Manudeep Bhuller,
Magne Mogstad, Kjell G. Salvanes, NHH: Life Cycle Earnings, Education Premiums
and Internal Rates of Return. This paper
exploits Norwegian population panel data with nearly career long earnings
histories to answer these important questions. We provide a detailed picture of
the causal relationship between schooling and earnings over the life cycle,
following individuals over their working lifespan. To account for endogeneity
of schooling, we apply three commonly used identification strategies. Our estimates show that
additional schooling gives higher lifetime earnings and steeper age-earnings
profile, in line with predictions from human capital theory. These estimates
imply an internal rate of return of around 10 percent, after taking into
account income taxes and earnings-related pension entitlements. Under
standard conditions, this finding suggests it was financially profitable to
take additional schooling because the rates of return were substantially higher
than the market interest rates.
Øystein
Hernæs, Simen Markussen, Knut Røed, JHR:
Television, Cognitive Ability, and High School Completion. We exploit
supply-driven heterogeneity in the expansion of cable television across
Norwegian municipalities to identify developmental effects of commercial
television exposure during childhood. We find that higher exposure to commercial television reduces
cognitive ability and high school graduation rates for boys. The effects appear
to be driven by consumption of light television entertainment crowding out more
cognitively stimulating activities. Point estimates suggest that the
effects are most negative for boys from more educated families. We find no
effect on high school completion for girls, pointing to the growth of
non-educational media as a factor in the widening educational gender gap.
Øystein Hernaes,
IZA: Activation against Absenteeism: Evidence from a Sickness Insurance Reform
in Norway. I evaluate a
program aimed at strictly enforcing a requirement that people on long-term sick
leave be partly back at work unless explicitly defined as an exception.
Employing the synthetic control method, I find that the reform reduced work-hours lost due to
absenteeism by 12 % in the reform region compared to a comparison unit created
by a weighted average of similar regions. The effect is driven by both
increased part-time presence of temporary disabled workers and accelerated
recovery. Musculoskeletal disorders was the diagnosis group declining
the most. The findings imply large savings in social security expenditures.
Miles Corak, IZA: ‘Inequality Is the Root of Social Evil,’or Maybe Not?
Two Stories about Inequality and Public Policy. Income inequality is on the rise, and everyone, from
President Obama and Pope Francis to Prince Charles and Standard & Poor's,
is talking about it. But
these conversations about what are arguably the most significant changes in the
distribution of incomes and earnings since the 1940s are leading to very
different views on how public policy should respond. This is as true in
Canada as it is in almost all of the other rich countries where inequality has
risen. In this paper I tell two stories about inequality – one from the
perspective of those who feel it is not a problem worth the worry, and the
other from the perspective of those who see it as "the defining challenge of
our time" – in order to clarify the issues facing Canadians, and what
public policy should do about them.
James Suzman,
Guardian: How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000
years ago. A recent research paper examining inequality in early
Neolithic societies confirms what early-20th century anthropologists already
knew, on the basis of comparative studies of farming societies: that the
greater the surpluses a society produced, the greater the levels of inequality
in that society. The new research maps the relative sizes of people’s
homes in 63 Neolithic societies between 9000BC and 1500 AD. It finds a clear
correlation between levels of material inequality – based on the size of
household dwellings in each community – and the use of draught animals, which
enabled people to put far greater energy into their fields.
Wenqi Wei et
al., Nature: Regional ambient temperature is associated with human personality. Human personality traits differ across geographical
regions. However, it remains unclear what generates these geographical
personality differences. Because humans constantly experience and react to
ambient temperature, we propose that temperature is a crucial environmental
factor that is associated with individuals’ habitual behavioural patterns and,
therefore, with fundamental dimensions of personality. To test the relationship
between ambient temperature and personality, we conducted two large-scale
studies in two geographically large yet culturally distinct countries: China
and the United States. Using data from 59 Chinese cities (N = 5,587),
multilevel analyses and machine learning analyses revealed that compared with individuals who grew
up in regions with less clement temperatures, individuals who grew up in regions
with more clement temperatures (that is, closer to 22 °C) scored higher on
personality factors related to socialization and stability (agreeableness,
conscientiousness, and emotional stability) and personal growth and plasticity
(extraversion and openness to experience). Taken together, our findings
provide a perspective on how and why personalities vary across geographical
regions beyond past theories (subsistence style theory, selective migration
theory and pathogen prevalence theory). As climate change continues across the
world, we may also observe concomitant changes in human personality.
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