Category: Data Source
Alice Evans on the ideological gender divide
“I suggest,
- Men and women tend to think alike in societies where there is
- Close-knit interdependence, religosity and authoritarianism, or
- Shared cultural production and mixed gendered offline socialising.
- Gendered ideological polarisation appears encouraged by:
- Feminised public culture
- Economic resentment
- Social media filter bubbles
- Cultural entrepreneurs.”
Here is the full piece, currently the best piece on this topic.
Central African Republic estimate of the day
Published in the journal Conflict and Health last April, the report suggests that the world’s deadliest humanitarian crisis in 2022 was not in Afghanistan, Ukraine, or other places featured regularly in the news — but in CAR.
The Central African Republic has neither reliable birth and death registries nor regular censuses. To figure out how many people were dying, Karume’s team traveled by car, boat, motorcycle, and foot to conduct interviews across the country. When they analyzed their survey data, they estimated that nearly 6 percent of CAR’s population died within 2022, in a country with a median age around 15. Scaling for population size, this toll would amount to a loss of more than two New York Cities. And yet, the world outside of Africa is barely aware that CAR is a country. The title of the team’s report asks: “How can we not know?”
Here is more, by Amy Maxmen, via Dylan Matthews.
South Dakota is trying to hold on
Map of the TFRs by US state for 2023, based on recently released birth data from January-September 2023. The TFR declined to around 1.62 kids per woman last year, but there are important regional differences. Values range from 1.99 in South Dakota to 1.19 in Washington DC. pic.twitter.com/xXXzKm1kT6
— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) January 22, 2024
Bihar is holding on:
Quick tour of Argentina’s fiscal deficit (from my email, anonymous author)
I won’t double indent, but this is not by me, though I agree with it:
“I agree with your read re Argentina’s history of fiscal stability. From this paper (unclear if the data is accurate), here is Argentina’s deficit from 1960 to 2016 or so:
[See Figure 3 here]
Notice 2003-2009 is the only time with a noticeable superavit (exports > imports, taxes > spending), which coincides with Kirchner. It happily coincided with booming soy prices and it was immediately followed by more public spending. Remember soy exports have their own special tax rate (retenciones + FX tax, ~double other exports). Here are soy prices (source):
[See Figure here]
Here is Carlos Pagni in 2009 covering the law that let the state spend as much as it pleased once again. This was only a few years after 2004, when the IMF had forced Argentina to pass Ley 25.917 constraining government spending and debt under GDP.
Also notice that the deficit continued after the hyperinflation of 1989-1990! Between the privatizations, Plan Bonex, and reduced social spending, Menem reduced inflation (and caused a recession for which he is resented to this day). Then Cavallo comes in with convertibilidad. This gets world bankers excited and the dollars start flowing back into Argentina but the fiscal deficit immediately resumes. That same Menem ran an ad campaign in 1999 partially based on infrastructure investments after his decade of deficit.
In other words, the Peronistas simply do not believe that too much spending leads to a crisis. They will always spend if allowed to. Argentina still lacks the institutions to prevent this.
Looking at the recent history of fiscal deficit, Milei can make two contributions:
Short-term: Cut spending before things explode. The Peronistas would’ve continued to print + spend, deepening the problems. Milei is already succeeding at this and will likely succeed while he remains in power. For example, he has cut some of the funding to the provinces, which will be forced to cut their spending. Some of them are already considering printing their own currency (paper bonds like the LECOP or Patacones from 2001).
Long-term: Prevent future spending. This is what the Libertarians promise: remove the people that spend us to the ground for good. We should measure “historical success” by this measure. This is why dollarization is attractive: it prevents the state from printing money to fund its deficit.
I have my hopes up but I don’t understand Argentinian institutions or history well enough to know if he can make progress on this. As a comparison, the Bank of England was founded in 1694 and became formally independent a few centuries later in 1997 (including an IMF intervention into fiscal spending as recent as 1976).”
No, Covid spending wasn’t the only factor, but…
Barro, CPI rate correlation with covid spending in 37 countries pic.twitter.com/AD47gPTbYb
— 161phi (@161phi) January 21, 2024
A year or so ago I recall telling Bari Weiss in a podcast that the inflation was perhaps half real shocks, half an aggregate demand problem. Don’t let the revisionists talk you into the hardcore RBC view!
