Month: October 2019
When can companies force change by standing up to foreign governments
It’s easy to condemn firms for meek apologies — and to criticize the NBA and others as willing tools of the Chinese regime, “submitting to authoritarianism” to make a buck. However, our research suggests even when companies want to support global democracy and human rights, they find it much harder than anticipated and trap themselves in unenviable choices…
Our research has shown, time and again, how companies fail to live up to these lofty expectations [improving liberties and human rights]. It’s not for lack of trying. Instead, companies find the problems governments want them to solve are incredibly hard — and companies themselves suffer the political fallout when they can’t get things right.
And this:
Companies are most likely to deliver benefits when the measures they take are concrete, focused on specific goals and build on existing corporate expertise. These measures are more likely to affect change when companies join in collective actions by the business community that complement international political campaigns.
There is much more at the link, including discussions of China and South Africa.
Dav Pilkey on ADHD
Q: And you had to sit in the hall in elementary school?
A: So little was known about those conditions back in those days, and I think it was just seen as I was distracting everyone in the class with my silliness. I couldn’t stay in my chair and keep my mouth shut. So the teachers from second to fifth grade just put me in the hall. It ended up being kind of a blessing for me, too, because it gave me time to draw and to create stories and comics. I guess I made lemonade out of it…
Q: You must hear from young readers who tell you about their own difficulties and why your books help them.
A: I do. That’s actually one of the reasons I love to go out on the road and tour so much. Sometimes they’re proud in a way. There will be kids who will have posters they hold up that say that they’ve “got dyslexia like Dav,” or they’ll tell me proudly that they have ADHD. I don’t call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Delightfulness. I want kids to know that there’s nothing wrong with you. You just think differently, and that’s a good thing. It’s good to think differently. This world needs people who think differently; it’s your superpower.
Michael Kremer, Nobel laureate
To Alex’s excellent treatment I will add a short discussion of Kremer’s work on deworming (with co-authors, most of all Edward Miguel), here is one summary treatment:
Intestinal helminths—including hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, and schistosomiasis—infect more than one-quarter of the world’s population. Studies in which medical treatment is randomized at the individual level potentially doubly underestimate the benefits of treatment, missing externality benefits to the comparison group from reduced disease transmission, and therefore also underestimating benefits for the treatment group. We evaluate a Kenyan project in which school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs was randomly phased into schools, rather than to individuals, allowing estimation of overall program effects. The program reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one-quarter, and was far cheaper than alternative ways of boosting school participation. Deworming substantially improved health and school participation among untreated children in both treatment schools and neighboring schools, and these externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment. Yet we do not find evidence that deworming improved academic test scores.
If you do not today have a worm, there is some chance you have Michael Kremer to thank!
With Blanchard, Kremer also has an excellent and these days somewhat neglected piece on central planning and complexity:
Under central planning, many firms relied on a single supplier for critical inputs. Transition has led to decentralized bargaining between suppliers and buyers. Under incomplete contracts or asymmetric information, bargaining may inefficiently break down, and if chains of production link many specialized producers, output will decline sharply. Mechanisms that mitigate these problems in the West, such as reputation, can only play a limited role in transition. The empirical evidence suggests that output has fallen farthest for the goods with the most complex production process, and that disorganization has been more important in the former Soviet Union than in Central Europe.
Kremer with co-authors also did excellent work on the benefits of school vouchers in Colombia. And here is Kremer’s work on teacher incentives — incentives matter! His early piece on wage inequality with Maskin, from 1996, was way ahead of its time. And don’t forget his piece on peer effects and alcohol use: many college students think the others are drinking more than in fact they are, and publicizing the lower actual level of drinking can diminish alcohol abuse problems. The Hajj has an impact on the views of its participants, and “… these results suggest that students become more empathetic with the social groups to which their roommates belong,.” link here.
And don’t forget his famous paper titled “Elephants.” Under some assumptions, the government should buy up a large stock of ivory tusks, and dump them on the market strategically, to ruin the returns of elephant speculators at just the right time. No one has ever worked through the issue before of how to stop speculation in such forbidden and undesirable commodities.
