Educational for-profit charter schools do worse in Sweden
I estimate the long-run earnings impacts of for-profit and non-profit charter high schools in Sweden. Since the 1990s, privately managed schools have expanded dramatically—driven entirely by for-profit providers—and now enroll nearly half of urban high school students. Unlike in many other settings, there are no schools operating outside of the public system: all schools rely on equal public funding, cannot charge top-up fees, and are subject to the same regulation. Using a combination of value-added and regression discontinuity methods, I find that charter school attendance reduces long-run earnings by 2% on average—comparable to the returns to half a year of schooling in similar settings. For-profits generate these losses by hiring less-educated, lower-paid teachers, consistent with concerns around cost-cutting. By contrast, non-profits reduce earnings by specializing in arts programs: conditional on such specialization, they perform as or even better than public schools. In a discrete choice framework using rank-ordered school applications, I show that students’ preferences are weakly related to schools’ earnings impacts. Most of the for-profit market share is explained by student demand for attractive locations and study programs, presenting a trade-off between satisfying short-run demand and boosting long-run economic outcomes.
That is the job market paper from Petter Berg, from Stockholm School of Economics.
Housing costs and fertility
Many developed countries face low and falling birthrates, potentially affected by rising costs of housing. Existing evidence on the fertility-housing cost relationship typically uses geographic variation (raising selection issues), neglects unit size, and says little about policy. To progress on these fronts, I first specify a dynamic model of the joint housing-fertility choice allowing choices over location and house size, estimated using US Census Bureau data. I extend ‘micro-moment’ techniques (Petrin, 2002; Berry et al., 2004a) both to circumvent data constraints and to incorporate heterogeneous residuals, which can prevent misspecification. Housing choice estimates confirm a Becker quantity-quality model’s predictions: large families are more cost-sensitive, and so rising housing costs disincentivize fertility. To study the causal effect of rising housing costs on fertility, I vary them directly within the model, finding that rising costs since 1990 are responsible for 11% fewer children, 51% of the total fertility rate decline between the 2000s and 2010s, and 7 percentage points fewer young families in the 2010s. Policy counterfactuals indicate that a supply shift for large units generates 2.3 times more births than an equal-cost shift for small units: family-friendly housing is the more important policy lever.
That is from Benjamin K. Couilliard, a job market candidate from University of Toronto.
Should USG support a 50-year mortgage?
More “affordability” from Trump!? From GPT-5:
Broad, government‑backed 50‑year mortgages would likely lower monthly payments but raise house prices, slow equity build‑up (and raise default risk in downturns), and increase interest‑rate risk in the financial system. As a general affordability policy for the U.S., that’s a poor trade‑off. If used at all, a 50‑year term should be tightly targeted (e.g., to loan modifications or to newly built homes only), not adopted wholesale for new purchases…
In the short run, sellers and incumbent owners capture much of the benefit via higher sale prices; first‑time buyers face higher entry prices…
Here is the whole answer. Albania has the right idea!
The first human arrivals in the New World may have sailed from northeast Asia
The first people to migrate to North America may have sailed from north-east Asia around 20,000 years ago. Experts have argued that prehistoric people in Hokkaido, Japan, used similar stone tools to those later found in North America, and suggest that seafarers may have travelled to the continent during the last ice age, bringing this stone technology with them. This adds weight to the theory that the first Americans arrived much earlier than previously thought.
And:
“By [around 30,000 years ago], Upper Palaeolithic seafarers were using sea-going vessels to access some of the outer islands in the Japanese archipelago … and were capable of negotiating the Kuroshio Current, one of the fastest in the world,” Davis and his colleagues write in their paper, published in October in the journal Science Advances. “This suggests that such experienced seafarers may also have been capable of handling adverse Pacific coastal currents.”
Nonetheless, the team also suggest that the journey could have happened at a much slower pace. In this reconstruction, the prehistoric seafarers gradually followed a route along the Pacific coast.
Here is the full story. I have long wondered why, every now and then, in Japan I see a person who looks a great deal like a “Native American.”
Saturday assorted links
1. Zvi (NN) on my podcast with Sam Altman. I will note that GPT-5 is very good at picking out restaurants for me in northern Spain, and Neruda you have to read in Spanish, otherwise it is lame.
2. Peter Thiel on young people and socialism (Free Press).
3. Is the Heritage Foundation imploding?
4. Fertility job market papers.
5. Iguana advisory for Florida.
6. The full twenty minute Sydney Sweeney GQ interview is worth watching. Few books about sociology are this valuable. And memed, about free trade.
