QLD Branch - Upcoming Meetings
Tuesday May 22nd 2012
Time: 4:00pm– 5:00pm.
Location: The Hall (Z2 Block, Room 226), 10 Musk Avenue, QUT, Kelvin Grove Campus. The Hall is next to La Boite's Roundhouse Theatre, entry on Musk Ave. Click here for directions to Kelvin Grove. Car parking is available at the top of Musk Avenue.
Speakers: Daniel Müller & Dr Lionel Page, School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology
Title: Political Selection and the Relative Age Effect.
Abstract: In this paper we present substantial evidence for the existence of a pattern in the distribution of births of leading US politicians in favour of those that have been the oldest in their cohort at school. This "relative age effect" has been proven to influence performance at school and in sports, but evidence on its impact on people’s vocational success has been rare. We find a marked break in the density of birth dates of politicians using a maximum likelihood Sawtooth test and McCrary’s (2008) nonparametric test. We conject that being relatively old in a peer group may create long term advantages which can create a significant role in the ability to succeed in a highly competitive environment like the race for top political offices in the USA. The magnitude of the effect we estimate is larger than what most other studies on the relative age effect for a broader (adult) population find, but is in general in line with studies that look at populations in high-competition environments.
Biography: Lionel is an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow and a Queensland Smart Future Fellow. Before joining QUT in 2010 he was a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster in London and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. Lionel graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan and the ENSAE (Paris Graduate School of Economics, Statistics and Finance) and received his PhD from the Paris School of Economics (Paris 1 – Sorbonne) in 2007.
Tuesday June 19th 2012
Time: 4:00pm– 5:00pm.
Location: TBA.
Speakers: Justin Boyle, CSIRO
Title: Understanding Demand and Capacity to Improve Health Service Delivery.
Abstract: TBA.
