Category: Data Source
Does legalizing immigrants reduce their lawbreaking?
I reproduce this verbatim from Angus:
Cool study forthcoming in AEJ Applied about how legal immigration status reduced recidivism of foreign prisoners in the EU. Here’s a link to an un-gated version of the paper.
Here’s the abstract:
We exploit exogenous variation in legal status following the January 2007 European Union enlargement to estimate its effect on immigrant crime. We difference out unobserved time-varying factors by i) comparing recidivism rates of immigrants from the “new” and “candidate” member countries; and ii) using arrest data on foreign detainees released upon a mass clemency that occurred in Italy in August 2006. The timing of the two events allows us to setup a difference-in-differences strategy. Legal status leads to a 50 percent reduction in recidivism, and explains one-half to two-thirds of the observed differences in crime rates between legal and illegal immigrants.
So the good news is that the identification scheme here is pretty darn good. The bad news is that to achieve this strong identification, the paper ends up studying a fairly small sample of foreign criminals:
We are left with 725 and 1,622 individuals in the treated and control groups, respectively.
Model this
Where in that market do you want to be? Who is there? For how long will things stay like this?
I thank Christopher Balding for a related pointer.
United States fact of the day
In recent years, Burmese have made up the largest share of refugees resettled in the United States.
The link is here, in 2012 more than 87,000 people were granted asylum status in the United States, here is further data on the process and who exactly is let in.
And we cannot manage 20,000 plus Syrians today? I do not see that we are having major problems from those earlier arrivals and of course many of them, including some of the Burmese, are Muslims.
Why am I not seeing anyone back out the implied growth rate from these numbers?
The 13.8% decline in imports was significantly worse than consensus expectations for an 8.2% decline, and will only add to concerns over declining Chinese demand.
Under what required assumptions would this translate into a growth rate of say four percent? Backward-looking? Forward-looking? Or is this just a slow structural shift as the Chinese economy gradually moves into services? Inquiring minds wish to know.
The full report is here.
China and the Great Depression of the 1930s
I learned a good deal reading Ramon H. Myers’s essay “The World Depression and the Chinese Economy 1930-6” in Ian Brown’s The Economies of Africa and Asia in the Inter-war Depression. Here are a few of his points:
1. In the 1920s, per capita growth in China was probably around 0.33 percent a year, one percent a year in absolute terms. I would add the notion that the country already was on an explosive growth path does not seem borne out by these estimates.
2. The Chinese financial system at the time was quite free-wheeling and money flowed into China to facilitate the country’s 1915-1930 growth.
3. By the late 1920s, China’s exports were only about 2 to 3 percent of gdp.
4. The Japanese seized Manchuria 1931-32, and the region had been accounting for a significant portion of China’s industrial growth.
5. The loss of Manchuria excepted, Chinese internal growth rose about 11.6 percent a year across 1930-36. It seems the country just wasn’t hit that hard by the global Great Depression.
6. There was sustained deflation during 1931-1935; some of this ties in to complex developments in the silver market, as China was on a silver standard. Yet economic activity still expanded. Silver flowed out of the country, but there was a big boost in credit and “inside money.”
7. As an aside, had I mentioned that the Nanjing government only firmly controlled two provinces of the country as of 1935, with “minimal control” in eight others?
8. Shanghai grew throughout most of the 1930s, with exceptions for the Japanese attack and the Yangtse flood of 1931.
Myers’s conclusion that the Great Depression did not hit China so hard has been challenged (pdf), but so far his account is the most convincing I have found. China during the Great Depression remains an understudied topic.
How many manufacturing jobs pay less than $15 an hour?
In Mississippi, 7.3% of all workers in the state are manufacturing workers who make less than $15 an hour. Losing many of these jobs would have a serious negative impact on the state.
Because of its sample size, the CPS is of more limited use for small geographies. However, there is a relatively large number of observations for Los Angeles County, CA. Almost 400,000 manufacturing workers live in the county, and 55% of them make less than $15 an hour. Many of these workers will be affected by $15 minimum wages that have been approved for the City of Los Angeles and the unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County.
This data suggest that if the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour across the U.S., it would impact a significant number of manufacturing workers, with some states being hit harder than others. This reflects the fact that lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour would not just be quantitatively larger than previous U.S. experience, but qualitatively different in that it would affect a different set of workers and industries. Leisure/hospitality and retail make up 54% of the workers who make less than $8 an hour, but only 34% of those making less than $15 an hour. As the minimum wage rises it affects other sectors. For manufacturing, at least, the effect is likely to be greater.
That is from Adam Ozimek, more at the link.
How left-leaning are lawyers?
