Month: November 2014

Ezra Klein interviews Peter Thiel

There are many good bits, here is one of them:

…I have a slightly different cut on the Snowden revelations. I think it shows the NSA more as the Keystone Cops than as Big Brother. What is striking to me is how little James Bond-like stuff was going on and how little they did with all this information. That’s why I think, in some ways, the NSA is more in this anti-technological zone where they don’t know what to do with the data they find. So they just hoover up all the data, all over the world. I think it was news to Obama that he was tapping into [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel’s cell phone.

One way to think about this is that if the NSA bureaucracy actually knew what they were doing, they would probably need way less information. What’s shocking about Snowden is how much information they had and how little they did with it.

Read the whole thing.

Assorted links

1. Daniel Davies on the foreign exchange scandals.

2. Should having a toilet be a prerequisite for running for public office?

3. Hermit crabs solve a matching problem and swap shells.

4. The wrong way to steal a chainsaw.

5. Tax incidence theory: “…up to 74 percent of the variation in adoption costs is explained by child characteristics.”

6. How do Harvard faculty complain about their health care benefits?: “What I don’t have time to do is find $1,500 in my back pocket.”

Markets in everything: de-naming rights and re-naming rights (Coase vindicated)

Since its adolescence more than four decades ago, the New York Philharmonic’s home at Lincoln Center has been known as Avery Fisher Hall. Now, as the orchestra prepares for a major renovation expected to cost more than $500 million, the Fisher family has agreed to relinquish the name, so the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center can lure a large donor with the promise of rechristening the building.

…Lincoln Center is essentially paying the family $15 million for permission to drop the name and has included several other inducements, like a promise to feature prominent tributes to Avery Fisher in the lobby of the renovated concert hall.

While the ability to raise money through naming opportunities has become a staple tool for arts organizations, perhaps no event speaks louder to its utility as a fund-raising mechanism than Lincoln Center’s willingness to pay a veteran donor to step away so it can court a new benefactor in his stead.

The full story is here.

Which fields in economics get cited the most?

We have some new results, from Maria Victoria Anauati, Sebastian Galiani, and Ramiro H. Gálvez, all consistent with my prior intuitions:

Does the life cycle of economic papers differ across fields of economic research? By constructing and analyzing a large dataset that combines information on 9,672 articles published in the top five economic journals from 1970 to 2000 with detailed yearly citation data obtained from Google Scholar, we find that published articles do have a life cycle that differs across fields of economic research (which we divide into the categories of applied research, applied theory, econometrics methods and theory). Applied research and applied theory papers are the clear winners in terms of citation counts. For the first years after their publication, they receive higher numbers of citations per year than papers in other fields of research do. They also reach a higher peak number of citations per year and apparently sustain those peak levels for longer, in addition to being cited over longer periods of time (i.e., they have a longer lifespan). Citation patterns are much less favorable for theoretical papers, which are the object of fewer citations per annum in the first years following publication, have lower peak numbers and a shorter lifespan. Econometric method papers are a special case; the pattern for most of these papers is similar to the pattern for theory papers, but the most successful papers (as measured by the number of citations) on econometric methods are also the most successful papers in the entire discipline of economics.

The SSRN paper is here.  And via Ben Southwood, here is an interesting new paper on how citation success usually pops up early in the life of a paper: “…citations in the first two years after publication explain more than half of the variation in cumulative citations received over a longer period.”

How can Scandinavians tax so much?

Henrik Jacobsen Kleven has a new JEP piece on that question., here is one short excerpt:

…these countries also spend relatively large amounts on the public provision and subsidization of goods that are complementary to working, including child care, elderly care, and transportation. Such policies represent subsidies to the costs of market work, which encourage labor supply and make taxes less distortionary…Furthermore, Scandinavian countries spend heavily on education, which is complementary to long-run labor supply and potentially offsets some of the distortionary effects of taxation…

The paper makes numerous other good points.

By Besley and Persson, here is a related JEP piece on why developing economies tax so little.  And here is a recent piece on whether Sweden can become a fully cashless society.  By the way, the full issue of JEP is here.