Michael Kremer has produced a truly amazing set of papers.
Esther Duflo reminiscenses
I first contacted Esther (and Abhijit) in 2006, when I wanted to write a New York Times column on their RCT work in India, specifically Hyderabad. They were both extremely welcoming of my inquiries and did everything possible to give me a chance to observe their work up close.
I ended up traveling to Hyderabad, India, and spent a whole day with their RCT program in the field. Annie Duflo, Esther’s sister, was gracious enough to travel with me around the city for an entire day, visiting the meetings where the women would show up to receive loans, and talking with the loan suppliers. Overall I was astonished at how well-organized the work was, and how sophisticated the on-the-ground implementers were. This was really work very carefully done.
Then, in 2013, seven years later, Banerjee and Duflo and co-authors Glennerster and Kinnan created a paper with the core results from the experiment, here is one version of the abstract:
This paper reports results from the randomized evaluation of a group lending microcredit program in Hyderabad, India. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighborhoods, leading to an 8.4 percentage point increase in takeup of microcredit. Small business investment and profits of pre-existing businesses increased, but consumption did not significantly increase. Durable goods expenditure increased, while “temptation goods” expenditure declined. We found no significant changes in health, education, or women’s empowerment. Two years later, after control areas had gained access to microcredit but households in treatment area had borrowed for longer and in larger amounts, very few significant differences persist.
Along with some (broadly consistent) results from Dean Karlan, this became one of the definitive papers on the effects of micro-credit. It meant that micro-credit is OK, but not the cure for poverty. That had a big subsequent impact on both policy and philanthropy.
You might have thought they would rest there, but no, they kept on looking at the data more deeply and over additional years, hoping to learn yet more from the experiment. And just this last week, a new paper came out, modifying the earlier results, based on more years of data. Here is the new abstract and paper (with Breza and Kinnan):
Can microcredit help unlock a poverty trap for some people by putting their businesses on a different trajectory? Could the small microcredit treatment effects often found for the average household mask important heterogeneity? In Hyderabad, India, we find that “gung ho entrepreneurs” (GEs), households who were already running a business before microfinance entered, show persistent benefits that increase over time. Six years later, the treated GEs own businesses that have 35% more assets and generate double the revenues as those in control neighborhoods. We find almost no effects on non-GE households. A model of technology choice in which talented entrepreneurs can access either a diminishing-returns technology, or a more productive technology with a fixed cost, generates dynamics matching the data. These results show that heterogeneity in entrepreneurial ability is important and persistent. For talented but low-wealth entrepreneurs, short-term access to credit can indeed facilitate escape from a poverty trap.
That is a pretty stunning extension of the original results, bravo to all hands involved! Rust never sleeps, and in the hands of Banerjee and Duflo, neither does science.
Abhijit Banerjee reminiscenses
Abhijit and I were in the same first year class at Harvard, and I have two especially strong memories of him from that time.
First, he was always willing to help out those who were not as advanced in the class work as he was. Furthermore, that was literally everyone else. He was very generous with his time.
Second, when it came to the first-year Macro final (I don’t mean the comprehensive exams), Andy Abel wrote a problem with dynamic programming, which was Andy’s main research area at the time. Abhijit showed that the supposed correct answer was in fact wrong, that the equilibrium upon testing was degenerate, and he re-solved the problem correctly, finding some multiple equilibria if I recall correctly, all more than what Abel had seen and Abel wrote the problem. Abhijit got an A+ (Abel, to his credit, was not shy about reporting this).
One of my favorite Abhijit papers is “On Frequent Flyer Programs and other Loyalty-Inducing Economic Arrangements,” with Larry Summers. I believe it was published QJE 1987, but somehow the jstor link does not show up from google searches. This was one of the first papers to show how consumer loyalty programs could segment the market and have collusive effects.
Another favorite Abjihit paper of mine is his job market paper, “The Economics of Rumours,” later published in ReStud 1993. Have you ever wondered “if this rumor is true, why haven’t I heard it before?” Abhijit works through the logic of the model on that one, in a scintillating performance. It turns out this paper is now highly relevant for analyzing information transmission through social media.
