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How will we know when the recession is over?
'll all be exhausted: Using Canadian time use data, we exploit exogenous variation in local unemployment rates to investigate the cyclical nature of sleep time and show that for both men and women, sleep time decreases when the economy is doing relatively better. Our results suggest that in a recession Canadians sleep an average of 2 hours and 34 minutes more per week, or 22 minutes more per day. Given the importance of even small changes in sleep time on…
1 min read
How much of a bonus should employers give?
ing ten waves (1998-2007) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), this paper investigates the ceteris paribus association between the intensity of incentive pay, the dynamic change in bonus status and the utility derived from work. After controlling for individual heterogeneity biases, it is shown that job utility rises only in response to 'generous' bonus payments, primarily in skilled, non-unionized, private sector jobs. Revoking a bonus from one year to the next is found to have a detrimental impact on…
1 min read
What’s the best way to predict the unemployment rate?
ogle. We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard initial claims or combinations of both. We find that models augmented with the GI outperform the traditional ones in predicting the monthly unemployment rate, even in most state-level forecasts and in comparison with the…
1 min read
Is Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” right that genius is all about hard work?
t when it comes to chess: Learners acquire expertise at different rates and reach different peak performance levels. Key questions arise regarding what patterns of individual differences in expertise development occur and whether innate talent affects such development. International chess is a good test domain for both issues, because it has objective performance measures, actual practice measures (number of games), longitudinal population data, and minimal gatekeeper influence. Players' expertise development typically follows either a logarithmic or a power-function curve, approaching…
1 min read
Is marriage a good idea for handsome men?
ybe not: Physical appearance plays a crucial role in shaping new relationships, but does it continue to affect established relationships, such as marriage? In the current study, the authors examined how observer ratings of each spouse's facial attractiveness and the difference between those ratings were associated with (a) observations of social support behavior and (b) reports of marital satisfaction. In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between…
1 min read
Can pretending to have amnesia make you forgetful?
ybe: Defendants who are accused of serious crimes sometimes feign amnesia to evade criminal responsibility. Previous research has suggested that feigning amnesia might impair subsequent recall. In two experiments, participants read and heard a story about a central character, described as “you,” who was responsible for the death of either a puppy (Experiment 1) or a friend (Experiment 2). On free and cued recall tests immediately after the story, participants who had feigned amnesia recalled less than did participants who…
1 min read
Is group studying more effective?
t if you want to remember anything: Humans routinely encode and retrieve experiences in interactive, collaborative contexts. Yet much of what we know about human memory comes from research on individuals working in isolation. Some recent research has examined collaboration during retrieval, but not much is known about how collaboration during encoding affects memory. We examined this issue. Participants created episodes by elaborating on study materials alone or collaboratively, and they later performed a cued-recall task alone, with the study…
1 min read
Are movie stars worth it?
ey definitely increase the revenue for a film but don't increase the valuation of the companies that release the movies: Is the involvement of stars critical to the success of motion pictures? Film studios, which regularly pay multimillion-dollar fees to stars, seem to be driven by that belief. This article sheds light on the returns on this investment using an event study that considers the impact of more than 1200 casting announcements on trading behavior in a simulated and real…
2 minutes
