Category: Data Source
Job security is not getting worse
There is a widespread belief that work is less secure than in the past, that an increasing share of workers are part of the “pprecariat”. It is hard to find much evidence for this in objective measures of job security, but perhaps subjective measures show different trends. This paper shows that in the US, UK, and Germany workers feel as secure as they ever have in the last thirty years. This is partly because job insecurity is very cyclical and (pre-COVID) unemployment rates very low, but there is also no clear underlying trend towards increased subjective measures of job insecurity. This conclusion seems robust to controlling for the changing mix of the labor force, and is true for specific sub-sets of workers.
That is from Alan Manning and Graham Mazeine, forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The stuff of horror movies?
Though the trend is a positive one:
We study the intergenerational persistence of inequality by estimating grandmother-mother associations in the loss of a child, using pooled data from 119 Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 developing countries. Compared with compatriots of the same age, women with at least one sibling who died in childhood face 39% higher odds of having experienced at least one own-child death, or 7 percentage points at age 49. Place fixed effects reduce estimated mortality persistence by 47%; socioeconomic covariates explain far less. Within countries over time, persistence falls with aggregate child mortality, so that mortality decline disproportionately benefits high-mortality lineages.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Frances R. Lu and Tom Vogl.
Baby bust in India?
One of the most consequential statistic passed by without much noise.
India's total fertility rate fell below population replacement rate to 2.0, with many states far below that level, thanks to effective campaigns around family planning & contraception. https://t.co/hN65hiFEsc pic.twitter.com/fDSIMl3j5F
— Arvind Ravikumar (@arvindpawan1) May 19, 2022
Via Noah Smith.
Sentences to ponder model this
Consistent with beauty-blind admissions, alumni’s beauty is uncorrelated with the rank of the school they attended in China. In the US, White men who attended high-ranked schools are better looking, especially attendees of private schools. A one percentage point increase in beauty rank corresponds to a half-point increase in the school rank.
Here is more, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Remote work and home prices
What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional percentage point of remote work causes a 0.93 percent increase in house prices after controlling for negative spillovers from migration. This cross-sectional estimate combined with the aggregate shift to remote work implies that remote work raised aggregate U.S. house prices by 15.1 percent.
Who is rich in America?
We now know who is rich in America. And it’s not who you might have guessed.
A groundbreaking 2019 study by four economists, “Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century,” analyzed de-identified data of the complete universe of American taxpayers to determine who dominated the top 0.1 percent of earners.
The study didn’t tell us about the small number of well-known tech and shopping billionaires but instead about the more than 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year. The researchers found that the typical rich American is, in their words, the owner of a “regional business,” such as an “auto dealer” or a “beverage distributor.”
That is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (NYT), who covers some other interesting wealth/happiness topics as well.
When were U.S. home prices at their worst?
That of course is only one metric, and it focuses on flows rather than homes as an asset. It nonetheless puts a number of matters in perspective. Here it is in words:
1981 was the most unaffordable year for those who need a mortgage, with annual payments consuming a whopping 52% of their income. For comparison, in 2022 mortgage payments require 27% and the absolute lowest point is back in 1963 when only 18% was required. In 2006 (at the peak of the housing bubble), families would need 30% of their income. Thus we can confidently say that 2022 is so far not the worst year in history for those who can’t afford to buy a house without a loan.
Canada and New Zealand seem to be the truly scary places. Here is the full essay by Nikita Sokolsky.
The LGBTQ+ earnings gap
There is a new paper on this topic, here is the abstract:
This article provides recent estimates of earnings and mental health for sexual and gender minority young adults in the United States. Using data from a nationally representative sample of bachelor’s degree recipients, I find a significant earnings and mental health gap between self-identified LGBTQ+ and comparable heterosexual cisgender graduates. On average, sexual and gender minorities experience 22% lower earnings ten years after graduation. About half of this gap can be attributed to LGBTQ+ graduates being less likely to complete a high-paying major and work in a high-paying occupation (e.g., STEM and business). In addition, LGBTQ+ graduates are more than twice more likely to report having a mental illness. I then analyze the role of sexual orientation concealment and find a more pronounced earnings and mental health gap for closeted graduates.
That is from Marc Folch at the University of Chicago.
A new twins study
An overall twin correlation across thirty-eight measures was r = 0.95, p < .001. In contrast with previous research, the twins’ general intelligence and non-verbal reasoning scores showed some marked differences.
Yes that concerns identical twins raised in separate environments. Here is the paper by Nancy L. Segal and Yoon-Mi Hur, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How strong are the racial preferences of universities?
