Category: Data Source
Is religion actually declining in emerging economies?
Building on large-scale survey data and recent scholarship, we document persistent and, in many regions, increasing levels of religiosity…we analyze the determinants and consequences of religious behavior, showing how income volatility, financial insecurity, and cultural transitions sustain demand for religion. Third, we explore the institutional and political dimensions of religion in EDCs, emphasizing the role of religious institutions as public goods providers and as politically influential actors. This discussion offers a framework for understanding religious organizations as adaptive, competing platforms in pluralistic religious marketplaces. Overall, our findings suggest that religious adaptation, rather than decline, is central to understanding the future of religion and its economic implications in the developing world.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Sara Lowes, Benjamin Marx, and Eduardo Montero.
Who gets into the best colleges and why?
We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. The three factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of post-college success.
That is from a new paper by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman. One immediate conclusion is that standardized test scores help lower-income groups get into the best schools, compared to the alternatives.
Is it Possible to Raise National Happiness?
That is a new paper by Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik, here is the abstract:
We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective and current life evaluations, and apply it to unexploited archival data from the USA. When correcting for rescaling, we find that the well-being of Americans has substantially increased, on par with GDP, health, education, and liberal democracy, from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Using several datasets, we shed light on other happiness puzzles, including the apparent stability of life evaluations during COVID-19, why Ukrainians report similar levels of life satisfaction today as before the war, and the absence of parental happiness.
To give some intuition, the authors provide evidence that people are more likely engaging in rescaling than being stuck on a hedonic treadmill. I think they are mostly right.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
AI-engaged economics papers are growing rapidly
…share of economics papers that is ABOUT or USES AI increased 10X to 5% in 5 years and growth is basically vertical.
Be there or be square!
Here is the tweet, here is the underlying paper by Eamon Duede, et.al. Other science are considered as well, I do not need to tell you the results, they consider philosophy too.
The decline in reading for pleasure
We measure reading for pleasure and reading with children from 2003 to 2023, using a nationally representative sample from the American Time Use Survey (n = 236,270). We found marked declines in the proportion of individuals reading for pleasure daily in the US, with decreases of 3% per year (prevalence ratio = 0.97, 95% confidence interval = 0.97, 0.98, p < 0.001). There were disparities across population groups, with widening gaps for those of Black (vs. White) race, with lower education levels and less annual income.
That is from a new paper by Jessica K. Bone, Feifei Bu, Jill Sonke, and Daisy Fancourt. I have not seen any plausible debunkings of this paper or result (which I believe), but if I do I will pass them along. Note by the way that Denmark is abolishing the VAT on books, in an effort to boost reading. It was formerly twenty-five percent, the highest in the world.
Data on the effects of censorship in early modern England
We use a panel-data framework to study the effects of print censorship on early-modern England’s cultural production. Doing so requires distilling dispersed qualitative information into quantitative data. Integrating the historical record implicit in a large language model (LLM) with facts from secondary sources, we generate an annual index of print censorship. Applying a machine-learning (ML) algorithm to a major corpus, we construct document-level measures of the innovativeness (quality) and volume (quantity) of cultural production. We use pre-existing topic-model estimates to apportion each document among distinct cultural themes-three affected by censorship and five unaffected. We thereby assemble a yearly theme-level panel for 1525-1700. We use local projections to estimate censorship’s dynamic effects. Paradoxically, censorship raises the level of innovativeness in censorship-affected themes relative to non-affected themes. Censorship has a temporary chilling effect on the quantity of cultural production, with output recovering within a decade. Our findings are robust to the use of an instrumental-variable approach addressing the endogeneity of censorship. Our findings are unchanged when using three alternative LLMs to produce the censorship index. Using LLMs and ML to measure hard-to-quantify phenomena like censorship and cultural production, we provide new insights into the drivers of cultural evolution.
Here is the full paper by Peter Murrell and Peter Grajzl. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How is fertility behavior in Africa different?
Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertility decline has lagged behind that of other regions. Using large-scale, individual-level data, I provide new evidence on how fertility in sub-Saharan Africa compares with that in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America by examining differences in fertility outcomes by grade level across regions. Unlike prior research that compared aggregate fertility and education outcomes, I estimate fertility outcomes separately for each combination of region, area of residence, age group, and grade level. I find that differences in fertility between sub-Saharan Africa and other regions increase with education up to the end of primary school and then rapidly decrease. There is little consistent evidence of differences among women with secondary education or higher. Moreover, for grade levels where fertility is significantly higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions, the differences are substantially smaller for surviving children than for children ever born. Using women’s literacy as a proxy for school quality, I show that the results for literacy rates follow a similar pattern to the fertility outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that higher offspring mortality and lower quality of primary schooling contribute to higher fertility in sub-Saharan Africa compared with other regions.
