Month: November 2024
Wednesday assorted links
1. The Indonesian energy trajectory. A new Substack.
2. Emily Oster on fluoride, vaccines, and raw milk (NYT).
3. Why didn’t people smile in old photos?
4. Fukuyama on how to make government more efficient.
5. Did a New Zealand start-up in a Wellington apartment just make major progress on nuclear fusion? (FT)
6. Christina Kirchner to prison for six years? (in Spanish)
Does declining fertility lower the gender pay gap?
Using a descriptive decomposition and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that, in gross terms, fertility decline can explain almost one-quarter of gender pay convergence from 1980 to 2018. Even net of a host of controls for human capital and job characteristics, fertility decline explains 8 percent of the attenuation of the US gender pay gap 1980–2018—about half as much as changes in education and about a quarter as much as changes in full-time work experience and job tenure combined. Finally, we show that employees’ fertility decline was fastest in the 1980s and subsequently slowed; this, in conjunction with persistent gender differences in parenthood–wage associations, helps explain stalled progress toward gender pay parity.
That is from a newly published article by Alexandra Killewald and Nino José Cricco. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Signaling Quality in Crowdfunding Projects with Refund Bonuses
My latest paper, Signaling Quality: How Refund Bonuses Can Overcome Information Asymmetries in Crowdfunding (with the excellent Tim Cason and Robertas Zubrickas) is just published in Management Science.
Many promising crowdfunding projects fail due to a fundamental issue: trust. Potential backers often hesitate because they lack confidence in the credibility or viability of the projects. This gap is natural, as traditional bank financing involves a bank acting as an intermediary, vetting the project, assessing its risk, and effectively endorsing it with their reputation. In contrast, crowdfunding operates without such intermediaries. Backers rely on limited, often one-sided information provided by project creators, making it challenging to assess risks or validate claims. Unlike banks, which can access financial records, credit histories, and industry expertise, individual backers typically lack the time, resources, or skills to conduct rigorous due diligence. Moreover, assessing risk is expensive. So how can we convey information about the true value of a crowdfunding project to investors?
Here my co-authors and I turn to refund bonuses. We have previously shown in lab experiments that refund bonuses can dramatically increase the rate of success of crowdfunding contracts and, more generally, make it possible to produce public goods privately. The idea of a refund bonus is simple. In an ordinary Kickstarter-like contract, if a project fails to raise enough funds to reach its threshold, the funds are returned to the investors. In a refund bonus contract, if a project fails to reach its threshold the investors get their money back plus a refund bonus. The effect of the refund bonus is to make investing in socially valuable projects a no-lose proposition. Either the project succeeds which is great because the project is worth more than its cost or it fails and you get a refund bonus. The investor is better off either way.
Now consider the refund bonus from the point of view of the entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur who offers a refund bonus has a special reason to want their project to succeed, namely, if the project succeeds they don’t have to pay the refund bonus. Entrepreneurs know more about the quality of their project than investors. The entrepreneurs, for example, know the truth about their advertising campaign. Does the cool demo really work or was it puffery or worse? Entrepreneurs who offer refund bonuses are thus implicitly offering a kind of testament or bond–I am so confident that this project will succeed that I am willing to offer a refund bonus if it doesn’t succeed. As with a warrantee, the point of the warrantee is not that consumers will use it but that they won’t. The warrantee is a signal of quality. Similarly, we show that offering refund bonuses can signal quality.
Working out the equilibrium requires some game theory because if refund bonuses 100% guaranteed high-quality (i.e. if only entrepreneurs with high quality projects offered refund bonuses) then every project that offered refund bonuses would succeed but then entrepreneurs with lower quality projects wouldn’t fear offering refund bonuses. Thus, the equilibrium is mixed, all entrepreneurs with high quality projects offer refund bonuses but some entrepreneurs with low quality projects also offer refund bonuses. Nevertheless, the equilibrium is such that on average refund bonuses signal quality. We test the theory in a lab experiment and it works. Investors were significantly more likely to put their money into projects where the entrepreneurs chose to offer refund bonuses (n.b. this is in comparison to experiments where refund bonuses were imposed, i.e. we specifically test the signaling role of refund bonuses.)
Thus, refund bonus for crowdfunding provide a decentralized method of reducing asymmetric information. The refund bonus credibly allows information about quality to be transmitted from the entrepreneur to the investors. The bottom line is that refund bonuses increase the power of crowdfunding finance making it more competitive with intermediated finance.
Addendum: Here is an excellent podcast on refund bonuses and crowdfunding. “Refund bonuses could revolutionize crowd funding!”
