I used the national panel data of Japan to investigate the determinants of suicide. The major findings are twofold. First, the social capital that enhances community integration had a greater effect on the suicide of females than that of males. This is probably because females are less likely to have full-time jobs and thus have more spare time, leading them to seek social involvement in their neighbourhoods and participate in community activities. Second, divorce causes the propensity to commit suicide among males to become about two times higher than that among females because of the compensation costs that males are more likely to pay to females.

Source: "The different impacts of socio-economic factors on suicide between males and females" from Applied Economics Letters, Volume 17, Issue 10 July 2010 , pages 1009 - 1012

Just rewatched one of my favorite doumentaries last night: Touching the Void. Mountain climbing of this sort seems suicidal to me, but this is one of the greatest stories of will to live I've ever seen. The book it is based on is here. And don't just believe my recommendation; it has 4.5 stars on Amazon with 159 reviews. Wikipedia summary is here.

Related Posts:

Does country music increase suicide rates?

Does rock music promote suicide?

Are opera fans more accepting of suicide?

You just committed murder. What should you do now?

How do presidential elections affect suicide rates?

Do gun-buyback programs save lives?

What physically happens to someone electrocuted in the electric chair?

How can you tell whether someone was asleep when he committed murder?

Does "will to live" really make a difference in when you die?

You should follow me on Twitter here. You can also subscribe to the blog's feed or follow on Facebook. If you want to help support the blog, please do your Amazon shopping via this link. Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

Professional bookmakers rarely accept bets from individuals who directly control the outcome of the bet. We analyse a unique exception to this rule and a potential policy innovation in the battle against obesity: a weight loss betting market. If obese individuals have time-inconsistent preferences then commitment mechanisms, such as personal gambles, should help them restrain their short-term impulses and lose weight. Correspondence with the bettors confirms that this is their primary motivation. However, it appears that the bettors in our sample are not particularly skilled at choosing effective commitment mechanisms. Despite payoffs of as high as $7350, approximately 80% of people who spend money to bet on their own behaviour end up losing their bets. Empirical analysis of the betting market yields further insights. Males are treated very differently compared to females: being male is considered equivalent to having an extra 6 months to lose the same amount of weight. Movements in the market price also confirm the belief that rigidity is preferred to flexibility in setting successful weight loss targets.

Source: "Betting on weight loss … and losing: personal gambles as commitment mechanisms" from Applied Economics Letters, Volume 17, Issue 12 August 2010 , pages 1161 - 1166

For more on gambling stories, I recommend this book.

A friend of mine who knows a lot about gambling recommends Cash Games (How to Win at No-Limit Hold'em Money Games) Vol. 1 for poker players.

Related posts:

How to quickly and easily improve your blackjack game.

The Secret Behind Powerball Lottery Strategies

What do you buy when you buy a lottery ticket?

If you give away a lottery ticket, is it more likely to win?

Are men better gamblers when accompanied by a woman?

What the hell is wrong with Australian Gambling researchers?

Do bookmakers possess superior skills to bettors in predicting outcomes?

How science can improve your "March Madness" bracket and win you some money

Does where you live determine whether you'll be a problem gambler or whether you'll get physically abused?

Are oldest, middle or youngest kids the biggest risk takers?

Since 1993 the Federation of International Football Association's (FIFA) monthly world ranking system for senior national football teams has become a reliable source to judge a team's potentiality in football. In the past four FIFA worldcup football tournaments from 1994 to 2006, the top seeded team never won the FIFA worldcup except in 1994 when Brazil won as the number one team. This article examines the strength of this element of uncertainty in FIFA worldcup using two empirical models. We find empirical evidence of the fact that in spite of the number of cases of surprise upsets from the lower ranked teams or poor performance by the top seeded teams; overall the results are strongly in favour of the higher ranked teams.

Source: "How predictable are the FIFA worldcup football outcomes? An empirical analysis" from Applied Economics Letters, Volume 15, Issue 15 December 2008 , pages 1171 - 1176

I have a lot of friends who are really into soccer but this is about as close as I get to being a fan.

Related posts:

Do people work less in the US when the World Cup is going on?

Does how far away an "away game" is affect how a sports team performs?