That is from a recently published article by Claus C. Pörtner.
Jeff Asher on manipulating crime data
Jeff Asher: Within a city, within a district, there are times, either by mistake or by intention, that an agency will manipulate a certain type of crime. There are times where things will get underreported. There will be mistakes. There are times where things will get over reported and there will be mistakes. But because there’s 18,000 individual agencies reporting data, usually when the data is wrong, it’s obviously wrong.
It’s like Chicago reporting, you know, six murders in a month when the city averages over 20, and in some years more than that. Way more than that. It’s when you’ve seen these sharp drops in crime all of a sudden when a data reporting system changed. But to manipulate national crime data would be virtually impossible. I think that’s the value of being able to go and get it from each individual city. You can draw your conclusions and audit agencies that look wrong and still come to the correct conclusion. And I’ll note the FBI has seven major categories of crime that they collect. And there are ten different population groups. Every one of those population groups in every category of crime reported a decline in 2024, per the FBI. So it’s not a big blue city thing. It’s a small city thing. It’s a suburb thing. It’s a rural county thing. It’s a big city thing. It’s everywhere…
But of the 30 cities that reported the most murders to the FBI in 2023, murders are down in 26 of them. We’re seeing a 20% drop in murder, a 10% drop in violent crime, a 13% drop in property crime. Whereas in 2024 murder fell a lot and auto theft fell a lot, now it’s pretty much that everything is falling a considerable amount.
Here is his full dialogue with Paul Krugman. And here is Jeff’s YouTube channel on the same topics. Yes, I know public disorderliness is up in some regards. But do not use that as an excuse to mood affiliation with an extremely negatively view of the trends!
A median voter theory of right-wing populism
From a recent paper:
Populists are often defined as those who claim that they fill “political representation gaps” -differences between the policymaking by established parties and the “popular will.” Research has largely neglected to what extent this claim is correct. I study descriptively whether representation gaps exist and their relationship with populism. To this end, I analyze the responses of citizens and parliamentarians from 27 European countries to identical survey policy questions, which I compile and verify to be indicative of voting in referendums. I find that policymaking represents the economic attitudes of citizens well. However, I document that the average parliamentarian is about 1SD more culturally liberal than the national mean voter. This cultural representation gap is systematic in four ways: i) it arises on nearly all cultural issues, ii) in nearly all countries, iii) nearly all established parties are more culturally liberal than the national mean voter, and iv) all major demographic groups tend to be more conservative than their parliamentarians. Moreover, I find that demographic differences between voters and parliamentarians or lack of political knowledge cannot fully account for representation gaps. Finally, I show that right-wing populists fill the cultural representation gap.
That is by Laurenz Guenther. I am myself (largely) a cultural liberal, so I am not siding with the right-wing populists here. But let us be clear what is going on. The right-wing populists are gaining ground in so many countries because the cultural liberals in various parliaments and congresses are extremely reluctant to meet the preferences of their median voters. On the immigration issue most of all. And then they wish to talk about threats to democracy!
The whole thing is really quite tragic. Whether you are willing to admit this state of affairs to yourself is one of the better measures of self-awareness in our current political environment. tekl.
Are Juries Racially Discriminatory?
We implement five different tests of whether grand juries, which are drawn from a representative cross-section of the public, discriminate against Black defendants when deciding to prosecute felony cases. Three tests exploit that while jurors do not directly observe defendant race, jurors do observe the “Blackness” of defendants’ names. All three tests—an audit-study-style test, a traditional outcome-based test, and a test that estimates racial bias using blinded/unblinded comparisons after purging omitted variable bias—indicate juries do not discriminate based on race. Two additional tests indicate racial bias explains at most 0.3 percent of the Black-White felony conviction gap.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are not Getting Harder to Find (one hypothesis)
R&D investment has grown robustly, yet aggregate productivity growth has stagnated. Is this because “ideas are getting harder to find”? This paper uses micro-data from the US Census Bureau to explore the relationship between R&D and productivity in the manufacturing sector from 1976 to 2018. We find that both the elasticity of output (TFP) with respect to R&D and the marginal returns to R&D have risen sharply. Exploring factors affecting returns, we conclude that R&D obsolescence rates must have risen. Using a novel estimation approach, we find consistent evidence of sharply rising technological rivalry and obsolescence. These findings suggest that R&D has become more effective at finding productivity-enhancing ideas, but these ideas may also render rivals’ technologies obsolete, making innovations more transient. Because of obsolescence, rising R&D does not necessarily mean rising aggregate productivity growth.
