The impact of study abroad on student language skills and personality traits

When we revamped the Bachelor of Management Studies with Honours in 2018, one of the things we introduced was a greater focus on international engagement. As I noted in this post in 2019, the international study tour was an integral (and unique in the New Zealand context) component of the new degree structure. The importance of having more than a passing appreciation of the global context to modern management students (and other students) seems obvious (and taken to an extreme in the case of the original proposal for Minerva University), but is there evidence to support the benefits of such an international approach?

This 2018 article by Silvia De Poli, Loris Vergolini, and Nadir Zanini (all Fondazione Bruno Kessler), published in the journal Applied Economics Letters (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online), provides some suggestive evidence in favour of study abroad. De Poli et al. make use of data from the MOS-4 programme implemented in the Italian province of Trento in 2012, which randomly selected applicants who had just completed their fourth year of high school to complete a four-week intensive English language course in the UK or Ireland. Interestingly, De Poli et al. looked at how the programme affected academic performance, as well as personality traits of the students. Comparing students who were randomly selected with those who weren't, they find that:

...the programme, in the short term, had a positive and significant effect on five of the eight personality traits considered: self-confidence, adaptability, social orientation, willingness to communicate and openness... On the other side, the programme has no effect on other dimensions related to ‘global self-esteem’, defined as the objective assessment of their skills and the acceptance of their quality...

Regarding the improvement of English language skills, we found that participants achieved a better score in the post-programme test as well as enjoying higher school achievement one semester after returning to school... However, with respect to other subjects (e.g. humanities and sciences), participants’ achievement, measured one semester after completion of the programme, did not improve.

However, not all students appeared to have benefited equally. As I have noted in relation to online learning (most recently here), the more engaged and high ability students benefited the most. Specifically, De Poli et al. found that:

...high attainers appeared to have benefitted more from the programme, as they achieved better results in English language in their first semester at school after completion of the programme...

So, as I said earlier, we can take this as suggestive evidence in favour of study abroad. This study had the advantage of randomisation, which is rarely a feature of study abroad programmes, where self-selected students go to (often) self-selected countries to study abroad. That reduces the chance that we can genuinely determine the effect of study abroad due to selection bias. What we really need now is a randomly assigned study abroad programme at the university level, and one that isn't simply focused on the acquisition of host country language skills.

The changing drinking norms among young people

I've done a fair amount of research on alcohol consumption and behaviour in the night-time economy (see here, and here, and here, with more research accepted for publication that I will blog about later). That research was based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 and in 2019 in the Hamilton CBD. The one thing we most noticed about how nightlife had changed over that five-year period was how much quieter things were in 2019 than in 2014. The people who were drinking were just as intoxicated in 2019 as in 2014, but there were fewer of them. The decline was especially noticeable on Thursday and Saturday nights.

Such a rapid change in the nightlife came as a real surprise to us. But it may simply reflect a generational change in drinking behaviour, as outlined in this 2020 article by Rakhi Vashishtha (La Trobe University) and co-authors, and in this article in The Conversation this week, by Sarah MacLean (also La Trobe University) and co-authors. MacLean et al. first note that:

Young people in Australia, the UK, Nordic countries and North America have, on average, been drinking significantly less alcohol than their parents’ generation did when they were a similar age.

They then outline a number of possible explanations for this generational shift, including:

...uncertainty and worry about the future, concern about health, changes to technology and leisure, and shifting relationships with parents.

In relation to uncertainty, MacLean et al. note that:

A couple of decades ago, getting really drunk was widely regarded by many young people as a “rite of passage” into adulthood and a good way of taking time out from the routines of work and study.

Now, young people feel pressure to present as responsible and independent at an earlier age and some fear drinking to intoxication, and the loss of control it entails, will jeopardise their plans for the future.

Although, people who do drink may still do stupid things, especially if they suffer from FoMO.

On health concerns, MacLean et al. write:

Health and well-being also seem to be increasingly important to young people.

Research from 15-20 years ago found young people viewed the consequences of heavy drinking (vomiting, unconsciousness) positively, or at least ambivalently.

More recent studies suggest this has changed, with young people expressing concerns about risks to mental health and long-term physical health related to their alcohol use.

However, Australian and Swedish research also found some young people regard the social benefits of drinking as important to their well-being.

For many young people, however, this seems to involve moderate alcohol consumption, in place of the “determined drunkenness” observed in the 1990s and early 2000s.

 In relation to changes in technology, MacLean et al. note that:

Technology has reshaped how young people socialise, with contradictory effects on youth drinking.

Social media provides new (less regulated) avenues for alcohol companies to promote their products. Holding a drink is de rigueur for a photo on social media celebrating a night out.

Yet, young people are also careful to manage their online images...

Our research found young people worry about who might see images of them drunk on social media (such as friends, family and future employers), a risk that is unique to this generation.

Finally, on relationships with parents:

Young people also spend more time with their parents, potentially developing more communicative relationships that reduce their need to drink and rebel.

It is interesting that there has been such a change in drinking behaviour among young people over a very short time. MacLean et al. have raised some interesting explanations for why, which may also apply to New Zealand (see this post for more on the shift in behaviour in New Zealand). It would be interesting to see what the relative contributions of these different explanations are to the change in behaviour, and indeed if there are other factors at play as well.

