Category: Data Source

Publishing pays in economics

Here is a new paper by Suzanne O’Keefe and Ta-Chen Wang:

We study salaries of economics faculty at the University of California to determine how publications affect salary. We find that each publication in a top 10 journal has a positive and significant effect on annual base salary of 1.5%, or $2,053. Unlike previous research, our analysis specifies the impact of publications in specific journals. Publications in American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Review of Economics and Statistics have an independent positive effect on salary. Compensation is also affected by faculty rank, seniority, university of employment, and teaching awards. Base salary does not significantly differ by gender, however, gross salary is about 9% lower for women. After controlling for migration and faculty rank, seniority has a negative impact on salary.

Here is a sentence of interest:

Full-time tenure-track economics faculty members in the UC system have gross salaries ranging from about $70,000 to $378,000.

Against my expectations, UCLA economics professors are paid more than 13k more, on average, than UC Berkeley economics professors.  The pay gap for women is larger in economics than in these universities as a whole.

The possibly gated article is here, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.

Can you raise your kid as a conservative or liberal?

Here is a new study (caveat emptor all the way):

This new study, by a team led by psychologist R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, begins with new mothers describing their intentions and approach in 1991, and ends with a survey of their children 18 years later. In between, it features an assessment of the child’s temperament at age 4.

…“Parents who endorsed more authoritarian parenting attitudes when their children were one month old were more likely to have children who were conservative in their ideologies at age 18,” the researchers report. “Parents who endorsed more egalitarian parenting attitudes were more likely to have children who were liberal.”

Obviously genes are an alternative channel of influence.  And this is a stunner:

Also, the Illinois researchers did not gauge the parents’ political beliefs.

So I don’t believe the interpretations at all.  Still, it is interesting to see the extent of attitudinal persistence, and furthermore “…our results also showed that early childhood temperament predicted variation in conservative versus liberal ideologies.”  I suspect, however, that politics would turn out to be less susceptible to parental shaping than, say, religion or general temperamental approach to religion.

I consider this study radically incomplete, but still it is interesting to see the question tackled with a twenty-year time window and some ex ante planning.

For the pointer I thank www.artsjournal.com.

Where oh where are they?

Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.

Here is more.  Planets, planets everywhere…

Imprisonment and infant mortality

Here is a new study by Christopher Wildeman (pdf):

This article estimates the effects of imprisonment on infant mortality using data from the United States, 1990-2003. Results using state-level data show consistent effects of imprisonment rates on infant mortality rates and absolute black-white inequality in infant mortality rates.  Estimates suggest that had the American imprisonment rate remained at the 1973 level—the year generally considered the beginning of the prison boom—the 2003 infant mortality rate would have been 7.8% lower, absolute black-white inequality in the infant mortality rate 14.8% lower. Results using micro-level data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) show that recent parental incarceration elevates early infant mortality risk, that effects are concentrated in the postneonatal period, and that partner violence moderates these  relationships. Importantly, results suggest that recent parental incarceration elevates the risk of early infant death by 29.6% for the average infant in the sample. Taken together, results show that imprisonment may have consequences for population health and inequality in population health and should be considered when assessing variation in health across nations, states, neighborhoods, and individuals.

New Videos: Leading Thinkers on Development

At MRUniversity we just released over 30 new videos on leading thinkers on development. We cover Amartya Sen (who gets three), Bela BelassaKarl Polanyi, Adam Smith, Paul Romer, William Easterly and many others. In terms of  the course these videos are optional, they are for dipping into as per one’s interest. In these videos, we sometimes provide a second perspective on issues we discuss in greater detail in forthcoming topic videos.

On Monday we will be releasing a new section of the Development Economics course, Food and Agricultural Productivity.

Hyperinflation in Iran

Steve Hanke estimates that Iran’s monthly inflation rate has reached 70%.

