Category: Data Source
The increase in residential segregation by income
Via Kevin Drum:
Via Harrison Jacobs, here’s a recent study showing the trend in income segregation in American neighborhoods. Forty years ago, 65 percent of us lived in middle-income neighborhoods. Today, that number is only 42 percent. The rest of us live either in rich neighborhoods or in poor neighborhoods.
There is more here.
Restructuring the Social Sciences
Very interesting paper (pdf) from Gary King with practical advice on reorganizing centers and departments for the information age:
The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making due with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit to having a major impact on the world. To facilitate these important developments, universities, funding agencies, and governments need to shore up and adapt the infrastructure that supports social science research. We discuss some of these developments here, as well as a new type of organization we created at Harvard to help encourage them — the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. An increasing number of universities are beginning efforts to respond with similar institutions. This paper provides some suggestions for how individual universities might respond and how we might work together to advance social science more generally.
Some evidence that incentives for good teaching can work
In a new NBER Working Paper, Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff report:
Teachers in the United States are compensated largely on the basis of fixed schedules that reward experience and credentials. However, there is a growing interest in whether performance-based incentives based on rigorous teacher evaluations can improve teacher retention and performance. The evidence available to date has been mixed at best. This study presents novel evidence on this topic based on IMPACT, the controversial teacher-evaluation system introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools by then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. IMPACT implemented uniquely high-powered incentives linked to multiple measures of teacher performance (i.e., several structured observational measures as well as test performance). We present regression-discontinuity (RD) estimates that compare the retention and performance outcomes among low-performing teachers whose ratings placed them near the threshold that implied a strong dismissal threat. We also compare outcomes among high-performing teachers whose rating placed them near a threshold that implied an unusually large financial incentive. Our RD results indicate that dismissal threats increased the voluntary attrition of low-performing teachers by 11 percentage points (i.e., more than 50 percent) and improved the performance of teachers who remained by 0.27 of a teacher-level standard deviation. We also find evidence that financial incentives further improved the performance of high-performing teachers (effect size = 0.24).
You will find the paper ungated here.
The Quality Of Care Delivered To Patients Within The Same Hospital Varies By Insurance Type
That is the new paper by Christine S. Spencer, Darrell J. Gaskin, and Eric T. Roberts. Let me excerpt the three most important sentences from the abstract:
We found that privately insured patients had lower risk-adjusted mortality rates than did Medicare enrollees for twelve out of fifteen quality measures examined. To a lesser extent, privately insured patients also had lower risk-adjusted mortality rates than those in other payer groups. Medicare patients appeared particularly vulnerable to receiving inferior care.
I don’t have a great deal of confidence in our ability to estimate the size of that effect, but keep that difference in mind next time someone tells you that Medicare is so much more efficient than private health insurance in this country.
Cohorts born in the late 1930s and 40s did especially well
Via @ClaudiaSahm, there is a new paper (pdf) from Emmons and Noeth at the St. Louis Fed, the abstract is here:
The global financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession reduced the income and wealth of many families, but older families generally fared better than young and middle-aged families. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances reveals that being young was a significant risk factor during the downturn, regardless of a family’s race, ethnicity, or education level. Among older families, those headed by someone 70 or over fared slightly better than those headed by someone between 62 and 69. Income and wealth also increased most strongly among older families during the two decades preceding the crisis. Part of the explanation for favorable income and wealth trends among currently living older Americans is a positive birth-year cohort effect. After controlling for a host of factors related to income and wealth, we find that cohorts born in the late 1930s and 1940s have experienced more favorable income and wealth trajectories over their life courses than earlier- or later-born cohorts. While it is too soon to know how cohorts born in recent decades will fare over their lifetimes, it appears that the median Baby Boomer (born in the 1950s and early 1960s) and median member of Generation X (born in the late 1960s and 1970s) are on track for lower income and wealth in older age than those born in the 1930s and 1940s, holding constant many factors other than when a person was born.
One driving force seems to be that the older generation was simply more motivated to save. And here is a dramatic sentence:
Among young and middle-aged families, the median levels of net worth were 30.5 percent and 24.1 percent lower in 2010 than in 1989, respectively.
The paper presents many interesting facts, but I would start with pp.9-10.
From The Guardian, here is an argument that middle class youth in Great Britain today will end up faring worse than did their parents.
Do children brought up in the same family share the same environmental influences?