How the Chinese view their own climate agreement

Both sides put out their joint statement, the U.S. issuing it via the White House and China releasing it through the official Xinhua News Agency. But whereas one side gave it a high gloss, the other seemed to be trying to bury it under the rug. The top story on the website affiliated with the Communist Party flagship paper The People’s Daily was about Xi and Obama meeting the press  — but the article made no reference to the climate agreement. Other stories on the homepage touched on the climate statement but tended to relegate it to the latter half of the article, and omitted the American-style superlatives. The popular Beijing News, a state-run paper known for gently testing the editorial boundaries, also didn’t mention the climate deal in its Nov. 12 cover story on the APEC meeting that brought Obama to China. It focused instead on the meeting’s anti-corruption accord and progress on plans for a pan-Asian free trade zone spearheaded by China.

Here is one reason why:

Beijing is under fire domestically for its unsuccessful efforts to curb local air pollution, noting that people were furious that authorities managed to clear the air for the visiting APEC dignitaries but can’t do it on a daily basis for their own citizens. ” There may be worries that focusing on climate change rather than air pollution doesn’t meet the public’s main concerns,” Seligsohn said via email.

That is all from a good piece by Alexa Olesen at Foreign Policy.

When will China reverse its carbon emissions?

No one knows for sure, you will find a brief survey of some estimates here.  Let’s start with a few simpler points, however.

First, China is notorious for making announcements about air pollution and then not implementing them.  This is only partially a matter of lying, in part the government literally does not have the ability to keep its word.  They have a great deal of coal capacity coming on-line and they can’t just turn that switch off.  They’re also driving more cars, too.

Second, China falsifies estimates of the current level of air pollution, so as to make it look like the problem is improving when it is not.  Worse yet, during the APEC summit the Chinese government blocked the more or less correct estimates coming from U.S. Embassy data, which are usually transmitted through an app.  A nice first step to the “deal” with the United States would have been to allow publication (through the app) of the correct numbers.  But they didn’t.  What does that say about what one might call…”the monitoring end”…of this new deal?

Third, a lot of the relevant Chinese regulatory apparatus is at the local not federal level (in fact it should be more centrally done, even if not fully federalized in every case).  There are plenty of current local laws against air pollution which are simply not enforced, often because of corruption, and often that pollution is emanating from locally well-connected, job-creating state-owned enterprises.  Often the pollution comes from one locality and victimizes another, especially in the north of the country.   Those are not good local regulatory incentives and it will take a long time to correct them.  Right now for instance Beijing imports a lot of its pollution from nearby, poorer regions which simply wish to keep churning the stuff out.  The Chinese also do not have anything close to a consistently well-staffed environmental bureaucracy.

Fourth, if you look at the history of air pollution, countries clean up the most visible and also the most domestically dangerous problems first, and often decades before solving the tougher issues.  For China that highly visible, deadly pollutant would be Total Particulate Matter, which kills people in a rather direct way, and in large numbers, and is also relatively easy to take care of.  (Mexico for instance has been getting that one under control for some time now.)  The Chinese people (and government) are much more worried about TPM than about carbon emissions, which is seen as something foreigners complain about.  Yet TPM is still getting worse in China, and if it is (possibly) flat-lining this year that is only because of the economic slowdown, not because of better policy.

When will China cap carbon emissions?  “Fix TPM and get back to me in twenty years” is still probably an underestimate.  Don’t forget that by best estimates CO2 emissions were up last year in China by more than four percent.  How many wealthier countries have made real progress on carbon emissions?  Even Denmark has simply flattened them out, not pulled them back.

The Chinese really are making a big and genuine effort when it comes to renewables, it is just that such an effort is dwarfed by the problems mentioned above.

The media coverage I have seen of the U.S.-China emissions “deal” has not been exactly forthcoming in presenting these rather basic points.  It’s almost as if no one studies the history of air pollution anymore.

I understand why a lot of reporters want to “clutch at straws” — it’s good for both clicks and the conscience — but a dose of realism is required as well.  The announced deal is little more than a well-timed, well-orchestrated press release.

What’s up with GruberGate?

Is it up to three cynical tapes about Obamacare now?   I’ve lost track.

