Andrew Leigh

Today, I’m an academic. Tomorrow, I become a public servant. After some generous arm-twisting from the brother of a famous econ-blogger (and no small amount of flexibility from my senior ANU colleagues), I’m taking a six-month secondment to the Australian Treasury. I’ll be a principal adviser in the social policy division, working on issues such as health, education, and labour markets.

The position will run in two three-month blocks: July to September, and December to February. Not surprisingly, the job requires that I cease media commentary, stop writing my column for the AFR, and close down this blog.

The last will be perhaps the biggest lifestyle change for me. Since I began blogging in July 2004, I’ve written nearly 2000 posts, or about 1.4 postings a day. There have been several times when I’ve contemplated giving it up, but the pleasures of being able to get an idea out into the world meant that I never quite managed to kick the habit. My guess is that I’ll get the blog going again in March 2009, but it’s possible that I’ll move on to other things (there are a couple of books I’ve wanted to write, and directing blog time into book time might turn out to be sensible in the long run).

I’ve never worked as a public servant before, so I’m not sure whether I’ll be temperamentally suited to the role. One of the great joys of academia is being able to choose what you work on each day. When I chat with friends who are working for this government, this doesn’t sound like one of the luxuries they presently enjoy.

Still, for an Australian social democrat, this seems like a unique time to try and have some impact on policy (however small it might turn out to be). As anyone who’s read my stuff would know, I’m keen to push ideas around getting more great school teachers in front of low-income kids, improving the evidence base on Indigenous policy, getting more information into the public domain, and perhaps even getting a randomised trial or two underway. Worst case scenario is that I get to learn a bit about how government works, and spend six months in a department run by Ken Henry, one of the more impressive people in Australian public life.* That doesn’t seem like much downside risk to be bearing.

So it’s goodbye from me, at least for a little while. Thanks to my readers: commenters and lurkers all. It’s been a pleasure.

* Once he returns from his wombat-shooting trip, that is.

The third classroom experiment returns to an exercise that I posted about on 6 March, at the start of semester. At the end of an introductory quiz, I asked the class:

Looking around the classroom, what percentile of the relative distribution do you expect to end up? For example, 100 means you expect to top the class, 75 means you expect to outperform 75% of the class. 50 means you expect to be at the middle of the distribution, 25 means you expect to outperform 25% of the class. 1 means that you expect to be at the bottom of the distribution.

My March post dealt with the fact that there was a rather strong ‘Lake Wobegon Effect’ in the data, with no student saying that they expected to end up below the 50^th percentile. Now that we have the final grades, we can ask the question: how well did students predict their relative rank? Below is the relationship between students’ predicted percentile in the distribution (horizontal axis), and their actual percentile (vertical axis). If all students correctly predicted their rank in the class, all the dots should line up along the red line. By contrast, the green line shows the fitted relationship. Students who rated themselves more highly did in fact do a smidgin better, but the relationship is very weak.

Now, here’s what happens when I break the sample into male and female students.

It seems that female students were substantially better at predicting their relative rank than male students. Does anyone know of psychological theories that are consistent with this?

As anyone who has wandered the corridors of an economics faculty knows, we are not a profession known for our sartorial splendour. Australia’s top-ranked economist (according to the RePEC database) is Adrian Pagan, who is rarely seen in anything but a t-shirt and shorts during summer. In the US, for every Ed Glaeser (who always wears a suit), there must be half a dozen Matthew Rabins (a splendid behavioural economist with a penchant for tie-die t-shirts).

In terms of the signal that dressing up sends to other economists, my guess is that it’s strongly negative. When I arrived at ANU on my first day wearing a suit and tie, I could immediately tell that several people thought they’d hired a dud. (My protestations about having been a lawyer in a previous life did little to assuage this.)

By contrast, there is some evidence that looks matter in the classroom. In a neat paper several years ago, Dan Hamermesh and Amy Parker showed that more beautiful academics get higher teaching ratings. But does primping pay?

To test this, I ran an experiment on my Masters students this semester. At the end of each class, I asked them to tear off a scrap of paper, and write a number on it, from 1 to 10, where 1 indicated that this was the worst lecture they’d attended in their life, 10 was the best lecture they’d attended in their life, and 5 was an average lecture. They could also write comments/suggestions on the scrap of paper. (This turned out to be a useful feedback tool for me, though I don’t recommend it for the faint-hearted!)