Abhijit is the clearest case I know of a brilliant theorist who decided the future was with empirical work — he was right. Nonetheless his early theory papers are still worthy of attention. When Abhijit went on the job market, his letter writers suggested he might someday win a Nobel Prize, so strong were his talents. They were right, but I suspect they had no idea for what the prize in fact would turn out to be.
The Nobel Prize in Economic Science Goes to Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer
The Nobel Prize goes to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer (links to home pages) for field experiments in development economics. Esther Duflo was a John Bates Clark Medal winner, a MacArthur “genius” award winner, and is now the second woman to win the economics Nobel and by far the youngest person to ever win the economics Nobel (Arrow was the previous youngest winner!). Duflo and Banerjee are married so these are also the first spouses to win the economics Nobel although not the first spouses to win Nobel prizes–there was even one member of a Nobel prize winning spouse-couple who won the Nobel prize in economics. Can you name the spouses?
Michael Kremer wrote two of my favorite papers ever. The first is Patent Buyouts which you can find in my book Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal Science. The idea of a patent buyout is for the government to buy a patent and rip it up, opening the idea to the public domain. How much should the government pay? To decide this they can hold an auction. Anyone can bid in the auction but the winner receives the patent only say 10% of the time–the other 90% of the time the patent is bought by the government at the market price. The value of this procedure is that 90% of the time we get all the incentive properties of the patent without any of the monopoly costs. Thus, we eliminate the innovation tradeoff. Indeed, the government can even top the market price up by say 15% in order to increase the incentive to innovate. You might think the patent buyout idea is unrealistic. But in fact, Kremer went on to pioneer an important version of the idea, the Advance Market Commitment for Vaccines which was used to guarantee a market for the pneumococcal vaccine which has now been given to some 143 million children. Bill Gates was involved with governments in supporting the project.
My second Kremer paper is Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990. An economist examining one million years of the economy! I like to say that there are two views of humanity, people are stomachs or people are brains. In the people are stomachs view, more people means more eaters, more takers, less for everyone else. In the people are brains view, more people means more brains, more ideas, more for everyone else. The people are brains view is my view and Paul Romer’s view (ideas are nonrivalrous). Kremer tests the two views. He shows that over the long run economic growth increased with population growth. People are brains.
Oh, and can I add a third Kremer paper? The O-Ring Model of Development is a great and deep paper. (MRU video on the O-ring model).
The work for which the Nobel was given is for field experiments in development economics. Kremer began this area of research with randomized trials of educational policies in Kenya. Duflo and Banerjee then deepened and broadened the use of field experiments and in 2003 established the Poverty Action Lab which has been the nexus for field experiments in development economics carried on by hundreds of researchers around the world.
Much has been learned in field experiments about what does and also doesn’t work. In Incentives Work, Dufflo, Hanna and Ryan created a successful program to monitor and reduce teacher absenteeism in India, a problem that Michael Kremer had shown in Missing in Action was very serious with some 30% of teachers not showing up on a typical day. But when they tried to institute a similar program for nurses in Putting a Band-Aid on A Corpse the program was soon undermined by local politicians and “Eighteen months after its inception, the program had become completely ineffective.” Similarly, Banerjee, Duflo, Glennerster and Kinnan find that Microfinance is ok but no miracle (sorry fellow laureate Muhammad Yunus). A frustrating lesson has been the context dependent nature of results and the difficult of finding external validity. (Lant Pritchett in a critique of the “randomistas” argues that real development is based on macro-policy rather than micro-experiment. See also Bill Easterly on the success of the Washington Consensus.)
