Category: Data Source
What is the “Poet Voice” signaling?
By comparing Poets and Talkers along these lines, the researchers were able to draw two overall conclusions. First, when compared to the Talkers, the poets tended to speak more slowly and stay within a narrower pitch range. Second, very few Talkers indulged in long pauses, but plenty of poets—33 percent—had no trouble leaving their listeners hanging for two seconds or more…
This is also, perhaps, why it can seem grating or detached: “In a more natural conversational intonation pattern, you vary your pitch for emphasis depending on how you feel about something,” says MacArthur. “In this style of poetry reading, those idiosyncrasies … get subordinated to this repetitive cadence. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, you just say it in the same way.” Overall, the researchers write, “from this small sample, we would conclude that perhaps when some listeners hear poets read with one or more of these characteristics—slow pitch speed, slow pitch acceleration, narrow pitch range, low rhythmic complexity, and/or slow speaking rate—they hear Poet Voice.”
One estimate of the rate of return on pharma
…return on investment in pharma R&D is already below the cost of capital, and projected to hit zero within just 2 or 3 years. And this despite all efforts by the industry to fix R&D and reverse the trend.
That is from Kelvin Stott. Keep in mind this is during a time when global demand has been growing, which suggests the supply side is all the more constipated.
Germany fact of the day
Thomas Piketty, the French economist, calculates that more than half of total wealth in Germany today is inherited — an estimate confirmed by German economists. In the 1960s and 1970s, the share was just a little over 20 per cent.
That is from Tobias Buck at the FT.
Transportation speed matters
High skilled workers gain from face to face interactions. If the skilled can move at higher speeds, then knowledge diffusion and idea spillovers are likely to reach greater distances. This paper uses the construction of China’s high speed rail (HSR) network as a natural experiment to test this claim. HSR connects major cities, that feature the nation’s best universities, to secondary cities. Since bullet trains reduce cross-city commute times, they reduce the cost of face-to-face interactions between skilled workers who work in different cities. Using a data base listing research paper publication and citations, we document a complementarity effect between knowledge production and the transportation network. Co-authors’ productivity rises and more new co-author pairs emerge when secondary cities are connected by bullet train to China’s major cities.
That is from Xiaofang Dong, Siqi Zheng, and Matthew E. Kahn. Of course, supersonic air travel should be next…
What will it take to reduce Bay Area housing costs?
A 2016 academic analysis by David Albouy, Gabriel Ehrlich and Yingyi Liu estimated that, in general, rents decrease by 3 percent for each 2 percent increase in the housing stock. (This estimate is close to the estimate of a lengthy blog post analysis at Experimental Geography, done two years ago, looking specifically at San Francisco’s history over the last six decades.)
If our goal is to reduce the average market-rate apartment rent to 27.5 percent of median household income (the midpoint between the 25-30 percent range that is normal), that means reducing the rent from $43,200 to $24,895, a 42.4 percent reduction. Using our ratio of a 2 percent housing stock increase leading to a 3 percent decrease in rents, that means, keeping all else equal, the Bay Area would theoretically need to increase the number of housing units overnight by 28.3 percent. (Let’s round up to 30 percent to make the subsequent calculations more intuitive).
…For example, if it takes 20 years to make up our housing deficit, and underlying trend growth for the U.S. population is 0.7 percent per year (15 percent over 20 years), and the average household size remains 2.3 persons, then the Bay Area will need to grow households 30 percent more than the amount of households needed to accommodate trend U.S. population growth (i.e. 30 percent more than the underlying 15 percent population growth), for a total growth of housing stock of approximately 50 percent over 20 years.
Let’s state it plainly: The Bay Area must increase its total housing stock by 50 percent over the next 20 years to bring affordability down to a reasonable level.
That is from the excellent Patrick Wolff.
Individuals process small and large numbers differently.