In order to gauge the effect of attire, I alternated from lecture to lecture between a suit and tie, and a collared shirt with beige pants. I figured that if the effect of dressing up was big enough, it would show in the data.

Turned out that it did, but not the way I expected. On lectures when I was wearing a suit, students gave the class an average rating of 5.8 out of 10. On lectures when I was not wearing a suit, students gave it 6.3 out of 10. Somewhat surprised by this, I looked back at the schedule, and realised that several of the suit-wearing lectures coincided with days when the students took an in-class test. After accounting for this, it transpired that the difference was a mere 0.2 points (in favour of the suit). In other words, primping doesn’t pay… at least if you’re an economics lecturer.

For anyone teaching an introductory economics course, I can highly recommend complementing a standard textbook with a few exercises from Robert Frank’s The Economic Naturalist. Frank’s notion of economics is as a set of tools that helps us better understand problems in everyday life (eg. Why do drive-through ATMs have braile keypads? Why do milk cartons have square bottoms and soft drink containers have round ones? Why are hotels cheaper at the last minute and airline tickets more expensive?). I’m not sure I would be confident structuring a whole course around these kinds of questions (as Frank does), but a little bit of economic naturalism certainly seemed to help leaven the lectures.

Much of the latest issue of the Economic Journal is devoted to the contribution that economics can make to early assessments of the quality of wine, a field first popularised by Orley Ashenfelter. Here’s a summary.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last semester, I decided to run a few experiments with the students in the introductory economics class I was teaching. The first had to do with the power of chocolate in improving test scores. This theory arose from my mother-in-law, who always gave her daughter a chocolate on days when she had to take an important test at school.

To begin with, I offered the students two choices of sweets before their in-class test – a chocolate and a non-chocolate option. I asked them to mark their choice on their test paper.

After the in-class test, it transpired that there was no difference between the grades of chocolate-eaters and non-chocolate eaters. But we were worried. What if the choice of chocolate was correlated with something about the student? Perhaps chocolate did help test performance, but this effect was washed out by the propensity of lazy students to eat more chocolate?

To solve the problem, we decided to implement a unique solution: the world’s first (so far as I know) chocolate-test-taking randomised trial. Alternate test papers were marked on the back “chocolate” or “non-chocolate”. Before starting the test, students could grab a sweet. Afterwards, we tabulated the results.

Chocolate group – mean of 12.8
Non-chocolate group – mean of 13.2

There was no statistically significant difference between the groups, indicating that the small difference in means was likely to have just been statistical noise.

Our conclusion: theories about the effect of chocolate on test-taking performance are not supported by the evidence. The only reason to eat chocolate before a test is that you like the taste.

My regular co-author Joshua Gans has written a terrific book called Parentonomics: An Economist Dad’s Parenting Experiences. I read a draft earlier this year, and loved it. He is now putting the first copy on ebay, to raise money for the MS Readathon. Details here.

Joshua is also looking for a research assistant, which I think would be a fun job for someone with a lot of energy and diverse interests.

The ABS has a new survey out today on personal fraud (HT: Dan Andrews). The headline in tomorrow’s reporting will doubtless be the finding that 453,100 Australians lost on average $2,160 as a result of personal fraud. But what surprised me in skimming it was how equally distributed the losses were across society. I had assumed that scams would be like a regressive tax, hitting the poor more than the rich. But it seems that falling victim to a scam is about as common for the young and old, men and women, more and less educated, and rich and poor. Even the infamous “I have come into a large fortune” scammers (aka “advance fee fraud”) seem to be about as successful across all demographics.

For any Canberrans interested in the hot topic of housing prices, we’re running an event on Monday afternoon that may be of interest. Speakers are Brian Howe, Stephen King, and Rob Taunton. Details over the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

My colleagues at ANU’s Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute are running a series of “Case Studies of Australian Social Policy” seminars. They have an impressive lineup, which I’ve reproduced over the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

A paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Law and Economics demonstrates the welfare cost of more stringent security at US airports.

