Category: Data Source
Parking fact of the day
Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts. In a recent survey conducted by Bruce Schaller in the SoHo district in Manhattan, 28 percent of drivers interviewed while they were stopped at traffic lights said they were searching for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising.
…What causes this astonishing waste? As is often the case, the prices are wrong. A national study of downtown parking found that the average price of curb parking is only 20 percent that of parking in a garage, giving drivers a strong incentive to cruise.
Here is more, from Donald Shoup.
Australia fact of the day
Which country's stock market has been the best performer in the world — not just over the past year or decade, but over the last 110 years?
It's Australia, which stands above all others in its combination of higher returns and lower volatility.
While they speak our language, and we have some common origins, they have hitched their wagon to the dynamic growth of Asia. And it's paid off, as Australia has had the best performing stock market in the world from 1900 to 2009.
Australia posted 7.5% after-inflation returns per year during that time, with a standard deviation of 18.2%, according to a study from Credit Suisse. Those returns are the highest and the volatility the second lowest of the 19 major markets the researchers studied.
During that time, U.S. stocks made a 6.2% return, with a standard deviation of 20.4%. That means investors would have made more money in Australian stocks with less volatility than in the U.S. or any other major market over that long stretch.
The full story is here and hat tip goes to Ann Jessica Lien on Twitter.
Question: does this mean that Australia is really good, economically speaking, or simply not thought very much of by others?
CAPTCHA Economics
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are the distorted text puzzles that are designed to keep spammers out of websites. Although some AI systems have been developed to solve CAPTCHAs the market has discovered that it is cheaper to farm out the problems to workers in developing countries.
Here is an amazingly detailed investigation from researchers at UC San Deigo of the market for solving CAPTCHAs.
Bottom line:
- Prices run about $1 per thousand CAPTCHAs solved, depending on the time of
day and demand.
- The median response time to solve a CAPTCHA is 14
seconds and accuracy runs about 90%.
- “[T]he
business of solving CAPTCHAs,…is a well developed, highly-competitive industry with the capacity to solve on the order of a million CAPTCHAs per
day.”
Hat tip: Mim’s Bits.
Wichita fact of the day
It is, in percentage terms, the most export-oriented city in the United States.
According to a study published late last month by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, nearly 28 per cent of the city’s gross metropolitan product is sold abroad. That makes it the most export-oriented in the country, just ahead of Portland, Oregon – noted for its computer and electronics companies – and San Jose in California’s Silicon Valley.
Can you say "small aircraft"?
Downward Revision in 2nd Quarter GDP?
Secretary of the Treasury Geithner in the NYTimes on August 2:
While the economy has a long way to go before reaching its full potential, last week’s data on economic growth show that large parts of the private sector continue to strengthen.
Catherine Rampell at the NYTimes blog Economix on August 3:
On Friday, in its preliminary estimate of gross domestic product, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said it believed the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent last quarter.
…G.D.P. numbers go through several revisions as the bureau receives more complete data, and it now looks as if the revisions may be significant. According to the June factory order data, released today, the number the bureau used to calculated the inventory component of G.D.P. was way off.
As a result, economists are predicting that the second quarter G.D.P. number will be revised downward from 2.4 percent to somewhere around 1.7 percent.
Previous revisions to GDP show the recession began earlier and had a deeper trough than first thought. Moreover, on balance, the previous revisions also suggest that the recovery has been even weaker than first thought. If the argument above holds up, that trend will continue. The news is not good.
GDP is lower today than it was at its peak in 2007.
Macroeconomics is complicated and bewildering, installment #386
Andrew Rose and Mark Spiegel report:
We update Rose and Spiegel (2009a, b) and search for simple quantitative models of macroeconomic and financial indicators of the "Great Recession" of 2008-09. We use a cross-country approach and examine a number of potential causes that have been found to be successful indicators of crisis intensity by other scholars. We check a number of different indicators of crisis intensity, and a variety of different country samples. While countries with higher income seemed to suffer worse crises, we find few clear reliable indicators in the pre-crisis data of the incidence of the Great Recession. Countries with current account surpluses seemed better insulated from slowdowns.
There are ungated versions here.
Negative Equity in Underwater Homes
Calculated Risk gathers the data on underwater homes:
- There are 14.75 million underwater homes and 4.1 million of these have more than 50% negative equity (the homeowners owe 50%+ more than their homes are worth).
- The total negative equity is $771 billion.
I decided to create a picture:
*Government Size and Implications for Economic Growth*
The authors are Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson and this book is a good summary of ongoing attempts to correlate the size of government with economic growth.
Nonetheless the book does not answer my two longstanding objections to how this literature is sometimes interpreted:
1. To what extent is "economic freedom" actually proxying for "quality of government?" (the link is the best blog post of this year so far, by the way)
2. Why say so much about growth rates and so little about income levels? The latter are positively correlated with size of government. You don't have to view big government as causing high per capita income, but at the very least the account of differential growth rates should be consistent with the account of differential levels of per capita income.
Why does AEI price the paperback at $20? Aren't think tanks supposed to subsidize the books they produce? Amazon, by the way, was claiming (incorrectly) that there is a hardcover at $30.
Why are so many homes unemployed?
Theories of unemployed labor are a subset of theories of unemployed resources.
The U.S. housing vacancy rate–an unemployment rate for homes–is at its highest level since at least 1965 (see figure). Why? Is it sticky prices? Lack of aggregate demand? Structural?
