What do the numbers say? A cost-benefit analysis of love and sex

by Zosia Bielski

The Globe and Mail
February 28, 2013

How’s your marriage portfolio doing?

In her book Dollars And Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love, University of British Columbia economics professor Marina Adshade suggests that almost every option, decision and outcome in love and sex is better understood when you look at matters through an economic lens.

Adshade reveals how economics trickle down to our most intimate moments, affecting everything from teen pregnancy rates to child care. While people don’t consciously do the “promiscuity math” every time they fall into bed with someone, she reveals how economic factors shift consequences in our lives, and how this shapes the way men and women behave. Adshade spoke to The Globe and Mail from Vancouver.

Is it politically incorrect to view sex and love via economics – unless you’re talking about straight-up prostitution, where value is easily measured? It makes everything people do seem opportunistic.

Somebody said to me the other day that this is a very cold perspective. The value of the economic approach is to offer some clarity on the decisions that we ourselves make. These are decisions that we can measure: how people match on income or education or political beliefs and how long those marriages last and how happy those people are.

Let’s turn to some of your counterintuitive findings: Birth control has actually increased unintended pregnancy rates outside of marriage. How?

The rate planet-wide is surprisingly high, given how much technology we have to control our own fertility. The unintended consequence of access to contraceptives is that you get more unintended pregnancies because social norms have evolved in a way that allow people to more freely express their sexuality. When more people have sex outside of marriage, you’re bound to get more pregnancy and child birth outside of marriage.

More

EEG experiment proves that money can buy happiness (first-ever scale to measure pleasure)

by Monica Diana Bercea

NeuroRelay
January 29, 2013

As we’re all so busy rushing through life, it’s easy to miss the moments of pleasure. Neuroscientists have revealed how everyday pleasure rank against each other and it’s official: money CAN buy happiness, reveals first ever pleasure scale. Winning £10 was all it took to dramatically increase people’s feelings of pleasure. Following closely behind this was the level of pleasure generated by affection. As for playing with puppies and kittens, puppies generated the highest feeling of pleasure in all participants, proving the belief that dogs really are a man’s best friend. As for chocolate, the test also proved just a tiny taste is all it takes to generate a significant pleasure boost.

Recording people’s brainwaves while they were placed in different situations, neuroscientists from Birkbeck University have calibrated the first-ever scale to measure pleasure. Using MyndPlay EEG (electroencephalography) headsets to measure an individual’s brain activity, neuroscientists were able to create a scale enabling them to place a numerical value on the level of pleasure people gain from different experiences. Rating between -100 (most displeasurable) and +100 (most pleasurable) and based on intensity and duration of brain activity, various emotions such as affection, play, good fortune, visual stimulation and achievement were tested.

Women were found to find life more pleasurable, recording an average of 66.4 on the pleasure scale, while men fell behind at 58.2. In addition, men were revealed as most affected by winning money, scoring as high as 90.1 when they were surprised with £10, while women were less impressed, scoring 79.3.

Here is how researchers made the first ever scale for pleasure:

More

University of London-Birkbeck College Press Release

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices

by Derek Thompson

Atlantic
January 16, 2013

A new paper reviews how psychology, biology, and neurology are ganging up on economics to prove that, when it comes to making decisions, people are anything but rational.

Daniel McFadden is an economist. But his new paper, "The New Science of Pleasure," shows the many ways economics fails to explain how we make decisions -- and what it can learn from psychology, anthropology, biology, and neurology.

The old economic theory of consumers says that "people should relish choice." And we do. Shopping can be fun, democracy is better than its alternatives, and a diverse and fully stocked grocery store ice cream freezer is quite nearly the closest thing to heaven on earth. But other fields of science tell a more complicated story. First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb. (That's one reason why stores place candy near the check-out aisle: They suspect your brain is too zonked to resist.) Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.

If you've read the work of Dan Ariely or Daniel Kahneman, you know exactly how far from perfectly rational we are when faced with a decision. Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences. So when we make a choice about how to spend a certain amount of time -- say, by going to Six Flags -- we forget that most of the time at an amusement park is spent waiting around doing nothing. Instead, we remember the thrill of the roller coaster. (This has been previously used to explain why people sometimes go back to disappointing old romantic partners, but that might be for another article.)

More

Read the Paper

Gender Differences in Doing Favors

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
January 11, 2013

If the question is, “Can you do me a favor?” the answer is a lot more likely to be yes if the request is made of a woman.