Do bookies take advantage of irrational preference for the home team?

What's best for the roster of sports teams - new blood or stability?

Things you didn't know about sports

You should follow me on Twitter here. You can also subscribe to the blog's feed or follow on Facebook. If you want to help support the blog, please do your Amazon shopping via this link. Here are the site's most popular posts of all time.

The current study examined whether permitting young women to drink alcohol at home during senior year of high school reduces the risk of heavy drinking in college. Participants were 449 college-bound female high school seniors, recruited at the end of their senior year. Participants were classified into one of three permissibility categories according to their baseline reports of whether their parents allowed them to drink at home: (a) not permitted to drink at all; (b) allowed to drink with family meals; (c) allowed to drink at home with friends. Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to compare the drinking behaviors of the three groups at the time of high school graduation and again after the first semester of college. Students who were allowed to drink at home during high school whether at meals or with friends, reported more frequent heavy episodic drinking (HED) in the first semester of college than those who reported not being allowed to drink at all. Those who were permitted to drink at home with friends reported the heaviest drinking at both time points. Path analysis revealed that the relationship between alcohol permissiveness and college HED was mediated via perceptions of parental alcohol approval.

Source: "Can parents prevent heavy episodic drinking by allowing teens to drink at home?" from Addictive Behaviors

Ralph Steadman of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fame has written two excellent books on booze: The Grapes of Ralph and Untrodden Grapes.

This article investigates whether the death penalty encourages defendants charged with potentially capital crimes to plead guilty in exchange for lesser sentences. I exploit a natural experiment in New York State: the 1995 reinstatement of capital punishment, coupled with the public refusal of some prosecutors to pursue death sentences (N.Y. Penal Law § 125.25 [McKinney 1975]). Using individual-level data on all felony arrests in the state between 1985 and 1998, I find the death penalty leads defendants to accept plea bargains with harsher terms, but does not increase defendants’ overall propensity to plead guilty. A differences-in-differences analysis of a national cross-section of homicide defendants confirms these results.

Source: "Does the Threat of the Death Penalty Affect Plea Bargaining in Murder Cases? Evidence from New York’s 1995 Reinstatement of Capital Punishment" from Am Law Econ Rev (Spring 2006) 8 (1): 116-142.

Great nonfiction crime books are "Low Life", "Homicide", "The Big Con", Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison, Donnie Brasco and Wiseguy, which inspired GoodFellas.

Related posts:

Do prison conditions have more of a deterrent effect on crime than the death penalty?

Are attractive people less likely to be convicted of a crime and more likely to get a shorter sentence?

Does the male/female wage gap extend to crime?

When does the sex of a judge affect their rulings?

Are lawyers any good at predicting the outcomes of their cases?

Can watching TV crime dramas distort perception of the criminal justice system?

Why you should only reference low numbers when you're on trial for murder:

Does it work when a defendant tries to excuse away crimes by saying he was abused as a child?

How would the law punish Siamese twins if one committed murder without the other being involved?

Do women receive lighter prison sentences than men? If so, why?

You just committed murder. What should you do now?

Male dominance rank, physical strength, indices of reproductive success, and indices of reproductive potential are correlated with masculine characteristics in many animal species, including humans. Accordingly, men generally perceive masculinized versions of men's faces and voices to be more dominant than feminized versions. Less dominant men incur greater costs when they incorrectly perceive the dominance of rivals. Consequently, it may be adaptive for less dominant men to be particularly sensitive to cues of dominance in other men. Because height is a reliable index of men's dominance, we investigated the relationship between own height and men's sensitivity to masculine characteristics when judging the dominance of other men's faces and voices. Although men generally perceived masculinized faces and voices to be more dominant than feminized versions, this effect of masculinity on dominance perceptions was significantly greater among shorter men than among taller men. These findings suggest that differences among men in the potential costs of incorrectly perceiving the dominance of rivals have shaped systematic variation in men's perceptions of the dominance of potential rivals.

Source: "Taller men are less sensitive to cues of dominance in other men" from Behavioral Ecology (2010) 21 (5): 943-947.

If you want to read more about men, women and human nature I recommend this book as well as The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.

