Some Links

A few interesting and useful links for Health Econ.

1. The sharp slowdown in health care expenditures. How much is because income growth slowed and how much is due to structural changes in the healthcare sector?

2. Obamacare rules increase transparency on how much pharma and medical device companies kick back to doctors. It probably won't change consumer's behavior, but may change doctor's.

3. Sex ratios matter. The worst cities for single females. I bet they act more like men.

Height

Looks like I need to find an asian woman to date. Anthropometry of Love: Height and Gender Asymmetries in Interethnic Marriages.

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are substantially more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for a taller husband, can explain a large proportion of these ethnic-spefi…c gender asymmetries. Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this signifi…cantly affects their marriage prospects with whites. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data from the Health Survey for England and the Millenium Cohort Study, which contains valuable and unique information on heights of married couples.

Premarital Sex

It looks like a couple of sociologists are imitating economists with their book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying. The New Republic reviewer has the traditional complaints seen from non-economists.

Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, sociologists both, rely heavily on this theory to explain the sex lives of young adults today. The rise of “the hookup culture” at colleges, they argue, can be attributed in part to the increasing scarcity of men on campus—an oversupply of sellers works to a buyer’s advantage. Sexual economics also suggests that many women look unkindly on promiscuous members of the same sex out of the same impulse that makes retailers angry when Wal-Mart comes to town: they are being undersold, and now they have to give discounts or lose customers.

Regnerus and Uecker are either indifferent or tin-eared about how distasteful this idea is:

Sex might cost little or nothing—a few drinks or some attention and compliments, or simply a promise to be discreet about the liaison. Typically it’s more expensive than that, such as a perceived commitment to being in an exclusive relationship for a while. The highest price a man can pay is a lifetime promise to share all his wealth, income, and affections with a woman exclusively.

Equating an intimate act to a business transaction is not only crass and reductive; it is also analytically misleading. The analogy to commerce implies an adversarial situation wherein the buyer always wants to pay the minimum and the seller wants to get the maximum. But men often find themselves bestowing attention, falling in love, and getting married after they have already been sleeping with the woman in question. Sexual economics has trouble accounting for that. Men willingly overspend, which describes approximately no one who buys a car. Similarly, the pay-for-play hypothesis fails to capture the fact that most women do not want to extract caring and love from a person disinclined to offer it, and they do not see sex as something they wish they could avoid until marriage.

The author fails to understand supply and demand in this context as a matching model. He also has apparently never heard of signaling. 

Sex Ratios

Unbalanced sex ratios lead to interesting behavior. It is the one reason I'm happy to be teaching at UW-La Crosse, rather than UW-Platteville.

From the Economist:

So many more women on the beach than men

AS ONE observes the economical use of fabric to contain flesh as it wiggles from one posto to the next on Rio de Janeiro's Ipanema beach, thoughts turn immediately to demography. Like other countries where the population is ageing, Brazil has more women than men. But in Rio the imbalance is particularly marked: for every 100 females in the city there are only 86.4 males, according to IBGE, the national statistics agency. That is far lower than the 95 males per 100 females that is the average for Brazil's big cities. What is going on? And does this explain the size of the bikinis?

The answer lies partly in three forces that have shaped Brazil over the past few decades. First, like the rest of the country, Rio has undergone an extraordinary transition in its birthrate. Although the Catholic church and the government discouraged contraception for decades, Brazilian women decided to have fewer babies. Many opted for sterilisation. One study suggests up to 40% of women aged 15-49 have been sterilised. “You find some families where three generations of women have been sterilised after childbirth,” says José de Carvalho, a demographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

As a result the fertility rate dropped from 6.2 live births per woman in 1960 to around two today, while people are living longer. In the past ten years, life expectancy has risen from 68.9 years to 72.4 years. An older population means more women in relation to men, because women tend to live longer.

Second, during the past 50 years millions of women have moved away from rural areas and towards cities, where they often find jobs in domestic service. This has further skewed the sex ratio in cities compared with the countryside. Copacabana, just down the beach from Ipanema, is one of the most imbalanced places in the whole of the country, thanks to a heavy concentration of the (disproportionately female) over-65s and their maids. The third factor is violence. Rio's murder rate, at 40 per 100,000 people, is shockingly high, and most of the victims are young men.

Evolutionary biologists would draw a straight line between the declining number of potential mates, the need for female cariocas to go to greater lengths to win them, and those small bikinis. But that seems far-fetched, given that much of the imbalance is down to simple ageing. Rio's grannies, who are the most affected, are—by and large—a demure lot. The problem of the bikini is going to require some further study.

My Inner Economist

Tapping my inner Economist, I can't help but wonder if this website is dedicated to towns where the sex ratio is askew? Or maybe just towns where the hot chicks are blind? I once told a class I could guess the sex ratio at UW-L was skewed towards females merely by looking at the number of couples where the guy was obviously not as good looking as the girl. They were shocked. I think next time I'll just point them to the hotchicks with douchebags website.