That’s the implication of two studies conducted by six self-described “overcommitted ‘semi’-workaholic women” and presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Economics Association. In one study, MBA students were asked to recall agreeing to a favor on the job at a time when they preferred to say no. The female participants did the favor even though they were five times likelier to report having felt worn out, perhaps because they were also twice as likely to have been worried about the consequences of saying no.

In a second study, this one involving altruistic behavior in small groups, female undergraduates were 50% more likely to comply with an implicit request for a favor than were male students. The willingness of women to do favors in the workplace may lead them to become overburdened with low-skill tasks, making promotion less likely, the researchers said.

More

Cerebral circuitry

by April Dembosky

Financial Times
January 3, 2013

I am flying. No plane, no wings, just me soaring over rooftops with a mild flip in my belly as I dip closer to the grid of city streets. I lean to the right to curve past a skyscraper, then speed up and tilt left to skirt by a tree. There has been an earthquake and I am looking for a lost child who is diabetic and needs insulin.

This is not a dream. I am awake, wearing my normal clothes – no cape or leotard – standing squarely on both feet in a room of the virtual reality laboratory at Stanford University.

About 70 test subjects have done the same simulation, half of them flying in a virtual helicopter, the other half granted the virtual superpower of flight. Half from each group have a mission: find and save the lost child.

After the simulation, head gear returned to a hook on the wall, a researcher reaches for her clipboard to ask a few questions. She accidentally knocks over a tin of pens. In sociology studies, this is a classic trick for measuring altruistic intent. The test subjects who flew Superman-style rushed to help clean up the spill. They responded four seconds faster and picked up two more pens on average than the helicopter passengers.

“If you are flying, you feel very powerful, so the sense of having power made people more generous, more altruistic,” says Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco who helped design the study, accepted for publication in the e-journal Plos One. “It could also be that the desire to be helpful was directly related to conscious or unconscious associations to Superman,” she adds.

Many new technologies begin with such virtuous goals of making the world a better place and its citizens better people. But many come with hidden costs that take time to surface. Now that mainstream internet sites such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are all in close reach with a few touches of the smartphone in your pocket, the human side-effects of being constantly connected are starting to emerge.

More

See also

Brazilian student auctions virginity

CNN
January 2, 2013

A Brazilian student set off a firestorm in her hometown by putting her virginity up for auction.

 

More

How To Make Better New Year’s Resolutions

by Ray Fisman

Slate
December 31, 2012

It’s that season again, when we resolve to accomplish a list of goals in the coming year. Not infrequently, these are the goals that we were resolved to accomplish during the preceding year.

If you were to ask Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir or Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan for a better New Year’s strategy, they’d likely suggest that the best resolution you can make is to do fewer things in 2013. The researchers argue that when busy people get busier, it leads to ignored deadlines, a cluttered desk, and a vicious cycle of falling further and further behind. Amid the disorder, a lot of bad decisions get made, and the best means of escape from this cycle may be a moratorium on new obligations.

Shafir and Mullainathan are leaders in the field of behavioral economics, which aims to apply insights from psychology to the study of economic decision-making. In their recent work, summarized in the forthcoming book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, they use behavioral economics to explain why conditions of scarcity—whether of time or money—often lead people to make bad decisions.

Mullainathan and Shafir describe the problem of managing money as being akin to packing a suitcase. Someone with plenty of time has a near-empty suitcase. It requires little attention or effort to decide whether to go to a movie on the spur of the moment. By contrast, those with crowded schedules have a full suitcase: Adding a new item means removing something that’s already been packed. Deciding how to rearrange your metaphorical suitcase takes time and energy and can lead to stress and sleepless nights. Indeed, the shortage of space itself can be responsible for bad decisions that, in turn, only make the problem worse.

More

The First Map of How Our Brain Organizes Everything We See

by Monica Diana Bercea

NeuroRelay
December 27, 2012

A research published in the Cell Press journal Neuron on the 20th of December 2012 (Alexander G. Huth, Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Jack L. Gallant. "A Continuous Semantic Space Describes the Representation of Thousands of Object and Action Categories across the Human Brain." Neuron, 2012; 76 (6): 1210) describes the first developed map of how our brain sorts everything we see.

