This paper uses as source material twenty-three autobiographical essays by Nobel economists presented since 1984 at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) and published in Lives of the Laureates (MIT Press). A goal of the lecture series is to enhance understanding of the link between biography and the development of modern economic thought. We explore this link and identify common themes in the essays, relying heavily on the words of the laureates. Common themes include the importance of real-world events coupled with a desire for rigor and relevance, the critical influence of teachers, the necessity of scholarly interaction, and the role of luck or happenstance. Most of the laureates view their research program not as one planned in advance but one that evolved via the marketplace for ideas.

Source: "Lessons from the Laureates" from IZA Discussion Paper No. 3956, January 2009

Full paper is here.

My favorite book by an economist is The Strategy of Conflict.

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It has been argued that the accessibility of persuasion motives elicits distrust in a communicator's underlying motives and leads to decreased persuasion success. However, this research highlights the fact that salient and positive communicator characteristics (here physical attractiveness) can temper consumers' attributions of selfish motives and lead to increased behavioral compliance when recipients are faced with direct persuasive appeals to get them to do something. This experiment demonstrates that recipients were more likely to comply with an attractive communicator's recommendation when she was forthright about her desire to change recipients' behavior than when she was not. The reverse was true for an unattractive communicator, a finding which indicates that the salience of persuasion motives is likely to become a liability when positive peripheral cues are absent. These effects on recipients' behavioral compliance were found to be mediated by the degree of selfish motives attributed to the communicator.

Source: "Compliance through direct persuasive appeals: The moderating role of communicator's attractiveness in interpersonal persuasion" from Social Influence, Volume 3, Issue 2 June 2008 , pages 67 - 83

Cialdini's seminal book on influence is here. I also recommend his more recent release Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive.

Check out my digest of things you didn't know about negotiation, persuasion and influence. 

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Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high incomes may attract not only skilled females but also unskilled females. Thus, a surplus of women in urban areas may result from a combination of better labor and marriage markets. Swedish municipality data support the results.

Source: "Sex and the City" from Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2005, vol. 107, issue 1, pages 25-44

This is yet another interesting study I found in Tim Harford's book The Logic of Life.

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How much of our sexuality is in our voices?

Hey everyone,

Heading to Cologne, Germany next week. Any suggestions on what to do?

Schedule's tight as always but people have been emailing about meetups so let's see if we can make something happen.

Feel free to email me.

-Eric

Little is known about if and how the effect of divorce on well-being varies across societal contexts. This article uses multilevel models for 38 developed countries to test three hypotheses about societal differences. Data are used from the European and World Values Studies. Results show that, in most countries, the divorced have a lower level of well-being than the married, but the magnitude of this difference varies significantly across countries, even when compositional factors are taken into account. The results show that the effect of divorce is weaker in countries where the family is strong, in line with notions of support. The effect of divorce also appears to be weaker when divorce is more common, which points to the role of declining selectivity as divorce rates go up. Mixed evidence was found for the role of norms. The divorce effect is stronger in countries that have stronger norms against divorce, but this was only found for religious persons. Together, these three factors explain more than half of the variance in the divorce effect. Outlier analyses further indicate that the estimates of cross-level interaction effects are sensitive to specific countries that are in the sample.

Source: "Country Differences in the Effects of Divorce on Well-Being: The Role of Norms, Support, and Selectivity" from European Sociological Review 2010 26(4):475-490

For more on the subject check out  "Marriage, a History." by Stephanie Coontz. If you're interested in the science of how relationships work and how to make them better you might want to check out the work of John Gottman. Malcolm Gladwell featured him in the bestseller "Blink." Gottman does have detractors, however.

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Cognitive priming procedures were used to identify the unique effects that luck-related concepts have on consumer behavior. The effects of these concepts could theoretically influence behavior through the elicitation of positive affect or via temporary changes in participants' self representations of how lucky they feel. An initial experiment showed that priming Asian consumers with lucky numbers independently influenced both their perceptions of personal luck and the positive affect they reported experiencing. Subsequent experiments, however, showed that the effect of these primes on consumer behavior was mediated by momentary changes in how lucky people felt (i.e. changes in the self concept) rather than by the positive affect they were experiencing at the time. Exposing consumers to lucky numbers influenced their estimates of how likely they were to win a lottery (Experiment 2), their willingness to participate in such a lottery (Experiment 4), their evaluations of different promotional strategies (Experiment 3), and also the amount of money they were willing to invest in different financial options (Experiment 4). The effect of luck on behavior was also moderated by a person's regulatory focus.