Read more:

• Hazardous drinking across the lifecourse
• No, pre-drinking isn't more common among people aged over 30
• The unexplained decrease in young adolescent drinking over time

Book review: Applied Economics (Thomas Sowell)

Last month, I reviewed Thomas Sowell's 2011 second edition of Economic Facts and Fallacies. This month, I read the 2009 revised edition of his book Applied Economics. Like the other book, this one is written in a clear and easy-to-read style, and supported by empirical evidence (not Sowell's own evidence, but evidence gathered from other research). However, there is a fair amount of overlap between the two books in terms of topic coverage, with discrimination and development in particular seeming to cover the same ground in both books. The 'hook' in this book is different though, and captured by the subtitle "Thinking beyond stage one". When I read that, I was thinking it meant beyond stage one economics - that is, intermediate economics in a standard progression through an economics major. Instead, Sowell refers to the tendency for politicians, policy makers and others to only think of the short-run first-order effects of a policy change, and not to work through subsequent effects that will occur in the medium-run or long-run. It is over these longer timescales that most unintended consequences become apparent, but for a politician in particular, negative impacts that occur after they are no longer in office will be of little consequence to them right now. As one example:

...a small-time criminal may find it expedient to kill some local store owner for the small amount of money in the store's cash register, if only to keep the store owner from identifying him, even though this might make no sense in organized crime.

Public outrage at such a murder could result in more law enforcement activity in the area, reducing the profitability of the crime syndicate's business in illegal drugs, prostitution, and other activities by making local customers more hesitant to engage in such activities when there was an unusually large police presence in their neighborhoods.

In this example, the small-time criminal isn't thinking beyond stage one, unlike crime syndicates that have strong incentives to do so. There are many similar examples that outline the consequences of failing to think beyond stage one. I feel like Sowell does a much better job of keeping on point in this book. However, like the other book, this one is a little uneven in places. For example, at one point he carefully explains why low American life expectancy cannot be taken as evidence of a poor health care system in the US, and then a few pages later uses declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union as evidence of poor health care. There is also much that some readers will disagree with, in particular Sowell's views on the integration of immigrants.

Despite that, there is also a lot of really good material in the book. I especially enjoyed the section on prejudice, bias, and discrimination, and especially Sowell's explanations of the costs of discrimination. Many researchers and policy makers could do well to read that section. There is also more humour in this book. For example:

Where the issue is the safety of nuclear power plants, for example, the answer to the question whether nuclear power is safe is obviously No! If nuclear power were safe, it would be the only safe thing on the face of the earth. This page that you are reading isn't safe. It can catch fire, which can spread and burn down your home, with you in it. The only meaningful question, to those who are spending their own money to deal with their own risks, is whether it is worth what it would cost to fireproof every page in every book, magazine, or newspaper, not to mention paper towels, stationery, notebooks and Kleenex.

Of the two Sowell books that I have read over the last month or so, this one is clearly the better of the two. Given the overlap in content, and the fact that this one seems to keep on point a bit more, I would recommend Applied Economics, rather than Economic Facts and Fallacies, to readers interested in getting a clear-eyed (but not necessarily entirely agreeable) perspective on a range of issues from an economics perspective.

Uber and alcohol-related traffic fatalities

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about the relationship between UberX and alcohol consumption, based on this recent article. The key takeaway was that the presence of UberX was associated with an increase in alcohol consumption. As I wrote then:

Decreasing the full cost of drinking at bars, by making it less expensive to travel to and from bars, increases alcohol consumption. That is likely to be associated with increased harm, including harm to health from over-intoxication, or violence. However, before we conclude that UberX has an overall negative effect, we need to consider that the availability of UberX might also offset some harm by reducing the incidence of drunk driving. Teltser et al. didn't look at the effects of UberX on harm, or on drink driving, which is something we would need more information on before drawing a firm conclusion.

Does Uber increase, or decrease, alcohol-related traffic accidents? That is essentially the question addressed by this recent NBER Working Paper by Michael Anderson and Lucas Davis (both University of California, Berkeley). They match normalised rideshare data [*] obtained directly from Uber with fatal traffic accident data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), from July 2012 to January 2017.

Interestingly, Anderson and Davis first show that the 'event study' extensive margin analysis that has been used by many other studies (which essentially use a difference-in-differences approach to compare accidents before and after the introduction of Uber, like the study linked above) leads to highly inconsistent and non-robust results. Most studies have used that approach because they lack access to actual rideshare data. Instead, Anderson and Davis look at the relationship between the (normalised) number of Uber trips and traffic fatalities, and find that:

A one unit increase in ridesharing activity reduces the probability of an alcohol-related fatal crash by 0.038 percentage points (t = -3.2). This corresponds to approximately a 4.8% decrease in alcohol-related fatalities.

Anderson and Davis then show that the effect is concentrated during nights and weekends (as you would expect), and that the results extend to all fatal crashes, in addition to the alcohol-related fatal crashes that their main analysis is based on. Based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, they show that:

Our estimates of the effects on alcohol-related fatalities imply that Uber saved 214 lives in 2019, or a reduction of approximately 6.1%.

As noted in my earlier post, driving and using Uber are substitutes. The presence of Uber should reduce the instance of driving, including drink-driving. This appears to be borne out by the analysis of Anderson and Davis. However, their analysis falls a bit short of convincing causal evidence, lacking exogenous variation in the number of rideshare trips. And, it would be interesting to know what effect (if any) omitting New York (in particular) and Seattle had on the analysis. Take this as suggestive evidence for now of the positive effects of Uber (in contrast with the negative effects on traffic congestion).

[HT: Richard Holden at The Conversation]

*****

[*] The normalization process leads to data that is expressed as a proportion of the number of rides originating in a specific Census tract in San Francisco. They have to omit Seattle and New York from their data, because the actual number of Uber rides in those cities are published, which would allow them to back out the number of rides in every other Census tract.

Read more:

• Uber and Lyft increase traffic congestion in cities
• The availability of UberX, and alcohol consumption