J. Zachary Mazlish on median wages under Biden
An excellent post, one of the best things written this year in economics. Here is part of the bottom line:
Inflation did make the median voter poorer during Biden’s term.
- In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020.
- This is true in the raw data, and even more stark after compositional adjustment.
- In particular, the change in median incomes was well below its 2012-20 run-rate.
- But, the change in median wages is not what matters; it is the median change in wages that does. And this metric was even weaker under Biden: lower than any period in the last 30 years other than the Great Recession.
- People do not feel wages, they feel total income. And median growth in total income — post taxes and transfers — was not just historically low: it collapsed and was deeply negative from 2021 onwards.
- Much of this decline is due to timing of pandemic stimulus and even less the “fault of Biden” than other things.
Here is the full post, plenty of detail and distinctions throughout.
Big business is better than you think (rooftops)
We characterize optimal product market policy in an unequal economy in which firm ownership is concentrated and markups increase with firm market shares. We study the problem of a utilitarian regulator who designs revenue-neutral interventions in the product market. We show that optimal policy increases product market concentration. This is because policies that encourage larger producers to expand improve allocative efficiency, increase the demand for labour and equilibrium wages. We derive these results both in a static Mirrleesian setting in which we impose no constraints on the shape of interventions, as well as in a dynamic economy with wealth accumulation. In our dynamic economy optimal policy reduces wealth and income inequality by redistributing market share and profits from medium-sized businesses, which are primarily owned by relatively rich entrepreneurs, to larger diversified corporate firms.
That is a recent piece from Review of Economic Studies, by Corina Boar and Virgiliu Midrigan.
*Blitz* (no spoilers)
This is the Steve McQueen movie about the Nazi blitz against London. I found it visually superb, countering clichés (mostly), showing a different and more varied side of civilian life in wartime, and perhaps the best screen treatment (ever?) of what life was like in the earlier “world of atoms”. I objected to the overuse of Dickensian references. In any case one of the best movies of this year, please note we live in a charmed time I hope you are enjoying it.
Tuesday assorted links
1. LDS on AI. And likely AI policy under Trump.
2. The Zvi on sports gambling.
3. Thoughts on limiting the administrative state.
5. George Packer on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.
6. Trump on higher education. And an insightful comment.
7. Auren Hoffman on the Dallas Cowboys new training facility, I was there and I agree.
The 1970s Crime Wave
Tyler and I wrap up our series of podcasts on the 1970s with The 1970s Crime Wave. Here’s one bit:
TABARROK: …people think that mass incarceration is a peculiarly American phenomena, or that it came out of nowhere, or was due solely to racism. Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow, takes his view. In fact, the United States was not a mass incarceration society in the 1960s.
It became one in the 1980s and 1990s due to the crime wave of the 1970s. It was not simply due to racism. It is true Blacks do commit more crimes relative to their population than whites, but Blacks are also overrepresented as victims. The simple fact of the matter is that Black victims of crime, the majority group, demanded more incarceration of Black criminals. In 1973, the NAACP demanded that the government lengthen minimum prison terms for muggers, pushers, and first-degree murders.
The Black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, advocated mandatory life sentences for “the non-addict drug pusher of hard drugs.” The Black columnist, Carl Rowan, wrote that “locking up thugs is not vindictive.” Eric Holder, under Obama, he was the secretary of—
COWEN: Of something.
TABARROK: Yes, of something. He called for stop and frisk. Eric Holder called for stop and frisk. Back then, the criminal justice system was also called racist, but the racism that people were pointing to was that Black criminals were let back on the streets to terrorize Black victims, and that Black criminals were given sentences which were too light. That was the criticism back then. It was Black and white victims together who drove the punishment of criminals. I think this actually tells you about two falsehoods. First, the primary driver of mass imprisonment was not racism. It was violent crime.
Second, this also puts the lie, sometimes you hear from conservatives, to this idea that Black leaders don’t care about Black-on-Black crime. That’s a lie. Many Black leaders have been, and were, and are tough on crime. Now, it’s true, as crime began to fall in the 1990s, many Blacks and whites began to have misgivings about mass incarceration. Crime was a huge problem in the 1970s and 1980s, and it hit the United States like a brick. It seemed to come out of nowhere. You can’t blame people for seeking solutions, even if the solutions come with their own problems.
A lot of amazing stuff in this episode. Here’s our Marginal Revolution Podcast 1970s trilogy
- 1970s Inflation: The Economic Fever That Changed America
- Oil Shocks, Price Controls and War
- The 1970s Crime Wave
Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
How well does bar exam performance predict subsequent success as a lawyer?
