New Bond Trailer

Country? USA.
PGY? One.
Stethoscope? Littman.
Software? Stata.
Skyfall? Done.

Nope, my life is definitely not this interesting.

From the trailer, it's clear that "Skyfall" maintains the beautiful cinematography of "Quantum of Solace," which was perhaps the most visually stunning Bond movie ever made. Hopefully the plot in this one is a bit thicker.

Partisan Professors and Race

Great new paper in the latest issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics about the political orientation of your professor and the grade you may receive in her/his class:

We study grading outcomes associated with professors in an elite university in the United States who were identified—using voter registration records from the county where the university is located—as either Republicans or Democrats. The evidence suggests that student grades are linked to the political orientation of professors. Relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors are associated with a less egalitarian distribution of grades and with lower grades awarded to black students relative to whites.


The paper is by Bar and Zussman and their models look at variations in grades within the same student taking courses in the same department, so it controls for selection into majors and, to some extent, classes. The most interesting part of this paper is the race angle. One may think that it has something to do with the fact the demographics of Republican professors, not so much their ideological preferences. Not so: even controlling for gender, age and race of the professor doesn't change the results.

So how to interpret this? I'm sure that many would argue that Republican professors harbor some subtle, perhaps subconscious, prejudices against black students (this guy would agree). This is entirely possible, but I think the study needs to be interpreted with some caution. First, the sample size of Republican professors is small (only 5.3% are). Secondly, its unclear where the grade variation is coming from. Do students - black or white - perform worse in Republican-professor taught classes (they don't like the take on the material, they may be too ticked off with partisan politics to focus on assignments, etc)? The study can't distinguish this explanation from the racist-professor one.

Discrimination in the Shadows

Two new papers looking at various aspects of discrimination in product and labor markets. The first, by Ian Ayres and coauthors, examines baseball card sales:

We investigate the impact of seller race in a field experiment involving baseball card auctions on eBay. Photographs showed the cards held by either a dark-skinned/African-American hand or a light-skinned/Caucasian hand. Cards held by African-American sellers sold for approximately 20% ($0.90) less than cards held by Caucasian sellers, and the race effect was more pronounced in sales of minority player cards. Our evidence of race differentials is important because the on-line environment is well controlled (with the absence of confounding tester effects) and because the results show that race effects can persist in a thick real-world market such as eBay.

The second looks at skilled immigrant labor in Canada. Canada, like many other first world countries, has made it a policy to strongly select for skilled immigrants to augment their workforce. Unfortunately, these immigrants do not do as well as one would hope in the labor market. Philip Oreopoulos explores this issue in greater depth:

Thousands of randomly manipulated resumes were sent in response to online job postings in Toronto to investigate why immigrants, allowed in based on skill, struggle in the labor market. The study finds substantial discrimination across a variety of occupations towards applicants with foreign experience or those with Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Greek names compared with English names. Listing language fluency, multinational firm experience, education from highly selective schools, or active extracurricular activities had no diminishing effect. Recruiters justify this behavior based on language skill concerns but fail to fully account for offsetting features when listed.

While they speak for themselves, here are a few collective comments on these papers:
1. Both illustrate the power of audit studies, where researchers elicit real-time behavioral responses in the field to some often innocuous stimuli. Resume experiments have a long history in economics and sociology. The EBay thing is new, and quite innovative.
2. Audit studies give us an example of behavior, but can further be extended to think about mechanisms and policy. One reason I like the Oreopoulos paper is that his randomization involved an explicit countersignal to having an immigrant last name. Unfortuntately, it didn't work to reverse the discriminatory effect, but it is informative that signaling language skills failed. What would be nice is to further extend this, both to other policies, but also to a further elucidation of mechanisms. I think qualitative work could be very useful in this regard. (My colleagues and I did this in a paper about corruption).
3. Both of these studies reveal that taste-based or statistical discrimination is pretty deep seated, though it may lurk in the shadows. So what to do about this? Jumping from (2), I hope the next wave of experiments look at different sorts of policies. Are there other nudges that can be used to counteract these forces? Or will immigrants have their change from Shankaranarayan to Steve in order to get jobs?