I’m not so interested in pushing through the mud on this one.  It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight.  Or how about blogs?: do we want a world where no former advisor can write honestly about the policies of an administration?  I’ve disagreed with Gruber from the beginning on health care policy and I thought his ObamaCare comic book did the economics profession — and himself — a disservice.  But I’m simply not very interested in his proclamations on tape, which as far as I can tell are mostly correct albeit overly cynical.  (If anything he is overrating the American voter — most people weren’t even paying close enough attention to be tricked.)  Criticisms of Gruber are not criticisms of a policy, and it is policy we should focus upon and indeed there is still a great deal of health care policy we need to figure out.  It’s hardly news that intellectuals who hold political power, even as advisors, very often do not speak the truth.  If anything, I feel sorry for Gruber that he has subsequently felt the need to so overcompensate by actively voicing such ex post cynicism, it is perhaps the sign of a soul not at rest.

In the meantime, I’d like to see more open discourse, not less.  Perhaps we should subsidize people who end up looking foolish, rather than taxing them.

Facts about Lords

The House of Lords, that is:

One hundred and thirteen draw paychecks from financial-services firms. Twenty-six are paid by resource-extraction companies. Twenty work for foreign governments, in capacities that include advising officials on policy and consulting for government-controlled companies.

Some of those jobs materialized after they joined the House of Lords.

There is much more here, from Justin Scheck and Charles Forelle.  For the pointer I thank Matthew A. Petersen.

The Reversal of the Latitude-Income Correlation

It’s well known that GDP per capita increases with distance from the equator and it does so moving both North and South. (I discuss this correlation at MRU in Geography and Development, Disease (video)). Dietz Vollrathat at the Growth and Development Blog points us to a new paper by Holger Strulik and Carl-Johan Dalgaard that shows that development used to be greater nearer the equator. Here’s the big picture.

The top panel shows that as absolute latitude (distance from the equator) increases today so does development, here measured as the urbanization rate. The left panel shows the world. The right panel shows, rather remarkably, that the relationship continues to hold in Europe.  The bottom panel shows that as absolute latitude increased in 1500 development, here measured as population density, decreased both in the world and Europe.

LatitudeIncome

What can account for this relationship and its reversal? The authors have a let’s say highly speculative (but very interesting!) theory. It runs as follows. Animals and people get bigger in colder climates possibly because surface area to volume decreases with size so larger animals can retain heat more easily. All else the same, however, bigger people means fewer people and so in the pre-industrial era higher latitudes had smaller populations leading to less innovation (ala my TED talk on market size and innovation). But fewer children also meant more investment in human capital per child (a Beckerian quality-quantity tradeoff). Higher human capital per child leads to increases in technology which allow and encourage even more human capital accumulation and fewer but yet even higher quality children and thus you hit a takeoff point where the economies of the colder regions accelerate generating the modern relationship.

Phew! Now that’s a theory. I don’t say that I believe it but I applaud the ambition. Bravo!

What alternative theories do MR readers propose?

Is the economics job market worth it?

There is a new NBER paper on this topic by McFall, Murray-Close, Willis, and Chen, gated copy here.  Here are some key takeaways from the paper:

1. One-third of the job candidates in the sample were women.

2. More than one quarter of all job candidates on the market come from top ten institutions, which tend to have the largest Ph.d. programs.

3. 28 percent of new job candidates enter the market with some kind of publication.  The average candidate has served as primary instructor for one or two courses, plus as teaching assistant for more than three courses.

4. The five most frequently listed fields are labor economics, macro, IO, applied micro, and econometrics, each listed by 21-23% of the candidates.

5. 72% of the people on the market express a preference for jobs as assistant professor.

6. More than eighty percent of the job candidates “expected to place in the top half of the distribution for their graduate department.”

7. Although there is overoptimism, in terms of relative rank candidates have a decent idea of where they will end up.

8. Job candidates receive three offers on average (noting that only half of the candidates in the total pool responded, so there may be bias.  Three strikes me as a little high on average).

9. Number of publications predicts higher yield in terms of job offers, whereas gender, undergraduate school, having a Ph.d. from the U.S., and teaching experience have only weak predictive power.

10. As a candidate progresses through the process of interview, flyout, and the like, unobservable characteristics matter more and more for predicting outcomes.  This is consistent with the view that the process itself yields information, though whether that information is ultimately accurate as a predictor of success remains an open question.

11. Approximately 92% of candidates ended up with a job (!).

12. More than two-thirds of the candidates are “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their final results.

13. The average base salary for accepted jobs is $93,000.  The median base salary is $88,600.

14. The paper has many other results of interest.  As Bryan Caplan has previously observed, being an economist is a great life and a great career — do it!