Month: April 2019
Is the IT Revolution Over? An Asset Pricing View
I develop a method that structures financial market data to forecast economic outcomes. I use it to study the IT sector’s transition to its long-run share in the US economy. The method uses a model which links economy-wide growth with IT’s market valuation to match transition data on macroeconomic quantities, the sector’s life cycle patterns, and, importantly, market valuation ratios. My central estimates indicate that the revolution ends between 2028 and 2034 and that future average labor productivity growth will fall to 1.7 percent from the 2.7 recorded over 1974–2015. I show empirically the IT sector’s price-dividend ratio univariately explains over half of the variation in future productivity growth.
By Colin Ward. Speculative, as they say! Still, interesting to see someone go through the exercise. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The ferry subsidy culture that is New York City
One of the new routes Mr. de Blasio announced this year — between Coney Island and Wall Street — is projected to require a subsidy from the city of $24.75 for every passenger, according to a report from the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civic organization.
The commission said that the average subsidy for each passenger in the system’s first year of operation was $10.73, far more than the $6.60 subsidy the de Blasio administration originally estimated.
…Although it would cost $27.50 per person to ride the ferry from Coney Island to Wall Street, according to the Citizens Budget Commission’s report, the estimated 1,100 commuters will only pay $2.75.
Those are some high costs for a boat that sits on the water…here is the full story by Patrick McGeehan (NYT).
The cost of cannabis
Accounting for income endogeneity, our results suggested that being a current cannabis user may cost an individual over £5600 per year, in terms of lost wellbeing, while being a current user of other drugs may cost approximately £4000 per year. While acknowledging possible reverse causality, we estimated the annual population cost of drug use may be as high as £10.7bn in terms of lost wellbeing.
That is from a new paper by Anna Maccagnan, Tim Taylor, and Mathew P. White, via the excellent Rolf Degen.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Robert Wiblin podcast with Mark Lutter and Tamara Winter.
2. College selectivity over time.
3. Switzerland signs Belt and Road deal with China.
4. Ross Douthat on Notre Dame (NYT).
5. The Economist on Joko Widodo.
6. “Not all Chinese warm to hotpot. Some older Sichuanese disown it altogether. They complain that it is causing an escalation of chilli-use in other dishes that drowns out subtle flavours. Chua Lam, a celebrity food critic based in Hong Kong, caused a stir in December when he wished hotpot would disappear from the face of the Earth. He dismissed it as “the most uncultured form of cooking”, requiring no real culinary knowledge.” It’s better in Chengdu (The Economist).
7. Business is not running the show in D.C. (The Economist).
Susceptibility-based growth predictions
Modern macroeconomic theories were unable to foresee the last Great Recession and could neither predict its prolonged duration nor the recovery rate. They are based on supply−demand equilibria that do not exist during recessionary shocks. Here we focus on resilience as a nonequilibrium property of networked production systems and develop a linear response theory for input−output economics. By calibrating the framework to data from 56 industrial sectors in 43 countries between 2000 and 2014, we find that the susceptibility of individual industrial sectors to economic shocks varies greatly across countries, sectors, and time. We show that susceptibility-based growth predictions that take sector- and country-specific recovery into account, outperform—by far—standard econometric models. Our results are analytically rigorous, empirically testable, and flexible enough to address policy-relevant scenarios. We illustrate the latter by estimating the impact of recently imposed tariffs on US imports (steel and aluminum) on specific sectors across European countries.
That is the abstract of a new piece by Peter Klimek, Sebastian Poledna, and Stefan Thurner in Nature Communications. Via the excellent Charles Klingman.
Will China capture the main benefits from Belt and Road?
Maybe not, that is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one excerpt:
I was struck by a recent deal between China and Montenegro that gave China the right to access land in Montenegro as collateral, in case Montenegro does not repay certain loans. This has upset people in Montenegro, and it makes China seem like an imperialist country with territorial designs. But there’s also a more benign interpretation: China is demanding land as collateral because it knows Montenegro is not creditworthy. The loan sent Montenegro’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product to almost 80 percent, from 63 percent in 2012.
To put that in context, let’s say you heard of a loan shark who threatened to break the fingers of borrowers who did not repay. You would sooner infer that was a risky, so-so investment rather than a sure winner.
