Category: Data Source
The still-coherent culture that is the United States
From Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica at NBER:
The results overall refute the hypothesis of growing cultural divides. With few exceptions, the extent of cultural distance has been broadly constant over time.
The data also show that:
1. From to 1995, the time use behavior of women and men converged a good deal, but not since then.
2. Differences in social attitudes by political ideology and income have increased since the 1970s. The rich and the poor have diverged the most in terms of their attitudes toward law enforcement.
3. Whites and non-whites “have converged somewhat on social attitudes but have diverged in consumer behavior.”
4. “Nevertheless, our headline result is that for all other demographic divisions and cultural dimensions, cultural distance has been broadly constant over time.” For instance, the media consumption gap between rich and poor has not been growing.
5. “The brand most predictive of top income in 1992 is Grey Poupon Dijon mustard. By 2004, the brand most indicative of the rich is Land O’Lakes butter, followed by Kikkoman soy sauce. By the end of the sample, ownership of Apple products (iPhone and iPad) tops the list. Knowing whether someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time. Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016.”
6. Voting and “trusting people” are among the “social attitudes” that best predict being rich.
7. Education is matched about as tightly to social attitudes now as it was in 1976.
8. “By 2016, watching Love It or List It and Property Brothers, both HGTV shows, were the most indicative of being educated.” [TC: yikes!]
9. Since the 1990s, there has been no divergence in the TV shows watched by liberals and conservatives. Note that in 2001, the three TV shows that best predicted ideology were The Academy Awards, Will and Grace, and Friends, all liberal. Nowadays it’s Fox shows, all conservative.
10. Liberals are more likely to drink alcohol, conservatives are more likely to go fishing.
11. Maybe this is the most important result: since 1976 there has not been much divergence between liberal and conservative attitudes toward civil liberties or law enforcement. The divergence on government spending is noticeable but not enormous (see p.39). the divergence on “Marriage, Sex, Abortion” is quite large. In another words, the true polarization is happening across gender issues, as I’ve argued numerous times in the past.
12. Here are related important results on the cultural divide. When will MSM articles catch up to the data?
How many places do you visit anyway?
The study, titled “Evidence for a conserved quantity in human mobility’ is published in Nature Human Behaviour is based on analyses of 40,000 people’s mobile traces collected in four different datasets.
It is also the first of its kind to investigate people’s mobility over time and study how their behavior changes.
Behind the project are Dr. Laura Alessandretti and Dr. Andrea Baronchelli, researchers in the Department of Mathematics at City, University of London, together with Professor Sune Lehmann from DTU Technical University of Denmark and the research team from Sony Mobile Communications.
“We first analysed the traces of about 1000 university students. The dataset showed that the students returned to a limited number of places, even though the places changed over time. I expected to see a difference in the behavior of students and a wide section of the population. But that was not the case. The result was the same when we scaled up the project to 40,000 people of different habits and gender from all over the world. It was not expected in advance. It came as a surprise,” says Dr. Alessandretti.
Old places disappear
The study showed that people are constantly exploring new places. They move to a new home, find a new favorite restaurant, find a new bar, or start going to another gym, etc. However, the number of regularly visited places is constantly 25 in a given period. If a new place is added to the list, one of the places disappears.
The pattern is the same when the researchers divide the locations into categories based on how often and how long time they spend at the location.
“People are constantly balancing their curiosity and laziness…
That is by John Stevenson, via K., here is the original research by Laura Andressetti et.al. On this question I retain an open mind.
Ethnolinguistic favoritism in African politics
African political leaders have a tendency to favor members of their own ethnic group. Yet for all other ethnic groups in a country, it is unclear whether having a similar ethnicity to the leader is beneficial. To shed light on this issue, I use a continuous measure of linguistic similarity to quantify the ethnic similarity of a leader to all ethnic groups in a country. Combined with panel data on 163 ethnic groups partitioned across 35 sub-Saharan countries, I use within-group time variation in similarity that results from a partitioned group’s concurrent exposure to multiple national leaders. Findings show that ethnic favoritism is more widespread than previously believed: in addition to evidence of coethnic favoritism, I document evidence of non-coethnic favoritism that typically goes undetected in the absence of a continuous measure of similarity. I also find that patronage tends to be targeted toward ethnic regions rather than individuals of a particular ethnic group. I relate these results to the literature on coalition building, and provide evidence that ethnicity is one of the guiding principles behind high-level government appointments.