The Impact of Post 9/11 Airport Security Measures on the Demand for Air Travel
Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali & Daniel H. Simon
We examine the impact of post-9/11 airport security measures on air travel in the U.S. Using five years of data on passenger volume, we evaluate the effects of the implementation of baggage screening and the federalization of passenger screening on the demand for air travel. These two congressionally mandated measures are the most visible changes in airport security following the 9/11 attacks. Exploiting the phased introduction of security measures across airports, we find that baggage screening reduced passenger volume by about five percent on all flights, and by about eight percent on flights departing from the nations fifty busiest airports. In contrast, federalizing passenger screening had little effect on passenger volume. We provide evidence that the reduction in demand was an unintended consequence of baggage screening and not the result of contemporaneous price changes, airport-specific shocks, or other factors. Moreover, this decline in air travel has substantial welfare implications. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that the airline industry lost about $1.1 billion, a tenth of the projected revenue lost because of 9/11 itself. Similar calculations show that the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security inconvenience likely led to over 100 road fatalities.

Ungated version here. Of course, more stringent security also has benefits, since it helps deter terrorist attacks. But my guess is that politicians tend to over-regulate in this area, since their reputations suffer more harm from a terrorist attack than they gain from streamlining airports.

With resource prices rising far faster than expected, my AFR op-ed today discusses the arguments for and against a windfall profits tax on mining companies. Full text over the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to research by Joshua Gans, I am the happiest of the six Australian econ-bloggers in his survey. What can one do but smile?

For anyone who was unable to attend last week’s New Techniques in Development Economics Conference (supported by AusAID), some of the papers are available online. Full program over the fold. Those that are available are hyperlinked; others should show up with a Google Scholar search at some point the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big fan of the look of LaTeX Beamer presentations, but am reluctant to switch over from Powerpoint (partly because of inevitable switching costs, partly because I hear that Beamer isn’t particularly good at handling graphics). Does anyone know of a “Beamer lookalike” Powerpoint template, which has the same look, an outline in the footer/header, etc?

My friend Macgregor Duncan draws my attention to a WaPo piece by Shankar Vedantamon how people undermine government intervention by changing their behaviour.

Read the rest of this entry »

My 16-month old son seems to drift off to sleep equally well regardless of what bedtime story I read to him. So I’ve switched from Winnie-the-Pooh to Les Murray. At risk of breaching copyright, here’s one of tonight’s poems, from the splendid Biplane Houses.

Read the rest of this entry »

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics (BOCSAR) is running a conference in Sydney on 18-19 February 2009, and are calling for abstracts. Conference details here (submissions close 11 July). I’m giving a plenary talk, which I’m very excited about. The man who runs BOCSAR, Don Weatherburn, was a strong influence on me to become an empirical researcher. Listening to him on radio in the 1990s, I was struck by the power of clear data to cut through the overblown rhetoric of the crime debate. Don’s measured tones were a welcome antidote to Laura Norder and the NSW Bear Pit.

Spurred by this paper (on how happy Brisbanians think Nobel economists are), Joshua Gans is running a survey on perceptions of the happiness of six Australian econ-bloggers. Go here to complete it.

I think Gans should also compare his externally-rated measures with self-assessment. For example, I’d class myself as “Very happy”.

I’m co-organising a conference today and tomorrow on “New Techniques in Development Economics” (program and location details here), including some of my favourite development economists from outside Australia (including but not limited to Chris Blattman, Leigh Linden, Seema Jayachandran, Dean Karlan, and Steve Stillman). For some background on the kinds of “new techniques” we’re discussing, check out this article in the Economist, and this recent conference at the Brookings Institution.

Policymakers (including those who don’t do development) are welcome to drop in to Friday’s 3.30-5pm roundtable on “the economics, ethics and politics of randomised trials”.

Another of my favourite sports economics papers - which I didn’t have time to mention in this week’s AFR oped - is this one, on hockey violence. An ambitious economics student could easily replicate it for rugby league, I would’ve thought.

Blood Money: Incentives for Violence in NHL Hockey
John P. Haisken-DeNew and Matthias Vorell
The level of violence in the National Hockey League (NHL) reached its highest point in 1987 and has reduced somewhat since then, although to levels much larger than before the first team expansions in 1967. Using publicly available information from several databases 1996-2007, the incentives for violence in North American ice hockey are analyzed. We examine the role of penalty minutes and more specifically, fighting, during the regular season in determining wages for professional hockey players and team-level success indicators. There are substantial returns paid not only to goal scoring skills but also to fighting ability, helping teams move higher in the playoffs and showing up as positive wage premia for otherwise observed low-skill wing players. These estimated per-fight premia, depending on fight success ($10,000 to $18,000), are even higher than those for an additional point made. By introducing a “fight fine” of twice the maximum potential gain ($36,000) and adding this amount to salaries paid for the team salary cap (fines would be 6.7% of the team salary cap or the average wage of 2 players), then all involved would have either little or no incentives to allow fighting to continue.