In essence, China is playing the role of loan shark, and that is not obviously the way to get ahead in today’s world. If China did claim some land in Montenegro as recompense for a bad loan, it might find holding the asset to be more trouble than it’s worth, much as Amazon decided to depart from a deal with New York because of hostility in parts of the city and state governments. If China tried to sell the land, a potential new buyer could never be sure of having enforceable title to the property.
Another problem with Belt and Road, at least from a Chinese point of view, is that China is dealing with many countries that are much smaller in terms of their GDP. There’s a tendency for small countries to renege on deals in hopes that big creditors won’t bother to make an example of them. You might think that smaller countries are easier for China to push around, and there is some truth to that. At the same time, both China and the small countries know that the small countries are not entirely masters of their fates, and so punishment strategies can be counterproductive or occasion more resentment than it is worth. Has the U.S. found it so easy to induce Honduras and Guatemala to stem the flow of migrants toward the border?
And this:
China has proven remarkably poor at supplementing Belt and Road with soft power persuasive techniques using diplomatic and cultural influence. This is no accident, nor does it reflect some kind of stubborn unwillingness of the Chinese to learn to wield soft power tools. Rather, the problem is structural. Since the Chinese government does not derive legitimacy through normal democratic channels, much of its diplomacy and foreign policy have to be channeled to please domestic audiences, whether the citizens or coalitions within the Communist Party. The necessary internal presentation shapes incentives for Chinese foreign policy, and that in turn alienate the other countries China is dealing with.
There is much more at the link.
Enraging dinosaur bone markets in everything
For sale on eBay: what’s claimed to be “maybe the only” young Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered for $2.95 million. Paleontologists decried the sale, saying that the specimen’s cost was artificially inflating the cost of other valuable fossils. “Only casts and other replicas of vertebrate fossils should be traded, not the fossils themselves,” an open letter from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Bethesda, Maryland. read. “Scientifically important fossils like the juvenile tyrannosaur are clues to our collective natural heritage and deserve to be held in public trust.”
…“The asking price is just absurd,” one researcher said.
Here is the full story, via Ze’ev. Might this increase the incentive to find such fossils?
Tuesday assorted links
1. Are patents responsible for declining business dynamism? (Not my view, but fyi.) Here is a paper blaming the slowdown on a deficiency in knowledge diffusion, I blame talent differentials in those cases.
2. “…measured productivity responds directly to competition.”
4. A short Time piece by me, excerpted and adapted from *Big Business*, on why current CEO pay is not outrageous. I do consider your most likely objections in the full chapter in the book.
5. Looking for Shakespeare’s library.
6. David Henderson on *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*.
The Effect of Economic Vulnerability on Protest Participation in the National Football League
Also known as “Incentives matter”:
What distinguishes between National Football League (NFL) players who participated in protests during the National Anthem and those who did not? Does the finding of a personal vulnerability constraint in high‐risk activism apply to this relatively elite population?
Protest participation during 2017 was determined for every NFL player, along with several variables pertaining to their performance, compensation, and the political atmosphere of their team.
Bivariate and multivariate tests both reveal that protest participation was far greater among players with large guaranteed contracts and among players who were well regarded for their performance.
Economic vulnerability ranges widely within the NFL such that players hold contracts offering guaranteed payments of anywhere between $92 million and nothing at all. The data here suggest that the personal vulnerability constraint documented in protest participation research also applies to this unique population of high‐profile people engaged in a most high‐profile protest. Documenting the existence of these constraints helps offer a more systematic foundation to our understanding of political activism behavior among athletes.
That is from a newly published article by David Niven.
Tax returns should not be made public information
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is an excerpt:
This idea has been suggested recently by Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times and also Matt Yglesias of Vox. In Norway it has been policy since 1814 and Finland does something similar.
I’m afraid, though, that universal tax transparency would boost U.S. economic inequality, take away second chances and devastate privacy.
And:
Or think about the dating market. Tax transparency would give high-earning men and women a bigger advantage and hurt their lower-earning competitors. Do we really wish to do that in an age of growing income inequality and diminished upward mobility?
Is it better if your parents and all your friends can see how well your new job is going or how much in royalties your last book earned? As it stands, we exist in a slightly more comfortable social equilibrium where your close associates assume the best or at least give you the benefit of the doubt. Transparency of earnings would increase stress and make failure and disappointment all too publicly evident. Or entrepreneurs with long-term projects which are going to make it — but not right away — might face too many social or family pressures to quit.