While neuromarketers aim to understand how people make sense of the thousands of advertisements that flood their retinas each day, scientists at the University of California have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings, and you may see it below (it looks like fractals, doesn’t it?):

“Humans can recognize thousands of categories. Given the limited size of the human brain, it seems unreasonable to expect that every category is represented in a distinct brain area,” says first author Alex Huth, a graduate student working in Dr. Jack Gallant’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Here is a video of the author that explains his work:

More

Read the Paper

Timur Kuran, "The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East"

Princeton University Press
2010

In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind--in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions.

Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life--including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies--all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history--will take generations to overcome.

The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.

Timur Kuran is professor of economics and political science and the Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton).

More

Yannis M. Ioannides, "From Neighborhoods to Nations: The Economics of Social Interactions"

Princeton University Press
Press Release
December 2012

Just as we learn from, influence, and are influenced by others, our social interactions drive economic growth in cities, regions, and nations--determining where households live, how children learn, and what cities and firms produce. From Neighborhoods to Nations synthesizes the recent economics of social interactions for anyone seeking to understand the contributions of this important area. Integrating theory and empirics, Yannis Ioannides explores theoretical and empirical tools that economists use to investigate social interactions, and he shows how a familiarity with these tools is essential for interpreting findings. The book makes work in the economics of social interactions accessible to other social scientists, including sociologists, political scientists, and urban planning and policy researchers.

Focusing on individual and household location decisions in the presence of interactions, Ioannides shows how research on cities and neighborhoods can explain communities' composition and spatial form, as well as changes in productivity, industrial specialization, urban expansion, and national growth. The author examines how researchers address the challenge of separating personal, social, and cultural forces from economic ones. Ioannides provides a toolkit for the next generation of inquiry, and he argues that quantifying the impact of social interactions in specific contexts is essential for grasping their scope and use in informing policy.

Revealing how empirical work on social interactions enriches our understanding of cities as engines of innovation and economic growth, From Neighborhoods to Nations carries ramifications throughout the social sciences and beyond.

Yannis M. Ioannides is the Max and Herta Neubauer Professor of Economics at Tufts University.

More

Income and Democracy: Lipset's Law Revisited

by Anke Hoeffler, Robert H. Bates and Ghada Fayad

International Monetary Fund
Working Paper No. 12/295
December 17, 2012

We revisit Lipset‘s law, which posits a positive and significant relationship between income and democracy. Using dynamic and heterogeneous panel data estimation techniques, we find a significant and negative relationship between income and democracy: higher/lower incomes per capita hinder/trigger democratization. Decomposing overall income per capita into its resource and non-resource components, we find that the coefficient on the latter is positive and significant while that on the former is significant but negative, indicating that the role of resource income is central to the result.

Read the Paper

Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012)

Princeton University
Institute for Advanced Study
December 12, 2012

Renowned social scientist Albert O. Hirschman, whose highly influential work in economics and politics in developing countries has had a profound impact on economic thought and practice in the United States and beyond, died at the age of 97 on December 10 at Greenwood House in Ewing Township, N.J. Hirschman was Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he had served on the Faculty since 1974.

“Albert Hirschman developed innovative methods for promoting economic and social growth through his study of the intellectual underpinnings of economic policies and political democracy,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute. “An impassioned observer who sought to understand the world as well as change it, Albert will be sorely missed by the Institute community and by the international community at large where his voice has influenced and guided advancement for more than half a century.”

Over the course of his long and extraordinarily productive career, Hirschman earned a reputation for progressive, lucid and brilliantly argued contributions to economics, the history of ideas and the social sciences. He explored a vast range of topics, inspired by the complexity of human behavior and social reality rather than by traditional economic models. He applied a subtle and iconoclastic perspective to reappraising conventional wisdom, resulting in original work that was a constant stimulus to critical thought in the social sciences. In a 1993 interview with Carmine Donzelli, Hirschman noted, “The idea of trespassing is basic to my thinking. Attempts to confine me to a specific area make me unhappy. When it seems that an idea can be verified in another field, then I am happy to venture in this direction. I believe this is a simple and useful way of discovering ‘related’ topics.”

More

Commerce Claus: The behavioral economics of Christmas

by George Loewenstein and Cass R. Sunstein

New Republic
December 20, 2012

Some economists dislike Christmas. They allege that it “destroys value,” which is, in Econoland, the first and only sin. The economist Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics, goes so far as to contend that the winter holiday season is “an orgy of value destruction.”

