December 31, 2017

From The Economist:

Among the college-educated in America, only 12% of births are to unmarried mothers; among those who dropped out of high school, the rate is 70%, up from 43% in the early 1980s. Similar trends can be seen across the wealthy world: the average out-of-wedlock birth rate for OECD countries is 40%.

From The Economist:

Although a wedding cannot turn a flimsy relationship into a strong one, it adds scaffolding that can save one that is in between. Making a public, lifelong commitment to another person is not the same as drifting into cohabitation to share the rent.

From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book I am currently reading"):

The Invented Part, by Rodrigo Fresán. A wonderfully inventive, intricate and entertaining novel on what it means to be a writer, and a reader.

From Journal of Consumer Research:

Nine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others’ money. Using a variety of products from socks to clocks to chocolates, we found that participants thought the same amount of money could buy more when it belonged to themselves versus others—a pattern that extended to undesirable products. Participants also believed their money—in the form of donations, taxes, fines, and fees—would help charities and governments more than others’ money. We tested six mechanisms based on psychological distance, the endowment effect, wishful thinking, better-than-average biases, pain of payment, and beliefs about product preferences. Only a psychological distance mechanism received support. Specifically, we found that the perceived purchasing power of other people’s money decreased logarithmically as others’ psychological distance from the self increased, consistent with psychological distance’s subadditive property. Further supporting a psychological distance mechanism, we found that framing one’s own money as distant (versus near) reduced the self-other difference in perceived purchasing power.

From NBER Working Paper:

This paper studies how health behaviors and investments are shaped through family spillovers. Leveraging administrative healthcare data, we identify the effects of health shocks to individuals on their family members' consumption of preventive care and health-related behaviors. Our identification strategy utilizes the timing of shocks to construct counterfactuals for affected households using households that experience the same shock but a few years in the future. We find that spouses and adult children immediately increase their health investments and improve their health behaviors in response to family shocks, and that these effects are both significant and persistent. Notably, we show that these spillover effects are far-reaching and cascade to siblings, stepchildren, sons and daughters in-law, and even “close” coworkers. While some responses are consistent with learning new information about one's own health, evidence from cases where shocks are likely uninformative points to salience as a major operative explanation. Our results underscore the importance of one's family and social network for models of health behaviors and have potential implications for policies that aim to improve population health.