Today’s links to interesting news and analysis. If you find this useful, please pass it to a friend or colleague.
- The 21st century will see new players at the great game of geopolitics: IBM building the world’s greatest Jeopardy player, the next step to A.I., New York Times, 14 June 2010
- Recommend!: what’s wrong with the IPCC and how to fix it, testimony of John R. Christy (Prof Atmospheric Science, U Alabama Huntsville) before the InterAcademy Council’s (IAC) review of the processes and procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 15 June 2010
- Dangerous people moving onto the political stage: “Armed revolt part of Sharron Angle’s rhetoric“, Las Vegas Sun, 17 June 2010
- When called on her repeated incitements to violence, Angle feigns incredulity: “Angle speaks about doing battle“, Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 2010
- Important, but the headline overstates the probable significance: “China Signals End to Yuan’s Two-Year Peg to Dollar“, Bloomberg, 19 June 2010
- Here is the actual statement by the Peoples Bank of China
Today’s featured research
Often developments that change the world remain unseen until their effects become irreversible: “Marriage and Career: The Dynamic Decisions of Young Men“, Eric D. Gould (Prof Economics, Hebrew U of Jerusalem), Journal of Human Capital, Winter 2008. Chateau gives a clearer, less technical explanation of this study’s significance in “Study Confirming My View Of The Job-Sexual Marketplace Nexus“, Citizen Renegade (“where pretty lies perish”), 18 June 2010.
Abstract of the paper:
This paper estimates the returns to career decisions in the marriage market and the returns to marital choices in the labor market. Theoretically, investments in the labor market could affect the chances of receiving a marriage offer, the type of offer, and the probability of getting divorced. Also, marital status could affect one’s outcomes in the labor market, most notably the “marriage premium” in wages. To untangle this simultaneous decision-making process, I develop a dynamic programming model of the joint career and marital decisions of young men between the ages of 16 and 39.
The results show that labor market decisions are strongly influenced by their returns in the marriage market. If there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue-collar jobs over white-collar jobs. These results suggest that the existing literature underestimates the true returns to human capital investments by ignoring their returns in the marriage market. In addition, the results show that the “marriage premium” is much lower than traditional OLS estimates, and is virtually non-existent for higher wage men. This result suggests that while marriage may make low wage men more serious about their careers, marriage has little effect on high wage men who are already highly motivated.
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