Category: Data Source
China’s ideological spectrum
It is basically statist vs. classical liberal, and it is strongly uni-dimensional. Those are the main lessons from a new and interesting paper by Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu:
We offer the first large scale empirical analysis of ideology in contemporary China to determine whether individuals fall along a discernible and coherent ideological spectrum, and whether there are regional and inter-group variations in ideological orientation. Using principal component analysis (PCA) on a survey of 171,830 individuals, we identify one dominant ideological dimension in China. Individuals who are politically conservative, who emphasize the supremacy of the state and nationalism, are also likely to be economically conservative, supporting a return to socialism and state-control of the economy, and culturally conservative, supporting traditional, Confucian values. In contrast, political liberals, supportive of constitutional democracy and individual liberty, are also likely to be economic liberals who support market-oriented reform and social liberals who support modern science and values such as sexual freedom. This uni-dimensionality of ideology is robust to a wide variety of diagnostics and checks. Using post-stratification based on census data, we find a strong relationship between liberal orientation and modernization — provinces with higher levels of economic development, trade openness, urbanization are more liberal than their poor, rural counterparts, and individuals with higher levels of education and income and more liberal than their less educated and lower-income peers.
Here is some NYT coverage of the piece. Here is some good Foreign Policy coverage. Currently this is the most downloaded piece on SSRN.
Why Manhattan children earn less when they grow up
I am late to covering this excellent piece by David Leonhardt, but it is worth your attention. The core result is this:
Low-income children who grow up in Manhattan make less money as adults than similar low-income children who grow up elsewhere…It’s just that affluent Manhattan children don’t grow up to be quite as affluent as affluent children elsewhere.
To make the case of the affluent child concrete, if the Manhattan parents earn 400k a year, the child at age 26 averages 50k a year, compared to an average of 55k for comparable non-Manhattan kids at that same age. David considers a few hypotheses:
1. That effect is possibly diminishing as Manhattan improves, but the changes doesn’t yet show up in the data.
2. Perhaps Manhattan parents, or Manhattan itself, teach that money is not so important. For one thing, you get interested in culture there. Or maybe you want to become famous more than you want to become wealthy.
3. People who grew up in Manhattan are less likely to be married at a particular age.
4. Manhattan schools are less than perfect.
I would add a few hypotheses (not claims) of my own:
5. Manhattan is a selection of the most ambitious, highest-achieving individuals from elsewhere, and thus if you grow up there ambition and achievement seem to be especially forbidding prospects. Better not to try too hard. Recall David Hume on the “posts of honour” appearing to be filled?
6. Manhattan is a bad place, and bad things happen in bad places.
7. Manhattan families are more likely to spoil their children, create problems of moral hazard by promising or implying future support, and have less of an internal aspirational culture.
8. If you grow up there, Manhattan appears to be the center of the known universe and you are less likely to leave it in pursuit of higher earnings. Fewer people from New Jersey feel this same way, and so they end up in the region with the highest potential earnings for them; that is sometimes but not always New York City. (This mechanism also means Manhattan children are more likely to remain near their parents, see #7.)
9. A lot of Manhattan wealth is linked to finance and entertainment, and other superstar markets, which are maybe “less heritable” in terms of income than that small Midwestern furniture factory.
What else?
The end of doggie privacy?
Dogs can run, but they can’t hide from PooPrints.
BioPet Vet Lab, which specializes in canine genetic testing, is partnering with the appropriately named London borough of Barking and Dagenham to track down dog owners who fail to remove their pets’ public deposits.
Starting in September 2016, people who don’t pick up after their dogs could be fined 80 pounds, or about $125. The registration of dogs’ DNA could become mandatory five months earlier if a pilot program proves successful.
There is more here, via Ray Lopez. And here is a related story from Vancouver.
Which students repay their student loans?
Fans of Game of Thrones know that “a Lannister always pays his debts.” So too do nearly all alumni from Notre Dame, Vassar, Harvey Mudd, and Brigham Young, at least when it comes to federal student loans.
