Category: Data Source
Does temporary migration from rich to poor countries cause commitment to development?
The author is Lee Crawfurd and the subtitle of the paper is “Evidence from quasi-random Mormon mission assignments.” Here is part of the abstract:
…we address this question using a natural experiment–the assignment of Mormon missionaries to two-year missions in different world regions–and test whether the attitudes and activities of returned missionaries differ. I find that assignment to a region in the global South causes returned missionaries to report greater interest in global development and poverty, but no difference in support for government aid or higher immigration, and no difference in personal donations or other involvement.
Maybe Mormons are different in this regard, or maybe missions are different (you feel you have done your bit?), but still an interesting result.
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile?
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives’ attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did not. Leveraging a targeted survey of 2,070 island residents and distance to Turkey as an instrument, we find that direct exposure to refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugees, immigrants, and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such exclusionary policies. Since refugees only passed through these islands, our findings challenge both standard economic and cultural explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment and show that mere exposure suffices in generating lasting increases in hostility.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Dominik Hangartner, Elias Dinas, Moritz Marbach, and Konstantinos Matakos, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
USA tax fact of the day
Between 1950 and 1959, he notes, the highest earning 1 percent of Americans paid an effective [average] tax rate of 42 percent. By 2014, it was only down to 36.4 percent—a substantial but by no means astronomical decline.
Here is more from Jordan Weissmann, via C.
Greek life isn’t as good as you thought
Using records from a large public university, we examine the impact of Greek life on academic performance and salaries. To isolate the causal effect of Greek life, we exploit a university policy prohibiting students from joining a Greek organization during their first semester and a minimum GPA for subsequent eligibility. Regression discontinuity and panel methods reveal that Greek affiliation reduces student grades by 0.1-0.3 standard deviations. Greek effects are largest during the semester of pledging, semesters of increased social activities, and for males. We find no evidence of a Greek salary premium and rule out even modest positive effects.
That is from a new paper by William E. Even and Austin C. Smith, being presented at the AEa meetings this week.
Do longer sentences reduce crime?
I find that Republican prosecutorial offices sentence defendants to longer incarceration spells as compared to their Democratic and Independent counterparts. This increase in incarceration length is driven by longer sentences for both violent and prop- erty offenses, and translates into a persistent increase in incarceration. These sentencing and incarceration enhancements do not lower crime at the county level, indicating that, in terms of public safety, the marginal return to the tough-on-crime stance may be close to zero.
That is from a new AEA paper by Ashna Arora.
Does Cognitive Imprecision Result in Under-Reaction or Over-Reaction?
That is the topic of a new paper by Michael Woodford, to be presented at this year’s AEA meetings. Here at least is the abstract:
Men who score high on standardized IQ tests display forecast errors for inflation that are 50% lower than forecast errors for other men in a representative sample of Finnish households. High-IQ men, but not others, have consistent inflation expectations over time and their inflation perceptions align with past expectations. Only high-IQ men increase their consumption propensity when expecting higher inflation in line with the consumption Euler equation. High-IQ men are also twice as sensitive to interest-rate changes when making borrowing decisions. Heterogeneity in education, income, or financial constraints do not explain these results. Limited cognitive abilities are thus human frictions to the transmission and effectiveness of economic policy and inform research on heterogeneous agents in macroeconomics and finance.
How many papers are there in economics about psychological cognitive bias as a source of error, as opposed to low IQ as a source of error? Might that be a bias of sorts and not one of IQ?
52 things learned by Kent Hendricks
Here are a few:
Contrary to the beliefs of roughly 33% of Americans, Kansas is not the flattest state. In fact, it’s the 9th flattest state, and it’s one of only two Great Plains states to make the top ten (the other is North Dakota). The flattest state is actually Florida, the second flattest state is Illinois, and the least flattest is West Virginia. (Disruptive Geo)
…The average high school GPA of a representative sample of 700 millionaires in the United States is 2.9. (Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
…Dinosaurs roamed the earth for a long time. Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus. (Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions)
…Pepperoni pizza is subject to more government regulation than plain cheese pizza. That’s because cheese pizzas are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while pepperoni pizzas—which have meat—are regulated by the Department of Agriculture. (Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany, Risk: A Very Short Introduction)
Here is the full list, interesting throughout.
Resource wealth depends on market orientation
This paper explores the effect of market orientation on (known or available) natural resource wealth using a novel dataset of world-wide major hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries. Our empirical estimates based on a large panel of countries show that increased market orientation causes a significant increase in discoveries of natural resources. In a thought experiment where economies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa remain closed, they would have only achieved one quarter of the actual increase in discoveries they have experienced since the early 1990s. Our results call into question the commonly held view that known or available natural resource endowments are exogenous.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Rabah Arezki, Frederick van der Ploeg, and Frederik Toscani, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
At what ages do children stop believing in Santa Claus?
Research in the Journal of Cognition and Development in 2011 shows that 83% of 5-year-olds think that Santa Claus is real, the study’s lead author, Jacqueline Woolley, wrote in The Conversation last year.
“We have found in more recent studies that that number of 85% sounds about right,” said Thalia Goldstein, assistant professor of applied developmental psychology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
“Children’s belief in Santa starts when they’re between 3 and 4 years old. It’s very strong when they’re between about 4 and 8,” she said. “Then, at 8 years old is when we start to see the drop-off in belief, when children start to understand the reality of Santa Claus.”
What about across the pond? They seem to be asleep over there:
Of 161 parents in the United Kingdom, 92.5% thought Father Christmas was real for their children up to the age of 8, according to a research paper presented at the annual meeting of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association in Finland in 1999.