When President Obama signed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, in July 2010, the official Iranian rial-U.S. dollar exchange rate was very close to the black-market rate. But, as the accompanying chart shows, the official and black-market rates have increasingly diverged since July 2010. This decline began to accelerate last month, when Iranians witnessed a dramatic 9.65% drop in the value of the rial, over the course of a single weekend (8-10 September 2012). The free-fall has continued since then. On 2 October 2012, the black-market exchange rate reached 35,000 IRR/USD – a rate which reflects a 65% decline in the rial, relative to the U.S. dollar.

The rial’s death spiral is wiping out the currency’s purchasing power. In consequence, Iran is now experiencing a devastating increase in prices – hyperinflation.

Iran’s hyperinflation is still well below world leader Hungary whose inflation rate in July of 1946 reached 4.19 × 10^16 percent per month or Zimbabwe’s more recent November of 2008 rate of 7.96 × 10^10 percent per month.

*Innovation Economics*

That is the new book by Rob Atkinson and Stephen Ezell.  It is far more mercantilist than I feel comfortable with, yet it is full of information and argumentation, and it is a book one can profitably engage with.  Here is one excerpt:

The largely consensus view among U.S. economic elites is that the massive U.S. job loss in manufacturing is simply a reflection of manufacturing doing well: using technology to automate work and to become more efficient.  It’s the agriculture story they tell us…

There are two big problems with this view.  The first is that it is not supported by the official government data.  In fact, U.S. manufacturing lost jobs much faster in the 2000s than in the 1990s, even though productivity growth was similar during the two decades.  In the 1990s, U.S. manufacturing employment fell 1 percent, while productivity increased 56 percent.  Yet, in the 2000s, manufacturing employment fell 32 percent while productivity increased only slightly faster, 61 percent.  So, clearly, higher productivity was not the main cause of the manufacturing employment collapse.

As Michael Mandel has pointed out repeatedly, there are also problems with the data, and here are our authors on that point:

…a closer look reveals that every durable goods industry grew more slowly in output than GDP except one: computer/electronics which grew a whopping 720 percent faster than GDP…To put this in perspective, this one sector accounted for 113 percent of U.S. manufacturing output growth in the 2000s, even though, in 1997, it accounted for just 12 percent of manufacturing output.

Note that a lot of this measured growth is quality improvement in computers, rather than growth of the sector in the traditional sense of having a rapidly expanding industry.  Employment in that sector fell.  The performance of the other manufacturing sectors is not so impressive:

…during 2001-2010, manufacturing minus computers actually lost 6 percent of its value-added.  Output of the electrical equipment and wood products industries declined by 7 percent, plastics by 8 percent, fabricated metals by 10 percent, printing by 12 percent, furniture by 19 percent, nonmetallic minerals and primary metals and paper by 31 percent, apparel by 34 percent, and textiles and motor vehicles by 39 percent.  In other words, thirteen manufacturing sector that made up 58 percent of U.S. manufacturing employment all produced less in 2010 than in 2001, all at a time when the overall economy grew 15.8 percent.

I suppose you could say that education and health care have in fact seen striking advances in productivity during this period.  Or you could recall my portrait in The Great Stagnation of an economy which has only a very small number of dynamic sectors, with computers of course in the lead.  Overall it is not a pretty picture.

Some life expectancies are shrinking

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

And this:

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

Here is more, scary throughout.  We are not as healthy as we thought we were.

Eurozone sticky wage update

From the always essential FT Alphaville:

Société Générale points out that unit labour costs — basically, wages — have been falling quite rapidly in the peripherals, and that this is probably due to austerity measures. New data from Eurostat breaks out what the agency calls ‘non-business’ wages: the education, health services, and public administration sectors. In otherwords, ‘non-business’ is a rough proxy for the public sector:

The logical follow-on from the above being that “non-business” sectors are a big contributor to the rapidly falling unit labour costs in the periphery, especially given their large state sectors:

SocGen’s Michel Martinez writes that there are outright wage declines in Greece while in the other peripherals, labour productivity (as measured by ULC) is outpacing wage gains.

TC again: No one should doubt that depreciation and expansionary monetary policy are a much easier path to lower real wages.  Yet the claim that wages are outright sticky for long periods of time, when economic pressures dictate wage declines, isn’t holding up that well.