Source: "The unique consequences of feeling lucky: Implications for consumer behavior" from Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 19, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 171-184

A book explaining an 8-year academic study of luck and how to be luckier is here. A book of fun (true) gambling stories is The Man With The 100,000 Breasts: And Other Gambling Stories. Very entertaining. 

In a prior post I explored why women might be more risk averse than men.

Are lucky people nicer?

Do men and women see luck very differently?

For the new study, in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Pessiglione and his colleagues Liane Schmidt, Stefano Palminteri, and Gilles Lafargue wanted to know if they could dig even farther down and show that one side of the brain could be motivated at a time. The test started with having the subject focus on a cross in the middle of the computer screen. Then the motivational coin – one euro or one cent – was shown on one side of the visual field. People were only subliminally motivated when the coin appeared on the same side of the visual field as the squeezing hand. For example, if the coin was on the right and they were squeezing with the right hand, they would squeeze harder for a euro than for a cent. But if the subliminal coin appeared on the left and they were squeezing on the right, they wouldn't squeeze any harder for a euro.

The research shows that it's possible for only one side of the brain, and thus one side of the body, to be motivated at a time, says Pessiglione. "It changes the conception we have about motivation. It's a weird idea, that your left hand, for instance, could be more motivated than your right hand." He says this basic research helps scientists understand how the two sides of the brain get along to drive our behavior.

Source

If you're curious about motivation, I recommend the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

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If entrepreneurs are liquidity constrained and not able to borrow to operate on an efficient scale, economic theory predicts that entrepreneurs with more personal wealth should do better than those with less wealth. We test this hypothesis using a novel data set covering a large panel of start-ups from Norway. Consistent with liquidity constraints, we find a positive relation between founder prior wealth and start-up size. The relationship between prior wealth and start-up performance, as measured by profitability on assets, increases in the first three wealth quartiles. In the top wealth quartile, however, profitability drops sharply in wealth. Our findings are consistent with a luxury good interpretation of entrepreneurship and that higher wealth may induce a less alert or a less dedicated management. We conclude that an abundance of resources might do more harm than good for start-ups.

Lean and Hungry or Fat and Content? Entrepreneurs' Wealth and Start-Up Performance MANAGEMENT SCIENCE Vol. 56, No. 8, August 2010, pp. 1242-1258

Good books about silicon valley and start-ups are here and here.

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Does time fly or stand still when one is reading highly arousing words? A temporal bisection task was used to test the effects of sexual taboo words on time perception. Forty participants judged the duration of sexual taboo, high-arousal negative, high-arousal positive, low-arousal negative, low-arousal positive, and category-related neutral words. The results support the hypothesis that sexual taboo stimuli receive more attention and reduce the perceived time that has passed (“time flies”)—the duration of high sexual taboo words was underestimated for taboo-word stimuli relative to all other word types. The findings are discussed in the context of internal clock theories of time perception.

Source: "Time flies when we read taboo words" from (2010) Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 563-568.

Did that post go by quickly?

Books on sex that I recommend are here and here. A fun novel about a sex-addict is here.

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The economics-of-crime approach usually ignores the emotional cost and benefit of cheating. In this paper, we investigate the relationships between emotions, deception, and rational decision-making by means of an experiment on tax evasion. Emotions are measured by skin conductance responses and self-reports. We show that the intensity of anticipated and anticipatory emotions before reporting positively correlates with both the decision to cheat and the proportion of evaded income. The experienced emotional arousal after an audit increases with the monetary sanctions and the arousal is even stronger when the evader’s picture is publicly displayed. We also find that the risk of a public exposure of deception deters evasion whereas the amount of fines encourages evasion. These results suggest that an audit policy that strengthens the emotional dimension of cheating favors compliance.

Source: "Cheating, Emotions, and Rationality: An Experiment on Tax Evasion" from Experimental Economics 13, 2 (2010) 226-247

Here's the quickest way to tell if someone is cheating on their taxes.

This book gives a fascinating look inside the IRS: Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS. Don't just take my word for it -- 4.5 stars on Amazon with 46 reviews.

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Does how much money your friends and neighbors make reduce your happiness?