Waldfogel’s main concern is that the value of gifts to their recipients is typically far lower than the money that was spent on them. He found that of the $65 billion spent on winter holiday gifts in 2009, about 20 percent was wasted, in the sense that the gifts were worth that much less to the recipient than they cost. And indeed, it is an inescapable fact of life that people who receive holiday gifts often don’t much like what they get. If you’ve ever been presented with a sweater that you would never wear in public or electronic equipment whose purpose escapes you, you will understand what Waldfogel is talking about.

In hard economic times, when both the government and ordinary people are trying desperately to save money, this is a sobering analysis. We don’t propose that Congress should try to solve the debt crisis by requiring people to give holiday season money to the Treasury Department rather than spending it on presents. But mis-giving does no good for anyone, and we have a few ideas about how to make it through the season a bit more easily.

More

Saving Economics from the Economists

by Ronald Coase

Harvard Business Review
December 2012

Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the classroom does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship. The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate.

That was not the case in the past. When modern economics was born, Adam Smith envisioned it as a study of the “nature and causes of the wealth of nations.” His seminal work, The Wealth of Nations, was widely read by businessmen, even though Smith disparaged them quite bluntly for their greed, shortsightedness, and other defects. The book also stirred up and guided debates among politicians on trade and other economic policies. The academic community in those days was small, and economists had to appeal to a broad audience. Even at the turn of the 20th century, Alfred Marshall managed to keep economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man.” Economics remained relevant to industrialists.

In the 20th century, economics consolidated as a profession; economists could afford to write exclusively for one another. At the same time, the field experienced a paradigm shift, gradually identifying itself as a theoretical approach of economization and giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter. Today, production is marginalized in economics, and the paradigmatic question is a rather static one of resource allocation. The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

This separation of economics from the working economy has severely damaged both the business community and the academic discipline. Since economics offers little in the way of practical insight, managers and entrepreneurs depend on their own business acumen, personal judgment, and rules of thumb in making decisions. In times of crisis, when business leaders lose their self-confidence, they often look to political power to fill the void. Government is increasingly seen as the ultimate solution to tough economic problems, from innovation to employment.

More

See also

Urging Economists to Step Away From the Blackboard

by Brendan Greeley

Bloomberg
November 29, 2012

Ronald Coase published his career-making paper, The Nature of the Firm, 75 years ago. He won the Nobel prize for economics in 1991. In a lecture in 2002, he argued that physics has moved beyond the assumptions of Isaac Newton, and biology beyond Darwin. (Not that he knew them.) But economics, he said, had failed to advance past the efficient-market assumptions of Adam Smith. This year Coase, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School, is attempting to start a new academic journal ambitiously titled Man and the Economy. The premise: Economics is broken. Coase’s journal is still just a plan, but his frustration with orthodox economics has energized his followers.

The financial crisis forced economists to confront the limitations of their profession. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted as much when he told Congress in October 2008 that markets might not regulate themselves after all. Coase says the problem runs deeper: Economists study abstractions and numbers, instead of firms and people. He doesn’t believe this can be fixed by tweaking models. An entire generation of economists must be encouraged to think differently.

The idea for the journal stems from his collaboration with Ning Wang, an assistant professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University who grew up in a rice- and fish-farming village in the Hubei province of China. Coase, 101, began working with Wang in the 1990s at the University of Chicago. Neither has a degree in economics; the two understood each other. “We’re not constrained by a mainstream, orthodox view,” says Wang. “A lot of people would see this as a weakness.” Coase declined to be interviewed.

When Coase and Wang hosted a conference on China in 2008, they noticed that many Chinese academics had never talked to either policymakers or entrepreneurs from their own country. They had learned only what Coase calls “blackboard economics,” sets of theories and mathematical relationships between bits of data. “I came from China,” says Wang. “We have a lot of nationals come here; they’re taught game theory and econometrics. Then they’re going home … without a basic understanding of how the real world functions.”

In an essay published on Nov. 20 in Harvard Business Review, Coase argues that in the early 20th century, economists began to focus on relationships among statistical measures, rather than problems that firms have with production or people have with decisions. Economists began writing for each other, instead of for other disciplines or for the business community. “It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice,” Coase writes in HBR, “ignoring the influences of society, history, culture, and politics on the working of the economy.” (By “choice,” he means ever more complex versions of price and demand curves.) Most economists, he argues, work with measures like gross domestic product and the unemployment rate that are too removed from how businesses actually work.