That is from Andrew Dickens in the latest American Economic Review.
The economics of land mines
Landmine contamination affects the lives of millions in many conflict-ridden countries long after the cessation of hostilities. Yet, little research exists on its impact on post-conflict recovery. In this study, we explore the economic consequences of landmine clearance in Mozambique, the only country that has moved from “heavily-contaminated” in 1992 to “mine-free” status in 2015. First, we compile a dataset detailing the evolution of clearance, collecting thousands of reports from the numerous demining actors. Second, we exploit the timing of demining to assess its impact on local economic activity, as reflected in satellite images of light density at night. The analysis reveals a moderate positive association that masks sizeable heterogeneity. Economic activity responds strongly to clearance of the transportation network, trade hubs, and more populous areas, while the demining-development association is weak in rural areas of low population density. Third, recognizing that landmine removal recon figured the accessibility to the transportation infrastructure, we apply a “market-access” approach to quantify both its direct and indirect effects. The market-access estimates reveal substantial improvements on aggregate economic activity. The market-access benefits of demining are also present in localities without any contamination. Fourth, counterfactual policy simulations project considerable gains had the fragmented process of clearance in Mozambique been centrally coordinated, prioritizing clearance of the colonial transportation routes.
That is a new NBER paper by Giorgio Chiovelli, Stelios Michalopoulos, and Elias Papaioannou, via Dan Wang. File under “Not Unrelated to NIMBY.”
China-U.S. fact of the day
Credit card debt in China is $2t v. $815b in the United States.
Mind….blown https://t.co/7HvCooryPX
— Censored John Oliver Balding (@BaldingsWorld) June 22, 2018
Do liberals and conservatives shop differently?
I usually urge care in interpreting or even believing such results, but if you are game here is another entry into the sweepstakes:
In our research, conservatives tended to differentiate themselves through products that show that they are better than others – for example, by choosing products from high-status luxury brands. In contrast, liberals tended to differentiate themselves through products that show that they are unique from others – for example, by choosing products with unconventional designs or colors. These distinct preferences emerged across multiple studies in which U.S. participants (university students who completed surveys in the lab, adults who took surveys online, and members of a research panel) indicated their political ideology and made real or hypothetical choices between products.
In one study, participants chose between coffee mugs that would be customized with their names and the message “Just Better” or “Just Different.” Conservatives were 2.2 times more likely than liberals to choose the mug that signaled superiority (“Just Better”) over the one that signaled uniqueness (“Just Different”). In another study, participants could win a gift card from one of two brands as a reward for participation — Ralph Lauren, which based on our numerous pretests of consumers’ brand perceptions generally signals superiority, and Urban Outfitters, which based on our pretests generally signals uniqueness. Conservatives tended to prefer Ralph Lauren, whereas liberals tended to prefer Urban Outfitters.
That is from Nailya Ordabayeva.
U.S.A. fact of the day
Number of unaccompanied minors, age 17 or lower, apprehended during or after border crossings, fiscal year 2017:
Trump aside, what exactly is the plan here?
Hat tip goes to @BaldingsWorld.
Is democracy in danger?
From the highly regarded Daniel Treisman:
Influential voices in academia and the media contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that the global proportion of democracies is actually at or near an all-time high; that the current rate of backsliding is not historically unusual; and that this rate is well explained by the economic characteristics of existing democracies. I confirm that breakdowns tend to occur in countries that are poor, have had relatively little democratic experience, and are in economic crisis. Extrapolating from historical data, I show that the estimated hazard of failure in a democracy as developed and seasoned as the US is extremely low — far lower than in any democracy that has ended in the past. Some suggest that undemocratic public attitudes and erosion of elite norms threaten US institutions, but there is little evidence that these factors cause democratic breakdown. While deterioration in the quality of democracy in countries such as Hungary and Poland is itself cause for concern — as is the reversion to authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey — alarm about a global slide into autocracy is inconsistent with current evidence.
