New AER Articles

The new American Economic Review should be arriving to my doorstep any day now. Until it gets here, I can't read it as I don't remember my username and password and thus cannot read the online version. But here are some that look really good.

1. Can Hepatitis B Mothers Account for the Number of Missing Women? Evidence from Three Million Newborns in Taiwan by Ming-Jen Lin and Ming-Ching Luoh. Their conclusion?

"We demonstrate that the probability of having a male birth is only slightly higher for HBV mothers than for mothers without HBV. The sex ratio at birth rises for the higher birth order and that in families where the first two children are female. Our findings suggest that HBV status has little impact on the missing women phenomenon."

As you may recall, Emily Oster's dissertation argued strongly that hepatitis B explained the "missing women" phenomenon in Asia, particularly in either India or China where it explained either 25% or 75% of the missing women. (I say "either" because I don't have the paper in front of me, and so can't remember if it's India that she says she can explain 75% or China. One is 25%, though, and one is 75%). The theory and her evidence was met with a lot of skepticism among economists and epidemiologists. Since then, Emily has come out with a paper herself casting doubt on her original hypothesis. Now here is another one. Overall, I think the explanation that the missing women in Asia is due to anything other than son preference is probably not correct.

2. The Effect of Credit Constraints on the College Drop-Out Decision: A Direct Approach Using a New Panel Study by Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd Stinebrickner. I mention this one only because the Stinebrickner's have really rode this one Berea College dataset to town. I think this is the second AER publication, plus a ton of other top general and top field publications, all based on this one survey that one of the brothers did for their university. I was actually inspired, in part, by the success of their own original field research to engage in my own current research agenda, which involves a massive amount of original data collection. Plus, Berea uses a random roommate assignment, which allows them a fairly clean mechanism by which to estimate peer effects. This one looks really interesting, and I look forward to reading it.

3. The Demand for, and Impact of, Learning HIV Status by Rebecca Thornton. The abstract to this is really interesting, and I can't wait to read it. Again, an original piece of field research, btw.

Abstract

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 percent of the participants learned their HIV results. However, even the smallest incentive doubled that share. Using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of HIV status, sexually active HIV-positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active HIV-positive individuals who did not learn their results; however, HIV-positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not. There is no significant effect of learning HIV-negative status on the purchase of condoms.

I will definitely be looking at this one. The effect of testing appears to increase safesex among HIV- folks, but not surprisingly, has no effect on HIV+ folks. Of course, testing - if it increases safesex among HIV- folks - is helping to limit the spread of HIV throughout the population. But what happens when the HIV+ and the HIV- person meets, both of whom have been tested? Well, that's probably where Nash bargaining problems arise, which is where my previous research has focused - on bargaining power and threat positions and overall mating conditions.