Here is the paper by Yoshiki Ando (Singapore Management University, TPRI), James Bessen (BU, TPRI), and Xiupeng Wang. Via Arjun.
Personalism and the returns to democracy
Studies of income and regime type typically contrast democracies and autocracies, ignoring heterogeneity in the character of authoritarian regimes. We focus on the consequences of personalist rule, where power is concentrated in an individual or small elite. Extending the dynamic panel strategy of Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo, and Robinson (2019), we estimate the differential growth performance of democracies, institutionalized autocracies, and personalist autocracies. Across eight GDP series, eight autocracy codings, and six measures of personalism, we observe a consistent pattern: Whenever an “autocratic penalty” emerges, it is concentrated in personalist regimes. The growth performance of institutionalized dictatorships, in contrast, is statistically indistinguishable from that of democracies. We document evidence that the “personalist penalty” is driven by some combination of low private investment, poor public-goods provision, and conflict. These findings emphasize the analytic payoff of unpacking autocracy and highlight the different incentives facing leaders with narrow and broad bases of power.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Christopher Blattman, Scott Gehlbach, and Zeyang Yu.
Did the Minnesota housing reform lower housing costs?
Yes:
In December 2018, Minneapolis became the first U.S. city to eliminate single-family zoning through the Minneapolis 2040 Plan, a landmark reform with a central focus on improving housing affordability. This paper estimates the effect of the Minneapolis 2040 Plan on home values and rental prices. Using a synthetic control approach we find that the reform lowered housing cost growth in the five years following implementation: home prices were 16% to 34% lower, while rents were 17.5% to 34% lower relative to a counterfactual Minneapolis constructed from similar metro areas. Placebo tests document these housing cost trajectories were the lowest of 83 donor cities (p=0.012). The results remain consistent and robust to a series of subset analyses and controls. We explore the possible mechanism of these impacts and find that the reform did not trigger a construction boom or an immediate increase in the housing supply. Instead, the observed price reductions appear to stem from a softening of housing demand, likely driven by altered expectations about the housing market.
That is from a new paper by Helena Gu and David Munro. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
New data on tenure
Tenure is a defining feature of the US academic system with significant implications for research productivity and creative search. Yet the impact of tenure on faculty research trajectories remains poorly understood. We analyze the careers of 12,000 US faculty across 15 disciplines to reveal key patterns, pre- and post-tenure. Publication rates rise sharply during the tenure-track, peaking just before tenure. However, post-tenure trajectories diverge: Researchers in lab-based fields sustain high output, while those in non-lab-based fields typically exhibit a decline. After tenure, faculty produce more novel works, though fewer highly cited papers. These findings highlight tenure’s pivotal role in shaping scientific careers, offering insights into the interplay between academic incentives, creativity, and impact while informing debates about the academic system.
Here is the paper. That is by Giorgio Tripodi, Ziang Zheng, Yifan Qian, and Dashun Wang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The economics of the U.S. auto industry, a brief history
The economic value of the cars being made has climbed substantially through the years. As a result, real value added and industrial production — two different ways of measuring actual output — are now at all-time highs.
And this:
What about jobs? The auto industry today employs 1 million workers. Between 1950 and the signing of NAFTA in 1993, it averaged 1.1 million workers, just slightly higher.
And this:
The deindustrialization of Detroit is typically understood as a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, and it is therefore blamed on the growth of trade during this period. But the fact is that auto investment and employment had started moving out of Detroit decades earlier.
I pieced together data from a variety of sources, which shows that auto manufacturing employment in the City of Detroit had already peaked in 1950, at just over 220,000 workers.
By 1970 the biggest declines had already occurred, with employment falling by more than half, to fewer than 100,000 jobs.
An important nuance is that many of these lost jobs migrated to other parts of Michigan, at least for a while. So while auto employment was collapsing in Detroit, the rest of Michigan managed to hold auto employment stable for another five decades until the 2000s, when it started falling everywhere in the state.
And:
Michigan now has about 280,000 fewer auto jobs than it did in the 1950s, a decline of roughly 60 percent. For the United States as a whole, auto employment is only down 4.7 percent — further showing that the struggles of Detroit and Michigan are less about the decline of the American auto industry and more about its relocation elsewhere.
Another way of understanding the trend: If Michigan had simply maintained the same share of American auto jobs as it had in the 1950s, meaning it did not lose any production to other states, then it would only have lost 21,000 auto jobs since then, not the 280,000 it actually did lose.
An excellent piece, recommended.