Adam Bonica, Adam S. Chilton, and Maya Sen have an extensive new paper (pdf) on this subject:
American lawyers lean to the left of the ideological spectrum. To help place this in context, the mean DIME score among the attorney population is -0.31 compared to -0.05 for the entire population of donors. Moreover, some 62% of the sample of attorneys are positioned to the left of the midpoint between the party means for members of Congress. Morover, the modal CFscore is in the center-left. This places the average American lawyer’s ideology close to the ideology of Bill Clinton. To be more precise, the modal CFscore for American lawyers is -0.52 and Bill Clinton’s CFscore is -0.68. This confirms prior scholarship and journalism that has argued that the legal profession is liberal on balance. To our knowledge, however, this figure represents the most comprehensive picture of the ideology of American lawyers ever assembled.
There is however a (quite slight) bimodal nature to the distribution and a cluster of right-leaning attorneys has views similar to those of Mitt Romney. Not so many lawyers are true extremists, at least not in this data set. Figure 2 on p.19 will not reproduce for me but it is an excellent picture of the data, including comparisons with other professions.
We learn also that female attorneys are considerably more liberal than male attorneys, but the number of years of work predicts a conservative pull. Being a law firm partner also predicts views which are more conservative than average. If you consider “Big Law” attorneys, while they are overall to the Left, they are more conservative on average than the cities they live in, such as NYC or Los Angeles. Lawyers in Washington, D.C. are especially left-leaning.
The top fourteen law schools all have distributions which lean to the Left (pp.28-29), and UC Berkeley has the most left-leaning alumni. The five law schools, of the fifty surveyed, with right-leaning alumni are University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M University, University of Georgia, Louisiana State University, and Brigham Young University. Pages 38-40 of the paper rank different major law firms by how left- or right-leaning their employees are.
Oil and gas, M&A, and energy lawyers are relatively conservative, see p.45. Entertainment lawyers are relatively left-leaning, same for civil rights and personal injury lawyers. Don’t even ask about law professors. Public defenders are far more left-leaning than prosecutors, though prosecutors are still more left-leaning than lawyers as a whole.
This paper is interesting throughout.
The Great Trade Contraction has been continuing
World trade recorded its largest contraction since the financial crisis in the first half of this year, according to figures that will feed concerns over the global economy and add fuel to a debate over whether globalisation has peaked.
The volume of global trade fell 0.5 per cent in the three months to June compared to the first quarter, the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, keepers of the World Trade Monitor, said on Tuesday. Economists there also revised down their result for the first quarter to a 1.5 per cent contraction, making the first half of 2015 the worst recorded since the 2009 collapse in global trade that followed the crisis.
That is from Shawn Donnan at the FT. Here is a previous post on the world trade slowdown, now a contraction apparently.
The growing importance of social skills in the labor market
That is a new NBER paper from David J. Deming:
The slow growth of high-paying jobs in the U.S. since 2000 and rapid advances in computer technology have sparked fears that human labor will eventually be rendered obsolete. Yet while computers perform cognitive tasks of rapidly increasing complexity, simple human interaction has proven difficult to automate. In this paper, I show that the labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Since 1980, jobs with high social skill requirements have experienced greater relative growth throughout the wage distribution. Moreover, employment and wage growth has been strongest in jobs that require high levels of both cognitive skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and trade more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I test and confirm using data from the NLSY79. The female advantage in social skills may have played some role in the narrowing of gender gaps in labor market outcomes since 1980.
There is an ungated copy here.
The great biomedical stagnation?
Bowen and Casadevall have a new PNAS paper on this question:
The general public funds the vast majority of biomedical research and is also the major intended beneficiary of biomedical breakthroughs. We show that increasing research investments, resulting in an increasing knowledge base, have not yielded comparative gains in certain health outcomes over the last five decades. We demonstrate that monitoring scientific inputs, outputs, and outcomes can be used to estimate the productivity of the biomedical research enterprise and may be useful in assessing future reforms and policy changes. A wide variety of negative pressures on the scientific enterprise may be contributing to a relative slowing of biomedical therapeutic innovation. Slowed biomedical research outcomes have the potential to undermine confidence in science, with widespread implications for research funding and public health.
Carolyn Johnson summarizes the results of the paper:
Casadevall and graduate student Anthony Bowen used a pretty straightforward technique to try and answer the question. They compared the NIH budget, adjusted for inflation, with the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the increases in life expectancy in the U.S. population over the same time period.
Those crude health measures didn’t keep pace with the research investment. Funding increased four-fold since 1965, but the number of drugs only doubled. Life expectancy increased steadily, by two months per year.
Johnson also covers some useful responses from the critics. The result also may say more about the NIH than about progress per se. And here is a more optimistic take from Allison Schraeger.
