Category: Data Source
What predicts attractiveness-enhancing behavior?
Such investigations are invariably somewhat speculative, but from some new research here goes:
The strongest predictor of attractiveness-enhancing behaviors was social media usage. Other predictors, in order of effect size, included adhering to traditional gender roles, residing in countries with less gender equality, considering oneself as highly attractive or, conversely, highly unattractive, TV watching time, higher socioeconomic status, right-wing political beliefs, a lower level of education, and personal individualistic attitudes.
That is from a paper by Marta Kowal, et.al.
The Impacts of Same and Opposite Gender Alumni Speakers on Interest in Economics
What is the impact of male and female alumni speaker interventions in introductory microeconomics courses on student interest in economics? Using student-level transcript data, we estimate the effect of speakers on future course-taking in models which use untreated lectures as control groups, including professor and semester fixed effects and student-level covariates. Alumni speakers increase intermediate economics course take-up by 2.1 percentage points (11%). Students are more responsive to same-gender speakers, with male speakers increasing men’s course take-up by 36% and female speakers increasing women’s course take-up by 40%, implying that the effect of alumni speakers is strongly gendered.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Arpita Patnaik, Gwyn C. Pauley, Joanna Venator, and Matthew J. Wiswall.
ChatGPT vs. the experts (Department of Uh-Oh)
ChatGPT’s answers are generally considered to be more helpful than humans’ in more than half of questions, especially for finance and psychology areas.
Most of all, ChatGPT does better in terms of concreteness. Note also that ChatGPT uses more nouns and deploys a more neutral tone than do the human experts. ChatGPT fares worst in the medical domain, but its biggest problem (from the point of view of the human evaluators) is giving too much information and not enough simple instructions. Hmm… In any case, here is the link.
I wonder how well the upgrades are going to do.
The Inflationary Effects of Sectoral Reallocation
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift of consumption from services to goods. We study this demand reallocation in a multi-sector model featuring sticky prices, input-output linkages, and labor reallocation costs. Reallocation costs hamper the increase in the supply of goods, causing inflationary pressures. These pressures are amplified by the fact that goods prices are more flexible than services prices. We estimate the model allowing for demand reallocation, sectoral productivity, and aggregate labor supply shocks. The demand reallocation shock explains a large portion of the rise in U.S. inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic.
That is from a new paper by Francesco Ferrante, Sebastian Graves, and Matteo Iacoviello. From the Board of Governors, 3.5 percentage points if you had to say how much. Via Nick Timiraos.
From my WhatsApp
Tyler Cowen: I am, by the way, not so convinced by the Jon Haidt piece on social media and mental illness: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1221094&post_id=104255435&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
Tyler Cowen: He readily admits that across individuals social media use explains only a tiny portion of the variation in happiness. His response is that it is other people’s usage of social media that makes you unhappy, because you can’t go talk to them.
Tyler Cowen: So there are (in his view) only system-wide effects, nothing that can be verified at the micro level. [TC: note the “to the point” style of WhatsApp leads to certain exaggerations and inaccuracies]
Tyler Cowen: It seems to me that if the stuff makes you so miserable, young people should be able to build small social “pods” of individuals who don’t do the stuff so much, hang out together, and are just way happier.
Tyler Cowen: Furthermore, if a lot of the problem is “young girls comparing themselves to thinner others on Instagram” and the like, that should show up as an individual-level effect. Not a group effect. There can be those beautiful, envy-inducing models on Instagram even if only a small percentage of one’s peers are on Instagram.Tyler Cowen: I agree the problem is larger with girls. And I think it is a mix of bullying, cyberbullying, envy, and unrealistic expectations. I just don’t think it is nearly as a large a problem as he claims.
Tyler Cowen: And I think that often “going to talk to other people” — you know the “Mean Girls” — is the problem itself. In that sense his various hypotheses contradict each other.
You will note also the recent result that school closures lower not raise the rate of youth suicide. It is thus hard for me to string together the hypothesis of a) “youth suicide rates are way up,” b) “this is because of social media,” and c) “social media make us miserable by taking away people to talk to and hang out with.”
Update on the New York Times Word Frequency Chart
By David Rozado, who has hit a bunch of home runs lately. Look at his charts, to my eyes they show woke terminology in the NYT as having peaked and as now declining. Here goes, they are very different from the earlier charts (also at the link) ending in 2019:
Climate change issues, however, continue to receive more coverage. Not all of the charts “go my way,” but this is hardly what you would expect if Wokeness were simply rising, rising, rising out of control. Oh, and check out these trends in pronoun usage. Also here is more from Rozado, mostly on how the positive sides of woke rhetoric are gaining at the expense of the negative sides.
Why not get out? Really
Bolotnyy: We found that these moderate to severe symptoms of depression and anxiety were about two to three times more prevalent among PhD students in these eight top-ranked economics PhD programs than in the general population. Suicidality was also about two times what you’d see in the general population.
And:
Economic students are about half as likely as other Harvard PhD students to be in treatment if they have some of these serious symptoms. That’s something that we’ve talked a lot about and tried to understand.
Here is more, brought to you by the AEA. I am very happy to see this work being done, kudos to Valentin Bolotnyy. And I am all for more social connections, better campus mental health counseling, and involved advisors, all of which are listed as potential partial remedies. Yet if I were the AEA, I would be wondering about pushing yet another recommendation — discouraging some people, at the margin of course, from even starting graduate school in economics? And other fields too.