Related Posts:

Do Masculine Names Help Female Lawyers Become Judges?

Can you tell if a man is dangerous just by looking at his face?

Do hypochondriac women prefer macho men?

Are "feminine" or "un-feminine" women more likely to be sexually harassed?

What Distinguishes Women with Unusually High Numbers of Sex Partners?

What are the best predictors of how sexual a woman is?

Accident related health problems have been suggested to cluster within persons. This phenomenon became known as accident proneness and has been a subject of many discussions. This study provides an overview of accident proneness. Therefore, 79 articles with empirical data on accident rates were identified from databases Embase, Medline, and Psychinfo. First, definitions of accidents varied highly, but most studies focused on accidents resulting in injuries requiring medical attention. Second, operationalisations of accident proneness varied highly. Studies categorised individuals into groups with ascending accident rates or made non-accident, accident, and repetitive accident groups. Third, studies examined accidents in specific contexts (traffic, work, and sports) or populations (children, students, and patients). Therefore, we concluded that no overall prevalence rate of accident proneness could be given due to the large variety in operationalisations. However, a meta-analysis of the distribution of accidents in the general population showed that the observed number of individuals with repeated accidents was higher than the number expected by chance. In conclusion, accident proneness exists, but its study is severely hampered by the variation in operationalisations of the concept. In an effort to reach professional consensus on the concept, we end this paper with recommendations for further research.

Previous research in sports economics has looked for the presence of consumer discrimination among sports fans of professional teams and it has produced mixed results. Scully (1974a, b) found evidence to suggest that fans of Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs did engage in consumer discrimination in the 1970s, but more recent work by Sommers and Quinton (1982) found no such evidence. In this article, we present evidence that suggests that consumer discrimination persisted in MLB into the early 1990s. Specifically, our empirical work suggests that consumers in Boston, Cleveland, Houston, San Diego and Saint Louis chose to attend fewer baseball games-ceteris paribus-when the home team in these cities added Hispanic players to the roster.

Source: "Consumer discrimination in professional sports: new evidence from major league baseball" from Applied Economics Letters, Volume 14, Issue 13 October 2007 , pages 951 - 955

If you're looking for some good books about sports check out Moneyball and Game of Shadows. Here's a great book about a sports junkie. For great sports gambling stories, I recommend this book.

Related posts:

Here are a lot of things you didn't know about sports

Why do pitchers hit batters in baseball?

Does how far away an "away game" is affect how a sports team performs?

How would Babe Ruth fare in baseball today?

Are baseball umpires racist?

Does the system described in "Moneyball" still give teams an edge today?

What would happen if economists were NFL and MLB coaches?

Previous research suggests that divorced individuals, particularly women, have higher rates of sleep disturbances as compared to married individuals. Among the married, however, little is known about the association between relationship quality and sleep. The present study examined the association between marital happiness and self-reported sleep disturbances in a sample of midlife women drawn from the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN), a multi-site, multi-ethnic, community-based study (N = 2,148). Marital happiness was measured using a single item from the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and sleep disturbance was assessed using 4 items from the Women's Health Initiative Insomnia Rating Scale (WHIIRS). After controlling for relevant covariates, maritally happy women reported fewer sleep disturbances, with the association evident among Caucasian women and to a lesser extent among African American women.

Source: "Marital Happiness and Sleep Disturbances in a Multi-Ethnic Sample of Middle-Aged Women" from Behavioral Sleep Medicine, Volume 7, Issue 1 January 2009 , pages 2 - 19

Best book I've ever read about the subject of marriage is by Stephanie Coontz, "Marriage, a History."

And if you're curious whether you're headed for a divorce, ask Visa.

Related posts:

Things you didn't know about marriage and relationships

How do women's tastes vary in short term vs long term partners?

Things you didn't know about sex.

In which countries does divorce impact happiness the most?

What really predicts divorce?

How common are couples where the man is shorter than the woman?

What you should look for in a marriage partner

How important is physical attractiveness to a happy marriage?

Is marriage a good idea for handsome men?

Does earning a lot of money make it harder for a woman to find a husband?

Does a female breadwinner raise risk of divorce?

Do you really have any idea what you're looking for in a romantic partner?