Duflo, Kremer and Robinson study How High Are Rates of Return to Fertilizer? Evidence from Field Experiments in Kenya. This is an especially interest piece of research because they find that rates of return are very high but that farmers don’t use much fertilizer. Why not? The reasons seem to have much more to do with behavioral biases than rationality. Some interventions help:
Our findings suggest that simple interventions that affect neither the cost of, nor the payoff to, fertilizer can substantially increase fertilizer use. In particular, offering farmers the option to buy fertilizer (at the full market price, but with free delivery) immediately after the harvest leads to an increase of at least 33 percent in the proportion of farmers using fertilizer, an effect comparable to that of a 50 percent reduction in the price of fertilizer (in contrast, there is no impact on fertilizer adoption of offering free delivery at the time fertilizer is actually needed for top dressing). This finding seems inconsistent with the idea that low adoption is due to low returns or credit constraints, and suggests there may be a role for non–fully rational behavior in explaining production decisions.
This is reminiscent of people in developed countries who don’t adjust their retirement savings rates to take advantage of employer matches. (A connection to Thaler’s work).
Duflo and Banerjee have conducted many of their field experiments in India and have looked at not just conventional questions of development economics but also at politics. In 1993, India introduced a constitutional rule that said that each state had to reserve a third of all positions as chair of village councils for women. In a series of papers, Duflo studies this natural experiment which involved randomization of villages with women chairs. In Women as Policy Makers (with Chattopadhyay) she finds that female politicians change the allocation of resources towards infrastructure of relevance to women. In Powerful Women (Beaman et al.) she finds that having once had a female village leader increases the prospects of future female leaders, i.e. exposure reduces bias.
Before Banerjee became a randomistas he was a theorist. His A Simple Model of Herd Behavior is also a favorite. The essence of the model can be explained in a simple example (from the paper). Suppose there are two restaurants A and B. The prior probability is that A is slightly more likely to be a better restaurant than B but in fact B is the better restaurant. People arrive at the restaurants in sequence and as they do they get a signal of which restaurant is better and they also see what choice the person in front of them made. Suppose the first person in line gets a signal that the better restaurant is A (contrary to fact). They choose A. The second person then gets a signal that the better restaurant is B. The second person in line also sees that the first person chose A, so they now know one signal is for A and one is for B and the prior is A so the weight of the evidence is for A—the second person also chooses restaurant A. The next person in line also gets the B signal but for the same reasons they also choose A. In fact, everyone chooses A even if 99 out of 100 signals are B. We get a herd. The sequential information structure means that the information is wasted. Thus, how information is distributed can make a huge difference to what happens. A lot of lessons here for tweeting and Facebook!
Banerjee is also the author of some original and key pieces on Indian economic history, most notably History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India (with Iyer).
Duflo’s TED Talk. Previous Duflo posts; Kremer posts; Banerjee posts on MR.
Before last year’s Nobel announcement Tyler wrote:
I’ve never once gotten it right, at least not for exact timing, so my apologies to anyone I pick (sorry Bill Baumol!). Nonetheless this year I am in for Esther Duflo and Abihijit Banerjee, possibly with Michael Kremer, for randomized control trials in development economics.
As Tyler predicted he was wrong and also right. Thus, this years win is well-timed and well-deserved. Congratulations to all.
On the road for Nobel day
Apologies readers, but I’ll be speaking at OECD in Paris exactly when the Nobel Prize for economics is announced. I do believe Alex plans coverage, but for catching this topic I will have to wait until next year…
In the meantime, if Alex’s post isn’t up yet, you can offer your opinion on the pick in the comments section here.
Monday assorted links
1. Portuguese political path dependence.
2. Japanese ninja student gets top marks for writing essay in invisible ink. “Eimi Haga followed the ninja technique of “aburidashi”, spending hours soaking and crushing soybeans to make the ink. The words appeared when her professor heated the paper over his gas stove.”
3. New part of Tale of Genji found.
4. An ecologist on tree thinning and wildfires.
5. Why was Nepal never colonized?
6. Young people who are convinced they should give away all of their inherited wealth.
Sunday assorted links
1. T.S. Eliot trove of letters to be unsealed.
2. The Mayans: “Hey all: you realize that researchers just used lasers to find *60,000* new sites in Guatemala?!? This is HOLY [expletive] territory.”
