Author: ekfletch

I am an independent researcher on issues of gender, labor, violence, education, and children.

Equal Pay Day

The end of the semester is starting to kick my butt, so posting here might be a bit light in the next couple of weeks. On May 2, I’ll be in San Francisco for the PAAs. If anyone else is going, I’d love to meet up and chat.

Today is tax day, and I was super confused why until Matt Yglesias explained it for me. I was a bit stressed about filing my local tax return on time yesterday (which, I don’t even really understand. Why can’t the state just collect it and distribute? Commonwealths, I don’t get it. Whatever.). It’s unclear to me whether it would have been late had I sent it today, but I guess better not to know, right?

As well as tax day, by coincidence, today is Equal Pay Day. As you might guess, it’s something I can get behind. So I’ve collected some links about Equal Pay. I totally had just planned to slap them up here, but (see above) I can’t even put up a link list without pontificating on something.

  1. Me, last week, on proposed language for new work law in Venezuela, as presented by a consortium of women’s groups.
  2. Text of Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay Act of 2009 (pdf)
  3. Mitt Romney and advisers refusing to say whether he’d support Lily Ledbetter Act
  4. Tweets on #EqualPayDay and #fairpay
  5. Stevenson and Wolfers on the subsidies for the rich that are written into the tax code, a class issue, but Betsy has also been vocal about how it subsidizes one-earner, two-parent families, essentially penalizing women who work. (if you didn’t see her on Up with Chris Hayes this weekend, check it out, she’s kind of a rockstar. Like a nerdy rockstar economist, but you know what I mean).
  6. Gender wage gaps by state from the National Women’s Law Center (h/t @Fem2pt0)
  7. Some facts from the National Committee on Pay Equity
  8. Colbert on the War on Women, Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Act, and Glen Grothman
  9. Clara Jeffrey and Monika Bauerlain of Mother Jones on women in journalism. Part of a bigger discussion within journalism about women writers. Not going to close the pay gap if women aren’t writing the big stories, too. (Me, earlier, on distribution of women writers/editors/reviewers in big magazines)
  10. Raise the minimum wage, from Bloomberg (h/t @price_laborecon 10 & 11)
  11. How to end the gender pay gap in seven steps, awesome post on The Nation from Bryce Covert
  12. Feministing has a good list as well. I’ll let you look at them yourself rather than repost them all.
  13. And because no discussion of feminism, apparently, is complete without a reference to a Ryan Gosling meme, here’s a nod to the same. (h/t @ridahb)
  14. Last, but not least, the Department of Labor’s Equal Pay Day release.

I’m sure more will come up during the day, so I’ll update, and feel free to send good ones my way. If by some chance you haven’t dressed yet, AFSCME says wear red to stand up for equal pay.

Hot professors get better evaluations

That’s pretty much the gist of the paper. Even controlling for things like age, confidence, etc., professors who are objectively deemed attractive are more positively assessed by their students.

It makes me curious, though. I wonder if there are premiums for being hot based on student and professor compositions. Perhaps departments like economics or physics–where the professors tend to be male and the students primarily male–see higher evaluations for their attractive female professors because they are more novel. Alternatively a sociology department, comprised of more women on both the professor and student side, might give a bigger boost to attractive male professors. The authors seem to acknowledge that this might be an issue given their strategy for selecting students to rate the professors’ appearance.

h/t Bill Easterly and the WSJ

Source: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Teaching Evaluations, Beauty and Abilities,” Michela Ponzo and Vincenzo Scoppa, Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica Working Paper (March) (via Ideas)

Equal pay for equal work, including housework

My twitter feed is abuzz with Romney’s claim that Obama is really responsible for the war on women. While I noted a few weeks ago here that the recovery has been slightly weaker for women, it’s certainly not true that women’s employment has decreased under Obama or that any specific policies enacted have had the goal of decreasing women’s employment.

Brian Beutler has a good post about it up at TPM.

Male-dominated industries took a hard, early hit during the recession. As those industries rebound, more jobs are going to men than to women. Conversely, women lost a huge number of jobs in states and municipalities as a result of teacher layoffs — a hemorrhaging that could have been stanched by Obama-proposed legislation to spur teacher hiring, which the GOP blocked.