Small numbers are processed on a linear scale, while large numbers are processed on a logarithmic scale. In this paper, we show that financial analysts process small prices and large prices differently. When they are optimistic (pessimistic), analysts issue more optimistic (pessimistic) target prices for small price stocks than for large price stocks. Our results are robust when controlling for the usual risk factors such as size, book-to-market, momentum, profitability and investments. They are also robust when we control for firm and analyst characteristics, or for other biases such as the 52-week high bias, the preference for lottery-type stocks and positive skewness, and the analyst tendency to round numbers. Finally, we show that analysts become more optimistic after stock splits. Overall, our results suggest that a deeply-rooted behavioral bias in number processing drives analysts’ return expectations.
That is from Tristan Roger, Patrick Roger, and Alain Schatt, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Allende, Pinochet, and the stock market
We document the impact of Allende’s election and subsequent coup on share prices.
A rare natural experiment to identify impacts of institutions on economic outcomes.
The unexpected socialist victory in 1970 reduced share prices by one half.
The 1973 coup launching a business-friendly dictatorship raised share prices by 80%.
These effects reflect Allende’s systemic challenge to private property rights.
That is from Daniele Girardi and Samuel Bowles, here is an ungated version.
How scary are Christians?
Only 3 percent of white Christians are first-generation immigrants. That compares with 10 percent of black Christians, 58 percent of Latino Christians, and 66 percent of Asian Christians. In other words, American Christianity is growing heavily through immigrants who are people of color. If Christians are really so scary, maybe it’s time to build that wall.
By the way:
And around the globe, the people most likely to be Christians are women of color.
So to put all the pieces together:
if you’re mocking Christians, you’re mostly mocking women, because women are more likely than men to be Christians. The greatest disproportion is found among black Christians, of whom only 41 percent are male. So you’re mocking black women in particular.
How common is child marriage in the United States?
Approximately 6.2 of every 1,000 children surveyed had ever been married. Prevalence varied from more than 10 per 1,000 in West Virginia, Hawaii and North Dakota to less than four per 1,000 in Maine, Rhode Island and Wyoming. It was higher among girls than among boys (6.8 vs. 5.7 per 1,000), and was lower among white non‐Hispanic children (5.0 per 1,000) than among almost every other racial or ethnic group studied; it was especially high among children of American Indian or Chinese descent (10.3 and 14.2, respectively). Immigrant children were more likely than U.S.‐born children to have been married; prevalence among children from Mexico, Central America and the Middle East was 2–4 times that of children born in the United States. Only 20% of married children were living with their spouses; the majority of the rest were living with their parents.
That is from Alissa Koski and Jody Heymann, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How do people respond to shared trauma?
Studies of the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19th, 1995, indicate that the traumatic event resulted in people seeking to strengthen their bonds with loved ones: Divorce rates went down, and birth rates went up.
While tragic, the Oklahoma City bombing provided a fortuitous case study. When domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols carried out the truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, a total of 168 people died and more than 700 were injured. At the time it was the most calamitous terrorist attack in American history. Sixty-two percent of people in the city reported that they were personally affected by the events of that day. Forty percent said they knew someone who was injured or killed. The death of nineteen young children in the bombing was particularly traumatic.
Researchers have since studied the ripple effect the attack had on both divorce rates and birth rates. Family researchers Paul A. Nakonezny, Rebecca Reddick, and Joseph Lee Rodgers note that after the bombing, survivors were statistically less likely than the general population to divorce. Divorce rates, compared to the previous 10 years, declined in the Oklahoma City region in the months after the blast. Researchers thought that the impact would be felt most acutely by those closest to the bomb site, and indeed, the impact was highest among those who lived in counties most directly affected by the bombing, and lessened in Oklahoma counties located further away from downtown Oklahoma City.
In a separate study, Joseph Lee Rodgers, Craig A. St. John, and Ronnie Coleman discovered that Oklahoma City metropolitan area underwent a baby boom nine months after the bombing. In seventy-seven Oklahoma counties, both factors—marriage longevity and increased procreation—declined the further away the counties were from ground zero.