Careful readers will notice footnote 2.

We would especially like to thank David M. Singer from hockeyfights.com for his help in the preliminary analysis.

Don Arthur emails on a topic close to my heart, with a sensible and straightforward proposal that should be extremely appealing to a federal government that has announced its commitment to evidence-based policymaking.

I’m a big fan of your op-eds on randomised control trials. You might be interested to know that Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA) is lobbying the government to use a RCT approach for projects funded through the new innovation fund for employment services.

CSSA’s latest submission says:

The innovation fund creates an opportunity for the Department to identify and disseminate information on innovative practices. However, because the impacts of employment programs are typically small, experimental or quasi-experimental methods are needed to accurately measure program impacts.

The Department should ensure that all programs supported by innovation funds are subject to a rigorous impact evaluation. The Department should consider contracting an independent research organisation to evaluate and report on innovative projects. The evaluators should have all necessary access to DEEWR data and other resources. Such an approach would assist comparison of projects under the scheme.

Using the resources of the Department it ought to be possible to conduct randomised control trials with job seekers receiving the ordinary level of service as a control group.

One of the reasons an experimental approach is feasible with employment services is that Centrelink is already referring job seekers to Job Network members on an almost random basis. Unless a job seeker states a preference for a particular provider, Centrelink shares out the referrals among providers with spare capacity.

The counterfactual in innovation experiments would be the regular level of service. That would neatly answer the most pertinent policy question — Is the new approach better than what we’re already doing?

The government is planning to hand out $41m in innovation funding. It would be a tragedy if we never found out whether the innovative approaches actually worked.

Peter Martin has a lovely column in today’s Canberra Times, using a metaphor that will appeal most to his local audience. Pointing out that the Telstra Tower was rendered unnecessary within a few years of its construction, he asks whether Labor’s plan of fibre to the node really is smart public policy.

This reminds me of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2000 outfitting each seat in its classrooms with an ethernet port. A year later, wireless took over, and they issued all their students with a free wireless card. A year after that, all new laptops were wireless capable, and they stopped issuing cards. So far as I know, the ethernet outlets were utilised for about nine months.

My AFR oped today is on sports economics. Full text over the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

A post by Harry Clarke bemoans the fact that policies regulating alcohol often fail to apply simple benefit-cost analysis. This got me thinking about some of the other issues upon which I’d like to see a little more rigorous benefit-cost thinking, and a little less off-the-cuff moralising.

• Road safety. At many Canberra intersections, a red turn arrow prevents right turns when the road is clear. My guess is that if we weighed up the cost (thousands of hours of lost time per year) against the benefits (fewer accidents), we would probably find that that former exceeded the latter. In other words, I think Canberra has a sub-optimal number of traffic accidents. 
• Pornography in Indigenous communities. A bipartisan movement has pushed to reduce the amount of porn available in remote NT communities. But this will only help reduce sexual violence if pornography is a complement for violence rather than a substitute. What little evidence exists seems to favour the substitute theory rather than the complement theory. In other words, perhaps the costs of this policy outweigh the benefits (and I’m ignoring any benefits to the porn buyer).
• Regulation of prediction markets. Since most policy regulation is concerned about the cost of problem gambling, the information benefits of prediction markets are often ignored. So we end up with a situation where Australian betting agencies cannot run markets on (for example) the unemployment rate a year from now. Justin Wolfers and I highlighted this issue last year, and a team of 22 economists has just done the same in a recent issue of Science magazine.

Of course, there’s an easy alternative to weighing costs and benefits. As usual Stephen Colbert puts the case best:

ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up.

Craig Emerson gave a wide-ranging speech to the Sydney Institute on Thursday night, discussing early childhood intervention, trade liberalisation, and innovation. A little unusually for a Labor MP, the speech also contained a robust defence of Adam Smith.

Read the rest of this entry »

My talk last night to the Skeptics was on the economics of education. In it, I mentioned two unexpected drivers of the drop in teacher quality. As I argued in my latest AFR oped:

It is rarely recognised, but Australia in the 1960s had two ingenious ways of keeping teacher quality high. First, rampant gender pay discrimination in the professions pushed many talented women into teaching (where gender pay gaps were generally smaller). Second, a highly regulated labour market meant that many companies rewarded their employees based on tenure, not performance - just as teaching did (and still does).

