Does the flu vaccine prevent deaths?

The Atlantic has a very nice article summarising the discussion of whether the flu vaccine prevents death among older people. The basic problem in evaluating interventions like these is self-selection, which can make "cohort studies" unreliable. Not really news to most economists, but it seemed to have created quite a fire storm among public health and MD researchers. A very worthwhile read.

Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and aids combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?

Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs

A substantially revised version of "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs" is available. It is joint work with Niels-Hugo Blunch. The abstract is here:

This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest since they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a ten percent increase in consumption per adult equivalent. The effects of participation on welfare for other households are smaller and not statistically significant, and become smaller the more educated the household is. We find positive and statistically significant effects of participation on literacy and numeracy rates, although the increases are too small to be the only explanation for the welfare effects. There is also evidence that participants are more likely to engage in market activities and to sell a variety of agricultural goods. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost we argue that the social returns to adult literacy programs are substantial.

Economics is *really* hard...

Apparently the relationship between price and demand seems to be a slippery concept. Elizabeth Kolbert (in an otherwise interesting piece) on obesity in the New Yorker has this to say about the argument that part of the reason for the increase in obesity is that the cost per calorie has gone down:

The correlation between cost and consumption is pretty compelling; as Finkelstein notes, there’s no more basic tenet of economics than that price matters. But, like evolution, economics alone doesn’t seem adequate to the obesity problem. If it’s cheap to consume too many calories’ worth of ice cream or Coca-Cola, it’s even cheaper to consume fewer. [my emphasis]

Oh well!

Crash

Well, I know much of the attention these days are to the economy, but this crash hit a little closer to home. I was stopped on the highway because of traffic when I got rear-ended. I got transported to the ER with a c-collar and on a backboard, but luckily there were no broken bones involved. [gallery]

If nothing else it also shows why people should pay attention and not tailgate, especially on a highway!

Children's Time Allocation, Heterogeneity and Simultaneous Decisions

My paper on children's time use is now available on-line. The abstract for the paper is:

This paper uses a longitudinal survey from the Philippines with detailed information on family time use to analyse the effects of economic factors on children's time allocation. This is done while taking account of censoring, unobservable family heterogeneity and simultaneous decisions with respect to time spent in different activities. It is shown that there is a statistically significant correlation between unobservable individual and household characteristics when it comes to hours spent working and in school, but that this correlation is substantially smaller than one. Including household heterogeneity leads to substantial changes in the estimated effects of many of the important explanatory variables.

Population Association of America's annual meeting

I presented my paper "Natural Hazards and Child Health" and a poster on my paper "The Demand for Sex Selective Abortions" at the Population Association of America's annual meeting (held in Detroit). It was a great conference in a horrible hotel.

Sex Ratios and Latitude

Last week's Science section of the New York Times had an article about variations in sex ratios by latitude, based on an article in Biological Letters. Essentially, the upshot is that people in Africa are less likely than people in Europe and Asia to have a boy (even after excluding data that might be affected by sex selective abortions). Garenne wrote about sex ratios in Africa in Human Biology in 2002 and found broadly similar results. You can read the NYT article here.

CSDE Seminar

I gave a seminar at the CSDE seminar series Friday 17 April. The topic of the talk was "The Demand for Sex Selective Abortions".  The abstract is here (it is the same paper as I presented at University of Michigan - see below).

Seminar at University of British Columbia

I gave a seminar at UBC 17 March on my paper "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education". I am in the process of revising the paper based on comments from seminar participants and referee reports I have gotten. An revised version should be ready in the not too distant future.

Pacific Development Conference

I presented my paper on "Natural Hazards and Child Health" at the Pacific Development Conference at SFSU in San Francisco this last Saturday. Anoshua Chaudhuri did a great job at arranging the conference (Anoshua is a graduate from the UW graduate programme and is an assistant professor at SFSU). The only "problem" with the conference is that it is almost too short; only one day which does not allow a lot of time to chat with people.