That is from Daily JStor.
A history of randomized assignment in the social sciences
Although the concept of randomized assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of the need for careful comparison groups, albeit often without the realization that randomization could be a particularly clean method to achieve that goal. In the second and more crucial phase of this history, four separate but related disciplines introduced randomized control trials within a few years of one another in the 1920s: agricultural science, clinical medicine, educational psychology, and social policy (specifically political science). Randomized control trials brought more rigor to fields that were in the process of expanding their purviews and focusing more on causal relationships. In the third phase, the 1950s through the 1970s saw a surge of interest in more applied randomized experiments in economics and elsewhere, in the lab and especially in the field.
That is from a Julian C. Jamison paper done at the World Bank, via various people in my Twitter feed.
The value of Facebook and other digital services
Women seem to value Facebook more than men do.
Older consumers value Facebook more.
Education and US region do not seem to be significant.
The median compensation for giving up Facebook is in the range of $40 to $50 a month, based mostly on surveys, though some people do actually have to give up Facebook.
I find it hard to believe the survey-based estimate that search engines are worth over 17k a year.
Email is worth 8.4k, and digital maps 3.6k, and video streaming at 1.1k, again all at the median and based on surveys. Personally, I value digital maps at close to zero, mostly because I do not know how to use them.
That is all from a new NBER paper by Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni.
How big are the buyer and renter gains from SB 827?
This article considers a counterfactual thought experiment: how would California’s housing market be different today if a policy currently under consideration in the California Senate—SB 827, which would allow new residential building along public transit corridors—had been implemented six years ago? I estimate that rent would be 5.8 percent lower in San Francisco, a savings of $266 per month on the median home, and 4.2 percent lower in Los Angeles County, savings of $124 per month.
That is from Salim Furth at Mercatus, here is much more. You will note those numbers do not include the higher output and innovation from a more efficient allocation of talent.
Here is Salim’s podcast with Matt Yglesias and Emily Hamilton.
Washington, D.C. fact of the day
The National African Art Museum has a problem:
Attendance dropped to 159,000 last year from a high of 403,000 in 2009, when there was a special exhibition. Last year’s number is 43 percent below the 10-year average.
One of the under-reported stories about D.C. is how much the city’s art museums have faded as intellectual and cultural centers for the city. This seems to be extreme for the African museum, perhaps because of urban gentrification, and perhaps because the African museum has an especially hard time mounting blockbuster exhibits famous to the public eye. Prince Twins Seven Seven just isn’t as famous as he ought to be.
In the meantime, you all have the internet to keep you busy.
The impact of the Dodd-Frank Act on small business
There are concerns that the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) has impeded small business lending. By increasing the fixed regulatory compliance requirements needed to make business loans and operate a bank, the DFA disproportionately reduced the incentives for all banks to make very modest loans and reduced the viability of small banks, whose small-business share of C&I loans is generally much higher than that of larger banks. Despite an economic recovery, the small loan share of C&I loans at large banks and banks with $300 or more million in assets has fallen by 9 percentage points since the DFA was passed in 2010, with the magnitude of the decline twice as large at small banks. Controlling for cyclical effects and bank size, we find that these declines in the small loan share of C&I loans are almost all statistically attributed to the change in regulatory regime. Examining Federal Reserve survey data, we find evidence that the DFA prompted a relative tightening of bank credit standards on C&I loans to small versus large firms, consistent with the DFA inducing a decline in small business lending through loan supply effects. We also empirically model the pace of business formation, finding that it had downshifted around the time when the DFA and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act were announced. Timing patterns suggest that business formation has more recently ticked higher, coinciding with efforts to provide regulatory relief to smaller banks via modifying rules implementing the DFA. The upturn contrasts with the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which appears to persistently restrain business formation.