Men,women,earnings

The difference in earnings between men and women is one of the most widely commented on statistics about the labour market. It currently features in notices on the back of some Dublin buses. Fame at last. It is also one of the most widely studied by economists. The public and many commentators tend to focus on the unadjusted difference i.e. not controlling for anything.
Economists, of course, want to control for stuff, hours at least as well as education, experience and so on. There are various techniques for looking at this including the well known Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. "Controlling" for things assumes they are exogenous and if they are not only offers only a partial explanation at best. For example say the "wage gap conditional on educational" is less than the raw, unadjusted gap: so what? As it happens, females do consistently do better than males educationally so conditioning on that will widen the gap, if anything.
Anyway here is the latest news from the Irish labour market on the male-female earnings difference.

Genes, economics and happiness

We all know some people are born stupid but what I didn't know was that some people are born to be happy dudes while others are inherently miserable. To be precise, heritability of happiness is approximately 33%, and much higher for men then women.
This is documented in a study by De Neve, Christakis, Fowler and Frey which is even able to pinpoint specific genes associated with happiness. This suggests that if you want your kids to be happy campers that you should be very careful who you mate with, especially if you are a woman. Unless its too late. There's a cheery thought.

Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess

New IZA Working Paper

Anna Dreber Almenberg, Christer Gerdes, Patrik Gränsmark

Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess

Abstract:
We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on chess competitions which includes a control for the players' skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness. Our results suggest that male chess players choose significantly riskier strategies when playing against an attractive female opponent, even though this does not improve their performance. Women's strategies are not affected by the attractiveness of the opponent.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp5314.pdf

Bang goes the theory: menstruation and absenteeism

This paper casts doubt on the well known paper, recently published in the AEA Applied Economics that attributed much of the absenteeism of female workers to menstruation basically as it followed a 28 day cycle and was absent in older (post-menopausal) women. Its important not to be too persuaded by one's own theory, no matter how clever.

Does menstruation explain gender gaps in worker absenteeism
Jonah Rockoff, Mariesa Herrman
Ichino and Moretti (2009) find that menstruation may contribute to gender gaps in absenteeism and earnings, based on evidence that absences of young female Italian bank employees follow a 28-day cycle. We analyze absenteeism of teachers and find no evidence of increased female absenteeism on a 28-day cycle. We also show that the evidence of 28-day cycles in the Italian data is not robust to the correction of coding errors or small changes in specification. We show that five day workweeks can cause misleading group differences in absence hazards at multiples of 7, including 28 days.
NBER 16523

Boys Live Dangerously in the Womb

American Journal of Human Biology, 2010 May-Jun;22(3):330-5.

Eriksson JG, Kajantie E, Osmond C, Thornburg K, Barker DJ.

Abstract

The growth of every human fetus is constrained by the limited capacity of the mother and placenta to deliver nutrients to it. At birth, boys tend to be longer than girls at any placental weight. Boy's placentas may therefore be more efficient than girls, but may have less reserve capacity. In the womb boys grow faster than girls and are therefore at greater risk of becoming undernourished. Fetal undernutrition leads to small size at birth and cardiovascular disorders, including hypertension, in later life. We studied 2003 men and women aged around 62 years who were born in Helsinki, Finland, of whom 644 had hypertension: we examined their body and placental size at birth. In both sexes, hypertension was associated with low birth weight. In men, hypertension was also associated with a long minor diameter of the placental surface. The dangerous growth strategy of boys may be compounded by the costs of compensatory placental enlargement in late gestation. In women, hypertension was associated with a small placental area, which may reduce nutrient delivery to the fetus. In men, hypertension was linked to the mothers' socioeconomic status, an indicator of their diets: in women it was linked to the mothers' heights, an indicator of their protein metabolism. Boys' greater dependence on their mothers' diets may enable them to capitalize on an improving food supply, but it makes them vulnerable to food shortages. The ultimate manifestation of their dangerous strategies may be that men have higher blood pressures and shorter lives than women.