January 04, 2018

From SSRN:

Based on detailed police accident reports for Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and using the introduction of the augmented reality game Pokémon GO as a natural experiment, we document a disproportionate increase in vehicular crashes and associated vehicular damage, personal injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations, called PokéStops, where users can play the game while driving. The results are robust to using points of play, called Gyms, that cannot be used to play the game while driving as a placebo. We estimate the total incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon GO while driving, including the value of the two incremental human lives lost, to be in the range of $5.2 million to $25.5 million over only the 148 days following the introduction of the game. Extrapolation of these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2.0 billion to $7.3 billion for the same period.

From PNAS:

We study how exposure to extreme temperatures in early periods of child development is related to adult economic outcomes measured 30 y later. Our analysis uses administrative earnings records for over 12 million individuals born in the United States between 1969 and 1977, linked to fine-scale, daily weather data and location and date of birth. We calculate the length of time each individual is exposed to different temperatures in utero and in early childhood, and we estimate flexible regression models that allow for nonlinearities in the relationship between temperature and long-run outcomes. We find that an extra day with mean temperatures above 32 °C in utero and in the first year after birth is associated with a 0.1% reduction in adult annual earnings at age 30. Temperature sensitivity is evident in multiple periods of early development, ranging from the first trimester of gestation to age 6–12 mo. We observe that household air-conditioning adoption, which increased dramatically over the time period studied, mitigates nearly all of the estimated temperature sensitivity.

From The New York Times (Daniel Mendelsohn on "What’s the last great book you read?"):

I’ll talk about the last “wonderful” book I read, since I’ve gotten allergic to the word “great” lately — everyone’s best friend on Twitter is “the great so-and-so” who has just written a “great” book or article, blah blah. The word means nothing any more. The last wonderful book I read was Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End” — a Gottlieb recommendation — about a young Irish immigrant who gets mired in the traumas of 19th-century American history, not least the extermination of the Native Americans and the Civil War. There’s something about the narrator’s voice, a combination of utter ingenuousness and deep humane wisdom, that reminds you of “Moby-Dick.” I’d say this is the great American novel of the decade, but the author happens to be Irish.

From The New York Times (Daniel Mendelsohn on "Which classic novel did you recently read for the first time?"):

Since I’m a nonfiction writer, and always trying to remind people that nonfiction is literature, too, I’ll talk about a classic work of nonfiction, ok? I’d read large chunks of Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in graduate school, inevitably, but a few years ago a friend of mine told me he’d just finished listening to the whole thing on audiobook, and I thought, Yup, now’s the time to tackle the whole thing. So I started listening to the marvelous recording by Bernard Mayes and I’m about to finish it after three years of shortish sessions on the elliptical machine. Apart from the history that Gibbon narrates — one that should be of interest to Americans right now, I’d say — I’m just knocked over by the prose: those fabulous, architectural, Augustan sentences are dazzling. Among other things, it’s a lesson in how immaculate syntax is the best delivery vehicle for devastating irony.

From The Economist:

In the West the institution is more resilient than it seems, although profoundly changed since the mid-20th century. In Asia, it is much more fluid and unstable than it might appear. What look like fundamental cultural differences between West and East are often just differences of timing and degree. Marriage is being transformed almost everywhere, and in many of the same ways. But different countries are at different stages of the journey.