R.I.P Steve Jobs

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do" - Jobs, during a 2005 commencement address.

Random Links

1. Al Gore comes out in favor of access to better health care, family planning services, and education, especially targeted towards women, as a strategy towards improving well-being in the developing world. All sensible stuff. Unfortunately, echoing the vitriol of family planning debates over the last half century or more, he was mistakenly, hilariously, and sadly criticized for being a eugenicist and/or Malthusian by some conservatives.

2. Chris Blattman on a great new paper linking weather disturbances/changes faced early in life to long-run outcomes. He makes some great points about the mechanisms underlying these relationships as well as appropriate practices for statistical work when researchers have abundant data points but little theory guiding exactly what the relationship between two variables might be.

3. Some time ago, I wrote about tennis rackets, lamenting the disappearance of one model in particular as if it were a lost love. Apparently, that tone was appropriate since the racket a pro tennis player chooses seems to say a lot about their personality and preferences - at least as it relates to the tennis court . (Hat tip: MG)

4. I just found out that Sanjay Basu, an MD/PhD epidemiologist doing an internal medicine residency at UCSF, has a great thing going with his new(-ish) blog, epianalysis. Sanjay has got to be one of the most talented, insightful and prolific researchers around. His work spans the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases that incorporate insights from fields as diverse as economics and epidemiology, all the way to deep political economy issues related to global health. He's produced a body of work while in residency that I would be proud of if it formed the entirety of my research career. Seriously. His blog is phenomenal and highly recommended. (Hat tip: PC)

Two Year Anniversary

Having found myself short on sleep and time over the last few weeks, I forgot to write a note here about the two year anniversary of my blog. Basically, I started this whole thing in July 2007 as a travel blog and somehow continued with it through my prospectus and dissertation writing. I'm really happy with how the blog has turned out and am grateful for your thoughtful comments.

I should point out that I fully intend to continue blogging at my usual pace once I achieve an optimal work-sleep-eat equilibrium here in med school! In the meantime, please bear with me and continue to check this space from time to time for new content.

Thank you again for your readership and support. It's been a fun two years and I look forward to more.

Workshops at Yale's StatLab

Here is the schedule for statistical package workshops offered through Yale's StatLab for Spring 2009. On the bill are workshops for HTML, Stata, SPSS and R, as well as tutorials on data management and survey data. I highly recommend these workshops for anyone interested in doing empirical work. I took the beginner Stata and R workshops during my first year of graduate school and both served as a great platform upon which to play around and add new knowledge.

There are some excellent web-based tutorials for statistical packages as well. My favorite is the UCLA Academic Technology Services Statistical Computing page, which offers a plethora of links (including pages for Stata, SAS, SPSS, and R).

Interesting Global Health Blogs

I recently came across two interesting blogs on global health. The first is by Karen Grepin, a PhD candidate at Harvard, and the second is out of MIT. Both blogs are more policy oriented and deal with hot issues in global health - spending, funding, disease outbreaks, etc - about which I somehow seem to know little (despite me being interested in, among other things, "international health"). You'll find both spaced linked in the sidebar from now on.

"Slumdog" Child Actors: Part III

This just in from Entertainment Weekly:

Back in November, when Slumdog Millionaire was just starting to heat up, I interviewed director Danny Boyle for a feature in Entertainment Weekly. At one point, we chatted about the challenge of hiring and directing three small local children who spoke only Hindi. One, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar (who plays the youngest Jamal), comes from a middle-class background, while the other two, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail (who play the youngest Latika and Salim), are from Mumbai slums similar to those depicted in the film. Boyle mentioned that he and the producers, cognizant of how a movie like Slumdog could change the kids’ lives for the worse if proper care wasn’t taken, had set up a trust fund for Ali and Ismail, accessible only if they enrolled in school -- a first for both of them. “They’d never been to school,” Boyle said. “So they have to stay in school until they’re 18. When they reach 18, and if they’ve passed all their exams, a quite substantial sum of money -- extra money [on top of their salaries] -- will be released to them.”