Somehow that option does not receive much consideration. (When I advise people. in part due to this and other data, I am much less likely to recommend graduate school than in earlier times.) Should not part of the mission of the AEA be to think like an economist? What about “exit”? Or is that only for other sectors?
Why are adolescents so unhappy?
Here is a new tack, or rather a very old one:
Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the otherwise positive relationship found between GDP per capita and adult life satisfaction for the same countries. Results are robust to various model specifications and both macro and micro approaches. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries. Effects are found to be more pronounced for girls than for boys.
That is from a new paper by Robert Rudolf and Dirk Bethmann. Is it the learning per se, or is the learning a proxy for a very particular kind of peer interaction? Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Incentives matter, edition #4637
Many developed countries currently both face and resist strong migratory pressure, fueling irregular migration. The Central Mediterranean Sea is among the most dangerous crossings for irregular migrants in the world. In response to mounting deaths, European nations intensified search and rescue operations in 2013. We develop a model of irregular migration to identify the effects of these operations. Leveraging exogenous variation from rapidly varying crossing conditions, we find that smugglers responded by sending boats in adverse weather and shifting from seaworthy boats to flimsy rafts. As a result, these operations induced more crossings in dangerous conditions, ultimately offsetting their intended safety benefits due to moral hazard and increasing the realized ex post crossing risk for migrants. Despite the increased risk, these operations likely increased aggregate migrant welfare; nevertheless, a more successful policy should instead restrict the supply of rafts and expand legal alternatives for migration.
While I agree with that policy recommendation, I say good luck with that one. “Not enough people are dying” is what one of those harsh, old school economists might have said instead. Good thing we got rid of them.
In any case, that article is by Claudio Deiana, Vikram Maheshri, and Giovanni Mastrobuoni, forthcoming in the American Economic Journal (Economic Policy), with the title being “Migrants at Sea: Unintended Consequences of Search and Rescue Operations.”
Democratic Republic of Congo growth estimate of the day
I worry about the distribution, but of course the news could be worse:
The International Monetary Fund said a mining boom helped the Democratic Republic of Congo’s economy perform “significantly stronger” last year than earlier forecast.
The economy of the mining giant is estimated to have grown 8.5%, compared with an earlier projection of 6.6%, the IMF said Wednesday in an emailed statement.
The fund also raised its growth forecast for this year to 8% from 6.7%, as it warned of downside risks “from the armed conflict in the east, uncertainty ahead of the elections, the continued effect of the war in Ukraine, and adverse terms-of-trade shocks.”
Congo produces almost 70% of the world’s key battery mineral cobalt and tied Peru last year as the second-largest copper producer, according to the US Geological Survey. The central African nation also produces significant amounts of gold and tin. Its mining industry as a whole grew 20% last year, the IMF said.
Has the Great Awokening in scholarship peaked?
Here is much more from Musa al-Gharbi. Via John Cunningham.
Should we pay mothers to stay home?
These are Finnish results, and their generality can be questioned, but it is not the first time such results have appeared:
We study the impacts of a policy designed to reward mothers who stay at home rather than join the labor force when their children are under age three. We use regional and over time variation to show that the Finnish Home Care Allowance (HCA) decreases maternal employment in both the short and long term. The effects are large enough for the existence of home care benefit system to explain the higher short-term child penalty in Finland than comparable nations. Home care benefits also negatively affect the early childhood cognitive test results of children, decrease the likelihood of choosing academic high school, and increase youth crimes. We confirm that the mechanism of action is changing work/home care arrangements by studying a day care fee reform that had the opposite effect of raising incentives to work – with corresponding opposite effects on mothers and children compared to HCA. Our findings suggest that shifting child care from the home to the market increases labor force participation and improves child outcomes.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Jonathan Gruber, Thomas Kosonen, and Kristina Huttunen. Note that the results may irritate both some social conservatives and some proponents of extremely generous maternal leave arrangements.
The trajectory of ESG
ESG was kind of a fad pic.twitter.com/k4pLSGdvgb
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) February 12, 2023
Russia fact of the day
Less than Nine Percent of Western Firms Have Divested from Russia
And here is part of the abstract:
We gathered extensive data on equity investments made by foreign companies headquartered in the European Union (EU) and G7 nations and checked whether following the outbreak of armed conflict divestment of their Russian subsidiaries could be confirmed. At the end of November 2022, our analysis shows that 8.5% of EU and G7 companies had divested at least one of their Russian subsidiaries. We performed extensive robustness checks that confirm our overall findings while also revealing some notable variation in divestment rates.
That is from a recent paper by EVenett and Pisani, via Charles Klingman.
The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners
Are the best-paying jobs with the highest prestige done by individuals of great intelligence? Past studies find job success to increase with cognitive ability, but do not examine how, conversely, ability varies with job success. Stratification theories suggest that social background and cumulative advantage dominate cognitive ability as determinants of high occupational success. This leads us to hypothesize that among the relatively successful, average ability is concave in income and prestige. We draw on Swedish register data containing measures of cognitive ability and labour-market success for 59,000 men who took a compulsory military conscription test. Strikingly, we find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 per year ability plateaus at a modest level of +1 standard deviation. The top 1 per cent even score slightly worse on cognitive ability than those in the income strata right below them. We observe a similar but less pronounced plateauing of ability at high occupational prestige.
That is from a new paper by Marc Keuschnigg, Arnout van de Rijt3, and Thijs Bol.