3. Are blackboards underrated? Not by mathematicians.
5. Against contempt.
How to Work and Sleep at the Same Time
An amazing result:
Many people have claimed that sleep has helped them solve a difficult problem, but empirical support for this assertion remains tentative. The current experiment tested whether manipulating information processing during sleep impacts problem incubation and solving. In memory studies, delivering learning-associated sound cues during sleep can reactivate memories. We therefore predicted that reactivating previously unsolved problems could help people solve them. In the evening, we presented 57 participants with puzzles, each arbitrarily associated with a different sound. While participants slept overnight, half of the sounds associated with the puzzles they had not solved were surreptitiously presented. The next morning, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement). Moreover, cued-puzzle solving correlated with cued-puzzle memory. Overall, these results demonstrate that cuing puzzle information during sleep can facilitate solving, thus supporting sleep’s role in problem incubation and establishing a new technique to advance understanding of problem solving and sleep cognition.
Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.
China fact of the day
Any Chinese person who has gone to elementary school or watched television news can explain the tale of China’s 100 years of humiliation. Starting with the Opium Wars in the 19th century, foreign powers bullied a weak and backward China into turning Hong Kong and Macau into European colonies. Students must memorize the unequal treaties the Qing dynasty signed during that period.
There’s even a name for it: “national humiliation education.”
Here is more from Li Yuan at the NYT.
What I’ve been reading
Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent. A very nice history of earlier post-war European migration, such as Turks and Greeks moving to West Germany, Cape Verdeans settling in Portugal, and so on. Excellent background for the current debates.
Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić, Model City Pyongyang. An excellent picture book, mostly of architecture, presenting Pyongyang as yet another installment in the 20th century series of deeply weird cities.
Jason Lyall, Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War. Perhaps the most thorough look at how cohesion has made some armies and fighting forces stronger than others. For instance there is a chapter “African World Wars: Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo on the Modern Battlefield.” I view this more as a cohesion story than an “inequality” story (current U.S. forces seem pretty sharp), in any case a good integration of military history with modern social science.
Paul Blustein, Schism: China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System. Given the import and timing on the topic, I am surprised this book has not received more attention. It is “more boring” than Blustein’s earlier works, such as on Argentina, but full of facts and substance on every page. For now it is the go-to book on this topic.
Four very good books!
The modern world has not yet abolished slavery and forced deprivation
The health service has said that it will stop locking up, isolating and physically restraining autistic children after an inquiry stated that it was damaging to their health.
NHS England has committed to make radical changes within 18 months, including a pledge not to place children with autism and learning difficulties in psychiatric wards unless they have a mental illness.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, commissioned an inquiry led by Teresa Fenech, director of nursing at NHS England, after a series of scandals that involved the abuse of vulnerable patients, enforced medication and the use of seclusion cells.
In one case a girl with autism, Bethany, then aged 17, was held in isolation for 21 months at a private psychiatric hospital in Northampton.
Here is more from The Times of London, via Michelle Dawson.
Saturday assorted links
1. Betting markets in everything: will gamers make pro-Hong Kong statements?
2. Who might have won the economics Nobel Prize?
3. The California power outage and labs. How are those cadavers doing?
4. What is wrong with Blackboard software?
5. Haiti update (New Yorker).
6. Are classroom effects small in K-2 education? And which values are we teaching our kids anyway?
“Two big names in European writing win literature Nobels”
I chuckled at that FT headline, fortunately the on-line version names Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke in its header.
Can you imagine a sports header: “Big name wins NBA most valuable player award.” No, they would name the “big name” because that big name is in fact big.
I still think Stephen King should get one. I didn’t enjoy trying to read Tokarczuk, though I suspect she is a very good writer in Polish. By Handke I can recommend his Sorrow of Dreams, a memoir of his mother dying, and also a book that influenced Knausgaard. But mostly I am find him boring, pessimistic, and nasty, perhaps consistent with his support for Milosevic and the tyranny in Serbia. I don’t think that disqualifies him from the prize per se, but neither do I see him as an author who had to win, though he is indeed “a big name in European writing.” The thing is, he is nothing more than that.
Here you can buy The Stand for $8.30, by the way I love Houllebecq but the new one isn’t very interesting, as sadly it reads like a parody of his earlier, superior work. Submission remains one of the truly great novels of recent times.