It's Raining Men! Hallelujah?

That is the title of this paper by Pauline Grosjean & Rose Khattar. The abstract:

We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th century. In areas with higher gender imbalance, women historically married more, worked less, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people living in those areas have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women are still less likely to have high-ranking occupations. We document the role of vertical cultural transmission and of homogamy in the marriage market in sustaining cultural persistence. Conservative gender norms may have been beneficial historically, but are no longer necessarily so. Historical gender imbalance is associated with an aggregate income loss estimated at $800 per year, per person. Our results are robust to a wide array of geographic, historical and present-day controls, including migration and state fixed effects, and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.

Attitudes Toward Bribery in Australia

Overall – Opposition to bribe taking was strong.
Gender – Females were significantly more opposed to bribe taking than men.
Age – The relationship between age and attitude toward bribe taking was linear. The older the age group, the more opposition there was to bribe taking…
Religiosity - Those who considered themselves to be religious were most strongly opposed to bribe taking, followed by nonreligious people and atheists.
Marital Status – Married and widowed people were most opposed to bribe taking, followed by divorced, separated, living together as married and single/never married people.
Education Level – Education was not a significant variable.
Employment Status – Retired people were most strongly opposed to bribe taking, followed by housewives, the self-employed, students, full-time and part-time employees and unemployed.

The paper is by Teresa Hernandez & Robert W. McGee.

Assertion about the Australian Economy

On one estimate, if Australia were to increase our maths and science scores to the level of Finland, our economy would grow by about half a percentage point faster, making the average household more than $500 per year better off.

Source. 

Health Economics: Australia Abstract of the Day

A basic prediction of theoretical models of insurance is that if consumers have private information about their risk of suffering a loss there will be a positive correlation between risk and the level of insurance coverage. We test this prediction in the context of the market for private health insurance in Australia. Despite a universal public system that provides comprehensive coverage for inpatient and outpatient care, roughly half of the adult population also carries private health insurance, the main benefit of which is more timely access to elective hospital treatment. Like several studies on different types of insurance in other countries, we find no support for the positive correlation hypothesis. Because strict underwriting regulations create strong information asymmetries, this result suggests the importance of multi-dimensional private information. Additional analyses suggest that the advantageous selection observed in this market is driven by the effect of risk aversion, the ability to make complex financial decisions and income.

Source: Buchmueller et al. (Journal of Health Economics, September 2013).  

From the conclusions:

We find that adults covered by private hospital insurance spend fewer nights in hospital over the course of a year than individuals without private coverage. Privately insured individuals are in better self-reported health and are less likely to report a recent physician’s visit. Since private insurance in Australia provides no reimbursement for outpatient care, this latter result can be interpreted as evidence that the privately insured group is healthier than the group without private coverage. Thus, our results are consistent with advantageous, rather than adverse selection . . . 

Our analysis of household expenditure data indicates that consumers who purchase private health insurance are also significantly more likely to purchase other types of insurance.

Drafts of the paper and a slide presentation are here.  

Crime and education

This paper aims at disentangling the strong association between human capital and crime by investigating whether crime reduces investment in human capital or whether education reduces criminal activity. Heretofore, we exploit two aspects of the Australian survey data on education and crime we use. First, as the data are obtained from twins, we are able to control for many unobserved characteristics affecting both criminal behaviour and the schooling decisions. Second, as criminal behaviour is measured over different periods of time – prior to and after senior high school completion – we can address the causality between crime and education as well. As early criminal behaviour may affect human capital formation, and human capital may influence criminal behaviour in later stages of life, we follow a two step analysis.

First, we address the effects of early criminal behaviour on educational attainment. The estimates suggest that early criminal behaviour is detrimental to investment in human capital. Within pairs of twins we find that early arrests (before the age of 18) reduce educational attainment with .7 to .9 years and lower the probability of completing senior high school with 20 to 23 percentage points. In addition, the timing of the early arrest matters, arrests at age 13, 14 or 15 are most detrimental for educational attainment. These estimates are found after controlling for conduct disorder and early school performance.

Second, we focus on the effect of human capital on crime. As early criminal activity might be an important confounder, we control for early arrests. The estimates suggest that human capital has a negative effect on crime. Completing senior high school reduces the probability of incarceration with 2 to 3 percentage points. We find similar but statistically insignificant effects on the probability of being arrested since the age of 18 and on the number of arrests. The size of these estimates might be downward biased because of measurement error in schooling. IV- estimates using a second independent measure of schooling suggest that the effect of human capital might be larger. Lochner and Moretti (2004) report IV-estimates of the effect of high school completion on imprisonment of 8 percentage points for blacks and 0.9 for whites.

When combining these findings, it seems that the causality between human capital and crime runs in both directions. Still, the impact of early criminal behaviour on human capital formation dominates the impact of human capital formation on future crime behaviour. Controlling for early arrests and early behaviour problems reduces the estimated effect of human capital on crime to less than one third of the previously estimated association. From this, we conclude that early criminal behaviour explains most of the association between human capital and crime.

The strong detrimental effects of early criminal behaviour become also transparent if we consider the estimated effects of early arrests on all three measures of crime. Early arrests increase the probability of incarceration with 20 percentage points and the probability of being arrested since the age of 18 with 10 percentage points. These effects are much larger than the estimated effects of human capital. For instance, the estimated effect of being arrested before the age of 18 on incarceration is almost ten times higher than the estimated effect of completing high school.

That is from the conclusions of the interesting paper "Why are criminals less educated than non-criminals? Evidence from a cohort of young Australian twins" by Webbink et al., forthcoming in The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization (2013). A draft (2008) is here.

Immigrants create more jobs

This paper analyses the impact of a change in Australia’s immigration policy, introduced in the mid-1990s, on migrants’ probability of becoming entrepreneurs. The policy change consists of stricter entry requirements and restrictions to welfare entitlements. The results indicate that those who entered under more stringent conditions – the second cohort – have a higher probability to become self-employed, than those in the first cohort. We also find significant time and region effects. Contrary to some existing evidence, time spent in Australia positively affects the probability to become self-employed.

That is from the abstract of a new paper by Mahuteau et al: "Immigration Policy and Entrepreneurship."

From the concluding remarks and policy implications:

In terms of its economic impact, there is a strong misconception in the immigrant countries that migrants “steal” natives’ jobs and that the cost of immigration outweighs its benefit. This is indeed, to a certain extent, been supported by work of Borjas and others. However, there is overwhelming evidence in favour of the view that immigrants are a net benefit to the receiving countries (Altonji and Card, 1991; Pischke and Velling, 1997;Dustmann et al, 2008). Although our paper has not addressed the particular issue of immigrants’ effect on the Australian labour market, the main result of the paper could be interpreted in the context of the ongoing debate, with the conclusion that immigrants create jobs. In this regard, Australian immigration policy could be considered as one of the main contributors to the job-creating activities in the country.