Maybe not. Here is a fascinating 2011 paper (pdf) from Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels, and here is part of the abstract:
…environmental differences between children in the same family (called ‘‘nonshared environment’’) represent the major source of environmental variance for personality, psychopathology, and cognitive abilities. One example of the evidence that supports this conclusion involves correlations for pairs of adopted children reared in the same family from early in life. Because these children share family environment but not heredity, their correlation directly estimates the importance of shared family environment. For most psychological characteristics, correlations for adoptive ‘‘siblings’’ hover near zero, which implies that the relevant environmental influences are not shared by children in the same family. Although it has been thought that cognitive abilities represent an exception to this rule, recent data suggest that environmental variance that affects IQ is also of the nonshared variety after adolescence.
My favorite part of the paper is the section which discusses how siblings represents a non-shared environment for each other. For instance my sister grew up with a slightly younger brother and I grew up with…a slightly older sister, which is a somewhat different proposition.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Why are children shorter in India than in Africa?
Via Chris Blattman, Jayachandran and Pande have a new paper (pdf), here is the abstract:
Height-for-age among children is lower in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. This presents a puzzle since India is richer than the average African country and fares better on most other development indicators including infant mortality. Using data from African and Indian Demographic and Health Surveys, we document three facts. First, among firstborns, Indians are actually taller than Africans; the Indian height disadvantage appears with the second child and increases with birth order. Second, investments in successive pregnancies and higher birth order children decline faster in India than Africa. Third, the India-Africa birth order gradient in child height appears to vary with sibling gender. These three facts suggest that parental preferences regarding higher birth order children, driven in part by cultural norms of eldest son preference, underlie much of India’s child stunting.
Is the American public becoming more conservative?
Sort of, yes, as John Sides reports:
Importantly, the public has not moved in a conservative direction in all issue areas. For example, support for same-sex marriage has been increasing across all states. It is also worth noting that our findings on the 1960s and 2000s hides important shifts in policy mood between these periods, such as increased policy liberalism during the 1980s. However, when it comes to support of government programs, the net conservative shift is clear. Considering the evidence that inequality is near an all-time high, this may seem like a surprising result. Prominent economic models, for example, expect that as the rich get richer, public support for government policies like spending more on education, infrastructure, and job creation would increase. Instead, across the country, the public’s policy mood has moved in a conservative direction.
There is more of interest here.
The culture that is England
England is the only country in the developed world where the generation approaching retirement is more literate and numerate than the youngest adults, according to the first skills survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In a stark assessment of the success and failure of the 720-million-strong adult workforce across the wealthier economies, the economic thinktank warns that in England, adults aged 55 to 65 perform better than 16- to 24-year-olds at foundation levels of literacy and numeracy. The survey did not include people from Scotland or Wales.
The OECD study also finds that a quarter of adults in England have the maths skills of a 10-year-old. About 8.5 million adults, 24.1% of the population, have such basic levels of numeracy that they can manage only one-step tasks in arithmetic, sorting numbers or reading graphs. This is worse than the average in the developed world, where an average of 19% of people were found to have a similarly poor skill base.
When the results within age groups are compared across participating countries, older adults in England score higher in literacy and numeracy than the average among their peers, while younger adults show some of the lowest scores for their age group.
Here is further information, via Annie Lowrey.
Ho hum, move along, nothing to see here (really)
I can’t load the image into WordPress for some reason, but check out this picture of how VIX — one measure of U.S. market volatility — is behaving in recent weeks and months. It’s down, and staying low.
This is one reason why I am not much covering the government shutdown or debt ceiling crisis, though I view both disputes as inefficient, harmful, and tactically unwise to boot. In fact, that graph should be plastered below most of the blog posts you read on these topics.
How much is African poverty really declining?
I’ve never been convinced by extant treatments of this topic. Here is one further stab at the problem, from Afrobarometer (pdf):
New data from Round 5 of the Afrobarometer, collected across an unprecedented 34 African countries between October 2011 and June 2013, demonstrates that lived poverty remains pervasive across the continent. This data, based on the views and experiences of ordinary citizens, counters projections of declining poverty rates that have been derived from official GDP growth rates. For the 16 countries where these questions have been asked over the past decade, we find little evidence for systematic reduction of lived poverty despite average GDP growth rates of 4.8% per year over the same period. While we do see reductions in five countries (Cape Verde, Ghana, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe), we also find increases in lived poverty in five other (Botswana, Mali, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania). Overall, then, despite high reported growth rates, lived poverty at the grassroots remains little changed. This suggests either that growth is occurring, but that its effects are not trickling down to the poorest citizens in fact, income inequality may be worsening), or alternatively, that actual growth rates may not match up to those being reported. The evidence also suggests, however,that investment in infrastructure and social services are strongly linked with lower levels of lived poverty.