Using detailed admissions data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC cases, we examine how racial preferences for under-represented minorities (URMs) affect their admissions to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are on average over four times larger than if they had been treated as white. For typical Hispanic applicants the increase is 2.4 times. At UNC, preferences vary substantially by whether the applicant is in-state or out-of-state. For in-state applicants, racial preferences result in an over 70% increase in the African American admit rate. For out-of-state applicants, the increase is more than tenfold. Both universities provide larger racial preferences to URMs from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
Here is the paper, by Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and Tyler Ransom, forthcoming as an NBER paper.
Mexicans die from the cold
We examine the impact of temperature on mortality in Mexico using daily data over the period 1998–2017 and find that 3.8 percent of deaths in Mexico are caused by suboptimal temperature (26,000 every year). However, 92 percent of weather-related deaths are induced by cold (<12 degrees C) or mildly cold (12–20 degrees C) days and only 2 percent by outstandingly hot days (>32 degrees C). Furthermore, temperatures are twice as likely to kill people in the bottom half of the income distribution. Finally, we show causal evidence that the Seguro Popular, a universal health care policy, has saved at least 1,600 lives per year from cold weather since 2004.
That is from a new paper in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, authored by François Cohen and Antoine Dechezleprêtre. Here are ungated copies.
Britain fact of the day
In 1990, out-of-pocket spending by Britons on medical expenses was equivalent to 1 per cent of GDP, while across the Atlantic, uninsured Americans forked out more than twice as much, at 2.2 per cent. Thirty years on, that gap has all but disappeared. Americans’ non-reimbursable spending now stands at 1.9 per cent, and Britons’ has doubled to 1.8 per cent.
That is from John Burn-Murdoch the FT. And this:
And the bulk of the increase in spending is from those who can least afford it. Between 2010 and 2020, the portion of UK spending that went on hospital treatments increased by 60 per cent overall, but more than doubled among the lowest-earning fifth of the population. The poorest now spend as much on private medical care as the richest, in relative terms. One in 14 of Britain’s poorest households now incurs “catastrophic healthcare costs” in a typical year — where costs exceed 40 per cent of the capacity to pay. This is up from one in 30 a decade ago…
Hmm….And here is a relevant (ungated) visual. Via Ilya Novak.
Swiss fact of the day
Two months into Vladimir Putin’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine, however, what is remarkable is just how little Russian capital actually seems to be in the Alps. Neutral, inscrutable Switzerland was, perhaps more than any other country, presumed to be the treasure house of the Putin kleptocracy.
But despite Bern having mirrored all of the US and EU sanctions against Russian oligarchs — measures that apply to around 900 people globally — just $8bn of Russian assets in the country have so far been frozen.
Consider, by comparison, that the channel island of Jersey alone has frozen $7bn of assets linked to a single Russian tycoon, Roman Abramovich.
Here is more from the FT.
New evidence on schooling and pandemic learning
We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020-21 school year on students’ pass rates on standardized tests in Grades 3–8 across 11 states. Pass rates declined from 2019 to 2021: an average decline of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 in English language arts (ELA). Focusing on within-state, within commuting zone variation in schooling mode, we estimate districts with full in-person learning had significantly smaller declines in pass rates (13.4 p.p. in math, 8.3 p.p. in ELA). The value to in-person learning was larger for districts with larger populations of Black students.
That is from a new paper by Rebecca Jack, Claie Halloran, James Okun, and Emily Oster.
What drives people to extremist YouTube videos?
There is a new and very interesting paper on this topic by Annie Y. Chen, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, Ronald E. Robertson and Christo Wilson. Here is the abstract:
Do online platforms facilitate the consumption of potentially harmful content? Despite widespread concerns that YouTube’s algorithms send people down “rabbit holes” with recommendations to extremist videos, little systematic evidence exists to support this conjecture. Using paired behavioral and survey data provided by participants recruited from a representative sample (n=1,181), we show that exposure to alternative and extremist channel videos on YouTube is heavily concentrated among a small group of people with high prior levels of gender and racial resentment. These viewers typically subscribe to these channels (causing YouTube to recommend their videos more often) and often follow external links to them. Contrary to the “rabbit holes” narrative, non-subscribers are rarely recommended videos from alternative and extremist channels and seldom follow such recommendations when offered.
I am traveling and have not had the chance to read this paper, but I do know the authors are very able. I am not saying this is the final word, but I would make the following observation: there are many claims made about social media, and many of them might be true, but for the most part they are still largely unfounded.