This paper estimates the exogenous effect of schooling on reduced incidence of hypertension. Using the changes in the minimum school-leaving age law in the United Kingdom from age 14 to 15 in 1947, and from age 15 to 16 in 1973, as sources of exogenous variation in schooling, the regression discontinuity and IV-probit estimates imply that completing an extra year of schooling reduces the probability of developing subsequent hypertension by approximately 7-12% points; the result which holds only for men and not for women. The correct IV-probit estimates of the LATE for schooling indicate the presence of a large and negative bias in the probit estimates of schooling-hypertension relationship for the male subsample.

Source: "Does Education Reduce the Risk of Hypertension? Estimating the Biomarker Effect of Compulsory Schooling in England" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 4847, March 2010

Best book I read lately about health issues was The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. I doubt you'll be disappointed.

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Are Scottish people living dangerously?

Nope:

Highlighting the potential implications these beliefs have, those in sub-Saharan Africa who believe in witchcraft rate their lives -- their evaluative wellbeing -- worse than those who don't. Gallup asks respondents to rate the status of their lives on a ladder scale, based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, with steps numbered 0 to 10, with 10 being the best possible life. Those who believe in witchcraft rate their lives at a 4.3 on average, while those who do not believe or don't have an opinion rate their lives higher on the scale, at 4.8 on average.

Source

Not a religious text but close.

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Here you can find out if romantic rivals spur religiosity.

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Here are some curious economic effects of religion.

Jose Canseco. Yeah, it was due to steroids. Does that make it a trick question? :)

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, a star baseball player in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, affected the performance of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data, we show that a player’s performance increases significantly after they played with Jose Canseco. After checking 30 comparable players from the same era, we find that no other baseball player produced a similar effect. Furthermore, the positive effect of Canseco disappears after 2003, the year that drug testing was implemented. These results suggest that workers not only learn productive skills from their co-workers, but sometimes those skills may derive from unethical practices. These findings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and profits. Our analysis leads to several potential policy implications designed to reduce the spread of unethical behavior among workers.

Source: "Learning unethical practices from a co-worker: the peer effect of Jose Canseco" from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Economics Depratment, University of Exeter and University of Haifa

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.

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

What would happen if economists were NFL and MLB coaches?

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How much football is in a football game?

Yes, but only for African-American women:

We investigate the effect of skin tone on employment probabilities in a longitudinal data set. Using an objective measure of skin tone from a light-spectrometer and a self-reported measure of race we find that over time the effect of skin tone on employment has diminished. These results hold both across the white and African-American samples as well as within the African-American sample itself with regard to skin tone. Further investigation indicates that all of the gains can be attributed to African-American women; there are no changes in the employment probabilities for African-American men in the 15 year panel data. We find that the expansion of employment for women is concentrated in the services occupations.

Source: "Skin Tone’s Decreasing Importance on Employment: Evidence from a Longitudinal Dataset, 1985-2000" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 5120, August 2010

Interestingly, race doesn't affect teamwork on the court in the NBA but it does influence MLB umpires.

I did a deeper dive on the subject of discrimination here.

I'm curious to read this book: Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. It's by Studs Terkel, author of the classic, Working. 

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To get more sex:

Few empirical studies have been devoted to exploring behaviors occurring immediately following sexual intercourse. Therefore, this study conducts an exploratory investigation of various post-coital behaviors that the authors propose may reflect the divergent adaptive reproductive strategies of each sex as understood from an evolutionary perspective. An online questionnaire was administered to 170 individuals examining sex differences in post-coital compared to pre-coital activities related to pair-bonding with long-term mates, as well as a variety of common post-coital activities comparing short- and long-term mating contexts. It was found that females were more likely than males to initiate and place greater importance on several behaviors related to intimacy and bonding following sex with long-term partners. Males were more likely to initiate kissing before sex, and females after sex. Intimate talk and kissing were rated by both sexes as more important before intercourse with a long-term partner, whereas cuddling and professing one's love was rated more important after sex. In a second set of more specific post-coital behaviors, females were more likely to engage in post-coital behaviors related to bonding with both short- and long-term partners, whereas males were more likely to engage in ones that were extrinsically rewarding or increased the likelihood of further coital acts.

Source: "Sex Differences in Post-Coital Behaviors in Long- and Short-Term Mating: An Evolutionary Perspective" from Journal of Sex Research

Here is a great book that covers sex and the illegal economy. Great non-porn movie about sex is here.