Snooping through the tax system would definitely happen. Evidence from Norway indicates that in 2007, 40 percent of Norwegian adults checked somebody’s tax information online, higher than the penetration of Facebook in Norway. Anonymity of the snooper was removed in 2014, and visits fell dramatically (88 percent by one measure), but still you can imagine paying others to snoop for you or the information eventually getting out over time.
The result of tax-record publication was that “this game of income comparisons negatively affected the well-being of poorer Norwegians while at the same time boosting the self-esteem of the rich,” according to Ricardo Perez-Truglia, a UCLA economics professor writing last week in VoxEU. There’s even a smartphone app that creates income leaderboards from the data on your Facebook friends.
Just as personal freedom and economic freedom are not so easily separable, the same is true for personal privacy and financial privacy. Are there actually people out there worried about Facebook privacy violations who wish to make all tax returns public and on-line?
The cost of Parisian Gothic cathedrals
This thesis examines the implicit costs of building the Gothic churches of the Paris Basin built between 1100-1250, and attempts to estimate the percentage of the regional economy that was devoted to build them. I estimate that over this 150-year period, on average, 21.5 percent of the regional economy was devoted to the construction of these Gothic churches, 1.5 percent of which is directly related to the implicit cost of labor.
That is from an honors thesis by Amy Denning, joint work with Keith Jakee.
New results on the China shock, furthermore the China shock is largely over
Using Census micro data we find that the impact of Chinese import competition on US manufacturing had a striking regional variation. In high-human capital areas (for example, much of the West Coast or New England) most manufacturing job losses came from establishments industry switching to services. The establishment remained open but changed to research, design, management or wholesale. In the low human-capital areas (for example, much of the South and mid-West) manufacturing job-losses came from plant closure without much offsetting gain in service employment. Offshoring appears to drive these manufacturing job losses – the Chinese trade impact arose primarily in large importing firms that were simultaneously expanding service sector employment. Hence, our data suggest Chinese trade redistributed jobs from manufacturing in lower income areas to services in higher income areas. Finally, the impact of Chinese imports appear to have disappeared after 2007 – we find strong employment impacts from 2000 to 2007, but nothing since from 2008 to 2015.
That is from a new paper by Nicholas Bloom, Kyle Handley, André Kurmann, and Philip Luck. Via Bryan Caplan.
Monday assorted links
1. Emily Hamilton on the Elizabeth Warren housing bill.
2. “… a $10 million boost in NIH funding leads to a net increase of 2.7 patents.” — Good or bad? Or can you tell?
3. Interview with Paul Coates.
4. Books on economics and philosophy.
5. Just how bad is crony capitalism anyway? A short excerpt from *Big Business*.
The new who gives a damn politics
It’s also worth noting that talk is going around DC that the US and China may keep the original $50B in tariffs, but that the Trump Administration has asked the Chinese to move theirs away from targeting the GOP base to less politically sensitive sectors, even proposing alternative industries to the Chinese side.
That is from Bill Bishop, who edits the email newsletter Sinocism, which I find essential and pay real money to read. Here is additional Bloomberg coverage.
The Disconnect Between Biological Time and Standard Time Reduces Health
In Poor Sleep Makes People Poor I discussed an important paper by Maulik Jagnani showing how India’s single time zone creates a big disconnect between biological time as given by light cues and clock time. The disconnects impedes sleep patterns and reduces human capital for those most effected.
In a new paper in the Journal of Health Economics, Sunset Time and the Economic Effects of Social Jetlag Giuntella and Mazzonna show that the same types of effects can be observed in the United States.
The rapid evolution into a 24h society challenges individuals’ ability to conciliate work schedules and biological needs. Epidemiological research suggests that social and biological time are increasingly drifting apart (“social jetlag”). This study uses a spatial regression discontinuity design to estimate the economic cost of the misalignment between social and biological rhythms arising at the border of a time-zone in the presence of relatively rigid social schedules (e.g., work and school schedules). Exploiting the discontinuity in the timing of natural light at a time-zone boundary, we find that an extra hour of natural light in the evening reduces sleep duration by an average of 19 minutes and increases the likelihood of reporting insufficient sleep. Using data drawn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Census, we find that the discontinuity in the timing of natural light has significant effects on health outcomes typically associated with circadian rhythms disruptions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and breast cancer) and economic performance (per capita income). We provide a lower bound estimate of the health care costs and productivity losses associated with these effects.
Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.