Boyle wasn’t presenting this in a Look at what a good, moral Westerner I am! See how I take care of the less fortunate! kind of way. Rather, he was explaining a course of action that, to me, seemed logical, responsible, and just. But now, an article printed in Britain's The Telegraph earlier this week has stained those good intentions with accusations of exploitation. In the story, Ali and Ismail’s parents accuse Boyle and producer Christian Colson of stiffing their kids out of a decent wage, alleging that their payment for a year’s work was “less than many Indian domestic servants.” This article comes on the heels of earlier reports that many Indians are taking offense with the title of the movie. Consider the flames of the inevitable Slumdog backlash duly fanned.

The movie’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, as well as Boyle and Colson, all have responded to the Telegraph story with statements, asserting that “For 30 days’ work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary,” and that the families have been given funds to cover “basic living costs, health care, and any other emergencies.” A subsequent Reuters news clip shows the father of one of the kids back-pedaling on the accusations, but is it possible the damage is done? The kids’ lives are now disrupted, with camera crews busting into their classrooms. Moreover, concerned that such public talk of money could make Ali, Ismail, and their families a target for local Mumbai criminals, Searchlight has moved them into private housing. For now, it seems this mess isn’t as out of hand as what happened with The Kite Runner kids in 2007, but how does the situation sit with you, PopWathgers? Who, if anyone, is at fault here? The media for stirring up drama? Searchlight? The Parents? And does the controversy affect how you feel about Slumdog?

So the trust fund is indeed a conditional cash transfer, which strikes me as paternalistic (similar to the strategy Dan and Valli discussed in their comments in the last post). At the same time, I like the fact that the children's families basic needs were addressed. Either way, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the numerous discussions that must have gone down regarding these payments.

"Slumdog" Child Actors: Part II

So, as it turns out, Hollywood has taken care of the child actors in Slumdog Millionaire. Quoting a quote from a Freakonomics blog post:

Danny Boyle placed the money to be paid to the three lead child actors in a trust that is to be released to them upon their completion of grade school at 16 years of age. The production company has set up for an autorickshaw driver to take the kids to school every day until they are 16 years old.

Upon their completion of grade school? Is this a conditional cash transfer? Is the reason not to pay to children now because of child labor law or paternalism or both? And have the producers met their obligation, if any, to help these kids out of poverty?

Seriously. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Is Hollywood Responsible for "Slumdog" Child Actors?

My sister just sent over an interesting piece about the child actors in "Slumdog Millionaire." As it turns out:

Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who plays the youngest version of the main character's brother Salim in the film, lives with his parents and siblings in a makeshift plastic tent, pitched on a half-finished government park.

Besides friends and neighbours, he has a big garbage dump and armies of mosquitoes and flies for company.

Ten-year-old Azharuddin's mother says they have been homeless for a while: "We have been squatting on this government park since the time our hutments were demolished over a year ago and despite showing the right documents to the authorities we have not been allotted our room [a one-room tiny flat]."

Rubina Ali - who portrays the youngest version of the leading lady Latika in the film - is playing with Azhar and other children.

Their faces glow in the rays of the fading sunlight. They greet the BBC team with coyness. Ask them to pronounce the film's title and they fumble amid nervous smiles. "Aslum dog minaire," says Rubina. "No," Azhar tries to correct her, with his own incorrect version.

Here is a question I am pondering: do the producers of "Slumdog Millionaire" have a responsibility to help these child actors out of poverty? Especially when that same poverty was used to entertain millions? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

By the way, you should see "Slumdog Millionaire" - it's excellent.

Random Thursdays

1. I was excited to see Richard Jenkins get a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his work in The Visitor. His portrayal of a stuck-in-a-rut development economist who experiences a reawakening through a most unusual and heart-wrenching circumstance was truly one of the best (and least known) performances that I saw all year.

2. However, the Oscars really dropped the ball with some of the Best Picture nominations. The sentimental mess Benjamin Button over the hard-hitting Dark Knight and Gran Torino? Why do these guys get to decide?