Starting over from Katrina
One of the tragedies of Katrina was that so many of New Orleans’ residents were forced to move. But the severity of that tragedy is a function of where they were forced to move to. Was it somewhere on the Salt Lake City end of the continuum? Or was it a place like Fayetteville? The best answer we have is from the work of the sociologist Corina Graif, who tracked down the new addresses of seven hundred women displaced by Katrina—most of them lower-income and black. By virtually every measure, their new neighborhoods were better than the ones they had left behind in New Orleans. Median family income was forty-four hundred dollars higher. Ethnic diversity was greater. More people had jobs. Their exposure to “concentrated disadvantage”—an index that factors in several measures of poverty—fell by half a standard deviation.
That is from Malcolm Gladwell, interesting throughout.
Germany fact of the day, will support for immigration collapse?
Berlin has said it expects to receive a record 800,000 asylum seekers this year, more than the entire EU combined in 2014, laying bare the scale of the biggest refugee crisis to face the continent since the second world war.
Whether you consider this “good news” depends on what you are comparing it to. Most of all, we would prefer a situation where not so many people wanted asylum. In the meantime, my fear is that this immigration will not proceed in an orderly manner, and the backlash against immigration will grow stronger yet. I do not expect 2017 to resemble 2015; “unorthodox arrivals” to Europe were three times higher this July than last and at some point that process will be stopped, no matter what our moral judgment of the situation.
Interior minister Thomas de Maizière warned that the Schengen zone, which allows passport-free travel across much of mainland Europe, could not be maintained unless EU states agreed to share asylum seekers.
The Schengen agreement of course has been the best achievement of immigration policy in a long time. But can the European Union agree on a coherent asylum policy, and furthermore one which removes some of the relative burden from Germany and the UK? Keeping relatively free immigration does in fact require a good deal of regulation, most of all in Europe, but those same governments are not always good at regulating.
Here is some bad polling news from Sweden. Trouble is afoot in other corners too:
Authorities in Hungary said this week they would dispatch thousands of “border hunters” to arrest migrants entering the country from Serbia.
The forces, drawn from the Hungary’s police, will patrol the 175km long border with Serbia, where soldiers and labourers are building a 4m high razor-wire fence to keep out an estimated 300,000 migrants expected to arrive in the country this year.
I think of these developments as a good illustration of why an attempt at truly, fully open borders probably would, due to backlash, result in a lower level of immigration than the pro-immigration, immigration-increasing, low-skilled immigration increasing policies I favor. But the idea of maximizing subject to a backlash constraint is unpopular in libertarian circles, let me tell you, including at GMU lunch table. Nonetheless we are learning, I am sorry to say, that the backlash constraint is more binding than many of us had thought.
This all remains an under-reported story in many American newspapers, Even with Donald Trump still leading in the polls, it is not understood what a prominent role images of Calais are playing in British national debate. I don’t see all this as leading to anything good.
The cultural apocalypse that wasn’t
According to the O.E.S., songwriters and music directors saw their average income rise by nearly 60 percent since 1999. The census version of the story, which includes self-employed musicians, is less stellar: In 2012, musical groups and artists reported only 25 percent more in revenue than they did in 2002, which is basically treading water when you factor in inflation. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves.
That is from Steven Johnson, the piece is excellent throughout. And note this:
The new environment may well select for artists who are particularly adept at inventing new career paths rather than single-mindedly focusing on their craft.
Are tenure track professors better teachers?
At least at Northwestern University, the answer seems to be no. Figlio, Schapiro, and Soter report:
This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern and employ an identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which contingent faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from contingent faculty in their first-term courses. This result is driven by the fact that the bottom quarter of tenure track/tenured faculty (as indicted by our measure of teaching effectiveness) has lower “value added” than their contingent counterparts. Differences between contingent and tenure track/tenured faculty are present across a wide variety of subject areas and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s averages and less-qualified students.
Emphasis is added by me. I wonder how much of the problem is that the bottom quarter of the tenure track instructors are more likely not to have English as a first language?
The pointer is from Ben Southwood.
Are reading texts becoming harder or simpler?
Robert J. Stevens, et.al. have done a pretty serious study of this question, based on computer analysis of texts, and here is their key conclusion:
From about 1930 through 1960 or 1970, the cognitive demands of reading curricula changed little…
In the period of 1970 through 2000 we observed a fairly consistent increase in the difficulty of reading text and comprehension tasks, particularly at third grade.
For sixth graders, however, reading texts were somewhat more complex in the 1910-1930 period.
I also found this comparison interesting:
In the 1920s, 45% of all questions asked were explicit detail questions, whereas by 1990 and 2000 curricula, that had diminished to only 8% of the questions asked.
Alas I can no longer remember who deserves thanks for this pointer. Here is an earlier Alex post about whether TV shows are becoming more complicated.