Who feels the pinch of status competition?
Here is one interesting hypothesis:
Despite the persistence of anti-Black racism, White Americans report feeling worse off than Black Americans. We suggest that some White Americans may report low well-being despite high group-level status because of perceptions that they are falling behind their in-group. Using census-based quota sampling, we measured status comparisons and health among Black (N = 452, Wave 1) and White (N = 439, Wave 1) American adults over a period of 6 to 7 weeks. We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.
That is from a new paper by Nava Calouri, Erin Cooley, Lauren E. Philbrook. Via excellence.
How sticky are wages in nominal terms?
There is a new paper on this topic, with what seems to be very good data:
This paper examines the relationship between downward nominal wage rigidity and employment outcomes using linked
employer-employee data. Wage rigidity prevents 27.1 percent of counterfactual wage cuts, with a standard deviation of 19.2 percent across establishments. An establishment with the sample-average level of wage rigidity is predicted to have a 3.3 percentage point higher layoff rate, a 7.4 percentage point lower quit rate, and a 2.0 percentage point lower hire rate. Estimating a structural model by indirect inference implies that the cost of a nominal wage cut is 33 percent of an average worker’s annual compensation.
That is by Gabriel Ehrlich and Joshua Montes, recently published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Here are less gated versions of the paper. I found this of particular interest:
Establishments in the construction supersector display the least wage rigidity, with an average of 8.8 percent of wage cuts prevented. Establishments in the public administration and finance supersectors display the most wage rigidity, with average levels of 39.3 and 41.7 percent of wage cuts prevented, respectively.
Of course employment in the construction sector is highly cyclical, and employment in public administration often is governed by tenure, not exactly what fits best into the standard story.
U.S.A. facts of the day
The R&D spending of Amazon is greater than the R&D spending of all companies and government in France. Alphabet beats Italy.
Pepsi’s R&D spending beats all sources in Nigeria.
Here is more from Ethan Mollick.
World’s First Dominant Assurance Contract Platform
In September I alerted you to a crowdfunding campaign to produce a dominant assurance contract/refund bonus platform. Many of you stepped up and it’s now and up and running! The platform is called EnsureDone. It’s starting up small, with just a few projects, but already the projects are quite interesting. MakeSunsets, for example, had a campaign to raise $1000 to fund a test of seeding the atmosphere with sulfur to increase reflection. That campaign failed which meant the people who had agreed to contribute earned a refund bonus! The UX could also use some work. Still, it’s nice to see this idea being tested in the wild and I have inside info that another such platform will launch soon.
Department of Uh-Oh, economic research edition
We assess statistical power and excess statistical significance among 31 leading economics general interest and field journals using 22,281 parameter estimates from 368 distinct areas of economics research. Median statistical power in leading economics journals is very low (only 7%), and excess statistical significance is quite high (19%). Power this low and excess significance this high raise serious doubts about the credibility of economics research. We find that 26% of all reported results have undergone some process of selection for statistical significance and 56% of statistically significant results were selected to be statistically significant. Selection bias is greater at the top five journals, where 66% of statistically significant results were selected to be statistically significant. A large majority of empirical evidence reported in leading economics journals is potentially misleading. Results reported to be statistically significant are about as likely to be misleading as not (falsely positive) and statistically nonsignificant results are much more likely to be misleading (falsely negative). We also compare observational to experimental research and find that the quality of experimental economic evidence is notably higher.
That is from a new paper by Zohid Askarov, Anthony Doucouliagos, Hristos Doucouliagos, and T. D. Stanley.
Via my colleague Jonathan Schulz.
Are chatbots better than we are?