3. What is the market value of virginity? See here.

4. The Yale Daily News has a great three-part series on George W. Bush. The first two parts have been pretty interesting so far, portraying the President as far more complex than either liberals or conservatives like to paint him.

My Favorites from 2008

(1) Favorite Book - "Three Cups of Tea," chronicling the story of Greg Mortensen, an American mountaineer who, through a series of incredible events, took up the cause of building schools in Northwestern Pakistan and Afganistan, is a great way to close out the year. Mortensen's work (upwards of 70 projects in the region) in education, public health and skill building has probably done more (per dollar or per unit effort) to fight the likely root causes of terrorism - poverty and extremely high opportunity costs to obtaining education and skills - than anything else in recent memory.

A good story to remind us how to go about "going about" next year (and subsequent ones, as well).

(2) Favorite Film - A good hard look at crime, terrorism, civil liberties and how far "good" can go before crossing the line, along with some ridiculously sharp acting by Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart, compels me to put "The Dark Knight" at the top of my film list. Just because the Academy is too stodgy to give "popcorn flicks" Best Picture nominations doesn't mean that this phenomenal movie shouldn't get a nod. (Other favorites: "The Visitor," "Wall-E," "Slumdog Millionaire," and "Milk").

(By the way, "Least Favorite Trailer of 2008" goes to the one for the forthcoming Meryl Streep film "Doubt." Not only was it bizarre the first time around, I've been exposed to it before every movie I've seen in the last six months. Do they ever plan on releasing this film, or is the strategy to just keep showing the preview over and over for some extended period of time?)

(3) Favorite Academic Discourse - Is happiness contagious? James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis argue that it is: you will be happier if you have happier friends, or if your friends have friends who have happy friends. Fowler and Christakis have also argued in the past that obesity and smoking are contagious, as well.

In the same issue of the BMJ containing the happiness piece, Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason Fletcher (the latter of Yale University) argue that Fowler and Christakis' methodology to examine peer or social-network effects is faulty in that they do not fully control for the common environment shared by all the individuals in the network (after all, you and your friends may be happy because all of you were exposed to a city-wide balloon race or something like this). Using the Fowler-Christakis setup, they are able to show that things that shouldn't be contagious - acne, height and headaches - appear to be susceptible to peer effects just like happiness. When fully controlling for the common environment, these spurious causal effects disappear. (Yup, "Favorite Falsification Test of 2008").

Guess which piece got all the press attention. Justin Wolfers at Freakonomics has a good commentary on the discourse and the manner in which it was reported.

(4) Favorite Post - I really had a good time writing this one.

(5) Favorite Historic Moment - That Obama guy winning.

And, finally, best wishes for the New Year! I'll see you in 2009.

Harvey Milk Documentary on Hulu

I just found out that you can watch the documentary, "The Times of Harvey Milk" on hulu.com. Here is a link to the film.

I recently saw "Milk," starring Sean Penn, and found it to be extremely interesting, inspiring and ridiculously well acted. After watching the film, I was told by a few people that I might have gotten more out of the Penn version by watching the aforementioned documentary first. Regardless of what you choose to do, you should definitely see the film and check out the documentary.

Random Tuesdays

Some things of note:

1) Blogger and frequent commenter in this space James Hudspeth sent me this interesting article about how google searches can be used to track disease outbreaks, with information relays that are potentially faster than existing surveillance systems.

2) Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores (on my reading list for next month), has a fun and informative blog of the same name. Here is an interesting post from this blog looking at incentives and HIV/AIDS, with a special reference to disability grants in South Africa. Here is our paper on this subject.

3) Spotlight (with a thoughtful piece) on Obama.

4) People are addictive.

5) Be sure to check out the Yale University Insitute for Social and Policy Studies 40th Year Celebration and Conference. I think space is tight, but you can still get a sense of the bill through the papers and slides available via the link provided above. The conference focuses on using experiments to answer important questions in political science and economics, and the papers span a wide range of topics. All of them are super interesting.