And I would add this: They are not as wealthy as they thought they were.

Fox and Mitchum on the Flynn Effect and how it works

James R. Flynn recommends this paper, by Fox and Mitchum, in his new book:

Secular gains in intelligence test scores have perplexed researchers since they were documented by Flynn (1984, 1987). Gains are most pronounced on abstract, so-called culture-free tests, prompting Flynn (2007) to attribute them to problem solving skills availed by scientifically advanced cultures. We propose that recent-born individuals have adopted an approach to analogy that enables them to infer higher-level relations requiring roles that are not intrinsic to the objects that constitute initial representations of items. This proposal is translated into item-specific predictions about differences between cohorts in pass rates and item-response patterns on the Raven’s Matrices, a seemingly culture-free test that registers the largest Flynn effect. Consistent with predictions, archival data reveal that individuals born around 1940 are less able to map objects at higher levels of relational abstraction than individuals born around 1990. Polytomous Rasch models verify predicted violations of measurement invariance as raw scores are found to underestimate the number of analogical rules inferred by members of the earlier cohort relative to members of the later cohort who achieve the same overall score. The work provides a plausible cognitive account of the Flynn effect, furthers understanding of the cognition of matrix reasoning, and underscores the need to consider how test-takers select item responses.

The paper is here (pdf).

Greek Islands for Sale

Telegraph: As international inspectors in Athens scrutinise the country’s fitness to receive the latest aid payment, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has said commercial exploitation of some islands could generate the revenue lenders need to see to continue funding the country.

The shortlist includes islands ranging in size from 500,000 square meters (5.4 million square feet) to 3 million square meters, and which can be developed into high-end integrated tourist resorts under leases lasting 30 years to 50 years, Mr Taprantzis said.

…The fund reviewed 562 of the estimated 6,000 islands and islets under Greek sovereignty. While some are already privately owned, such as Skorpios by the Onassis shipping heiress Athina Onassis, the state owns islands such as Fleves, which is near the coastal resort area of Vouliagmeni, and a cluster of three islands near Corfu. Mr Taprantzis declined to identify any of the islands.

Legislation needs to be passed to allow development of public property by third parties and reduce the number of building, environmental and zoning permits needed before the plan can proceed, Taprantzis said.

It’s a good idea to move these assets into private hands. The U.S. Federal government also has a lot of land that could be privatized. (For the U.S. see map and note that only a small portion is parkland).

The Flynn Effect in East Germany

Economic, Educational, and IQ Gains in Eastern Germany 1990-2006 (gated), Eka Roivainen, Intelligence, Nov/Dec 2012

Abstract: Lynn and Vanhanen (2012) have convincingly established that national IQs correlate positively with GDP, education, and many other social and economic factors. The direction of causality remains debatable. The present study re-examines data from military psychological assessments of the German federal army that show strong IQ gains of 0.5 IQ point per annum for East German conscripts in the 1990s, after the reunification of the country. An analysis of IQ, GDP, and educational gains in 16 German federal states between 1990 and 1998 shows that IQ gains had a .89 correlation with GDP gains and a .78 correlation with educational gains. The short time frame excludes significant effects of biological or genetic factors on IQ gains. These observations suggest a causal direction from GDP and education to IQ.

For the pointers I thank Michelle Dawson and Ron Unz.

Code is Law

Geeta Dayal, Wired: On Tuesday, some visitors trying to get to the livestream of Michelle Obama’s widely lauded speech at the Democratic National Convention were met with a bizarre notice on YouTube, which said that the speech had been blocked on copyright grounds….

On Sunday, a livestream of the Hugo Awards — the sci-fi and fantasy version of the Oscars — was blocked on Ustream, moments before Neil Gaiman’s highly anticipated acceptance speech. Apparently, Ustream’s service detected that the awards were showing copyrighted film clips, and had no way to know that the awards ceremony had gotten permission to use them.

…As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech.

It is not just patent law which is out of control. If a copyright bot takes down a video for which there is fair use there ought to be grounds for a counter-suit.