NRA conventions and crime

Paper on the politicization of the FBI forthcoming in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today, May 2015

The abstract:      

An FBI report released on September 16th, 2014 makes the assertion that active shooter attacks and deaths have increased dramatically since 2000 – both increasing at an annual rate of about 16 percent. As the headline in the Wall Street Journal stated: “Mass Shootings on the Rise, FBI says.” 

But the FBI made a number of subtle and misleading decisions as well as outright errors. Once these biases and mistakes are fixed, the annual growth rate in homicides is cut in half. When a longer period of time is examined (1977 through the first half of 2014), deaths from Mass Public Shootings show only a slight, statistically insignificant, increase – an annual increase of less than one percent. 

The FBI’s misleadingly includes cases that aren’t mass shootings – cases where no one or only one person was killed in a public place. While the FBI assures people that it “captured the vast majority of incidents falling within the search criteria,” their report missed 20 shootings where at least two people were killed in a public place. Most of these missing cases took place early on, biasing their results towards showing an increase.

The paper can be downloaded here. 

So do professional football players face shorter life expectancy than those in baseball or Americans generally?: Apparently not

Bill Barnwell has a very detailed discussion of the numbers.  One would think that with all the discussion these days about the barbarianism in football and the claims of suicides being blamed on the sport, the life expectancy of players would be quite short.

Breastfeeding and intelligence: the problem with the newest research

Do I believe the end result?  Probably.  But I don't believe that this paper comes close to proving its case.  Fox News has this discussion of a recent study in JAMA Pediatrics.

. . . Belfort and her colleagues gathered data from 1,312 mothers and children in the United States, tracking everything from the mother’s frequency of breastfeeding to other factors including the mother’s intelligence, the mother and father’s education levels, measures of the home environment, the mother’s employment and the type of childcare the baby received.
While the link between breastfeeding and cognition had been previously explored, many earlier studies did not control for these additional factors.
“Many previous studies have been criticized because any link you might observe between breastfeeding and childhood intelligence could be explained by those other factors,” Belfort told FoxNews.com.
Belfort then performed a series of tests measuring the children’s cognitive development after infancy.  At age 3, the children underwent the higher Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a measure of receptive language, or how well a child understands language.
“A child’s receptive language is highly correlated with general intelligence as measured by more typical IQ tests,” Belfort said. . . . 

Unfortunately, the discussion at Fox News is really is too uncritical.  Of course, the bigger blame should be placed on JAMA Pediatrics   As with almost all medical studies, they ignore the issue of endogeniety when they can't do randomized experiments.  If I were do the experiment, I would control for family specific effects (that is a dummy variable for each family to pick up the average intelligence of children born into that family) and, after accounting for birth order, spacing between children, and the other controls included in the study, see if intelligence of children within the family varied with the amount of breastfeeding.  The problem with the current purely cross-sectional study is that the measurement error in how education and other factors are measured is large compared the differences they claim to find in intelligence.

Why Odd Even Days for Gas purchases will make gas lines longer

The point is a very simple one, and it is based on economics.  If you can only purchase gas every other day, you will fill up your tank more often just to make sure that you aren't stuck without gas on your no gas days.

What is the total number of deaths that occur each year because of government regulations?

There has been some discussion about parts of this question. For example, the FDA rules delay life saving drugs getting approved and may even prevent many drugs from being developed in the first place. MPG regulations make cars lighter and increase the number of traffic accident deaths. What is the cost of having drugs being illegal in terms of drug gangs? Regulations that lower wealth also increase deaths because wealthier countries have higher life expectancies. Can we sum them up? Thanks to Martyn Reiss for his email.

A simple test of union control of local public schools?

New Jersey is going to allow school districts to decide whether to leave their school board elections in April or to change them to November. Public teacher unions like April because the low voter turnout during those off elections give teacher union members who always vote a great say in determining who wins the elections. The issue here is simple: the public school districts where teacher unions have the greatest influence will be the least likely to switch from April to November.

The school elections bill passed the Senate by a vote of 34-3 and the Assembly by a vote of 62-11 with three abstentions.
It makes moving the election to November optional but allows school districts that do move to forgo votes on the district’s school budget, provided the spending plan calls for a tax levy within the state’s 2 percent cap.
Supporters of the measure claim it will save money on election expenses and increase voter participation.
“Politicians and pundits have talked about doing this for years, but special interests and inertia have prevented progress on this important issue — until today,” said Assemblyman Lou Greenwald, D-6th of Voorhees, who sponsored the legislation. “Empowering towns to move their school elections to November will give voters better control of their local finances while saving property taxpayers the costs of holding yet another local election.” . . .

A chance to see how elastic is the demand for using cars?

I frequently hear people discuss how much driving will be reduced from increases in the price of gasoline. One of the problems with measuring the impact is that so many other things are changing at the same time. That problem might not be too huge given that we still have so much of a variation in the price of gasoline over time. Still these huge increases in NJ road tolls over the last few years do significantly increase the price per mile of travel and it allows one to compare the changes versus other highways at the same time that are facing the same increase in price. From the WSJ:

. . . Tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike will go up by 53% in the new year; on the Garden State Parkway, they will jump about 50%.

Drivers could be forgiven for having forgotten the new cost: The increase is the second of a two-phase hike adopted by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and approved by former Gov. Jon Corzine in 2008. Tolls went up by about 40% that year.

Still, the authority advertised the hikes on digital signs on the highways and fliers passed out at toll plazas, said spokesman Thomas Feeney. Of the dozen New Jersey drivers interviewed at the Thomas Edison rest stop here on Friday, most knew that the increases were coming.

"I take highways everyday, so I don't have a choice. It's crazy," said Karan Hannalla, 57, an East Brunswick customer service manager who commutes 26 miles a day to Cranford. She will be paying about $2.50 more a day to commute to and from work. . . .

Question: Are votes counted in primaries more quickly than in general elections

I am wondering whether votes are counted faster in Republican or Democrat primaries. Or whether they are counted faster in primaries or general elections. There is always the claim that certain districts will hold back on releasing their votes until they know the number of votes need to win a close election. If so and if one party is more likely to do it than another party, in close elections there should be a difference across parties in terms of how quickly votes are reported.

Feyrer and Sacerdote's claims about the Stimulus

I have been reading through Feyrer and Sacerdote's paper on the Stimulus (available here), and there were a couple points. It seems to me that their state level results that are very dependent on a couple very small states, namely North Dakota and Vermont. It appears that North Dakota is particularly problematic because 60 percent the job growth that occurred during the time period that you studied was simply due to jobs in the oil industry boom (and presumably there was some secondary job creation from that expansion), jobs which would seem difficult to relate to the Stimulus. In addition, you weight your county level regressions by population, but if you do the same thing for the state level regressions, the results seem to go away. I have used slightly different months, but I believe that the pattern is the same. Sorry that this is hard to read, but the coefficients and t-statistics are in bold.


. reg changeemppop122010to022009 recoveryfundsawardedpercapita if state~="DC"

Source | SS df MS Number of obs = 50
-------------+------------------------------ F( 1, 48) = 5.94
Model | 5.2409e-10 1 5.2409e-10 Prob > F = 0.0186
Residual | 4.2381e-09 48 8.8295e-11 R-squared = 0.1101
-------------+------------------------------ Adj R-squared = 0.0915
Total | 4.7622e-09 49 9.7188e-11 Root MSE = 9.4e-06

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
c~op12100209 | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
recoveryfu~a | 7.69e-09 3.16e-09 2.44 0.019 1.34e-09 1.40e-08
_cons | -.0000224 3.48e-06 -6.44 0.000 -.0000294 -.0000154
------------------------------------------------------------------------------


. reg changeemppop122010to022009 recoveryfundsawardedpercapita if state~="DC" & state~="North Dakota" & state~="Vermont"

Source | SS df MS Number of obs = 48
-------------+------------------------------ F( 1, 46) = 1.65
Model | 1.0780e-10 1 1.0780e-10 Prob > F = 0.2060
Residual | 3.0137e-09 46 6.5516e-11 R-squared = 0.0345
-------------+------------------------------ Adj R-squared = 0.0135
Total | 3.1215e-09 47 6.6415e-11 Root MSE = 8.1e-06

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
c~op12100209 | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
recoveryfu~a | 3.71e-09 2.89e-09 1.28 0.206 -2.11e-09 9.52e-09
_cons | -.0000193 3.09e-06 -6.25 0.000 -.0000256 -.0000131
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

. reg changeemppop122010to022009 recoveryfundsawardedpercapita [aweight= pop2010] if state~="DC"
(sum of wgt is 3.0918e+08)

Source | SS df MS Number of obs = 50
-------------+------------------------------ F( 1, 48) = 0.54
Model | 2.5924e-11 1 2.5924e-11 Prob > F = 0.4649
Residual | 2.2924e-09 48 4.7759e-11 R-squared = 0.0112
-------------+------------------------------ Adj R-squared = -0.0094
Total | 2.3183e-09 49 4.7313e-11 Root MSE = 6.9e-06

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
c~op12100209 | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
recoveryfu~a | 3.29e-09 4.47e-09 0.74 0.465 -5.69e-09 1.23e-08
_cons | -.0000182 3.97e-06 -4.58 0.000 -.0000262 -.0000102
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Newly Published Research: "The effect of macroeconomic news on stock returns: New evidence from newspaper coverage"

Here is some newly published research that I have with Gene Birz in the latest issue of the Journal of Banking & Finance. This paper finds that media bias can have real economic effects. We will see how many downloads this paper gets. Hopefully, it will get some attention.

Journal of Banking & Finance
Volume 35, Issue 11, November 2011, Pages 2791-2800

The effect of macroeconomic news on stock returns: New evidence from newspaper coverage

Gene Birz and John R. Lott Jr.
Received 19 May 2010; accepted 13 March 2011. Available online 17 March 2011.
Abstract
Previous literature has produced weak evidence to support the hypothesis that real economic news affects stock returns. This is, in part, attributed to the difficulty of measuring how investors interpret macroeconomic announcements in different economic environments. In this paper, we choose a different approach of measuring macroeconomic news to better estimate its effect on stock returns. Since newspaper stories provide an interpretation of the statistical releases, we choose newspaper stories as our measure of news. Our findings indicate that news about GDP and unemployment does affect stock returns.
Keywords: Stock returns; Macroeconomic news; Information

Data on speed limits by state

This data is current as of today. Click on picture to make chart bigger. All of it is available here. What can I say? I like to collect data.

Where people are downloading my papers from JSTOR

For the "% of readers by discipline," click on the slide to discover what they mean.

Available here.

Available here.

Available here.

Available here.

Honesty Ratings

The Gallup Poll is available here. It might be interesting to see what can explain the variations in these survey numbers over time.

A theory of changes in media bias

So people watch the media that fits their views. But the intensity that different groups of people follow the news will vary systematically over time, just as there are midterm elections that tend to go against the party in power. From Politico:

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press delivers data that puts last week’s huge election night ratings win for Fox News into some context:

While Republicans followed campaign news more closely than Democrats throughout much of 2010, partisans tracked the outcome at similar levels. Fully 57 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of Democrats say they followed the election results very closely. Roughly four-in-ten independents (41 percent) say the same. However, Republicans (61 percent) are more likely than Democrats (42 percent) and independents (39 percent) to say the election is the story they followed most closely.
Four years ago, when Democrats tallied large gains, Democrats tracked the midterm results more closely than Republicans or independents. At that time, nearly six-in-ten Democrats (58 percent) said they followed news about the election outcome very closely, compared with 47 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of independents.

Seeing when relationships breakup

There is a lot of interesting data that is in need of being explained here.

Worried about when you might get dumped? Facebook knows.
That's according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up.
British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled the chart. He showed off the graphic at a TED conference last July in Oxford, England.
In the talk, McCandless said he and a colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases "breakup" and "broken up."
They found two big spikes on the calendar for breakups. The first was after Valentine's Day -- that holiday has a way of defining relationships, for better or worse -- and in the weeks leading up to spring break. Maybe spring fever makes people restless, or maybe college students just don't want to be tied down when they're partying in Cancun. . . .

Mondays seem like an obvious day to put up the information about a breakup.

So why do younger people view Obama so positively?

On issues such as Social Security reform, on labor market regulations, and what he is going to do on the national debt, one would think that younger voters would actually oppose Obama. While he is less popular among young people than he was a couple of years ago when he was running on an agenda of cutting government spending, he is still quite popular.

Meetings of the College Democrats that attracted 200 people in 2008 now pull in a dozen. New voter registration is way down, too, and free posters of President Obama — once “the Michael Jordan” of politics, as one freshman put it — are now refused by students. . . .

This was not what Generation O expected Mr. Obama won two years ago with 66 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old vote, a historic proportion. Americans under 30 also worked on campaigns at a greater rate than the general population did for the first time since 1952, or possibly even earlier, according to the National Election Studies. . . . .

While most of them still view him more favorably than their parents or grandparents do, various polls show that the youthful passion that led to action has not been sustained. . . .

More research needs to be done on this point in bold.

Philippine panel crime rate data

A source for Philippine panel crime rate data is here. Unfortunately, this data only seems to be available from 1983 on. Guns were banned during the 1970s in the Philippines.

Sunspot data

The raw data on sunspot activity is available here. Some diagrams are available here. The raw data shows how clearly the recent sunspot activity has been suppressed.