And here is a study vulnerable to the replication crisis:
The interviews revealed that 39.2% of the children believed that the man they visited was the same Santa who came down their chimneys…1.3% had a somewhat “adult belief,” Goldstein said, in which they said that the man was not Santa and did not live at the North Pole but could communicate with the real Santa.
That is a CNN article from last year. Why is the word “marginal” declining in popularity? How many seven year olds know what “marginal” means? How many know not to believe everything the President says? How many understand hedging?
Is Islam Compatible with Free-Market Capitalism? An Empirical Analysis, 1970–2010
Are majority-Muslim countries laggards when it comes to developing liberal economic institutions? Using an Index of Economic Freedom and its component parts, this study finds that Muslim-dominant countries (>50% of the population) are positively associated with free-market capitalism. Protestant dominance is also positively correlated, but the association stems from just two components of the index, mainly “legal security and property rights protection.” Surprisingly, Protestant countries correlate negatively with “small government” and “freedom to trade,” two critical components of free-market capitalism. Muslim dominance shows positive correlations with all areas except for “legal security and property rights.” The results are consistent when assessing similar variables measuring property rights and government ownership of the economy collected by the Varieties of Democracy Project. Capitalistic policies and institutions, it seems, may travel across religions more easily than culturalists claim.
That is by Indra de Soysa, I call it speculative but nonetheless an underrated point, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
U.S.A. fact of the day
As recently as 2013, New York had more people than Florida. Now Florida has 1.75 million more than New York. Indeed 35% of US population growth now occurs in Florida and Texas.
That is from Scott Sumner. And here is Scott’s post on how the United States is becoming more like Europe:
The US population has gone from growing about one percentage point faster than the EU in the 1990s, to perhaps a third of a point faster today.
So what other ways is the US becoming more like Europe?
1. The percentage of Americans who are not religious has been rising dramatically.
2. Our health care system is increasingly socialized.
3. Our politics increasingly resembles the populism of places like Hungary and Italy. The political polarization resembles the Brexit split in the UK. Anti-immigration nationalism came on the scene in Europe before it hit the US.
4. The recent criminal justice reform bill slightly (and I emphasize slightly) moves us in the European direction of lower rates of incarceration. We are also slightly softening the war on drugs.
5. Walkable shopping areas are increasingly popular. Some cities are moving to allow dense townhouses in areas previously reserved for single-family homes.
Continuous improvement, Lebron James edition
Curry and James are both taking four pull-up threes per game this season. Curry is making 45% of them. James is making 40% of them.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. James made 30% of his two pull-up threes per game in 2016. His shooting percentage ranked 19th of the 21 players who took as many of these shots as he did. He was closer to Kobe Bryant and Russell Westbrook than Curry.
There are 12 players this season with similar numbers to his. Curry is still No. 1 in terms of shooting percentage. James is now No. 2.
…James now relies on threes for nearly 30% of his shots. That percentage is by far the highest of his career. It’s also higher than Kevin Durant’s this season.
He’s not only taking more 3-pointers. He’s also taking longer 3-pointers.
Here is the full WSJ article. Here is my earlier post on the three-point shot and the duration of the Great Stagnation.
The value of Facebook?
Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits are hard to measure. We report the results of a series of three non-hypothetical auction experiments where winners are paid to deactivate their Facebook accounts for up to one year. Though the populations sampled and the auction design differ across the experiments, we consistently find the average Facebook user would require more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year. While the measurable impact Facebook and other free online services have on the economy may be small, our results show that the benefits these services provide for their users are large.
Here is the paper, by Jay R. Corrigan et.al., via Jake Seliger, and here is Jake’s take on the recent Facebook disputes.
Does school spending matter for child outcomes?
It seems it does, here is an excerpt from the conclusion of a new C. Kirabo Jackson paper on this question:
The recent quasi-experimental literature that relates school spending to student outcomes overwhelmingly support a causal relationship between increased school spending and student outcomes. All but one of the several multi-state studies find a strong link between spending and outcomes – indicating that money matters on average. Importantly, this is true across studies that use different data-sets, examine different time periods, rely on different sources of variation, and employ different statistical techniques. While one can poke holes in each individual study, the robustness of the patterns across a variety of settings is compelling evidence of a real positive causal relationship between increased school spending and student outcomes on average. However, an examination of single-state studies suggests that, on average, money matters, but that this is not always so in all settings or in all contexts.
And this:
To better understand why some studies find positive impacts while others do not, an examination of the few studies that are not positive is instructive. Three out of the seven papers that are not significant involve Title I spending, and three out of the seven involve capital spending. Given that 6 out of 7 of the studies that find no significant impact (86%) involve particular spending types may suggest that while overall budget increases may improve outcomes, increased funding tied to particular uses may not. In particular, the evidence is consistent with capital spending and Title I spending being less predictably effective than spending in general.
Here is an earlier and related paper on whether school spending cuts matter.
Stunning Figures on Energy Efficiency
Over the past 60 years, the energy efficiency of ever-less expensive logic engines has improved by over one billion fold. No other machine of any kind has come remotely close to matching that throughout history.
Consider the implications even from 1980, the Apple II era. A single iPhone at 1980 energy-efficiency would require as much power as a Manhattan office building. Similarly, a single data center at circa 1980 efficiency would require as much power as the entire U.S. grid. But because of efficiency gains, the world today has billions of smartphones and thousands of datacenters.
From Mark Mills at Real Clear Energy.