This week in research #104

This week I hosted the ANZRSAI (Australia New Zealand section of the Regional Science Association international) conference in Hamilton. Hosting a conference keeps you pretty busy, but I still managed to attend some sessions, and here are some of the highlights I found from the conference:

• Bruce Newbold kicked off the conference with an excellent keynote on the mobility of older people in Canada, and I was surprised how many older people move from other provinces to Alberta, and how few move to the Atlantic provinces
• Bill Cochrane presented on residential segregation by occupation (a proxy for socioeconomic status or class), showing that the population became more segregated between 2013 and 2018, but not between 2018 and 2023 (and Hamilton was an outlier on various aspects of the analysis, possibly because the satellite towns of Te Awamutu and Cambridge were not included)
• Michelle Thompson-Fawcett's keynote showed how urban design can incorporate Mātauranga Māori, and in my view this talk pointed to one way of considering Indigenous regional science and urban planning
• Robert Tanton showed how he created a synthetic population equivalent to the Australian Census, to explore access by older people to doctors (but the use cases for a synthetic census population are far wider than that)
• Iain White closed the conference with an excellent keynote on urban growth and climate change resilience, drawing on many of his previous research projects

Aside from the conference, here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Smith and Grimes (open access) explore the impact of income measurement issues on the estimated relationship between income and life satisfaction
• Prince and Wallsten (with ungated earlier version here) find that there is not a strong preference for data to be stored locally, except for data types where privacy is already of high value, such as financial and biometric data, and home address and phone number
• Berens, Henao, and Schneider (with ungated earlier version here) find that abolishing moderate tuition fees in Germany led students to reduce their academic effort, by postponing graduation and withdrawing from registered exams, and that the number of 'ghost students' increased
• Hua and Humphreys find that new players whose careers started at the time of the cancelled 2004-05 NHL season experienced shorter careers than those not exposed (including European players)
• Banerjee et al. (open access) conduct an experiment on a major international online freelancing platform, and find that, while both men and women prefer flexible work hours, the elasticity of response for women is twice that for men
• Guelmamen, Garcia, and Mayol (open access) find that while inter-municipal cooperation in water supply in France is associated with higher water prices, these increased tariffs are offset by better network performance, as indicated by lower water loss indices and improved water quality (seems important given the trajectory of change in New Zealand right now)
• Palacios-Huerta (with ungated earlier version here) reviews the beauty that is using sports as a setting for testing models and hypotheses

The decline in high school economics in Australia, and what should be done about it

Since I became a lecturer in economics some twenty years ago, one thing that has become apparent has been the decline in the number of students studying economics at high school. When I taught my first classes, nearly half of students (most of which were management students, or social science students) had taken at least one economics class at high school. Now, it is down to less than one quarter. One of the contributing factors to that decline is that many schools replaced economics as a subject with business studies.

So, I was interested to read this new article by Tanya Livermore and Mike Major (both Reserve Bank of Australia), published in the journal Australian Economic Papers (ungated earlier version here). They find similar results for Australia, which are summarised in Figure 1 of the paper:

The figure shows economics enrolments in Year 12 (the final year of high school in Australia) declining by around two-thirds between the mid-1990s and 2023. At the same time, the gender split in economics enrolments has grown, with the male share of economics high school enrolments increasing from near-parity to over two-thirds by 2023. Neither trend is a good thing.

Livermore and Major look to understand why these trends have occurred. First, they refer to qualitative evidence collected from educators, which concludes that a number of factors are to blame:

First, too few educators are equipped to teach Economics and too little relevant Australian economics content is available, providing school leaders with limited incentive to offer (or promote) the subject. Second, it has been reported that many students do not select Economics because they do not understand what it is and how it might be relevant to them... Third, the introduction of Business Studies to the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) in the early 1990s saw a large number of students take up the subject instead of Economics, with reports that Business Studies, which is more vocationally oriented, is perceived as being easier to learn and more helpful for employment...

If Livermore and Major had written the same sentences in relation to New Zealand, I expect they would be equally valid. To further explore the factors associated with taking (or not taking) economics at high school, Livermore and Major then rely on a survey of students in NSW in Years 10 to 12. The survey was undertaken at 51 schools in 2019, and the sample size is over 4600 students. Of the Years 11-12 students, less than 10% were studying any economics. Livermore and Major also look at the school-level factors that are associated with whether or not a school offers economics (and for this, they have a sample of 768 schools). In this school-level analysis, they find that:

...schools are significantly more likely to teach Economics if they have a higher ICSEA score, a larger Year 12 cohort, teach a larger variety of subjects, or are all boys.

Again, these results would not come as a surprise if they were described as being for New Zealand schools. Larger schools, and those that teach a larger variety of subjects, will be more likely to offer economics. ICSEA is the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, so more advantaged schools are more likely to offer economics. And single-sex boys' schools are more likely to offer economics (which raises the question of what girls' schools are offering instead of economics). Turning to the proportion of students who study economics (and accounting for the fact that not all schools offer economics), Livermore and Major find that:

...being at a school with a higher ICSEA score is associated with increased demand for Economics amongst students... Non-government schools experience lower demand for Economics relative to government schools, holding ICSEA and other characteristics constant. Relative to co-ed schools, all-boys schools are associated with greater student demand for Economics, and all-girls schools are associated with less.

I would have thought that non-government schools (most of which are likely to be religious schools) would have been more likely to offer economics. At least, that is my impression of New Zealand schools, but that might be a key difference with NSW schools. Anyway, turning to individual students' subject choice, Livermore and Major find that:

...males are more likely to choose Economics than females, even when controlling for school characteristics...

