond to conventional wisdom and polling data; it doesn't lead them." One wonders as well whether the traders on these sites are really a diverse set of people with access to different types of information.

Why do we disagree on policy?

From Sunday's NY Times:

Steven Pinker identifies five "spheres" of morality: harm, fairness, community, authority, purity.

Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

It is better to lend than to receive

From Vanderbilt Magazine:

Before and after receiving a gift of charity, the poor remain the poor and in debt. But through microlending the poor borrower gains both the new capabilities developed to meet the demands of repayment and the reputation as someone with whom others can do business. That is, when it all works, the poor become more like the non-poor: willing and able to pay their debts.

Will high oil prices lead to recession?

From Cato:

In 1983, the economist James Hamilton shocked the profession by showing that "all but one of the US recessions since world war two have been preceded, typically with a lag of around three-fourths of a year, by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum".

Professor Hamilton's thesis was challenged in 1997 by Mr Bernanke, Mark Gertler and Mark Watson. It is difficult to isolate the effect of oil prices on recessions, they argued, because "a number of the most significant tightenings of US monetary policy have followed on the heels of major increases in the price of imported oil". They found that "an important part of the effect of oil price shocks on the economy results not from the change in oil prices per se, but from the resulting tightening of monetary policy". ...

In 2007, by contrast, the Fed stopped chasing higher oil prices with higher interest rates. As a result, the US embarked on a fascinating new experiment in which oil prices and interest rates were moving in different directions for a change.

Anti-conservation incentives

From Cato:

In early 2006, landowners in Boiling Springs Lakes, N.C., began clear-cutting timber from their property after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that development could threaten local red-cockaded woodpecker populations. The FWS released a map showing clusters of the woodpecker in the area and announced plans to identify additional habitat for the endangered bird. That prompted landowners to grab their chainsaws to clear their property of the trees in which the woodpeckers make their homes before their land could be designated as endangered species habitat.

...As a practical matter, the Endagered Species Act (ESA) requires private landowners to obtain permission from the FWS before modifying endangered species habitat on their own land. However, it is not illegal to modify land that might become endangered species habitat some day in the future, nor are landowners required to take affirmative steps to maintain endangered species habitat. So, in Boiling Springs Lakes as elsewhere, landowners seek to avoid the burden of the ESA by eliminating potential species habitat on their land.