There is more here, from Brookings, via Matthew C. Klein. Ahem…and for whatever reason, students from St. Johns do well too…
Deaths in police custody, research results
The limited data available do not suggest a recent overall increase in the number of homicides by police or the racial composition of those killed, despite the high-profile cases and controversies of 2014-2015, according to a New York Times analysis. But a January 2015 report published in the Harvard Public Health Review, “Trends in U.S. Deaths due to Legal Intervention among Black and White men, Age 15-34 Years, by County Income Level: 1960-2010,” suggests persistent differences in risks for violent encounters with police: “The rate ratio for black vs. white men for death due to legal intervention always exceeded 2.5 (median: 4.5) and ranged from 2.6 (95% confidence interval [CI] 2.1, 3.1) in 2001 to 10.1 (95% CI 8.7, 11.7) in 1969, with the relative and absolute excess evident in all county income quintiles.”
And this:
For the most recent period where statistics are available (2003-2009), the BJS found that 4,813 persons “died during or shortly after law enforcement personnel attempted to arrest or restrain them… About 60% of arrest-related deaths (2,931) were classified as homicides by law enforcement personnel.” However, among these 2,931 homicides by law enforcement personnel, 75.3% were reported to have taken place in response to a violent offense — constituting a force-on-force situation, such as an intervention with an ongoing assault, robbery or murder: “Arrests for alleged violent crimes were involved in three of every four reported homicides by law enforcement personnel.” Still, 7.9% took place in the context of a public-order offense, 2.7% involved a drug offense, and among 9.2% of all homicides by police no specific context was reported.
There is much more of interest at the Harvard Kennedy School link.
Do people underestimate how much they will enjoy doing things alone?
Roberto Ferdman reports:
Ratner has a new study titled ‘Inhibited from Bowling Alone,’ a nod to Robert Putnam’s book about Americans’ waning participation in group activities, that’s set to publish in the Journal of Consumer Research in August. In it, she and co-writer Rebecca Hamilton, a professor marketing at the McDonough School of Business, describe their findings: that people consistently underestimate how much they will enjoy seeing a show, going to a museum, visiting a theater, or eating at a restaurant alone. That miscalculation, she argues, is only becoming more problematic, because people are working more, marrying later, and, ultimately, finding themselves with smaller chunks of free time.
Might part of the problem be narcissism?:
“The reason is we think we won’t have fun because we’re worried about what other people will think,” said Ratner. “We end up staying at home instead of going out to do stuff because we’re afraid others will think they’re a loser.”
But other people, as it turns out, actually aren’t thinking about us quite as judgmentally or intensely as we tend to anticipate. Not nearly, in fact. There’s a long line of research that shows how consistently and regularly we overestimate others’ interest in our affairs.
There is more here. For the pointer I thank Claire Morgan.
Not everyone in this country is nice
People search frequently for it, roughly as often as searches for “migraine(s),” “economist,” “sweater,” “Daily Show,” and “Lakers.”
That is from an interesting Wonkblog article, using Google searches, trying to estimate the most racist regions of America. The rural Northeast and Midwest don’t do so well.
The pointers are from SV and AM.
Rating colleges and universities by value-added
A new Brookings study by Rothwell and Kulkarni attempts to do just that. The list of ratings for two-year institutions puts NHTI’s-Concord Community College at the top, followed by a large number of institutions you mostly haven’t heard of. For four-year institutions the list starts with:
1. Caltech
2. Colgate
3. MIT
4. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology,
with other surprises to follow. The Colorado School of Mines does better than Princeton, for instance. Here is the report itself, here is a story on the report. I am finding the web site for the rankings is still a little glitchy, let’s hope they fix that soon, or maybe it is just the current volume of traffic.
Are one-way streets a plague on mankind?
Or at least a plague on Louisville? From Emily Badger in The Washington Post:
…they took advantage of a kind of natural experiment: In 2011, Louisville converted two one-way streets near downtown, each a little more than a mile long, back to two-way traffic. In data that they gathered over the following three years, Gilderbloom and William Riggs found that traffic collisions dropped steeply — by 36 percent on one street and 60 percent on the other — after the conversion, even as the number of cars traveling these roads increased. Crime dropped too, by about a quarter, as crime in the rest of the city was rising. Property values rose, as did business revenue and pedestrian traffic, relative to before the change and to a pair of nearby comparison streets. The city, as a result, now stands to collect higher property tax revenues along these streets, and to spend less sending first-responders to accidents there.
Gilderbloom and Riggs have also done an analysis of the entire city of Louisville, comparing Census tracts with multi-lane one-way streets to those without them. The basic pattern holds city-wide: They found that the risk of a crash is twice as high for people riding through neighborhoods with these one-way streets. The property values in census tracts there were also about half the value of homes in the rest of the city.