More

See also

Are wealth and prosperity synonymous?

by James Melik

BBC News
November 23, 2012

What is it besides the money in people's pockets that makes a society prosperous?

Many people argue there are ingredients other than hard cash to consider - such as personal freedom and good governance.

The International Energy Agency recently predicted the US could become self-sufficient in energy within a couple of decades - a move that should make any nation more prosperous.

Will Hutton, who chairs the economic research think tank Big Innovation Centre, and is principal of Hertford College in Oxford, says: "A secure energy supply will lead to lower energy prices, which could lead to a more vigorous US manufacturing sector."

It might make the US more prosperous financially, but will it feel safer and more at peace with itself?

Not necessarily so, thinks Jeff Gedmin at London-based think tank the Legatum Institute, which says its aim is to advance ideas and policies in support of free and prosperous societies around the world.

"I don't think there is any kind of mechanical relationship between material wealth and the well-being of citizens," he says.

"Every year we publish the Prosperity Index, and we find this year, for the first time, the US drops out of the top 10."

"When you look at access to education, access to health care, or access to opportunity, there are problems," he says. "The feeling Americans have is that hard work, as it once was, does not get them ahead any more in the same way."

More

Read more on the Prosperity Index

The lottery of life: Where to be born in 2013

Economist
November 21, 2012

Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?

To answer this, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.

Its quality-of-life index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are—to objective determinants of the quality of life across countries. Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of family life matter too. In all, the index takes 11 statistically significant indicators into account. They are a mixed bunch: some are fixed factors, such as geography; others change only very slowly over time (demography, many social and cultural characteristics); and some factors depend on policies and the state of the world economy.

A forward-looking element comes into play, too. Although many of the drivers of the quality of life are slow-changing, for this ranking some variables, such as income per head, need to be forecast. We use the EIU’s economic forecasts to 2030, which is roughly when children born in 2013 will reach adulthood.

More

Misery Leads to Myopia on Money

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
November 16, 2012

If you’re organizing the funeral of a recently deceased loved one, beware. Sadness makes people more short-sighted when it comes to money, a new paper reports.

In experiments, researchers first primed participants by showing short films known to instill either sadness, disgust or neutral feelings. Then participants were offered choices between immediate sums of money or larger sums they would receive months later.

Faced with such choices—a staple in social science experiments—people typically discount future rewards heavily. But results in this case show that sad people discounted the future much more than people feeling neutral or disgusted. In one experiment, neutral-feeling people required $56 to forgo $85 three months later, but sad people required only $37.

More

Read the Paper

Women eager to negotiate salaries, when given the opportunity

by William Harms

UChicagoNews
November 15, 2012

Although some scholars have suggested that the income gap between men and women is due to women’s reluctance to negotiate salaries, a new study at the University of Chicago shows that given an invitation, women are just as willing as men to negotiate for more pay.

Men, however, are more likely than women to ask for more money when there is no explicit statement in a job description that wages are negotiable, the study showed.

“We find that simple manipulations of the contract environment can significantly shift the gender composition of the applicant pool,” said UChicago economist John List, the Homer J. Livingston Professor in Economics.

List was a co-author of a paper based on a study of people responding to job advertisements in which salaries were advertised either as negotiable or fixed. Women were three times more likely to apply for jobs with negotiable salaries and to pursue negotiations once they applied, the study found.

Among those responding to an explicit salary offer, 8 percent of women and 11 percent of men initiated salary negotiations. When the salary was described as negotiable, 24 percent of women and 22 percent of men pursued salary discussions.

“By merely adding the information that the wage is ‘negotiable,’ we successfully reduced the gender gap in applications by approximately 45 percent,” said List.

More

Read the Paper

For Investors, Costly Academic Studies

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
November 7, 2012

A wide variety of investment strategies are described in the finance literature, but they do have something in common: after the professors write about them, returns are diminished.

That’s the finding of a couple of finance professors who looked at 82 market anomalies exploited by investors and then described in academic papers. In a working paper, the authors estimate that “the average anomaly’s post-publication return decays by about 35%.”

Mostly this seems to be the result of investors learning about the strategy from the academic papers and trading on it, thereby diminishing the precious anomaly in just the way markets are supposed to work. The effect is most pronounced, the professors write, “in large market capitalization stocks, high dollar volume stocks, low idiosyncratic risk stocks, and stocks that pay dividends.”

Link

Read the Paper