Maybe so:
We administer a Turing Test to AI Chatbots. We examine how Chatbots behave in a suite of classic behavioral games that are designed to elicit characteristics such as trust, fairness, risk-aversion, cooperation, \textit{etc.}, as well as how they respond to a traditional Big-5 psychological survey that measures personality traits. ChatGPT-4 exhibits behavioral and personality traits that are statistically indistinguishable from a random human from tens of thousands of human subjects from more than 50 countries. Chatbots also modify their behavior based on previous experience and contexts “as if” they were learning from the interactions, and change their behavior in response to different framings of the same strategic situation. Their behaviors are often distinct from average and modal human behaviors, in which case they tend to behave on the more altruistic and cooperative end of the distribution. We estimate that they act as if they are maximizing an average of their own and partner’s payoffs.
That is from a recent paper by Qiaozhu Mei, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, and Matthew O. Jackson. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
A Systematic Review and New Analyses of the Gender-Equality Paradox
Contrary to what some naysayers might claim, the paradox is real:
Some studies show that living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education, are associated with the magnitude of psychological sex differences. We systematically and quantitatively reviewed 54 articles and conducted new analyses on 27 meta-analyses and large-scale studies to investigate the association between living conditions and psychological sex differences. We found that sex differences in personality, verbal abilities, episodic memory, and negative emotions are more pronounced in countries with higher living conditions. In contrast, sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, and math are smaller in countries with higher living conditions. We also observed that economic indicators of living conditions, such as gross domestic product, are most sensitive in predicting the magnitude of sex differences. Taken together, results indicate that more sex differences are larger, rather than smaller, in countries with higher living conditions. It should therefore be expected that the magnitude of most psychological sex differences will remain unchanged or become more pronounced with improvements in living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education.
That is from a new piece by Agneta Herlitz, Ida Hönig, and Martin Asperholm. Via excellence.
Income redistribution through taxes and transfers continues to rise
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the introductory bit:
The broader historical trends show that the US tax-and-transfer system is getting more progressive, including in recent years. And the US government is increasingly redistributing wealth to the bottom half of the income distribution.
And:
The best information indicates that transfer income is rising over time, one example being the increasing numbers of states accepting the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Even following the Clinton-era welfare reforms, the real resources that US governments (at all levels) sent to the poor continued to increase. Welfare itself became more temporary, but aid for food and child care, among other needs, rose in real value.
In a recent study, Thomas Coleman and David A. Weisbach of the University of Chicago focus on research of tax-and-transfer progressivity and establish some ground rules for judging its reliability: It should measure income comprehensively; look at both taxes and transfers; examine the issue over decades; and make their data available. Under these criteria, only three studies qualify. After scrutinizing that research, Coleman and Weisbach conclude:
Methodological choices produce some differences in the size of their estimates and the size of the trends, but the central story in all these studies is the same: the dominant change in the tax and transfer system over the past half-century has been an increase in transfers to the bottom. … All three studies show that the tax and transfer system has become more progressive and more redistributive.
A good rule for thumb for articles, policy papers, and tweets: if you see the word “gutted” used (but not as a reference to others), the output is likely bad.
How women are perceiving the economics profession
Fewer women reported being satisfied with the climate in the economics profession in 2023 compared to five years ago, despite efforts during that time to improve conditions for women in the field, according to a new survey.
About 17% of women in economics said they strongly agreed or agreed with a statement about being satisfied in the profession, down from 20% in 2018, according to the topline results of a survey conducted in the fall. The preliminary findings were presented by University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist Marianne Bertrand Friday at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in San Antonio.
The gap between women and men’s experience in economics widened slightly over the past five years, with 39% of men saying they were satisfied with the profession’s climate, compared to 40% in 2018.
Women made up just 17.8% of full economics professors in 2022. While representation is higher among students and associate professors, the share of new economics doctoral degree recipients that were women fell in 2023, Bertrand said Friday.
The culture that was East German
This paper studies important determinants of adult self-control using population-representative data and exploiting Germany’s division as quasi-experimental variation. We find that former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans and provide evidence for government surveillance as a possible underlying mechanism. We thereby demonstrate that institutional factors can shape people’s self-control. Moreover, we find that self-control increases linearly with age. In contrast to previous findings for children, there is no gender gap in adult self-control and family background does not predict self-control.
That is from the Economic Journal by Deborah A Cobb-Clark, Sarah C Dahmann, Daniel A Kamhöfer, and Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.