Over the past half-century, these two factors changed radically. On balance, the large-scale entry of women into business, law, and medicine has been a terrific development. But an unintended consequence is that fewer talented women now become teachers. And while the growth of performance pay has benefited many occupations, it has made the uniform salary schedules in teaching look increasingly unattractive to today’s graduates.

On the theme of unexpected factors that might lower teacher quality, a school principal in the audience made a point I’d never heard before. To the extent that teaching is a much better job for parents than most other occupations, the push in other occupations for universal paid maternity leave - and more family-friendly provisions generally - will have the effect of drawing still more talented women out of teaching. Of course, this isn’t an argument against maternity leave (just as the above quote isn’t an argument for going back to a world where 95% of lawyers were men). But it does imply that we should think broadly about policy spillovers; and maybe universal paid maternity leave needs to go hand-in-hand with better pay for teachers.

As a teenager, I was a member of the Australian Skeptics. I always used to love reading their newsletters, replete with scientific take-downs of psychics and other charlatans (since 1980, they have offered a cash prize to anyone who proves they have psychic powers). So I’m delighted to be speaking to the Canberra branch of the Australian Skeptics tonight - Friday 13th.

By coincidence (or was it?), I cycled to work today listening to James Randi talking to Scientific American about his $1 million prize for “anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power”. Well worth a listen.

According to a new paper by Amanda Goodall, Lawrence Kahn, and Andrew Oswald, the answer is yes.

We measure the success of National Basketball Association (NBA) teams between 1996 and 2004, and then attempt to work back to the underlying causes. We have information on 15,040 regular season games for 219 coach-season observations, for which we compute winning percentages; in addition, we study post-season playoff success for these coaches. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a main explanatory factor is the quality of the group of players. But, less predictably, there seem also to be clear effects from the nature of a team s coach. Teams perform substantially better if led by a coach who was, in his day, an outstanding player.

They also cite evidence that this holds in a context with direct relevance to me: university management.

Goodall finds a positive cross-section correlation between the scholarly quality of presidents and the academic excellence of their institutions, and some evidence, for a set of British universities, that those led by highly cited scholars show improved performance over the ensuing decade.

So if your boss is incapable of doing your job, perhaps he or she isn’t much chop as a manager.

Team Heckman has a new paper out (NBER version here, free version here) on early childhood intervention. Much of the ground has been covered by previous Heckman papers, but one new aspect is a 5-point guide to designing what he thinks will be effective early childhood programs.

Read the rest of this entry »

News that a million-dollar drug trial has been aborted because the jurors were playing Sudoku makes Steven Landsburg’s proposed incentive system suddenly look rather attractive.

Weighing evidence is a difficult job. It requires a lot of attention and a lot of energy. And it would be a good thing if juries performed that job with diligence. The way to make workers diligent, as every manager knows, is to reward them when they succeed and punish them when they fail. It would be easy to apply that principle to juries: When subsequent evidence reveals that jurors got the verdict right, send each of them a big fat check. When subsequent evidence reveals they got it wrong, hit each of them with a big fat fine. And if you worry the associated risk will discourage people from serving on juries, pay them each a big fat fee for serving in the first place.

My father - presently in Malaysia - emails an observation about the US Presidential race.

This must be the very first US election where the candidates of both major political parties each spent some years living in Southeast Asia, our near neighborhood. Neither resided in really salubrious surrounds (Hanoi Hilton cf. urban Jakarta), though I suspect Obama has rather happier memories of local hospitality!

So it looks like Australia will have the iPhone 2.0 within a month or two. If you believe the NYT, it will be at the same price as Americans. If you believe the SMH, it could cost Australians a lot more. Still, if the price is within the bounds of reasonable, I think I’ll upgrade.

Who will be Obama’s running mate? According to Intrade, Clinton is the favourite, with a 24% chance. Next in line is Virginia Senator Jim Webb (19%) and Bill Richardson (8%). And reflecting the huge degree of uncertainty in such a pick, “any other” is 31%.

On the red side, Mitt Romney is 21% to be McCain’s running mate (though given how harshly McCain spoke of him, I find this hard to imagine), Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is 16%, Mike Huckabee is 13%, and “any other” is 43%.