I am not suggesting that these are “the right” numbers, and you might object that they are based on individual responses to questions. Still, the numbers do show a very definite poverty reduction in the case of Ghana and some other countries with good news, so the responses do not seem entirely unconnected to reality. In any case I have long been suspicious about how much African growth has been resource-generated rather than based in ongoing gains in agricultural productivity.
If you would like better news from Africa, here are some figures from last year about declining child mortality. Here are some new results comparing Africa to earlier stages in British history, the original paper is here (pdf).
The nature of current unemployment
Dylan Matthews writes:
…Short-term unemployment is actually lower than it was in 2007. Indeed, the percentage of the labor force that had been unemployed for five weeks or less didn’t grow all that much during the economic meltdown. What changed was what happened after or within those five weeks. In 2007, they typically ended with a job. In 2009 and 2010, they more often ended with another few weeks of unemployment. The result is that if you break down the unemployment rate by duration, the problem appears to be almost entirely about long-term unemployment…
There is more here, including a good picture.
New results on labor market polarization
The piece is by Christopher L. Smith, at the Board of Governors, and from this work we learn a few things:
1. Once we adjust for demographics, labor market polarization is a stronger effect than the raw data themselves suggest.
2. Polarization is driven both by more people leaving the middle income category and fewer people entering it.
3. The actual changes in polarization often arrive during cyclical downturns but then stick.
4. “…the share in middle-type jobs has fallen for all types of workers.” (wrt education) The declines have been the worst for younger workers and for non-college workers. Even for college-educated workers, the share employed in low-end jobs has risen since the early 2000s.
5. The inflow into middle-type jobs, from the previously unemployed, is declining steadily with time.
6. Unemployed, previously middle-type workers are tending to remain non-employed rather than to trend into lower-type jobs.
7. The rate at which persons in low-type or (especially) middle-type jobs transition into high-type jobs is rising over time.
8. Yet the rate at which persons in low-type jobs transition into middle-type jobs is falling over time.
9. The core trends on labor market polarization date from the mid-1980s.
Here is a summary of the research. The paper is here.
For the pointer I thank Claudia Sahm.
Does changing household size resurrect American economic performance?
Persons per family household:
1990: 3.22
2000: 3.24
2010: 3.24
Not so much change, and if you look you will see there is also not so much change for non-family households. The Census pdf is here. I have covered this ground before, but the myth of “changing household size means economic progress has been just fine” dies hard.
By the way, the average number of people in a household categorized as “living alone” has remained strictly constant at one.
All of this is referring back to yesterday’s discussion, and I thank Paul for the reminder. Also from the MR comments, Ricardo writes:
…you can find median income numbers broken down by size and type of household over time precisely to distinguish single 19-year-olds from married couples with children. They do not change the underlying story much at all. See:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/families/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/
What happens in these debates is that some people simply cannot bear the thought that incomes for a large percentage of Americans are stagnant and so try to introduce all sorts of red herrings into the discussion without actually doing the basic research required to see that the stagnationists are basically correct on just about any relevant measure you care to use. To pick one example, let’s look at white married-couple families to move past any concerns about single moms or poor, non-white immigrants skewing the results downward. You can find this in Census Table F-7. You will note that white married-couple families where the wife does not work have experienced almost complete stagnation in real income. Real income among this group was slightly higher in the 1970s than it was in 2007 (the peak over the past 10 years). I challenge you to look at any number of measures and you will see that the gains made in overall family or household income are almost entirely due to more women entering the labor force and earning only slightly higher wages. If you focus solely on per capita income, you miss the fact that people may be marrying less and having fewer children as a consequence of the stagnation in male wages and the need many women feel to work longer hours.
Guy S writes:
Household composition adjusted data from the Census Bureau can be found on pgs 16-17 in this document: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/20130917_ip_slides_with_plotpoints.pdf
This has been a total wipeout of income potential for the lowest quintile households in the US.
The Great Reset (free Facebook won’t make up for this)
In 2012, real median household income was 8.3% lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.
Here is the link. There are further details here, which notes that the median family income was higher in 1989. Ryan Avent has some good charts.