AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 11, November 2012
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
Unexpected regular season football victories by NCAA Division I-A schools increase alumni athletic donations and applications.
In The Benefits of College Athletic Success: an Application of the Propensity Score Design with Instrumental Variables (NBER Working Paper No. 18196), Michael Anderson finds that unexpected regular season football victories by NCAA Division I-A schools increase alumni athletic donations by $134,000. These victories also increase applications...
Article
The volume of applicants attracted to open job postings is negatively related to firms' financial health.
Average employment within a company decreases by 27 percent in the two years surrounding a bond default and by 50 percent or more around a bankruptcy filing. Such job losses can be extremely costly for laid off workers who may face limited opportunities to find new employment, lower average wages at a new job, and possible psychological costs. These losses...
Article
[In the 1920s] a 10 percentage point increase in the fraction of Republicans in a market also is correlated with a 23 percentage point increase in the probability that an entering newspaper chooses a Republican affiliation.
In Competition and Ideological Diversity: Historical Evidence from U.S. Newspapers (NBER Working Paper No. 18234), co-authors Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse Shapiro, and Michael Sinkinson find that American households in the early twentieth century...
Article
Projection bias causes consumers in the car and housing markets to make decisions that are overly influenced by the weather at the time of the decision.
Weather clouds people's judgment when it comes to buying cars and homes, according to Projection Bias in the Car and Housing Markets (NBER Working Paper No. 18212). If it's warm or sunny, they're more likely to buy a convertible. After a snowstorm, they're more likely to buy a four-wheel drive vehicle and, when it's...
Article
Second liens were strongly associated with the use of low down payments to purchase homes.
Second lien loans are an important segment of the credit markets in the United States, even larger in the aggregate than total credit card borrowing. In A New Look at Second Liens (NBER Working Paper No. 18269), authors Donghoon Lee, Christopher Mayer, and Joseph Tracy use data from credit reports and deed records to investigate the extent to which second liens may have...
Article
Private long-term disability insurance claims rates are much lower than claims rates on Social Security Disability Insurance, and ... private long-term disability policies have a much higher return-to-work rate among initial claimants.
Through its Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs, the U.S. government provided nearly 12 million disabled individuals with annual benefits totaling $150 billion in 2010. The public...