I was listening the other day to Tony Abbott claiming that the price elasticity of petrol is zero (Joshua Gans quotes the Coalition’s Greg Hunt making the same claim). It was perhaps the first time that I had heard a politician use the word ‘elasticity’, and it made me wonder whether Abbott was resorting to jargon because it would sound more outlandish to say ‘we don’t believe people buy less petrol when the price goes up’.

Anyhow, this struck me as the kind of issue that people have probably researched, and sure enough a quick search turned up a nice meta-analysis by Daniel Graham and Stephen Glaister. Here’s the key graph:

As the authors conclude:

There are differences between the short- and long-run elasticities of fuel consumption with respect to price. Typically, short-term elasticities are in the region of -0.3 and long-term between -0.6 and -0.8. Therefore, it may be right to say that ”it won’t make much difference” or ”people will use their cars just the same”, but only in the short run. The evidence is clear - and remarkably consistent over a wide range of studies in many countries - that in the long run there is a significant response, albeit a less than proportionate one.

In other words, a 10% rise in petrol prices reduces petrol demand by 3% in the short-term, and by 6-8% in the long-term. (Although the study isn’t clear on this point, I’m guessing short term is <1 year, and long term is >1 year.)

Of course, these aren’t the first politicians to ignore economic evidence, but this seems to be an instance in which the evidence is simply overwhelming.

If you haven’t yet seen it, I can highly recommend watching Obama’s victory speech in St Paul, Minnesota (link above, transcript here). Behind his Philadelphia race speech, I think it’s the best of his career. (Clinton’s concession speech yesterday was also pretty good, though Obama’s writing and vocal cadences are unmatchable - if you’ve never watched a full speech, you won’t be able to understand his appeal.)

So it’s Obama vs McCain for the White House. I’ve been an Obamaphile for a couple of years now, but in terms of pure theatre, I’m also excited about him facing off against McCain, one of the most interesting pollies in the game. Should be a great five months.

Gay marriage is typically debated as a moral issue - but it might also have public health implications. A clever paper by Thomas Dee (forthcoming in the Economic Journal) suggests that countries which permit gay marriage could improve public health. Here’s the working paper version:

Forsaking All Others? The Effects of “Gay Marriage” on Risky Sex
Thomas S. Dee
One of the conjectured benefits of establishing the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships is that it would promote a culture of responsibility and commitment among homosexuals. A specific implication of this claim is that “gay marriage” will reduce the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections (STI). In this study, I present a simple 2-period model, which provides a framework for discussing the ways in which gay marriage might reduce (or increase) the prevalence of STI. Then, I present reduced-form empirical evidence on whether gay marriage has actually reduced STI rates. These evaluations are based on country-level panel data from Europe, where nations began introducing national recognition of same-sex partnerships in 1989. The results suggest that these gay-marriage laws led to statistically significant reductions in syphilis rates. However, these effects were smaller and statistically imprecise with respect to gonorrhea and HIV.

As part of its budget cuts, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is scaling back several overseas posts. As the SMH reports it.

During the Senate hearings, Mr Chester revealed the department had withdrawn five more diplomatic positions since the May budget, the result of a requirement to cut a further $4.4 million from DFAT spending in 2008-09.

In January, the government announced it would cut $52 million from DFAT’s budget over three-and-a-half years, part of spending cuts across the whole of government.

The $52 million included a savings of $17 million in 2008-09.

Mr Chester said that as a result of the budget there was an additional $4.4 million worth of savings the department had to make in 2008-09.

“They will be the withdrawal of a small number of positions overseas and a reduction in total A-based (Australian-based) staffing of nine,” he said.

“And we’ll have an additional efficiency dividend across the operating budgets of all work units.”

The overseas staff will come from missions in Belgrade, Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, Port Louis and Kuala Lumpur.

As far as I understand it, the rationale for most of the budget cuts has been that the government does not want to place upwards pressure on inflation. But I wouldn’t have thought this applied to diplomats, who spend most of their salary in another country. Indeed, bringing them home could conceivably have an inflationary impact, since they will now spend their money in Canberra instead of abroad. Surely the current context (healthy budget, inflationary pressures) is a natural time to be expanding our diplomatic presence, not reducing it.

My AFR oped today is on teacher quality, discussing the various ways we might identify the best teachers. Full text over the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »