Silence is Golden: Railroad Noise Pollution and Property Values

This paper uses a unique dataset containing property values and manually collected noise measurements in Memphis, Tennessee to estimate the impact of train noise pollution on commercial and residential property values. Results show that a residential property exposed to 65 decibels or greater of railroad noise results in a 14 to 18 percent decrease in property value. Once a 65 decibel measure is included, there is no additional impact on price of distance to the closest railroad crossing. For commercial property, neither crossing proximity nor noise level significantly affect property value. The results provide evidence of a negative externality that is created by railroad noise for households and the need for more exact measures of noise levels. The findings are also consistent with previous literature suggesting firms have different ideas than individuals about desirable locational attributes

Game, set, and match: Do women and men perform differently in competitive situations?

This paper analyzes potential gender differences in competitive environments using a sample of over 100,000 professional tennis matches. Focusing on two phenomena of the labor and sports economics literature, we find robust evidence for (i) the hot-hand effect (an additional win in the most recent ten matches raises the likelihood of winning by 3.1 to 3.3 percent) and (ii) the clutch-player effect, as top players are excelling in Grand Slam tournaments, the most important events. Overall, we find virtually no gender differences for the hot-hand effect and only minor distinctions for the clutch-player effect

Good girl, bad boy: Corrupt behavior in professional tennis

This paper identifies matches on the male and female professional tennis tours in which one player faces a high payoff from being “on the bubble” of direct entry into one of the lucrative Grand Slam tournaments, while their opposition does not. Analyzing over 378,000 matches provides strong evidence for corrupt behavior on the men’s tour, as bubble players are substantially more likely to beat better ranked opponents when a win is desperately needed. However, we find no such evidence on the women’s tour. These results prevail throughout a series of extensions and robustness checks, highlighting gender differences regarding corrupt and unethical behavior, but also concerning collusion. We especially find evidence for collusion once monetary incentives are further increased. Finally, the market for sports betting does not seem to be aware of this phenomenon, suggesting a market imperfection and further confirming our suspicion of irregular activities in men’s tennis

Gender in Jeopardy!: The Role of Opponent Gender in High-Stakes Competition

Using 4,279 episodes of the popular US game show Jeopardy!, we analyze whether the opponents\u27 gender is able to explain the gender gap in competitive behavior. Our findings indicate that gender differences disappear when women compete against men. This result is surprising, but emerges with remarkable consistency for the probability to (i) respond, (ii) respond correctly, and (iii) respond correctly in high-stakes situations. Even risk preferences in wagering decisions, where gender differences are especially pronounced, do not differ across gender once a woman competes against males. Using a fixed-effects framework, and therefore exploiting within-player variation only, confirms these findings. These results, derived from a large real-life setting, suggest that gender differences in performance and risk attitudes are not gender-inherent, but rather emerge in distinct social environments

Anchoring in Financial Decision-Making: Evidence from the Field

This paper analyzes 12,596 wagering decisions of 6,064 contestants in the US game show Jeopardy!, focusing on the anchoring phenomenon in financial decision-making. We find that contestants anchor heavily on the initial dollar value of a clue in their wagering decision, even though there exists no rational reason to do so. More than half of all wagers occur within $500 of the initial dollar value, although the maximum possible wagering value averages$5,914. This anchoring phenomenon remains statistically significant on the one percent level, even after controlling for scores, clue category, time trends, and player-fixed effects.When exploiting within-player variation only and implicitly controlling for a host of individual behavioral attitudes and preferences, raising the anchoring amount by 10 percent translates to an increase of 3.1 percent in the wager. In terms of magnitude, anchoring is marginally more pronounced for women with an elasticity of 0.34 versus 0.28 for males. Finally, this paper is among the first to investigate anchoring among children and teenagers. We find little evidence for anchoring among children under the age of 13, but the effect begins to emerge for teenagers and further manifests itself among college students. Overall, our findings suggest anchoring plays a substantial role in financial decision-making under pressure

Does Starting School Before Labor Day Affect High School Retention and Graduation: Evidence From Virginia\u27s Kings Dominion Law

Several states have required K-12 public schools to start after Labor Day in an effort to aid the tourism and hospitality industry. However, little is known about how these policies impact educational outcomes. We examine the impact of Virginia\u27s post-Labor Day school start law on high school retention and graduation rates. We use a difference-in-differences model to exploit exogenous variation in school division start dates. Our results show small differences of up to three weeks have little effect on high school dropout and graduation rates. Our findings inform the debate on post-Labor Day school start laws and compulsory attendance age cutoff laws

Going it Alone: The Social and Emotional Life of Disconnected Youth

This study presents patterns across multiple dimensions of social isolation among a sample of military youth, and describes how these patterns are related to preceding risk factors and distal outcomes. The presentation will be of interest to professionals interested in strategies for fostering positive outcomes by developing and enhancing family and community support for at-risk youth populations

Emplacement of inflated Pāhoehoe flows in the Naude’s Nek Pass, Lesotho remnant, Karoo continental flood basalt province: use of flow-lobe tumuli in understanding flood basalt emplacement

Physical volcanological features are presented for a 710-m-thick section, of the Naude’s Nek Pass, within the lower part of the Lesotho remnant of the Karoo Large Igneous Province. The section consists of inflated pāhoehoe lava with thin, impersistent sedimentary interbeds towards the base. There are seven discreet packages of compound and hummocky pāhoehoe lobes containing flow-lobe tumuli, making up approximately 50% of the section. Approximately 45% of the sequence consists of 14 sheet lobes, between 10 and 52-m-thick. The majority of the sheet lobes are in two packages indicating prolonged periods of lava supply capable of producing thick sheet lobes. The other sheet lobes are as individual lobes or pairs, within compound flows, suggesting brief increases in lava supply rate. We suggest, contrary to current belief, that there is no evidence that compound flows are proximal to source and sheet lobes (simple flows) are distal to source and we propose that the presence of flow-lobe tumuli in compound flows could be an indicator that a flow is distal to source. We use detailed, previously published, studies of the Thakurvadi Formation (Deccan Traps) as an example. We show that the length of a lobe and therefore the sections that are ‘medial or distal to source’ are specific to each individual lobe and are dependent on the lava supply of each eruptive event, and as such flow lobe tumuli can be used as an indicator of relative distance from source

VAST: An ASKAP Survey for Variables and Slow Transients

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will give us an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the transient sky at radio wavelengths. In this paper we present VAST, an ASKAP survey for Variables and Slow Transients. VAST will exploit the wide-field survey capabilities of ASKAP to enable the discovery and investigation of variable and transient phenomena from the local to the cosmological, including flare stars, intermittent pulsars, X-ray binaries, magnetars, extreme scattering events, interstellar scintillation, radio supernovae and orphan afterglows of gamma ray bursts. In addition, it will allow us to probe unexplored regions of parameter space where new classes of transient sources may be detected. In this paper we review the known radio transient and variable populations and the current results from blind radio surveys. We outline a comprehensive program based on a multi-tiered survey strategy to characterise the radio transient sky through detection and monitoring of transient and variable sources on the ASKAP imaging timescales of five seconds and greater. We also present an analysis of the expected source populations that we will be able to detect with VAST.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figures. Submitted for publication in Pub. Astron. Soc. Australi

Anatomy of a post-starburst minor merger: a multi-wavelength WFC3 study of NGC 4150

(Abridged) We present a spatially-resolved near-UV/optical study of NGC 4150, using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Previous studies of this early-type galaxy (ETG) indicate that it has a large reservoir of molecular gas, exhibits a kinematically decoupled core (likely indication of recent merging) and strong, central H_B absorption (indicative of young stars). The core of NGC 4150 shows ubiquitous near-UV emission and remarkable dusty substructure. Our analysis shows this galaxy to lie in the near-UV green valley, and its pixel-by-pixel photometry exhibits a narrow range of near-UV/optical colours that are similar to those of nearby E+A (post-starburst) galaxies. We parametrise the properties of the recent star formation (age, mass fraction, metallicity and internal dust content) in the NGC 4150 pixels by comparing the observed near-UV/optical photometry to stellar models. The typical age of the recent star formation (RSF) is around 0.9 Gyrs, consistent with the similarity of the near-UV colours to post-starburst systems, while the morphological structure of the young component supports the proposed merger scenario. The RSF metallicity, representative of the metallicity of the gas fuelling star formation, is around 0.3 - 0.5 Zsun. Assuming that this galaxy is a merger and that the gas is sourced mainly from the infalling companion, these metallicities plausibly indicate the gas-phase metallicity (GPM) of the accreted satellite. Comparison to the local mass-GPM relation suggests (crudely) that the mass of the accreted system is around 3x10^8 Msun, making NGC 4150 a 1:20 minor merger. A summation of the pixel RSF mass fractions indicates that the RSF contributes about 2-3 percent of the stellar mass. This work reaffirms our hypothesis that minor mergers play a significant role in the evolution of ETGs at late epochs.Comment: 28 pages, 2 tables, accepted for publication in Ap