Meanwhile, I’m reading proposed Venezuelan legislation for the new Organic Work Law (Ley Orgánica de Trabajo or NLOT) and marveling at the language put forth by a consortium of women’s groups. Case in point, one of the goals of the proposed legislation:

Visibilizar el aporte de las trabajadoras del hogar no remunerado a la vida social, y garantizar sus derechos laborales.

My translation: “Make visible the contributions to the social fabric of unpaid, female home workers and guarantee their workers’ rights”

The text is filled with language that appears to have the goal of being inclusive particularly of women’s contributions in the home. It calls for giving those responsible for “reproduction and life care” access to social security payments, “equal pay for equal work”, and up to 14 months paid maternity leave  I don’t have enough understanding of the law to say whether it’s a “good law” per se, but it’s incredible that so many women’s groups in Venezuela agreed to this proposed language.

Note that this isn’t the law, and might not ever be. But someone’s talking about it.

The text of the proposed law, in Spanish, was sent to me by Florangel Parodi, former Venezuelan Minister for Women. I’m happy to pass it along if anyone is interested.

 

The blogging bump (or I am a huge nerd)

I’ve been writing here, on this blog, for a little more than eight months. What started as a way to take a break from finishing my thesis and put down some thoughts about economics has turned into a big part of how I spend my time thinking about economics. Responding to tweets and news articles and other bloggers helps me formulate my thoughts about teaching and my research, and gives me a place to keep track of papers I’m reading. I find it much more useful than EndNote, but that’s perhaps more indicative of the way my head works than anything.

One partly unintended consequence is that I’ve gained a little notoriety. The first time Modeled Behavior tweeted one of my posts, my site stats shot up and I was so confused. I thought someone had made a mistake, then became nervous that Gary Becker had read it and was going to end my career, or something. When discovered the source and tweeted them (him? it? how do we refer to a hivemind?) to say thanks, the hivemind confirmed they had similar fears that elevated site stats were a result of pissing someone off.

With that, I’ve done a very non-scientific survey of bumps. My site stats have, on average, risen over time, but there’s still a noticeable difference when one of the more established economics bloggers tweets or reblogs my stuff. Also, I don’t always know who reblogs or retweets, so if you did and I didn’t mention you, it’s nothing personal, wordpress just didn’t indicate very well to me who you are.

By way of methodology, I wanted to calculate a percentage increase in day-over-day page views, as displayed by WordPress on the day of a tweet or mention. But stats will only let me go back far enough to see three of the bumps. So, the others are cobbled together from my memory. These posts all occurred between February 10 and April 10, 2012.

The biggest bump so far came from a combined DeLong/Modeled Behavior bump. I can’t separate them out with great confidence, but given the second biggest bump came from Modeled Behavior and the magnitude of daily hits was more than twice the sole MB day, so I’m going to give it to DeLong. It’s close though, for sure. Without further ado, my list of blogging bumps, in descending order of magnitude of percentage change (or as best I remember it) in hits on day I was tweeted/reblogged/whatever.

  1. Brad Delong (est. 1005%)
  2. Modeled Behavior (est 610%)
  3. Justin Wolfers (304%)
  4. Tyler Cowen (144%)
  5. Marc Bellemare (est 50%)
  6. Brett Keller (20%)

As I see it, my analysis suffers from a few big problems:

  • heterogeneity of tweets/posts might change click-through rates (did they retweet/reblog because I said something antagonistic about Gary Becker, or just mentioned them, or something else entirely? Did the retweet or reblog contain a link to this blog?).
  • Serial autocorrelation (If hits are high on one day, they’re bound to be high on the next as people read through recent blog entries and tweets, and when retweets were close together, I could be attributing hits to one when they belong to another).
  • Trend over time is also partially due to people coming back because they found me interesting (different, but related to 2, and impossible to know how big or small it is).
  • the time of day. It’s pretty well established that tweets in the morning and mid-afternoon get the most views (or so I am told–please don’t quote me), so retweets/blogs will have differential effects given when both I and the retweeter publish the post. I don’t control for this. (also, days on this blog are on Mountain Time. Colorado, I just don’t know how to quit you. No, really, I don’t know to change it.)
  • unknown retweets/reblogs
  • Popularity of other blogs. (For instance, MB bump came before the Time list of top tweeters came out, so their bump may be even bigger now)

Please don’t judge me (for not controlling for obvious variables. You can judge me for writing this post; that’s fine.)