Eh:
How well does bar exam performance predict lawyering effectiveness? Is performance on some components of the bar exam more predictive? The current study, the first of its kind to measure the relationship between bar exam scores and a new lawyer’s effectiveness, evaluates these questions by combining three unique datasets—bar results from the State Bar of Nevada, a survey of recently admitted lawyers, and a survey of supervisors, peers, and judges who were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of recently-admitted lawyers. We find that performance on both the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) and essay components of the Nevada Bar have little relationship with the assessed lawyering effectiveness of new lawyers, calling into question the usefulness of these tests.
Here is the full article by Jason M. Scott, Stephen N. Goggin, and David Faigman. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
A new meta-meta analysis says things I agree with
We combine societal-level institutional measures from 51 countries between 1996 and 2017 with individual decision-making outcome data from 1,126 laboratory experiments in six meta-analyses to evaluate the effects of within-country institutional change on pro-social and Nash behavior. We find that government effectiveness and regulatory freedom positively correlate with pro-social behavior. We find that freedom from each of the following components of regulation; interest rate controls, binding minimum wages, worker dismissal protections, conscription, and administrative requirements; are correlated with prosocial behavior and are inversely correlated with Nash behavior. These results suggest the importance of considering spillover effects in pro-social behavior when designing government policy.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
Where are incumbents still popular?
From my email, here is your Switzerland fact of the day:
The media is awash with stories about western countries incumbent parties losing elections in the last two years:
- https://www.semafor.com/article/11/08/2024/the-democrats-join-a-long-list-of-global-parties-wrecked-by-post-pandemic-backlash
- https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893
The exception no one seems to remember: Switzerland. In the october 2023 election, 3 out of the 4 governing parties increased their vote share. And it wasn’t just parties that are formally in government but effectively act as an opposition: The right wing Swiss People’s Party won. The left wing Social Democrats one. And the moderate Centre party one. The losers: The centre right Liberal Party (in government) and two different green parties (both outside of government).
Possible cause: Low inflation (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/the-polity-or-is-it-culture-that-is-swiss.html)?
From Johann C.
Monday assorted links
1. Those new Chinese service sector jobs.
2. New Robin Hanson project: first futarchy on Ethereum.
3. Claims about how the two parties have evolved (speculative).
4. Can Singapore regulate its cats? (NYT)
Who Wins and Who Loses when Firms Stay Private Longer?
Does reducing the number of firms in public equity markets harm investors? How much has the value firms can get from going public changed in the past few decades? I develop a dynamic supply and demand model of the firm entry to and exit from public markets to relate firm benefits from being public to firm characteristics. Firms face a dynamic discrete choice problem on whether to be in public markets, with the benefits of being public a function of their characteristics, demand elasticities for their characteristics, and various regulatory and cost of capital changes. My structural analysis allows me to not only break down the causes of the transformation in US public equity markets, but also to say what the consequences of them have been for firms and investors. I find that investors would have had slightly higher excess returns but no change in their portfolio Sharpe ratio if firms behaved as they did before Sarbanes-Oxley. I further find that a private firm’s implied option value of going public has fallen by over half since the pre-Sarbanes era. The reduction is mostly caused by an increase to fixed costs of being a public company in the post-Sarbanes era.
That is from the job market paper of Leo Stanek, from the University of Minnesota.
New results on tariff history do not favor protectionism
I cover these in my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that tariffs probably did more harm than good. Using meticulously collected industry-level and state-level data, the paper traces the impact of specific tariff rates more clearly than before. The results are not pretty.
One core finding is that industries with higher tariffs did not have higher productivity — in fact, they had lower productivity. Tariffs did raise the number of US firms in a given sector, but they did so in part by protecting smaller, less productive firms. That was not the path by which the US became an industrial giant, nor is it wise to use trade policy to keep lower-productivity firms in business. Not only does it slow economic growth, it also keeps workers in jobs without much of a future.
These results contradict the traditional protectionist story — that tariffs allow the best firms to grow larger and capture the large domestic market. In reality, the tariffs kept firms smaller and probably lowered US manufacturing productivity.
The paper also finds that the tariffs of that era raised the prices for products released domestically. That lowers living standards, and should give a second Trump administration reason to pause, as he just won an election in which inflation was a major concern. The finding about inflation also counters another major protectionist argument: that tariffs eventually lower domestic prices because they allow US firms to expand and enjoy economies of scale. That is the opposite of what happened.
The paper also details how lobbying, logrolling and political horse-trading were essential features of the shift toward higher US tariffs. A lot of the tariffs of the time depended on which party controlled Congress, rather than economic rationality. Trump is fond of citing President William McKinley’s tariffs, but they are evidence of the primacy of political influence and rent-seeking, not of a well-thought out strategic trade policy.
The authors of the new research are Alexander Klein and Christopher M. Meissner.