Cheerleaders in India

My parents recently got a DirecTV package covering the entire Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket season. I am home this weekend and have spent my mornings watching some of the matches and I have to say that these games are fantastic! The teams, comprised of the cream-of-the-crop of world cricket, play to capacity crowds and provide an intensity that matches some of the best international contests.

An interesting feature of the IPL is the presence of cheerleaders. During the opening weekend of league play, the Washington Redskin cheerleaders did a dance number for shocked/delighted Indian crowds. Following their lead, each team has its own set of cheerleaders, who dance around the boundaries in the same fashion as NFL cheerleaders do on the sidelines.

In Saturday's matches, I was surprised to note that the cheerleaders wore extremely revealing outfits. The exception were the Chennai Super King girls who, reflecting the still traditional ethos of the city, were fully clothed. However, during today's matches, cheerleaders for the Mumbai Indians covered their midriffs and legs and those for the opposing Deccan Chargers went a step further and wore reasonably demure Indian-style outfits.

Why the change? Apparently, the cheerleaders have caused quite a stir among conservatives in India, who find the whole concept "vulgar."

I find the whole hullabaloo to be ridiculous. Here's why:

1) I think Indians have a skewed concept of vulgarity. How are cheerleaders in short skirts more vulgar than the content of a typical Hindi movie, with all the gyrating and suggestive imagery/lyrics? It's pretty hypocritical for high level ministers to run around and comment on cheerleading when the very elements the criticize are present in their own region's media.

2) In the link posted above, one of the cheerleaders comments:

"We do expect people to pass lewd, snide remarks but I am shocked by the nature and magnitude of the comments people pass here (in India)" cheerleader Tabitha from Uzbekistan said.

"Be it a 70-year-old or a 15-year-old kid they all letch at us and make amorous advances.

"We are living in constant fear of being molested," she bemoaned.

Sadly, this is an experience shared by many women I know (especially foreigners) who have either traveled through or lived in India for some period of time. My running theory is that this can be chalked up to repression. Short of a large scale cultural education in how to treat women (which is definitely needed in many parts of the world), perhaps the very presence of cheerleaders can go so distance in lowering the "shock value" of sexuality in India, thus helping quell the kinds of wolfish behaviors that happen in regimes of repression.

Soccer and the "Culture of Violence"

Check out this recent paper by Ted Miguel and coauthors using soccer match infractions as a lens to explore the link between culture and violence. Here is the abstract:

Can some acts of violence be explained by a society's "culture"? Scholars have found it hard to empirically disentangle the effects of culture, legal institutions, and poverty in driving violence. We address this problem by exploiting a natural experiment offered by the presence of thousands of international soccer (football) players in the European professional leagues. We find a strong relationship between the history of civil conflict in a player's home country and his propensity to behave violently on the soccer field, as measured by yellow and red cards. This link is robust to region fixed effects, country characteristics (e.g., rule of law, per capita income), player characteristics (e.g., age, field position, quality), outliers, and team fixed effects. Reinforcing our claim that we isolate cultures of violence rather than simple rule-breaking or something else entirely, there is no meaningful correlation between a player's home country civil war history and soccer performance measures not closely related to violent conduct.

Why Your Congressman's Children Matter to You

Understanding how legislators, and government officials more broadly, form opinions and make decisions is crucial for understanding the broader political climate and predicting policy change. A recent paper in the American Economic Review by Yale economist and political scientist Ebonya Washington addresses this issue with an interesting angle and some startling results:

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congressperson's propensity to vote liberally, particularly on reproductive rights issues. The results identify an important (and previously omitted) explanatory variable in the literature on congressional decision making. Additionally the paper highlights the relevance of child-to-parent behavioral influence.

The crucial assumption in this paper is that the sex composition of the legislator's children is random or, at the very least, unrelated to other factors that might determine voting behavior. Washington addresses this by noting that 1) the time period covered in the study predated the wide-spread diffusion of fetal sex-determining technologies and 2) legislator's do not appear to follow different stopping rules conditional on the sex of birth's children. To address (2) the author utilizes information on the sex of the legislator's first birth (painstakingly recovered from newspaper announcements) and assess whether the total number of children varies with the first kid's gender (she finds that it does not).

A recent working paper by Dalton Conley and Brian McCabe utilizes Washington's finding to study the link between legislator voting behavior and campaign contributions. Noting that recovering causal estimates of this relationship is difficult, the authors use the sex composition of children to predict voting behavior, and then assess the relationship between predicted voting behavior and campaign contributions. The key assumption is that the gender mix of the kids doesn't have a direct, or indirect (via some unobserved factor), influence on campaign contributions.

Sex Selection Shocker

Amartya Sen wrote his famous piece on systematic gender bias, provocatively titled "More Than 100 Million Women are Missing," nearly 18 years ago. Since then, a great deal of work has looked at the causes of the pro-male sex ratio seen in many parts of the world, particularly Asia. Even so, it is a phenomenon we do not understand well and the problem has certainly not gone away. Indeed, two of the largest offenders, India (the North mainly) and China, appear to be going strong with these practices, likely driven by the diffusion of technology allowing prenatal sex determination.