House prices may be sticky but they have fallen a lot–maybe not enough–but they have fallen a lot more than have wages. On the other hand, house prices rose a lot more than wages. Maybe house prices are sticky relative to the required variation in market clearing levels.
What about lack of aggregate demand? The homeownership rate was 67.2 in 2000 and today it’s 66.9. Thus, we don’t have too great a supply of houses in the aggregate so aggregate demand is likely a factor.
Is the problem structural? It does seem that we have too many houses in the South and the West where the boom was concentrated. If we think of the unemployment rate as a measure of where there are too many houses then the following figure shows that there is a positive correlation between the home vacancy rate and the unemployment rate. It’s not as tight as one might expect, however. California, for example, has a high unemployment rate but a home vacancy rate slightly below the national average and many states such as Wisconsin have plenty of unemployment but a very low home vacancy rate.
My guesstimate is 50% AD, 25% sticky prices, 25% structural. Tyler would read it differently. I do think more progress could be made if greater attention were given to theories of unemployed resources and not just unemployed labor.
Does Beer Make Bud Wiser?
Here from Razib Khan at Gene Expression is a chart of percentage alcohol drinkers against score on the Wordsum test (0-10 score; a quick and dirty correlate .71 of adult IQ.). I will let you debate causality.
Historical Financial Statistics
That is a new database, on-line, it looks very useful and it is constructed by smart people. Summary:
Welcome to Historical Financial Statistics, a free, noncommercial data set that went online in July 2010. We aim to be a source of comprehensive, authoritative, easy-to-use macroeconomic data stretching back several centuries. Our target range of coverage is from 1492 to the present, with special emphasis on the years before 1950, which few databases cover in detail.
I am told by a credible source that progress will be cumulative.
West German unemployment in the 1980s
A number of commentators in the discussion yesterday doubted whether West Germany had non-natural rate unemployment just before unification. I didn't cover this in detail because I thought it was commonly accepted, but I'll offer up more evidence and it suggests oth unemployment and a deficiency of aggregate demand at the time. Here, from the Kansas City Fed, is one typical account of West Germany, from 1989:
Thus, unemployment increased steadily from 1970 to 1988. What caused this asymmetric effect of monetary policy on unemployment? As argued below, restrictive monetary policy in combination with adverse external shocks…
The article describes West Germany as, through the 1980s, having had "persistently high unemployment." (Keep in mind that less than twenty years before the unemployment rate in West Germany was one percent, though the natural rate was rising over time.)
There were also plenty of structural reasons for West German unemployment, but those nominal and real rigidities are potentially amenable to macroeconomic policy. Here's another treatment, from 1990, noting the persistent unemployment in West Germany, in excess of the natural rate. This lengthy study, while finding AD deficiencies to be one factor behind West German unemployment, focuses on structural causes of unemployment, most of all wage rigidities. That's a moot point; those unemployed workers still should benefit from well-executed fiscal and monetary policy, at least to the extent one believes such policies to be effective. The study also finds that frictional unemployment and structural unemployment in the Lilien sectoral shift sense — the kinds that don't respond well to fiscal policy under any account — to be slight in West Germany at that time.
Number of Birds Killed
Number of birds killed by the BP oil spill: at least 2,188 and counting.
Number of birds killed by wind farms: 10,000-40,000 annually.
Number of birds killed by cars: 80 million annually.
Number of birds killed by cats: Hundreds of millions to 1 billion annually.
Don't worry there is some good news.
Number of birds killed by fisheries: tens to hundreds of thousands annually (fortunately for the birds, some of these fisheries are now shut down).
The world’s largest database of job openings for economists
It is here and the bottom line is this:
Starting from today, walras.org and VoxEU.org have joined forces to form the largest global database of job openings for PhD economists. Any job posted on walras.org is automatically also posted on VoxEU’s new job market database, which can be accessed by clicking here.
You can also access the Jobs section directly using the new Jobs tab in the main navigation or by linking to www.voxeu.org/jobs/
Gender Parity in Schooling Around the World
The world has reached gender parity in schooling and in a few years we will see a schooling ratio in favor of women. Using UNESCO statistics (more detail here) on school life expectancy, the average country has a parity level of 1.01 in favor of women or, weighting by population, .991. In other words, at current rates women can be expected to get the same number of years of education as men, as a world average.
Equal life expectancy of schooling on a world level does not mean that all is well – basically we have a relatively small number of countries in which women get much less education than men and a large number of countries in which women get somewhat more education than men. On the vertical axis in the figure below (click to enlarge) is total life expectancy in school and on the horizontal axis the ratio of female to male life expectancy in school. The figure tells us a number of interesting things. First, the largest imbalances are against women and these tend to occur in countries with a low level of total education. South Korea is an interesting outlier.
Second, in India parity is below 1 and in China it is above 1. In India female school life expectancy increased by a huge 2.5 years between 2000 and 2007 and the parity ratio increased from .77 to .9 so we can expect the (weighted) world parity level to easily tip over 1 in the next few years (if it has not done so already). The graph suggests that a ratio around 1.09 is the "norm" towards which countries are trending with development.
Interestingly, some of the Muslim countries, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan (no data for 2007-2008 but in 2004 the parity ratio was less than 0.5), are below parity but Qatar and Iran have some of the highest ratios in the world, both above US levels.