The fourth Annual Meeting on the Economics of Risky Behaviors (AMERB), co-founded and co-organized by IZA Program Director Amelie F. Constant (George Washington University) and Erdal Tekin (Georgia State University and IZA), took place in April this year. Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, Turkey played host to this year’s meeting and while only in its fourth year, AMERB has become a well sought-after conference. The co-organizers received eighty-two paper submissions of which they could only accept fourteen for presentation – the maximum number for a two-and-a-half day meeting. The 2012 AMERB brought together thirty-seven top-notch economists and criminologists from all over the world, who presented their cutting-edge research on risky behaviors ranging from substance abuse to obesity to prostitution. AMERB was funded by IZA, the Andrew Young School of Georgia State University, the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk (CEAR) of Georgia State University, and the Center for Economic and Social Research (BETAM) at Bahcesehir University.
In the first session, Horst Entorf (Goethe University Frankfurt and IZA) discussed his work on “Criminal Victims, Victimized Criminals, or Both? An Econometric Analysis of the Victim-Offender Overlap.” His basis was that offenders are more likely than non-offenders to be victims and victims are more likely than non-victims to be offenders, and that this overlap is not well understood in criminology. He found that behavioral explanations like retaliatory anger might trigger cycles of crime. Other explanations for overlap found were broken homes and alcohol/drug abuse. The work presented by Brendon McConnell (University College London and IZA) on “Ethnicity, Sentencing, and 9/11” explained the source of ethnic sentencing differentials in U.S. federal courts by distinguishing between two main explanations for these disparities: discrimination and unobserved offense heterogeneity. Through a clever method of using the before and after data on criminals around 9/11, the researchers found that Hispanics experienced a 3.5% conditional sentencing penalty, and there was no change in penalty for any other ethnic or racial group over this period. Albert Young-Il Kim (Songang University) presented co-authored work on the “Long Run Impact of Traumatic Experience on Attitudes Toward Risk: Study of Korean War and Its Impact on Risk.” The analysis found that early childhood experience of the Korean War sizably increases risk aversion.
Scott Cunningham (Baylor University) analyzed the question “Does Decriminalization of Indoor Prostitution Reduce Rape and Gonorrhea?” Using evidence from a Rhode Island natural experiment, he estimated the causal effect of decriminalizing prostitution on public health outcomes. The results of the natural experiment show that decriminalization caused female and male gonorrhea incidence to decrease 61 and 27 percent, respectively. Decriminalization also resulted in between 40 and 54 percent fewer rapes from 2004 to 2009. After this, Pedro Portugal (Banco de Portugal and IZA) found in “The Impact of Drug Decriminalization in Portugal” that the new Portuguese policy led to a decrease in heroine and cocaine seizures, a decrease in the number of offenses and drug related deaths, and a decrease in the number of clients entering treatment.
“Play Hard, Shirk Hard? The Effect of Bar Hours Regulation on Absence and Health” presented by Colin P. Green (Lancaster University) examined two recent policy changes in England and Spain that increased and decreased opening hours, respectively, in a quasi-natural experiment. Green provided evidence that later bar opening hours increased work absenteeism and led to declining individual health. Tuomas Pekkarinen (Aalto University and IZA) estimated in “Cross-Border Health and Productivity Effects of Alcohol Policies” the effect of a large cut in the Finnish alcohol tax on mortality, work absenteeism, and alcohol related illnesses in bordering Sweden. Although unable to find significance in alcohol hospitalizations, the differences-in-differences strategy found an increase in absenteeism in Northern Sweden of 5% for males and 13% for females – a significant externality from Finnish legislation.
In a session on recidivism, Benjamin Hansen (University of Oregon) presented his preliminary findings on “Punishment and Recidivism in Drunk Driving.” After testing the effects of harsher punishments on deterring driving under the influence, quasi-experimental evidence suggests that stricter policies and penalties surrounding drunk driving negatively affect recidivism. In her paper entitled “Serving Time or Serving the Community? Exploiting a Policy Reform to Assess the Causal Effects of Community Service on Income, Social Benefit Dependency and Recidivism,” Signe Andersen (Rockwool Foundation Research Unit) found most importantly that community-service participants fare better for long-term social benefit dependency and income. Plus, offenders of violent crimes and misdemeanors have a lower rate of recidivism if they participate in community-service.
Stephen Machin (University College of London and IZA) delivered this year’s keynote address, considering possible connections between terror attacks and hate crimes. He uses existing data on hate crime incidence before and after the 7/7 and 9/11 terrorist attacks in four areas of England to assess the characteristics of hate crime differences. He finds there were big increases (20 to 30 percent), which occurred almost immediately in the wake of the two terror attacks. Also, although the increase tapered off in later years, the hate crime incidence against Asians and Arabs was higher than initially, suggesting a longer run effect. This increase in hate crimes points to an additional indirect social cost of terrorist activity. Machin concludes that if attitudes towards ethnic groups like British Muslims are changed by attacks, then the findings fit in with the proposition that ‘attitudinal shocks’ matter as an element of hate crimes.
In “Spillover Effects of Drug Safety Warnings on Health Behavior,” N. Meltem Daysal (Tilburg University and IZA) examined the impact of new medical information on drug safety on preventive health behavior. The authors found a spillover effect on preventive behavior driven almost entirely by those with a high-school degree or less. Elaine Kelly (Institute for Fiscal Studies, London) presented “Policing Cannabis and Drug Related Hospital Admissions: Evidence from Administrative Records,” in which a panel data set constructed from hospital records was used to estimate the short and long run effects of the de-penalization policy of small quantities of cannabis introduced in Lambeth. The authors found significant negative characteristics related to hospital visits for other drugs in the area, and proposed exercising caution to using a liberal drug policy even in the light of potential benefits. Marcello Sartarelli (IoE, University of London) explored education and risk in “Do Performance Targets Affect Risky Behavior? Evidence from Discontinuities in Test Scores in England.” Presenting evidence that having test performance goals in education has a negative affect on proxies for risky behavior, he also explored the policy implications.
Alfonso Sousa-Poza (University of Hohenheim and IZA) found in “Maternal Employment and Child Obesity -- A European Perspective” – unlike research from the U.S. – no evidence for maternal employment to have a negative effect on child obesity, diet, or physical activity. Daniel I. Rees (CU Denver and IZA) presented “Emotional Cues and Low Birth Weight: Evidence from the Super Bowl” and explained how data from the National Vital Statistics System for the period from 1969 through 2004 showed an impact of prenatal exposure to the Super Bowl on birth weight. According to the study, winning the Super Bowl is correlated with an increased risk of low birth weight; also, it is associated with increases in maternal tobacco and alcohol use.
Underlining the paramount importance of this line of research in economics, in other social sciences, and in society, the organizers pledged to continue this highly successful conference series.
Download the event program at:
www.iza.org/link/AMERB2012