Weird attacks on my gun research, also Scienceblogs censoring responses

Defenders of climate researchers who have refused to release their data, are claiming that I delayed releasing the data used in my book, More Guns, Less Crime. There are multiple inaccuracies in the posting, but let's just deal with what the poster claims is his core point for this post.

Conservative economist John Lott's 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime concluded based on the results of his own statistical analysis that more permissive hand gun laws reduced crime rates in counties and states that had adopted such laws. In a feat of statistical one-upmanship, Lott had compiled the largest data set on gun laws and crime statistics in the field. Naturally, conservatives and gun rights advocates immediately argued that Lott's empirical research was definitive reason to repeal gun laws across the country, since the result would be a decrease in crime rates.
In response, contending experts ranging from sociologists to law professors argued that before any policy was adopted based on Lott's research, that they should be able to examine Lott's raw data and the decisions that he made in conducting his analysis. Lott further stoked the fires of the controversy by being slow to release his data--which made it appear as if he had something to hide . . .

They have yet to publish my comment on their post, so here is my response:

This piece makes inaccurate claims about my work. The data in my original paper with David Mustard was released even before the paper was published. Our paper was published in the January 1997 of the Journal of Legal Studies. We provided our data to critics such as Dan Black and Dan Nagin as well as Jens Ludwig in August 1996. In fact, the Brady Campaign put on a panel at the National Press Club on December 9, 1996 where I debated them on their analysis of our data.

The first edition of More Guns, Less Crime was published in 1998. All the data for all the regressions and all the tables and figures in the book was again released to others even prior to the book being published. Most of that research involved the same data from 1977 to 1992 that was in my original paper with Mustard, but the additional data in the book that extended to 1994 was also released.

Ironically, I had a computer crash in July 1997 where I lost the data that I had already provided to the critics to whom we had already provided the data. David Mustard and myself asked these individuals to get back a copy of our data, but they declined to do so. I know that David asked them several times. Because we realized that we had an obligation to make our data available to others, David and I spent more than several months putting the data together again. (David spent significantly more time than I did putting that data back together again.)

Since then the data used in More Guns, Less Crime has been provided to over 200 hundred people at universities around the world. Dozens of papers have been published using the data. The paper by Black and Nagin was published in the Journal of Legal Studies in January 1998 (which was four months BEFORE More Guns, Less Crime was published). Given the lead-time in refereeing and publications, it should be fairly obvious that they had submitted their paper a year earlier in late 1996. How could they have submitted their paper for publication in the Journal of Legal Studies before my paper with Mustard was published if we hadn't shared the data?

So your story is backwards. Our data was given out immediately. When the data was lost in a hard disk crash, our critics refused to give us a copy back of our own data. David and I redid the data a second time. It was not something that we had to do (especially given the many months of work involved), but it was the right thing to do. It would have been better if our critics had simply given us back a copy of our own data.

It is easy enough for you to check out when the Black and Nagin paper was published. Another critical paper was published by Jens Ludwig in May 1998 in the International Review of Law and Economics. An entire issue of the Journal of Law and Economics in 2001 published papers on gun control, most of those papers using the data in my book.

UPDATE: This post was eventually put up, but I had sent in a second post at the same time as the first one that never seems to have gotten approved. That second piece pointed to articles that I have written on climate researchers from the pro-manmade global warming side who have refused to provide their raw data even well after their research has been published.

In any case, the original post on scienceblog was changed so I made this response (we will see if it gets put up):

As to the claim about "they should be able to examine Lott's raw data and the decisions that he made in conducting his analysis" it is easy for people to evaluate that also. For example, if they look at the Black and Nagin paper, people will see that Black and Nagin replicate the research that Mustard and I had done and they were able to do that because I provided them with all the raw data as well as the "do" file that contained the regressions. There was nothing else there to provide them. They didn't replicate most of the empirical work in the original paper with Mustard, but that was their choice. If you think that there was something else, please indicate what it would be. A response to the Black and Nagin paper is available here.

As to the Mother Jones interview, I gave two interviews to someone who was obviously hostile (not all of our discussions were transcribed). I offered to go off the record to explain things in depth because I wanted to provide a detailed discussion without worrying that he would take some small part of what I was saying out of context and distort it. The point was to take the time to give him a detailed response, but he wasn't interested in doing that. When you do interviews with hostile individuals you learn very quickly that people can take things out of context and you give a different interview than in situations where you are sure that the entire transcript is going to be made available. It was my understanding that we were doing the first type of interview.

UPDATE: Of course, only one of my posts have been put up at the website that is criticizing me. I made two posts (they put up one) and they then rewrote their post. I respond, but they don't put it up either.