The pointer is from the excellent Kevin Lewis.
FRED now has crypto data
Via David Siegel:
Not much, but it’s a start. The individual series are:
Coinbase Index https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBCCIND Coinbase Bitcoin https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBBTCUSD Coinbase Bitcoin Cash https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBBCHUSD Coinbase Ethereum https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBETHUSD Coinbase Litecoin https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
series/CBLTCUSD
Has the wage-education locus for women been worsening?
That question is the focus of some recent research by Chen Huang.
Women’s labor force participation rate has moved from 61% in 2000, to 57% today. It seems two-thirds of this change has been due to demographics, namely the aging of the adult female population. What about the rest? It seems that, relative to education levels, wages for women have not been rising since 2000:
I discover that the apparent increase in women’s real wages is more than accounted for by the large increase in women’s educational attainment. Once I condition on education, U.S. women’s real wages have not increased since 2000 and may even have decreased by a few percentage points. Thus, the locus of wage/education opportunities faced by U.S. women has not improved since 2000 and may have worsened. Viewed in that light, the LFPR decrease for women under age 55 becomes less surprising.
You can consider that another indicator of the Great Stagnation.
Maybe British common law wasn’t so great for colonies after all
Siwan Anderson
More than one-half of all people living with HIV are women, and 80 percent of all HIV-positive women in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determine current-day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law sub-Saharan African countries compared to civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safe sex practices and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the “feminization” of AIDS), explaining much of its prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa.
That is from the latest American Economic Review. Here is an earlier version and related material.
Is the reversal of the Flynn Effect environmental?
Maybe so, says a new paper by Be:
Using administrative register data with information on family relationships and cognitive ability for three decades of Norwegian male birth cohorts, we show that the increase, turning point, and decline of the Flynn effect can be recovered from within-family variation in intelligence scores. This establishes that the large changes in average cohort intelligence reflect environmental factors and not changing composition of parents, which in turn rules out several prominent hypotheses for retrograde Flynn effects.
In short, IQ relates inversely to sibling order, and the basic effect is not being generated by a changing composition of married pairs over time.
In other words, we have started building a more stupidity-inducing environment. Or at least the Norwegians have. But of course the retrograde Flynn Effect is starting to pop up in the data more generally, and not just in Norway. From The Times of London:
The IQ scores of young people have begun to fall after rising steadily since the Second World War, according to the first authoritative study of the phenomenon.
The decline, which is equivalent to at least seven points per generation, is thought to have started with the cohort born in 1975, who reached adulthood in the early Nineties.
Have a nice day!
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
The long-run consequences of male-biased sex ratios
From Pauline Grosjean & Rose Khattar, forthcoming, Review of Economic Studies:
We document the short- and long-run effects of male-biased sex ratios. We exploit a natural historical experiment where large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts were sent to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. In areas with more male-biased sex ratios, women were historically more likely to get married and less likely to work outside the home. In these areas today, both men and women continue to have more conservative attitudes towards women working, and women work fewer hours outside the home. While these women enjoy more leisure, they are also less likely to work in high-ranking occupations. We demonstrate that the consequences of uneven sex ratios on cultural attitudes, labor supply decisions, and occupational choices can persist in the long run, well after sex ratios are back to the natural rate. We document the roles of vertical cultural transmission and marriage homogamy in sustaining this cultural persistence.
Hat tip goes to the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Income inequality has stabilized as of late
But from 2007 through 2014, the figure stabilized. Looking at market income, inequality increased by only 3 percent. Once you add in cash payments and in-kind transfers from government safety net programs, inequality actually fell over this period.
That is from Michael Strain at Bloomberg.
MAGA?
US exports increased 14.4 percent from YTD April 2016 to YTD April 2018, from $725.8 billion to $830.5 billion.
US imports increased 16.5 percent from YTD April 2016 to YTD April 2018, from $886.2 billion to $1,032.3 billion.
Here is the source, via James Hohman. You don’t have to credit Trump with much if any of that, the broader point is that, as I argued yesterday, the age of trade is hardly over.