Category: Data Source

Does the death penalty deter murders?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a new and noteworthy NBER abstract:

Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyze the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the Furman and Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution morartoria. In each case we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific examples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and even small changes in the specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty is that the death penalty — at least as it has been implemented in the United States — is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just "reasonable doubt" about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty — even about its sign.

Here is the paper.  I have never been a big believer in retribution per se, as opposed to restraint or deterrence motivations for punishment. 

Bosnia and Herzegovina fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

…all the synthetic economies put together, with about 10m players, are about the size of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

That is Tim Harford, reviewing Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, from the 14 January Financial Times, p.W5.

Addendum: Here is the recent WSJ piece on economists and TV game shows, thanks to www.politicaltheory.info.

Friggonomics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a data base on legal Nevada prostitutes.

The average rate is about $400 an hour, and the average customer believes he is getting a woman 31 years of age.  I won’t summarize the rest, but there is a table of correlation coefficients for many variables.

Here is a concluding excerpt:

I have been informed of many instances of guys walking into a legal
Nevada brothel, picking a lady and going back to her room to negotiate,
and then quoting to her the averages I found in previous surveys. This
is not good negotiating strategy, a topic I usually prefer not to give
advice on.

Thanks to the excellent Cynical-C blog for the pointer; they swear they found the data by accident.  And here is a good piece on whether Heidi Fleiss’s brothel for women will succeed, I predict no.

The ten sexiest geeks?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The list is by www.wired.com, and one of them is an economist.  Excerpt:

Paul Zak, co-chair of economics at Claremont Graduate University, for teaching us about the "trust hormone," oxytocin, and whittling away at some long-held myths about the sexes. In a recent study he found that men, not women, react hormonally when they’re not trusted, and that men tend to take negotiations over money personally. With all that, it’s almost not fair he’s such a looker.

Dare I reveal my Austrian roots and ask sexy to whom?  Sexy to geeks perhaps?  They um…need more women on this list.

Violations of purchasing power parity

by  Tyler Cowen in

Mercer Human Resource Consulting, which publishes an annual list of the cost of living in cities worldwide, recently put Buenos Aires 142nd, out of 144 cities ranked. What was slightly more expensive than Buenos Aires? Bangalore, India. The only two cities that were cheaper were Manilia, Philippines and Asuncion, Paraguay.

Here is the link.  Yes you can get excellent pasta here for two dollars or less, or a nine-piece stainless steel knife set for $27.  Many of the best restaurants offer entrees for seven or eight dollars.  Some good and apparently legal CD collections can be had for two or three dollars a piece.

Do right-wing or left-wing academics have a “narrower tent”?

by  Tyler Cowen in

This paper provides copious results from a 2003 survey of academics. We analyze the responses of 1208 academics from six scholarly associations (in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology) with regard to their views on 18 policy issues. The issues include economic regulations, personal-choice restrictions, and military action abroad. We find that the academics overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Democratic dominance has increased significantly since 1970. A multivariate analysis shows strongly that Republican scholars are more likely to land outside of academia. On the 18 policy questions, the Democratic-voter responses have much less variation than do the Republicans. The left has a narrow tent. The Democratic and Republican policy views of academics are somewhat in line with the ideal types, except that across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest. Regarding disciplinary consensus, we find that the discipline with least consensus is economics. We do a cluster analysis, and the mathematical technique sorts the respondents into groups that nicely correspond to familiar ideological categories: establishment left, progressive, conservative, and libertarian. The conservative group and the libertarian group are equal in size (35 individuals, each), suggesting that academics who depart from the leftist ranks are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. We also find that conservatives are closer to the establishment left than they are to the libertarians.

That is by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern, here is the paper.

Africa fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

For say, a banana picker in the Central African Republic…The trade barriers at the borders of the rich world may have disappeared, but if our picker wants to sell his bananas abroad he first has to get them onto a ship bound for America or Europe.  That takes 116 days, and an incredible 38 signatures — each one an opportunity for some official to collect a bribe.

That is by Tim Harford, from today’s New York Times.  Today in fact was Tim Harford day, here is his Slate piece, which, among other things, recounts his dinner at China Star with yours truly.  Here is an account of his recent lunch with Tom Schelling.

Who pays the highest prices?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I do, it seems.  Don’t tell my suppliers, but I am a big fan of zero price search.  Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst write:

Using scanner data and time diaries, we document how households substitute time for money through shopping and home production. We find evidence that there is substantial heterogeneity in prices paid across households for identical consumption goods in the same metro area at any given point in time. For identical goods, prices paid are highest for middleaged, rich, and large households, consistent with the hypothesis that shopping intensity is low when the cost of time is high. The data suggest that a doubling of shopping frequency lowers the price paid for a given good by approximately 10 percent. [TC: is that all????]  From this elasticity and observed shopping intensity, we impute the shopper’s opportunity cost of time, which peaks in middle age at a level roughly 40 percent higher than that of retirees [emphasis added]. Using this measure of the price of time and observed time spent in home production, we estimate the parameters of a home production function. We find an elasticity of substitution between time and market goods in home production of close to 2. Finally, we use the estimated elasticities for shopping and home production to calibrate an augmented lifecycle consumption model. The augmented model predicts the observed empirical patterns quite well. Taken together, our results highlight the danger of interpreting lifecycle expenditure without acknowledging the changing demands on time and the available margins of substituting time for money.

Here is the paper, and thanks to Bruce Bartlett for the pointer.  We also learn that people with children pay higher prices (presumably they have less time to search) and people in their forties with children pay the highest prices of all, six to eight percent more than people in their twenties or sixties.

I also take these results to imply that poor households, which shop more frequently and pay lower prices, are better off in material terms than CPI-based measures of real income will imply.  That being said, they also have less time.  Fans of the "happiness literature," which suggests more money above a certain level doesn’t make you better off, should favor less search.  After all, we are told that people enjoy time spent with friends more than either money or sex.  So does this view (not mine) suggest that we shut down discount outlets and induce more consumption of time?  Are single price monopolies better than price discrimination?  Is Marshall’s the true enemy of the middle class?

Wired Ads a Leading Indicator?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Is it time to invest in technology stocks again?  Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing Blog points us to this graph (before getting too excited, however, I would want to detrend for seasonality, i.e. the Christmas effect):

The image

Rich Giles made a graph that compares the page counts of past issues of Wired
with the the rise and fall of Nasdaq over the years.

You’ll note that the Nasdaq (red) lags Wired’s page count (blue) by a
few months [No longer true, in the updated graph -see below – although they do seem to move together, AT]. I’m not suggesting you go an buy technology shares, but gee, I’m
thinking the reports of money pumping back into technology companies might just
be true given the big up-tick in this months page count (294).

Addendum: There were some problems with the author’s original graph.  He corrected and I have reposted.  The data are available here.  Thanks to the Stalwart and Paul N for pointing me to the problem.

Burkina Faso fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Over 2001 and 2002, America’s 25,000 cotton farmers received more subsidies — about $3 billion — than the entire economic output of Burkina Faso in a year.  Two million people in Burkina Faso live partly or fully from cotton farming.

The information is from Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food, by George Pyle.  The book is more libertarian and less anti-corporate than the title makes it sound.