T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Some holiday reading

OKONOMOS

Those on vacation and bored stiff with the wife and kids should download and read these papers

A few months ago, someone asked why this column draws so heavily on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of the US. The answer is simple: its sheer eclecticism appeals hugely to me.

Of the nearly 1,000 papers in the 2005 list, there are about a 100 that are, as my sons would say, rocking stuff man. And the list goes back almost two decades.

In recent years, the sheer inventiveness of the research has increased manifold. This is because data sets are becoming available on all manner of things.

My initial idea was to list about a third of these papers so that those of you who are on vacation and bored stiff with your wife and kids could download and read them. But the man who edits this page said no.

I then asked him to choose the three that appealed to him most. The fourth one, about friendships, is my contribution.

Measuring the Impact of Crack Cocaine by Roland G Fryer, Paul S Heaton, Steven D Levitt, and Kevin M Murphy, WP11318

Look at the third name here. It is none other than the hero of the best selling Freaknomics. He believes it's questions, not answers that matter.

Wherefore this paper asks: to what extent was cocaine responsible for the bad behaviour of American blacks in the 1980s, and why did they start to behave better in the 1990s. "We explore whether the rise and fall of crack cocaine can explain these patterns."

The authors have constructed an index based on proxies such as "cocaine arrests, cocaine-related emergency room visits, cocaine-induced drug deaths, crack mentions in newspapers, and DEA drug busts and so on". Great read after a fight with the wife over her drinking too many Bloody Marys.

Biology as Destiny? Short and Long-Run Determinants of Intergenerational Transmission of Birth Weight by Janet Currie and Enrico Moretti, WP11567

This one asks if "inter-generational correlations in health contribute to the perpetuation of economic status." The authors examine inter-generational correlations in birth weight and link those to future educational attainment and earnings. The data set is from California.

This rich mixture is given a rare old shaking and it turns out that "there is a strong intergenerational correlation in the birth weight of mothers and children...and intergenerational correlations in health play a role in the intergenerational transmission of income. Parent's income affects child health, and health at birth affects future income."

Only in California or all over the world?

Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia by David G Blanchflower and Andrew J Oswald WP11416

This one shows Australians their proper place. Although the new Human Development Index ranks Australia third, after reviewing the existing literature on the economics of happiness "" yes it does exist "" it "shows that Australians have some of the lowest levels of job satisfaction in the world... and perform poorly on a range of happiness indicators. The paper discusses this paradox."

How Do Friendships Form? Bruce Sacerdote and David Marmaros WP11530

This one tries to find out how people acquire friends, a fit subject for economic enquiry, I think. The authors have used a dataset from Dartmouth College about email volumes between any two people.

"The expected value of interacting with an unknown person is low", they say, "while the benefits from interacting with the same person repeatedly are high...Geographic proximity and race are greater determinants of social interaction than are common interests, majors, or family background."

It also seems that white students interact three times more often than a black student and a white student. "However, placing the black and white student in the same freshman dorm increases their frequency of interaction by a factor of three."

This sort of research is truly fascinating, even if it is not strictly economics? So as Paul Samuelson wrote in his foreword to Sukhumoy Chakravarty's book, bon aperitif and happy a new year.