Obama

Addressing my graduating class, the Dean of the Duke University Chapel gave a stirring speech about how we needed to resist being labeled the 9/11 generation. Though the horrific terrorist attacks happened during our senior year, the Dean urged us to think beyond 9/11 and become the generation that made its mark by decisively and proactively moving society away from that event and towards a better future. Rather than becoming pessimistic and jaded about our world, he wanted us to use our energies, skills and talents to refocus the collective gaze of society on the good and the promising.

Nearly seven years later, I witnessed a slew of my friends taking up the Dean's challenge, inspired the first black man gaining a major party nomination for President, who embodied progress, optimism and youth, speaking of hope and change. Several friends participated directly in the Obama campaign, working long hours in battleground states, making calls and coordinating rallies. Others chose to engage in vociferous discussion with their families and friends about their beliefs and about what they felt was the most important decision our country has had to make in a long time. Still others spent election day calling complete strangers encouraging them to get out to vote. Tuesday night, and for the rest of the week thereafter, these friends and many others across the country walked around with gleaming smiles, radiating a sense of optimism that seems to be a perfectly natural extension of the events of the last few months, but also completely remarkable given the aftermath of 9/11 and the recent financial crisis. As one of my professors gushed on the day after the election: "It is now morning in America."

I think the implicit Reagan comparison is entirely appropriate. If Reagan was the transformational figure of our parents' generation, Obama is most definitely ours. Before Tuesday, though, my views on President-Elect Obama had been more muted. To me, "Hope" and "Change" were empty campaign promises that I'd heard before, made by another inspirational candidate who turned out to be an underwhelming President. If anything, I chose to vote for Obama mainly because I liked his technocratic and pragmatic outlook (and also because the erstwhile Maverick Senator McCain had become much less of one).

Tuesday taught me that these concepts are not, and had never been, just vague and hazy campaign rhetoric. Indeed, the tangible effects of being inspired by a man who has become both a symbol and a (potential) instrument for optimism and progress are substantive and significant and should not be underestimated: millions of people appear ready to make sacrifices and continue to work at a grassroots level for change. Some of the optimism appears a bit unhealthy - after all, Obama does not hold a magic wand - but I think much it can be harnessed and put to use in a way never before seen, certainly not in my lifetime.

Prior to Nov 4, 2008, 9/11 was indeed the defining historical moment of our generation. It clearly changed our views about the world and about our own country. Much of this decade has been colored by this event, from the tangible policies and actions we have taken as well as to our national mood more generally. We now have another defining moment for our generation: the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, with all its optimism and its possibilities. Now let's put this all our good-will, excitement and sense of purpose to good use and get down in the trenches with our new President.

It's time to get to work.

Expectations and Depression (and Other Interesting Links)

1. My thesis committee chair Jody Sindelar, along with Bill Gallo and Tracy Falba on the relationship between deviations from one's a priori expectations about working and subsequent depression among those around retirement age. While causality is always difficult to establish, the symmetric correlation between working longer OR shorter than expected and depressive symptoms is striking and consistent with "feelings of loss of control" type explanations for depression:

"We found significant effects on depression at age 62 both for full-time workers who expected not to be working full-time, and for participants not working full-time who expected to be doing so. These results hold even after adjustment for earlier depressive symptoms, sociodemographic and other relevant controls. The findings suggest that working longer and retiring earlier than expected each may compromise psychological well-being. The current financial crisis may result in both scenarios as some workers may have to work longer than expected due to the decline in pension and other wealth while others may retire earlier due to job loss."

2. A fantastic back-and-forth between filmmaker Oliver Stone and venerable journalists Bob Woodward, Ron Suskund and Jacob Weisberg on Stone's new tragi-comic-biopic W and the Bush (II) presidency more generally. By the way, if you haven't seen W. yet, you should.

3. Dan Ariely presents evidence that conservatives may have a better sense of humor than liberals. Surprising? Not to me.

4. Chris Blattman on pictoral descriptions of the world wealth distribution from 1 AD onwards.

5. The financial crisis and funding for college athletics.

I'm Fired!