My podcast with Deutsche Bank
This was at first for a recent private event, now they have released the session. First I am interviewed, and then there is audience Q&A. Here is the Spotify link.
Emergent Ventures India, 12th cohort
Harish Ashok, 16, received his grant to build a multi-purpose rover.
Dev Patel, economist, received his grant to expand his method combining machine learning and geophysics to detect and forecast floods across Indian villages.
Saurabh Chandra, Pranay Kotasthane, and Khyati Pathak received their grant for Puliyabaazi Hindi Podcast, to expand and develop articles and video formats in simple, conversational Hindi.
Vishrant Dave, Ayush Ranjan and Prateesh Awasthi received their grant for Armatrix, hyper-redundant robotic arms for inspection and maintenance in hard-to-reach and hazardous industrial environments.
Akhil Reddy K received his grant for Livestockify, to develop solar-powered IoT sensors for real-time poultry disease and health monitoring.
Mohil Ahuja, 19, received his grant to develop a low-cost algae-based air purification system addressing indoor pollution.
Reivanth Kanagaraj received his grant for ColourCryption, to create low-cost anti-counterfeiting solutions using fluorescent inks.
Kaviraj Prithvi, 23, received his grant for uDot, to build a tactile display enabling blind students to study STEM.
Tawheed Rahman, highschooler, received his grant to build a low-cost prosthetic robotic arm.
Keya Shah, 22, received her grant to develop a prosthetics solution in Bangalore.
Sanjay Ganguli received his grant to acquire equipment for documenting wildlife stories from India.
Avhijit Nair, 26, received his grant for HydroPlas Tech, to produce graphene from waste plastic.
Rain Regious received his grant for TRIPd, to develop a wearable revolutionizing personal temperature control through thermoreceptors.
Pragyaan Gaur, 18, received his grant to build technology reducing industrial sulfur dioxide emissions.
Wajih ur Rehman received his grant to develop an aerosol-technology-based solution to curb air pollution in Pakistan.
Rakshith Aloori, 25, received his grant to build desalination machines solving the water crisis.
Prashansa Tripathi, doctoral student at IIT Jodhpur, received travel and conference support to attend the cognitive neuroscience skills training program at Cambridge University.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
TC again: I thank Shruti for preparing this blog post, and for all the work behind it!
Affordability sentences to ponder
Two books I hope you do not mood affiliate against
The firtst is Laura K. Field, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
The author chronicles the history of the “New Right” from a left-wing perspective, and often in ways that non-Trumpers also will find objectionable. Still, the book has plenty of facts and substance, and it is the best history of this group I know of. There is plenty of biography and group identification in here, so it serves as a guidebook.
The second is Mahmood Mamdani, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. I ordered this one before I knew who wrote it, namely Papa Mamdani. Again, there is plenty you can object to here, but it is an actual (partial) history of Uganda, interwoven with autobiography. The author actually tries to explain to you what was going on, rather than writing to “fill a gap in the literature,” or whatever. Too bad his actual views are so objectionable — Papa Mamdani, Uganda never had neoliberalism! Yet I am glad I bought it and will continue reading it, because it fills in many pieces of the story, most of all for the Ugandan campaigns against Israelis, the British, and Indians.
And there you go.
Friday assorted links
1. Private rooms in a nursing home do not seem to help individuals.
2. “We find that the height of Americans began to decline among those born around or before the early 1980s in parallel with the diminution in the rate of increase of life expectancy. The decline in adult height ranged from 0·68 ± 0.36 cm among white women to 1·97 ± 0.50 cm among Hispanic men and is statistically significant across all six demographic groups considered.” Link here.
4. Is there momentum in prediction markets?
5. Cluny Institute looking for a new partner.
6. Sam Altman on the role of government in AI.
7. Further discussion of Kosmos, the “AI scientist.” And from Tony Kulesa.
Very good sentences
TL;DR: AI now solves university assignments perfectly in minutes. Students often use LLMs as a crutch rather than as a tutor, getting answers without understanding. To address these problems, I propose a barbell strategy: pure fundamentals (no AI) on one end, full-on AI projects on the other, with no mushy middle. Universities should focus on fundamentals.
That is from Simas at Inexact Science.
What I’ve been reading
1. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. There are a variety of books on these figures and this topic, but after buying and perusing a whole bunch of them, this is the one I found useful.
2. Meryle Secrest, Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject. A highly entertaining quasi-autobiography, focusing on her work on the nine different biographies she wrote of some very different people. As far as I can tell, Secrest is 95 years old and living in the Washington, D.C. area — hope I run into her at Mama Chang some day. Though I suspect she lives in Bethesda.
