Five intriguing papers I discovered this week
In what might become a recurring feature, I am going to summarise the findings of a few research papers, potentially of interest to ASI blog readers, that were either first released this week, first published this week, or first come upon by me this week.
This paper is a large meta-analysis of 168 other papers, which in turn refer to 201 different studies and experiments. They find that at least 99.9% of financial behaviour in life cannot be explained by differences in financial education, or conversely at most 0.1% of the difference in people's financial decision-making and choices is down to education interventions designed to improve their financial literacy. In the words of their abstract: "even large interventions with many hours of instruction have negligible effects on behavior 20 months or more from the time of intervention".
While other correlational studies appear to show some relationship between financial behaviour and educational schemes (i.e. one explaining more than 0.1% of the variance between individuals) they explain that this is only because those typically getting financial education already have various psychological traits associated with careful management of finances. They therefore suggest that big schemes designed to improve lifetime financial decisionmaking are futile and a waste of money; the best we can hope for is "just in time" interventions, perhaps at the point of financial transactions, that are more likely to be taken in and not forgotten.
In this paper the authors find that a substantial fraction of the male-female "gap" in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) fields can be explained by the fact that women who are talented at maths tend to also have high verbal skills, skills that mathematically talented men are much more likely to lack. This means they have a wider range of choices available to them, and also possibly identify less closely with maths as part of their personality, and it is this choice not to pursue STEM further that drives the gap, rather than, for example, discrimination in the area or a perceived unfriendly atmosphere.
Liu, Huang and Wang found, reviewing 47 different experiments testing if schemes "teaching job search skills, improving self-presentation, boosting self-efficacy, encouraging proactivity, promoting goal setting, and enlisting social support" could boost the unemployed's chances of getting a job. In fact, on average those in the treatment groups—i.e. those actually subject to the intervention, and not in the control group—were 2.67 times more likely to get a job. Since the studies all used randomness of quasi-randomness to assign treatment, this suggests, they say, that schemes that develop skills and self-motivation can be effective. However, the schemes were more likely to help the young than the old, the short-term unemployed than the long-term unemployed, and job-seekers with special needs, as compared to the population at large.
4. Karwowski, M., and Lebuda, I., "Digit ratio predicts eminence of Polish actor" (Jul 2014)
In a slightly surprising study, the two authors looked at 98 Polish actors, both male and female, and compared the ratio between their second and fourth digits on their hand (a measure of prenatal testosterone exposure) and their productivity and fame. For both men and women, even controlling for age, a higher ratio predicted more pre-eminence.
5. Aisen, A., and Veiga, F. J., "How Does Political Instability Affect Economic Growth?" (Jan 2011)
In a classic example where economists do extensive research to tell us what we already know, this IMF paper from 2011 shows us how bad political instability is for economic growth. Actually, the paper is a great one because it allows us to estimate the size of the impact of different political elements on instability and then the size of instability's own impact on economic aggregates.
Their findings are highly interesting: whereas primary school enrolment has a pitifully small impact on economic growth, and the impact of investment, economic freedom and the security of property rights comes out quite small, violence, political instability and cabinet changes have substantial negative effects, as does, surprisingly, population growth. And while the most productive regions in Europe are the most ethnically diverse, in this study ethnic homogeneity is very strongly associated with growth. Of course, the conclusions of the paper—that countries should address the root causes of political instability—are much easier said than done!