My fantasy football team, following an almost miracle season, has regressed back to the mean this year. I am currently 2-4 and have the lowest point total of the 12 teams in our annual league. I attribute a lot of this to injuries: the three starting wide receivers I drafted are all out (two indefinitely and one for the year), as well as two of my defensive players. Furthermore, the league draft having been before the end of preseason, I found myself with two QBs with strong training-camp buzzes that turned out to be unusually poor forecasts. All in all, an idiosyncratic mess.

But, I look at my lifetime record (I average about a 6th place finish out of 12 teams) and realized that there is likely a persistent component to my lack of titles and general mediocrity. I also noticed that Yahoo! Fantasy Football has a new feature where people can co-manage a single fantasy team.

Given all this, I've decided to fire myself as the general manager of my team, and outsource the responsibilities of drafting and early season waiver-wire moves to someone else. I will still retain final authority over decision-making and retain the capacity to make some moves myself, but all of this will be in a much reduced role.

My firing of myself is effective immediately. I am currently looking for someone with at least five years of fantasy football experience (from competitive leagues, with a successful track record) to take over the GM role of the team. Let me know if you are interested.

Random Thoughts from Cape Town

I have about two days left here in Cape Town and decided that this would be an appropriate time to reflect on what has been a great experience. I came here with the intention of finishing off one paper, and starting the second. As was the case with my last trip here, I leave the region with some great experiences and some new puzzles to ponder. Here are a collection of random thoughts I have (too tired to string these together in the usual thematic piece). Enjoy.

****

On the plane ride over, I saw this great movie called The Visitor. It's about a tenured widower academic (a development economist!) who is going through the motions in life, until he meets an illegal immigrant who he eventually shares his apartment with and starts learning the African drums from. The immigrant chap is eventually arrested and detained, and the academic works hard to get him out, forming life changing relationships with the drummer and the drummer's wife and mother in the process. It is an uplifting, sad and thoughtful movie, all at once, and perhaps one of the best movies I've seen in the last few months. Furthermore, Richard Jenkins, who plays the academic, gives an incredible performance and should win awards for this.

Highly recommended.

****

I absolutely love the University of Cape Town. Aside being located on the side of Table Mountain (and thus offering incredible views of both the mountain side and the city below), UCT is one of the best academic institutions on the continent, and the research that is going on here is really interesting. You often get a good grip on the quality of the research in an institution from the comments you get during a seminar. At my seminar, the feedback was ridiculously sharp and useful - definitely one of the best academic experiences of my young research career.

****

Speaking of UCT, I got a chance to revisit the owner of the Chinese food stall here, who made an appearance in one of my earlier posts on incentives to induce environmentally friendly behavior. The gentleman is still offering his R0.50 discount to those who bring their own plates or containers for food, though, he noted sadly, few people take him up on that these days. He seemed quite distraught to keep having to dole out styrofoam containers. I told him that it might be time to up the incentive, to which he laughed in response.

I don't think he is going to take me up on this.

****

One of the best ways to spend a day in Cape Town is to hike up Table Mountain and/or Lion's Head. Both offer stunning vistas of the city and surrounding suburbs. My body continues to revolt after the two hikes I've done here, but spending a day out in the sun, walking and climbing on paths surrounded by spring colors and geckos was pretty mind blowing.

Also mind blowing are Chandini restaurant in Woodstock (amazing Indian food), the Royale Eatery (at least 15 options for vegetarian burgers) and the High Life (Hare Krishna) food stall at UCT.

****

Of course, the trip wasn't all fun and games - at least in the recreational sense. My colleague and I spent most of our time working (fun and games, though of a different sort, in my book), and are onto some new research questions. In particular, we are going to look at links between economic vulnerability and shocks and risky sexual behaviors. More on that in a later post...

All in all, this has been a great trip: productive, fun, and thought-provoking. And it's been great also to create partnerships that could spur projects and travel opportunities in the future.

Contest Reminder!

You have until Saturday (the 19th) morning to submit your entries for the "Competitive Eating" and "P-value" contests. The prizes are excellent and are outlined in the second link (and see here for proof that I actually deliver on the prizes).

Bring it.