Seminar at University of Michigan

I gave a seminar at the Population Studies Center at University of Michigan Monday 9 March 2009. The paper, "The Demand for Sex Selective Abortions," is still work in progress, but the presentation is here. Note that since this is work in progress methods and results might/will change, especially in light of the very useful comments I got during my visit. The abstract is:

One of the major changes that have taken place in India over the last two decades is a significant shift in the sex ratio at birth, as techniques for prenatal sex determination have become more widely available. There has, however, been little analysis of which factors influence the decision to abort female fetuses at the individual level. Furthermore, the sparse literature does not address the relationship between fertility, spacing and the demand for sex selective abortions, which may lead to biased estimates of the determinants of sex selective abortions. Using data from the three rounds of the National Family and Health Survey this paper relies on the observed spacing between births to examine the determinants of the demand for sex selective abortions. By employing a discrete hazard model it is possible to simultaneously control for the fertility and abortion decisions, while taking account of censoring and unobservable characteristics that might affect either.

David Lam seminar Friday 20 February

David Lam (University of Michigan) will be giving a seminar Friday 20 February at 2.00 PM in Condon 309. The title of his talk is "Schooling as a Lottery: Racial Differences in School Advancement in Urban South Africa". The abstract is below:

This paper develops a stochastic model of grade repetition to analyze the large racial differences in progress through secondary school in South Africa. The model predicts that a larger stochastic component in the link between learning and measured performance will generate higher enrollment, higher failure rates, and a weaker link between ability and grade progression.Using recently collected longitudinal data we find that progress through secondary school is strongly associated with scores on a baseline literacy and numeracy test. In grades 8-11 the effect of these scores on grade progression is much stronger for white and coloured students than for African students, while there is no racial difference in the impact of the scores on passing the nationally standardized grade 12 matriculation exam. The results provide strong support for our model, suggesting that grade progression in African schools is poorly linked to actual ability and learning. The results point to the importance of considering the stochastic component of grade repetition in analyzing school systems with high failure rates.

Most important questions in development?

3ie (International Initiative for Impact Evaluation) has a new questionnaire out, where they are looking for people's opinions about what the most important questions in development are. Below are the details and the link to the questionnaire.

Dear colleagues

3ie is a new organization dedicated to enhancing development outcomes through the promotion of evidence-based policy making. A survey has been launched to identify the most important questions on which 3ie should commission impact studies to produce evidence for policy-makers in low and middle income countries. The questions listed in the survey were collected in an earlier exercise, but there is an opportunity in the survey to propose new questions.

To take the survey please follow this link

http://www.3ieimpact.org/page.php?pg=medium

Please forward this message to ALL your colleagues to help us obtain a good response to this survey, encouraging them to also forward it. The survey will close on Friday January 30th.

Many thanks for your time

Howard White Executive Director, 3ie

3ie website www.3ieimpact.org

Ubuntu

Okay, so this is strictly speaking not about research, but it has interesting applications for developing countries. There is a nice article about Ubuntu and Shuttleworth (its sponsor or benefactor) in this Sunday's NY Times (see link below). Essentially, Ubuntu is a open-source operating system based on Linux. The difference from previous flavours of Linux is that it is very easy to deal with and has a very nice interface. I have it on both of my desktops (home and work), on my new eee 1000 pc, my old lap top and a version of it runs my mail, web, music and file server at home.

What really makes it interesting for developing countries, however, is the price: USD 0. You can download it for free and install it for free. In addition, there is a substantial amount of help available if you do run into trouble. Combine this with other open source programs like OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird and a user in a developing country can save a substantial amount of money and not fall foul of the anti-piracy laws. Of course, it will not get you an internet connection or even electricity if you do not have that, but then again neither will any of the other operating systems.

A Software Populist Who Doesn't Do Windows By ASHLEE VANCE A version of the Linux operating system called Ubuntu represents the fastest-growing threat to Microsoft in developed countries.