Does Marriage Equality negatively affect Marriage Incident Rates? Apparently it does in The Netherlands

Interesting times at the moment in Australia, with the upcoming Marriage equality postal plebiscite about to be commissioned to determine if the marriage definition will change.


Been looking at some of the arguments put forward by the "no" case. One of them is that by changing the definition of marriage, the institution itself becomes less relevant, meaning less marriages will occur, which isn't an ideal option. Seems a bit counter intuitive, you would think that by increasing the eligible pool of people that can get married, you would also increase overall marriage rates. But that all depends if people aren't put off marriage by the new eligibility.


Anyway, thought I would look at marriage rates in the Netherlands (which has had gay marriage longer than anyone else) to see if there was any impact.


So I downloaded marriage and birth stats from Statistics Netherlands, as well as population stats and made a dataset of marriage incidence (per 10,000 people) and birth incidence (per 10,000 people). Also added a dummy variable indicating Gay Marriage (which began in 2001)
Unfortunately, could only get stats from 1995-2016.







Running a regression, with dependent variable = Marriage Incidence, and independent variables being Birth Incidence and Gay Marriage dummy variable, leads to the following result.





So it does appear that the introduction of Gay Marriage did produce a reduction of 4 marriages per 10,000 people. This is statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval as well.


While it is only a small data set of 22 years, the result should give people pause if they believe marriage is an institution that should be continued. But if you want to accelerate the death of it, vote "Yes".

Market Risk Premium of the ASX200 for June 2017: 3.82%

Time for another Market Risk Premium update.


ASX200 average returns over the last 2 years = 1.857% p.a (Pretty lean returns)


Dividend Yield average over the last 2 years = 4.4875% p.a


Therefore, leaves the ASX200 total return at a pretty ordinary 6.34%. Better than a bank account I suppose, but still not great.


Risk free rate (average 10 year bond rate) = 2.52%


Therefore the market risk premium is 6.34-2.52 = 3.82%


Its positive, but below the 5 year average average of 5.07% I will estimate that it needs to come up a bit this year.

Women in Tech - Women do have to take some share of the blame here

All this talk about Women in Tech due to an un-name Google engineer daring to suggest that the reason why there is a gender gap  in companies like Google is because women aren't interested in tech careers.


I must admit, I sort of agree. If you look at the current stats about university courses and the gender divide, it looks pretty grim reading if you want the gender gap to get smaller.


Generally, the path to tech requires either an IT related degree, or an Engineering related degree. Thankfully the ABS records details of the people studying those types of degree. Lets have a look at the aggregate percentages over the years in Australia


In 2016, there are 271,037 people studying in either an IT field or an Engineering Field


Of those, 244,493 are male (90%). Only 26,544 are female (10%)


In 2006, there were 228,300 people studying in wither an IT field or an Engineering Field.


The percentages were then 13% female, 87% male.


So it has gotten a lot worse in 10 years. If it was bad 10 years ago, it is only going to get worse.

Apple Watch sales: Q3 2017: Now at $2.06b Billion

Not sure what has changed with the Apple Watch, but it has started to go gang busters.
People must be liking the Series 2.

See the graph below that is tracking Apple Sales based on my algorithm mentioned in earlier posts. After a shaky start, there has been continued growth in Apple Watch Sales over the last year.





Cracked $2 billion in sales for the first time this quarter. Not bad.

Are Christians more prone to domestic violence? Not in NSW

ABC recently broadcasted a report detailing that there are domestic violence issues in Christianity.
That sounded a bit dodgy to me, so I decided to do a regression analysis to see if it was true.


Got the following data from NSW sources


1. Incidents of Domestic Violence in 2016 from BOSCAR by postcode
http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Documents/RCS-Annual/PostcodeData.zip


2. Postcode census data in 2016 via DataPacks
https://datapacks.censusdata.abs.gov.au/datapacks/


 This gave me population data per postcode, median household income per postcode, Indigenous people per post code, Christian People per post code and finally Muslim people per postcode.


3. Using this info, I then created a data table which listed the domestic violence incidence per 10,000 people for each postcode. I also listed Indigenous people, Christian people and Islamic people per postcode as well.


4. I calculated the averages for each of these, including household income. Using these averages, I was able to calculate the anomalies from the average for each of these to ensure my data fits the assumptions of OLS regression


5. I then ran a linear regression with domestic violence anomaly being the dependent variable, and household income anomaly, Indigenous incidence anomaly, Christian incidence anomaly and Islam incidence anomaly.


The results are below.





Based on this data, income is actually not a statistically significant dependent variable for incidence of domestic violence, which was a surprise.


But Indigenous status, and both religions are statistically significant at the 95% confidence interval.


What is disturbing is that as Indigenous incident and Muslim incidence rise, so does domestic violence.


But for Christianity, the negative co-efficient means that domestic violence is actually less in those post codes where more people self report as Christians above the mean.


Which is certainly my experience. This might be different in other states of Australia, but if NSW is representative of Australia as a whole, I would say ABC is wrong in saying there are problems in the Christian church in regards to Domestic Violence. In fact, Christianity help reduce that incidence.

Real Wage Growth in Australia

Growth in wages is pretty piss poor in Australia. And the sad reality is that real wage growth has hit a negative in 2017. Check out the graph below.





As you can see, since 2013, wage growth has been pretty poor even though inflation has been minimal.
Not sure whether there is an answer to wage growth improving.