Student thoughts on recent Gettysburg economics events

As the semester goes on, my Methods students have more and more tools with which to analyze current events in economics, and ideas they encounter in their classes. A few students put together some thoughts on their blogs about recent visitors including Nate on George DeMartino and Andy on Hanushek.

I’m happy to see my students talking about what they’re seeing, but it’s also a reminder that I may need to talk a little bit more about dummy variables before the semester is up.

My post on Hanushek and Reschovsky is here. Sadly, I didn’t make it to DeMartino.

The British were here first

I’m only beginning to get into this economic history literature. In much of the work I’ve done so far, my comparative advantage came in the form of data work. So while having skimmed, but not read in depth, most of the literature cited was formerly compelling and advantageous, I’m going to have a little catching up to do if I’m going to branch out on my own in this field. Hence, my tweet from yesterday afternoon with three fat volumes of The Constitution and Finance of Early English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-Stock Companies by Scott. It’s okay to say you’re jealous.

The decline of industry and manufacturing in America over the past few decades has been decried as one of the primary culprits behind the decline of the middle class and of blue-collar jobs. It seems as though, we aren’t the first ones to be in this situation.

At the same time that British capital was leaving the island at unprecedented levels, British industry began a decline that signalled the beginning of Britain’s transformation from world’s workshop to banker. While it was no surprise that a nation would eventually surpass Britain in industrial might, the speed of the reversal caused much consternation among the British elite. The city of London, with its perceived propensity to funnel capital overseas rather than into domestic industry, was widely suspected of hastening the decline of British industry.

The growing pains of developing from a manufacturing economy to a service-based economy aren’t new. I think that’s why I like history, because it reminds me that even though nothing is a replica of the past, it’s not like no one has ever been in a similar situation before.

1. Benjamin R. Chabot and Christopher J. Kurz. 2010. “That’s where the money was: Foreign bias and English investment abroad, 1866–1907”. Economic Journal 120 (September), 1056–1079.

Welfare reform and desperation

This weekend’s NYT has a report on the status of welfare recipients in the recession. The consensus, it seems, is that things aren’t going so well.

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

I thought that selling sex was a rather obvious omission from this list. Even without it, though, it’s a rather depressing read.

I’m annoyed again about the ‘99% use birth control’ statistics

I’m harping here, a little bit, but I think it’s important to be precise. And this time, I have better thoughts about why.

Michael Cohen, of the Guardian, published a piece yesterday on why it’s important to view the birth control debates and increasing encroaching laws on abortion as a women’s rights issue, or a civil rights issue. In general, it’s a very well-thought out, interesting, timely, and important piece. But he uses the 99% statistic about women using birth control in the US, and he uses it in a way that conflates types of birth control and eliminates an avenue for talking about issues of access:

Since the 1965 supreme court decision, Griswold v Connecticut, which fully legalised birth control, the use of contraception has been widely-settled law. Today, approximately 99% of American women use some form of birth control.

My blog post from a few weeks ago on the subject is here, but I also wrote to Michael, quoting my own blog post as quoted in the email:

“I dug a little deeper into the original Vital Health Statistics report. In fact, 82.3% of women interviewed aged 15-44 who had ever had sex had used the Pill at some point in their lives. 93% had used condoms, more than 22% had tried Depo shots, 10% had tried the patch, and only 7.4% had an IUD (down from 18.4% 30 years ago–which is pretty interesting in and of itself).”

These are still really big numbers, but if you say that 99% of women use birth control, and imply that they are using the kinds of birth control covered in Griswold v Connecticut, you downplay the fact that many women do not have access to birth control—due to cost, education, state laws, or other reasons—which is also a significant part of this debate.

Women want to have control over when they conceive. That much is clear, regardless of what Nikki Haley says. But many don’t have access to it, a point that gets lost when we say that practically all women are using it.

Furthermore, women have worked hard to protect the right to control when they conceive, and with whom. There are still structural barriers to exercising that right. And while the 99% statistic is appealing, it’s not right and it’s not helpful.

