Better Minds Than Mine

Three interesting links. Data density ahead!

Econbrowser: Gasoline prices: consumers and politicians respond

Analyzing the consumer and politician responses to gasoline prices – and showing how an effective summarizing title is written.

Kids and Congress – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog

Ebonya Washington, an economist at Yale, has a great paper that was just published in the American Economic Review called “Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers’ Voting on Women’s Issues.”

She looks at members in the House of Representatives and looks to see whether their voting patterns change. She provides interesting evidence that, “conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congress person’s propensity to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues.”

The Perceived Returns to Education and the Demand for Schooling : The Watson Institute for International Studies

Using data from the Dominican Republic, we find that while the measured returns to schooling are high, the returns perceived by students are extremely low. Students provided with information on the higher measured returns reported increased perceived returns several months later. The least-poor of these students were also significantly less likely to drop out of school in subsequent years.

The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women’s Status in India : The Watson Institute for International Studies

This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural India. Using a three-year individual-level panel dataset, we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in women’s status.