The fight against obesity: more city parks, please

Obesity rates are increasing pretty much everywhere, but nowhere is the obesity problem as massive as in the United States. And nowhere else is television viewing such a cultural focus. With ever increasing viewing times, now about 4 hours a day, one has to wonder what drives Americans to spend so much time in front of the TV with a beer and greasy finger food. Maybe it is the lack of alternatives. Indeed, walk around almost any US city and you will find very few people outside, in a large part because there is nothing to do outside: few parks, no pedestrian areas, no river fronts, etc.

Maoyong Fan and Yanhong Jin show that this does indeed matter for obesity, in particular childhood obesity, which is the most difficult to reverse. One needs to differentiate by various characteristics, though. Parks work particularly well for girls in unsafe neighborhoods, but not as well for white adolescents with high incomes. Now switch that TV off and go outside.

Children in out-of-home care and adult criminality

It always saddens me when children are born into bad families. In extreme cases, society's responses is to put them into foster care or into institutions, in the hope that they will have a better shot at good adult outcomes. While there are some prominent counter-examples, the norm is that they still face significant hurdles. One measure of this is how frequently they end up being convicted of a crime.

Matthew Lindquist and Torsten Santavirta look at Sweden and children sent to foster or residential care. The latter seems seems to increase the likelihood of criminality in later years, as does placing boys in foster care after 13. Girls seems largely unaffected by this, except for residential care. Of course, this could all be selection bias, as the worst cases cannot be put in foster care. But in this study, much of the case record is knwon to the econometrician, in particular whether placement is due to child or parent behavior.

Niall Ferguson on the Generational Compact

The Harvard historian says it is badly frayed.

Anna Schwartz has passed away

Here is the NY Times obituary of the great monetary economist.

Are consulting and research substitues or complements?

Think tanks have a horrible reputation everywhere by in the media. The reputation is because they are often very biased and sell out to their funders. The media is because think tank staff are willing to provide the expected sound bites to journalists, no matter what the topic. All this would be OK if think tanks were good at conducting independent research. It turns out the most prominent ones, do not do much of it on the hot topics they talk about, according to Dan Farber, who finds that they do not publish much of relevance (and this is not even considering peer reviewed research).

Interestingly, the picture is very different with respect to consulting. Looking at academics across all fields from five Spanish niversities, Pablo D'Este, Francesco Rentocchini, Liney Manjarrés-Henrìquez and Rosa Grimaldi find that getting grant money is positively associated with getting consulting contracts. In other words, good researchers also get consulting gigs. And in some fields, consulting is where the financial rewards of research really lie, especially in social sciences where grants are usually relatively small.

Game theory with pipelines

It seems every winter brings a new situation where Russia is holding up one of its neighbors, or one of them another one, over the delivery of natural gas. The pipeline transfer of natural gas through various countries seems to be the perfect example of a problem that has been haunting human history since trade began: local fiefdoms extracting tolls on transiting merchandise. The case of natural gas is a very pure example, because it is rather difficult to find an alternate route, given the gigantic fix cost of laying the pipeline.

Yet, there is talk of constructing some new pipelines to circumvent the hold-up problem. The question is what the new route should be. Technical considerations are here secondary, capacity and supply as well, all that matters is how bargaining power is impacted. Franz Hubert and Onur Cobanli use cooperative game theory and Shapley values of coalitions to analyze three proposed pipelines. The best seems to be North Stream, which runs thorugh the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, bypassing all the troublemakers. South Stream, which goes through Bulgaria and then the Balkans or Greece and Italy, is of little strategic value, as too many players are involved. And Nabucco, which taps fields in the Middle East and runs through Turkey and Bulgaria is of substantial value, but the rents accrues mostly to Turkey.

On the secularization of America

How committed to religion are people? This is rather difficult to establish as surveys can be biased by social pressure. For example, it is nowadays perfectly acceptable to be an atheist in Europe, but an atheist would be a social outcast in many parts of the United States. Hence, many stay in the closet in the US and are not visible, for example by still attending church because of social pressure or because it is the only social activity in their area.

As so often, actions are more revealing than opinions. Fernando Lozano uses an indirect indicators of religiosity that is based of economic choices: working hours on religious holidays over the last 30 years in the US. A few interesting trends emerge: Jewish holidays have become more observed, while Christian ones have become more observed if they have been secularized (like St. Patrick) and less if not (Good Friday). This is consistent with the renewal of Judaism and the commercialization of Christian holidays.