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In this paper I consider the question of whether ethical decision-making affects a person’s happiness. Using cross-country data from the World Values Survey, I find that people who agree that it is never justifiable to engage in ethically-questionable behaviors report that they are more satisfied with their life than people who are more tolerant of unethical conduct, even after controlling for other factors known to affect self-reported happiness. The size of the ethics effect is roughly similar to that of a modest increase in income, being married and attending church, while the effect is smaller than that of having poor health or being dissatisfied with one’s personal finances. These results are robust across the four countries studied (the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil), although there is variation in the ethics and happiness relationship across countries. One implication of this study is that a consideration of a society’s ethical norms will improve our understanding of the subjective well-being of people.

Source: "Is the Just Man a Happy Man? An Empirical Study of the Relationship Between Ethics and Subjective Well-Being" from Department of Agricultural Economics Working Paper No. AEWP 2009-07

Solid books on happiness are here and here.

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Psychologists, self-help gurus, and parents all work to make their clients, friends, and children happier. Recent research indicates that happiness is functional and generally leads to success. However, most people are already above neutral in happiness, which raises the question of whether higher levels of happiness facilitate more effective functioning than do lower levels. Our analyses of large survey data and longitudinal data show that people who experience the highest levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of close relationships and volunteer work, but that those who experience slightly lower levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of income, education, and political participation. Once people are moderately happy, the most effective level of happiness appears to depend on the specific outcomes used to define success, as well as the resources that are available.

Source: "The Optimum Level of Well-Being, Can People Be Too Happy?" from PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, Volume 2—Number 4

Solid books on happiness are here and here.

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...A large analysis of papers in all disciplines shows that researchers report more "positive" results for their experiments in US states where academics publish more frequently. The results are reported in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on April 21st, by Daniele Fanelli, of the University of Edinburgh.

The condition of today's scientists is commonly described by the expression "publish or perish". Their careers are increasingly evaluated based on the sheer number of papers listed in their CVs, and by the number of citations received – a measure of scientific quality that is hotly debated. To secure jobs and funding, therefore, researchers must publish continuously. The problem is that papers are likely to be accepted by journals and to be cited depending on the results they report.

...This suggests that scientists working in more competitive and productive environments are more likely to make their results look "positive". It remains to be established whether they do this by simply writing the papers differently or by tweaking and selecting their data.

...Positive results were less than half the total in Nevada, North Dakota and Mississippi. At the other extreme, states including Michigan, Ohio, District of Columbia and Nebraska had between 95% and 100% positive results, a rate that seems unrealistic even for the most outstanding institutions.

Source

And if you're thinking of creating a fake study you might want to get this book.

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.

While many studies have shown that exposure frequency affects consumer attitudes and preferences, the current paper provides evidence that exposure order also does so. Three studies show that people like stimuli to which they are first exposed better than later encountered, similar stimuli. Controlling for exposure frequency and duration, individuals prefer the version of a song they heard first to a version they heard later and images they saw first to mirror images they saw later. In addition, our results suggest that perceived originality contributes to the preference for a first encountered stimulus. Our results are discussed in relation to research on order effects in sequential rating formats.

Source: "Madonna or Don McLean? The effect of order of exposure on relative liking" from Journal of Consumer Psychology

One of my favorite movies about music is here. A very good and very funny novel about a music lover is High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The movie was okay but the book is much better.

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In the current investigation, the authors examined how men are presented in popular media and the effects of such presentations on male adolescents' self-evaluations. In a content analysis of male models in advertisements of Sports Illustrated, Study 1 showed that media ideals increasingly emphasize aesthetic versus performance attributes of men. In Study 2, male adolescents (N = 107) were randomly assigned to view either images of male ideals emphasizing aesthetic attributes, images of male ideals emphasizing performance attributes, or neutral images. Results showed that viewing media ideals that emphasize aesthetic attributes contributes to negative self-evaluations whereas viewing media ideals that emphasize performance attributes contributes to positive self-evaluations. These findings suggest that body conceptualization, and not simply body type (i.e., muscularity), plays a role in how men feel about themselves and their bodies.

Source: "Media Images of Men: Trends and Consequences of Body Conceptualization" from Psychology of Men and Masculinity, Volume 8, Issue 3, July 2007, Pages 145-160

Next on my reading list.

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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.