The full story is here.
Does immigration enforcement reduce crime?
No. From Thomas J. Miles and Adam B. Cox in the JLE:
Prior research investigates whether immigrants commit more crimes than native-born people. Yet the central policy used to regulate immigration — detention and deportation — has received little empirical evaluation. This article studies a recent policy innovation called Secure Communities. This program permits the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police and to take the arrestee into federal custody promptly for deportation proceedings. Since its launch, the program has led to a quarter of a million detentions. We utilize the staggered rollout of the program across the country to obtain differences-in-differences estimates of its impact on crime rates. We also use unique counts of the detainees from each county and month to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to confined immigrants. The results show that the Secure Communities program has had no observable effect on the overall crime rate.
That is once again via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Trends and cycles in China’s macroeconomy
That is the NBER paper by Chang, Chen, Waggoner, and Zha, pdf here. Here is the abstract:
We make three contributions in this paper. First, we provide a core of macroeconomic time series usable for systematic research on China. Second, we document, through various empirical methods, the robust findings about striking patterns of trend and cycle. Third, we build a theoretical model that accounts for these facts. The model’s mechanism and assumptions are corroborated by institutional details, disaggregated data, and banking time series, all of which are distinctive of Chinese characteristics. The departure of our theoretical model from standard ones off ers a constructive framework for studying China’s macroeconomy.
China tobacco facts of the day
A conglomerate on the order of the old Gulf + Western, China National runs more than 160 cigarette brands, manufactured in about 100 factories across the country, and uses its earnings to invest in banks, luxury hotels, a hydroelectric plant, a golf course, and even drugmakers. Most of its money goes to its owner, the Chinese government; the tobacco industry accounts for about 7 percent of the state’s revenue each year [emphasis added], and China National controls as much as 98 percent of the market. All told, the industry in China employs more than 500,000 Chinese. They are among roughly 20 million people who get some income from tobacco, including members of 1.3 million farming households and workers at 5 million retailers, according to government figures. The extent to which the government is interlocked with the fortunes of China National might best be described by the company’s presence in schools. Slogans over the entrances to sponsored elementary schools read, “Genius comes from hard work. Tobacco helps you become talented.”
From Andrew Martin, there is more here. Of course this helps explain why the Chinese government has such mixed feelings about conducting a successful anti-tobacco campaign. By the way, do any of you know of a source on the 7 percent figure?
Which buyers benefit the most from the Export-Import Bank?
Veronique de Rugy and Diane Katz have the scoop:
…the primary beneficiaries on the buyer side of the transactions are also very large firms. Among the top 10 buyers, 5 are state-controlled and rake in millions of dollars from their own governments in addition to Ex-Im Bank subsidies.
Five of the top ten buyers are related to the production of oil or natural gas. The other five top buyers are airlines. Number one on the list is…can you guess it? Pemex. Clearly a company worthy of further subsidy, and from the American government too.
On the sell side, 80 percent of Ex-Im financing goes to support the exports of large American firms, note that the number one firm — Boeing — already receives plenty of implicit subsidy from DOD contracts. Is there no limit to strategic trade policy? And to the extent carbon emissions are important, how is the Ex-Im Bank doing on that scorecard?
How meritocratic is meritocracy?
There is some new research by Castilla and Bernard:
In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.” To assess this effect, we conducted three experiments with a total of 445 participants with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion, and termination recommendations for several employee profiles. We manipulated both the gender of the employees being evaluated and whether the company’s core values emphasized meritocracy in evaluations and compensation. The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. This finding demonstrates that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears and that there may be unrecognized risks behind certain organizational efforts used to reward merit. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms leading to the paradox of meritocracy effect as well as the scope conditions under which we expect the effect to occur.
The link is here, and for the pointer I thank Samarth Bhaskar.
Is globalization slowing down?
Probably so:
For at least three decades before the 2008 financial crisis, global trade regularly grew at twice the rate of the global economy, leading some economists to hail an era of “hyperglobalisation”. According to the WTO, the annual average recorded since 1990 has been 5.1 per cent growth.
With last year’s growth of 2.8 per cent, global trade has now expanded at, or below, the rate of the broader global economy for three straight years.
That is from Shawn Donnan, the rest of the FT piece is here.