ICSEA is also significantly associated with taking economics at the student level, with students from more advantaged schools more likely to study economics. Turning to the survey results, Livermore and Major first identify the positive and negative perceptions that students have about economics, finding that:

What positive perceptions do students have about Economics? Students typically believe that economics can be used for social good, is not all about money, and that an economics degree leads to a wide range of career options...

What negative perceptions do students have about Economics? Students generally do not perceive Economics as interesting and have little desire to know more about it. Economics is perceived as having a heavier workload than most other Year 11 and 12 subjects. Although Economics is seen as providing skills and tools for everyday life, students generally indicated they prefer to study Business Studies because they think it will be more useful for their future and more interesting... Although students perceive an economics degree to lead to a wide range of career opportunities, students are less likely to have a clear understanding of Economics (the subject) or the careers available if they were to choose Economics (as a subject).

The sheer weight of perceptions is clearly to the negative side, and that is a worry. Does it explain the gender difference in enrolments? Livermore and Major find that:

...females were less likely than males to ‘have a good understanding of what Economics is’, ‘find Economics interesting as a subject’ or ‘want to know more about Economics’... Females were also more likely than males to perceive Business Studies as easier, more useful and more interesting than Economics. In terms of career development, females were less likely to have clear or positive perceptions of career opportunities from studying economics.

Economics at high school clearly has an image problem. I am convinced this is true in New Zealand as well, based on the number of students in my first-year economics classes who express how much different economics is than what they thought it was going to be (I take that as a compliment!). If we want to increase student enrolments in economics, and narrow the gender gap, then the image problem needs to be addressed. Livermore and Major conclude that:

...one possible intervention to address diversity deficits in Economics is to improve students' understanding of what Economics entails.

Yes, but how? Sadly, Livermore and Major have pointed out the problem, identified the source, but not offered much in the way of solutions. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as providing students with information (see this post, and the links at the end of that post). We may need to look at fundamentally changing the way that economics is taught at high school. Some of us have made substantial changes to the teaching of university economics, and I believe it has had a positive effect (at least, there is evidence of gender parity at the top of our introductory economics classes, and in economics majors at Waikato). Those changes (or related changes) to teaching need to be allowed to propagate down to high school. And that is especially important given that we are finding that studying high school economics causally improves students' performance in introductory economics at university (I'll have much more to say on that research, with one of my Masters students, in a future post).

If the NSW evidence travels to New Zealand (and my classes suggest it does), then economics doesn’t have a demand problem so much as an information and curriculum design problem. High school students are choosing business studies instead of economics because business studies looks clearer, closer to jobs, and less risky. Fixing economics doesn’t mean dumbing the subject down. It means teaching the really interesting stuff earlier and better. Ditch the abstract mathematics, and focus on real-world applications, especially those with a more social focus. That's what we have done in introductory economics at Waikato. In my experience, that approach keeps the students, and the teachers, more engaged, and will hopefully allow economics to regain some of its lost ground.

The lifespan benefit of being elected to the MLB Hall of Fame

There is a clear difference in life expectancy between the rich and the poor (see this post, for example). However, disentangling how much of the life expectancy differential is a causal effect of socioeconomic status on mortality is difficult, because there are so many things that affect both socioeconomic status and mortality. This recent article by Chengyuan Hua and Brad Humphreys (both West Virginia University), published in the journal Economics Letters (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online), takes an interesting approach to answering the question.

Hua and Humphreys look at lifespan of professional baseball players, comparing those that have been elected to the MLB Hall of Fame with those who narrowly missed out on election. The idea is that election to the Hall of Fame increases socioeconomic status, and so comparing those who were elected and those who were not but are otherwise similar, means that the difference attributable just to the change in socioeconomic status can be identified.

In relation to election to the Hall of Fame, Hua and Humphreys note that:

Baseball players elected to the HoF must appear on 75% of the annual ballots cast, get removed from the ballot after appearing on fewer than 5% of ballots, and can only appear on a limited number of consecutive ballots...

The exogenous 75% election threshold permits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD) to identify the causal effect of HoF election on longevity.

Their dataset:

...includes the universe of candidates eligible for HoF induction from 1936 to 2024. We divide the sample into two groups: a treatment group of 131 players voted into the HoF while alive and a control group of 1067 players nominated by the BBWAA but not inducted.

Comparing the two groups, Hua and Humphreys find that:

...HoF members live 1.97 years longer than HoF nominees.

Hua and Humphreys go on to look at possible mechanisms that might explain the lifespan benefit of Hall of Fame election. They find that:

...HoFers are 5.8 p.p. more likely to become an MLB manager... MLB managers lived 2.86 years longer than their counterparts. We interpret this as evidence that HoFers are more likely to become MLB managers, a high-paying occupation.

In other words, Hua and Humphreys argue that the mechanism is that higher socioeconomic status leads to a better paying occupation, which in turn leads to longer lifespan. Of course, it could be more likely that healthier players are more likely to become managers, so the RDD approach isn't as clean in terms of identifying the mechanism. Nevertheless, it is plausible.

Now, what these results tell us more broadly about socioeconomic status and lifespan is unclear. Baseball players are very different from the general population. The sample here is both unusually affluent and unusually healthy, before we even consider the effect of raising their socioeconomic status. At best, these results tell us something about groups at a similar prior level of affluence and health.

Nevertheless, the implications for professional baseball players are clear. It's Hall of Fame or bust (two years earlier)!