It’s not that I do everything Justin Wolfers tells me to do…

But I did find this fun. On the Freakonomics blog today Justin Wolfers uses the 1940 census–which was just scanned and all put online–to find who was living in his house in 1940. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with other US Census records from earlier years. At one point, while taking economic history in graduate school, I found my grandfather and his parents and theirs in Georgia and North Carolina in the 1930, 1920, and 1910 records. I didn’t actually need these things for class; I was supposed to be looking for saloon-hall dancers and prostitutes in the 1860s Colorado mining towns, but that’s a blog post for another day.

I’m in the process of searching for my great grandparents in the 1940 census, as I know they moved around quite a bit after the crash, and my grandfather had already left home by 1940, but I did look at my current address in the Pennsylvania records ala Wolfers. The plaque outside my house in Gettysburg says it was built by a doctor who served in the Civil War and stuck around after it was over. By 1940, however, the house belonged to Helen Culp, a 52-year old single schoolteacher who finished college, and her sister, Margaret, a 37-year old department store employee, who finished high school. Though entirely coincidental, it feels appropriate that I should spend my time in Gettysburg in an educated, female teacher’s house. Helen and Margaret were white, their parents were born in Pennsylvania just as they were, and they grew up speaking English at home*. Helen earned $1400 in 1939 and her sister, $700. Helen’s salary is worth about $22,000 in 2010 dollars if we use Purchasing Power Parity calculations, but could have represented a lot more if we measure it by ‘prestige’ or ‘economic power’. If you haven’t used www.eh.net‘s “How Much is That” tool, you should; it’s super fun.

Helen said the value of her house was $5000. This is almost three years’ salary for her, which tells me that either she was paid very well for the time, or that houses were much cheaper in Gettysburg in 1940. I’m fairly certain I could not purchase my house with three years’ salary (although, Helen, at 52, had likely been teaching for much longer than I have). Currently, houses in Gettysburg are pretty expensive, at least compared to surrounding areas, primarily due to historical value, laws governing historical buildings and their preservation or destruction, and limits on building height and density.

This particular exercise amuses me because I’ve never actually lived in a house that was old enough to be in any of these records. Even in Boulder, CO, which is a fairly old town for the Western US, none of the places I lived was more than 40 or 50 years old. And now, I live in a house that is 145 years old. As an American from a relatively recently populated part of the country, I think all this old stuff is so interesting. It’s how I felt in Boston, too; history just seems to weigh heavier.

I only skimmed the pages before I found my address, but in looking at all the people who lived on my street and neighboring ones, I’m also struck by how little migration there is in and out of Adams County. Most people on the page lived in the same place 5 years before. If they didn’t, they came from New Oxford and Ortanna and Cashtown, towns that are within 7-10 miles of Gettysburg. This internal migration map of the US in 2011 shows that not much has changed. Like the 1940 inhabitants of my house and their neighbors, people don’t really move to, or leave Gettysburg, particularly not when compared to Boulder.

Well, except me (and college students).

*Two respondents per page were asked some supplemental questions about their parents, marriage history, and veteran status. Helen happened to be #14 on the page, so she was asked those questions as well. Some of these questions were standard on earlier Censuses, which is part of how I traced my greatgreatgrandparents back to North Carolina.

The costs of breastfeeding

When I started writing my final dissertation chapter, I chose to examine two investments in children–breastfeeding and taking children to the doctor–which I assumed to have different cost structures. The idea was that breastfeeding would be a time-intensive investment, while taking children to the doctor would be a monetarily intensive investment.

Further research showed that this dichotomy was clearly false. In order to breastfeed, one has to consume more calories, sleep less, and generally be available more. While I generally only cite the additional caloric cost in my presentation, new research highlights other costs of breastfeeding, which manifest themselves in wage penalties that accrue over time. From the Motherlode blog at the NYT:

Now researchers have zeroed in on an economic cost of following the pediatrician’s advice: women who breast-feed for six months or more suffer more severe and more prolonged earnings losses than mothers who breastfeed for a shorter amount of time, or not at all,” writes Tom Jacobs for Miller-McCune.

While mothers may not have to physically outlay cash in order to breastfeed, there are definitely significant costs associated with it. If the consensus is that breastfeeding is a desirable and healthy behavior, we have to make policies to support it.

Related (from Irrational Tonics and elsewhere):

  1. Breastfeeding, formula, and perception
  2. Support for breastfeeding by Tangerine and Cinnamon
  3. My quick response to Tangerine and Cinnamon post above
  4. My paper on Health Investments in Children: healthinvestFF_071911