Despite widespread prevalence of pro-male sex ratios, and being brought to attention about these sad demographic curiosities nearly two decades ago, I always seemed to be shocked by the latest statistic on gender bias. A recent paper by Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, literally made me fall out of my chair. Here's the punchline:

We document male-biased sex ratios among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents in the 2000 U.S. Census. This male bias is particularly evident for third children: If there was no previous son, sons outnumbered daughters by 50%. By contrast, the sex ratios of eldest and younger children with an older brother were both within the range of the biologically normal, as were White offspring sex ratios (irrespective of the elder siblings' sex). We interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage.

Of course, nobody should be surprised that this involves Asian parents. But this is happening in the United States and the data comes from the 2000 Census. Wow. I truly hope Almond and Edlund are working on a follow up to characterize what exactly is going on here: obviously abortion is a hush-hush topic, but it is hard for me to imagine Asian parents in the United States (whatever flavor) deliberately getting one in order to avoid a having a girl.

Also, I wonder if this bias is apparent among live births, as well. That is, within families, to parents (especially the Asian kind) systematically favor boys over girls? I am not sure a U.S. sample survey with large enough numbers of Asian families and child-by-child measures of parental investments is available (perhaps the CPS?) for analysis. But I would be interested to see some results if there is data out there.

Finally, gender bias is not restricted to Asian families. An intriguing paper by Enrico Moretti and Gordon Dahl finds the following results for the United States:

This paper shows how parental preferences for sons versus daughters affect divorce, child custody, marriage, shotgun marriage when the sex of the child is known before birth, and fertility stopping rules. We document that parents with girls are significantly more likely to be divorced, that divorced fathers are more likely to have custody of their sons, and that women with only girls are substantially more likely to have never been married. Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from the analysis of shotgun marriages. Among those who have an ultrasound test during their pregnancy, mothers carrying a boy are more likely to be married at delivery. When we turn to fertility, we find that in families with at least two children, the probability of having another child is higher for all-girl families than all-boy families. This preference for sons seems to be largely driven by fathers, with men reporting they would rather have a boy by more than a two to one margin. In the final part of the paper, we compare the effects for the U.S. to five developing countries.

Experiments and Corruption

A recurrent theme of this blog has been how clever empirical analysis can be used to recover causal effects in observational data. Such statistical tools are important because, in many cases, individuals or regions cannot be randomly assigned to various states that we are interested. At the same time, however, the use of field experiments, both to assess causal effects and to test various theories, is becoming more prevalent in economics, political science and public health. In an earlier post, I talked about the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a group set up by economists primarily based at MIT and Harvard which uses experiments to test out different local development interventions.

Another benefit of the experimental method is that it allows one to quantify things that are very hard to measure in even the most detailed surveys. This doesn't just include behavioral concepts such as individual preferences, risk aversion, or discount rates, but also phenomenon like corruption, where survey respondents may be loath to reveal their true history of actions due to fears of legal ramification.

Experiments looking at corruption are slowly growing in number. Just recently, I read a paper (no links available) by two Yale political science graduate students looking at the effects of the Indian Right to Information act versus corrupt practices versus the by-the-books apply and wait method in helping slum dwellers in New Delhi receive government ration cards, which serves as a form of ID as well as a means for accessing fair price food shops. In order to get a ration card, individuals have to fill out an application and prove that they meet a particular means test (i.e., their income must be below some threshold). The authors found that nothing greased the wheels quite like corruption, but the Right to Information request did allow individuals to get their ration cards reasonably quickly. Not a single member of the control group, who merely filled out an application for the car, received a ration card even some 7 months after the experiment began.

This experiment is similar in spirit to one recently published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which considers the influence of corruption in obtaining a driver's license in India. From the abstract:

We study the allocation of driver's licenses in India by randomly assigning applicants to one of three groups: bonus (offered a bonus for obtaining a license quickly), lesson (offered free driving lessons), or comparison. Both the bonus and lesson groups are more likely to obtain licenses. However, bonus group members are more likely to make extralegal payments and to obtain licenses without knowing how to drive. All extralegal payments happen through private intermediaries ("agents"). An audit study of agents reveals that they can circumvent procedures such as the driving test. Overall, our results support the view that corruption does not merely reflect transfers from citizens to bureaucrats but distorts allocation.

Some self-promotion: Paul Lagunes, Brian Fried (both of Yale political science) and yours truly recently conducted an experiment in a large Latin American city. The idea was to explore the intersection between corruption and inequality: do public officials behave more corruptly with upper class or lower class individuals? Our experiment involved traffic police and driving infractions, and we found that, conditional on being stopped, lower class individuals were much more likely to be asked to pay a bribe than upper class drivers, who were typically merely warned not to drive in that fashion in the future. Interestingly, not a single traffic ticket was given out during the duration of our experiment!

To help interpret the differential class results, we interviewed police officers in the city to get a sense of what might be driving differential treatments. Based on these interviews, our hypothesis is that upper class drivers were treated differently because of the cops' fear that the former's bureaucratic influence could get them in trouble with their supervisors.

We hope to have a draft of our paper out to a political science or criminology journal soon. I'll keep you posted.