3. Paul McCartney, Wings: A Story of a Band on the Run. Not really written by McCartney, but excerpts from interviews with parties involved with Wings, Paul included. Presented as if it were an oral history, which in part it is. Very well done, not for everyone obviously but it is for me. Macca and music aside, it is a good study of how to reinvent oneself, and how weird you need to be to actually succeed with that. Here is a good Ian Leslie review.
4. Eça de Queiros, Adam and Eve in Paradise. Originally from the 19th century, but translated into English only this year. A 60 pp. novella about exactly what the title indicates, noting that matters are not as simple as the first telling of that story might have suggested.
5. Daniel Baldwin Hess, editor, The Shoup Doctrine: Essays Celebrating Donald Shoup and Parking Reforms, is much needed and is exactly as it seeks to present itself.
Thursday assorted links
1. Those new service sector jobs.
2. Optimism is correlated with exceptional longevity.
3. “Kosmos has made 7 discoveries so far, which we are releasing today, in areas ranging from neuroscience to material science and clinical genetics, in collaboration with our academic beta testers. Three of these discoveries reproduced unpublished findings; four are net new, validated contributions to the scientific literature.” Link here.
4. The wisdom of Ross Douthat.
5. “Following large exogenous minimum wage increases, schedule unpredictability increases by 20% per week and schedules become even more responsive to weather shocks. This highlights how some of the welfare gains workers realize from a minimum wage may be offset by increased schedule unpredictability.” Link here to the paper.
6. Kevin Kelly’s essentials for independent travel in China.
7. New colossal statue for Alcatraz island? Recall Alex’s proposal.
8. Ross dialogue on feminization with Leah Libresco Sargent and Helen Andrews (NYT).
Creative Stagnation
Legislation requiring cars and trucks, including electric vehicles, to have AM radios easily cleared a House committee Wednesday, although it could run into opposition going forward.
H.R. 979, the “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act,” would require the Department of Transportation to enforce the mandate through a rulemaking. It passed the Energy and Commerce Committee by a 50-1 vote. Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) was the only “no.”
What’s next—mandating 8-track players in every car? Fax machines in every home? Floppy disks in every laptop? If Congress actually cared about emergency communication, it would strengthen cellular networks, not cling to obsolete technology. Congress is a den of old busybodies.
Hat tip: Nick Gillespie.
Addendum: If AM radio is so valuable for emergencies then the market will provide or you could, you know, put an AM radio in your glove box. No need for a mandate. We already have FM, broadcast TV, cable, satellite, cell, and Wireless Emergency Alerts; resilience can be met without specifying AM hardware.
Here Comes the Sun—If We Let It: Cutting Tariffs and Red Tape for Rooftop Solar
Australia has so much rooftop solar power that some states are offering free electricity during peak hours:
TechCrunch: For years, Australians have been been installing solar panels at a rapid clip. Now that investment is paying off.
The Australian government announced this week that electricity customers in three states will get free electricity for up to three hours per day starting in July 2026.
Solar power has boomed in Australia in recent years. Rooftop solar installations cost about $840 (U.S.) per kilowatt of capacity before rebates, about a third of what U.S. households pay. As a result, more than one in three Australian homes have solar panels on their roof.
Why is rooftop solar adoption in the U.S. lagging behind Australia, Europe, and much of Asia? Australia has roughly as many rooftop installations as the entire United States, despite having less than a tenth of its population.
First, tariffs. U.S. tariffs on imported solar panels mean American buyers pay double to triple the global market rate.
Second, permits. The U.S. permitting process is slow, fragmented, and expensive. In Australia, no permit is required for a standard installation—you simply notify the distributor and have an accredited installer certify safety. In Australia, a rooftop solar panel is treated like an appliance; in the U.S., it’s treated like a mini power plant. Germany takes a similar approach to Australia, with national standards and an “as-of-right” presumption for rooftop solar that removes red tape.
By contrast, the U.S. system involves multiple layers of approval—building and electrical permits, several inspections, and a Permission-to-Operate from the local utility, which may not be eager to speed things up just to lose your business. Moreover, each of thousands of jurisdictions has different requirements, creating long delays and high costs.
High costs suppress adoption, limiting economies of scale and forcing installers to spend more on sales than installation. Yet Australia and Germany are not so different from the United States—they simply made solar easy. If the U.S. eliminated tariffs, standardized/nationalized rules, and accelerated approvals, rooftop solar would take off, costs would fall, and innovation would follow.
The benefits extend beyond cheaper power. Distributed rooftop generation makes the grid more resilient. Streamlining solar policy would thus cut energy costs, strengthen protection against disasters and disruptions, and speed the transition to a future with more abundant and cleaner power.