Category: Data Source
Credentialism run amok
The share of job vacancies requiring a bachelor’s degree increased by more than 60 percent between 2007 and 2019, with faster growth in professional occupations and high-wage cities.
That is from a new NBER paper by Peter Q. Blair and David J. Deming, noting that the authors instead emphasize upskilling in the jobs themselves.
U.S. military fact of the day
In 2016, Politico reported that the total number of trombone, trumpet, keyboard and other instrument players [in the U.S. military] stands at about 6,500.
That’s a lot of Souza marches, but the State Department fields a bigger squad of diplomats. There are 8,106 Foreign Service officers, according to a State Department report. (The State Department has about another 5,700 people to support the diplomats, but they don’t do direct diplomatic work.) Still, there are a good 1,600 more diplomats than musicians.
Here is further information. Here is another relevant source. Via Andrew Goldman.
CEO pay in perspective how big is that rip-off anyway?
…the B-ratio I proposed here, measured as the CEO pay over the total payroll of the firm, relates CEO pay to the salary of each employee and may be the most relevant and informative figure on CEO pay as perceived by the firm’s employees themselves. How much a typical employee of the S&P500 firms implicitly “contributes” to the salary of his/her CEO? An amount of $273 on average or 0.5% of one’s salary, that is, one half of one percent on an individual salary basis.
That is from Marcel Boyer, via Alex T. and the mysterious v and Vincent Geloso.
Gangs really matter
We study the effects that two of the largest gangs in Latin America, MS-13 and 18th Street, have on economic development in El Salvador. We exploit the fact that the emergence of gangs in El Salvador was in part the consequence of an exogenous shift in US immigration policy that led to the deportation of gang leaders from the United States to El Salvador. Using the exogenous variation in the timing of the deportations and the boundaries of the territories controlled by the gangs, we perform a spatial regression discontinuity design and a difference-in-differences analysis to estimate the causal effect that living under the rule of gangs has on development outcomes. Our results show that individuals living under gang control have significantly worse education, wealth, and less income than individuals living only 50 meters away in areas not controlled by gangs. None of these discontinuities existed before the arrival of gangs from the US. The results are not determined by exposure to violence, lower provision of public goods, or selective migration away from gang locations. We argue that our findings are mostly driven by gangs restricting residents’ mobility and labor choices. We find that individuals living under the rule of gangs have less freedom of movement and end up working in smaller firms. The results are relevant for many developing countries where non-state actors control parts of the country.
That is from a new paper by Nikita Melnikov, Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Urban growth and its aggregate implications
That is the title of a new paper by Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga. This piece goes considerably beyond previous research by having a more explicit model of both urban-rural interactions, and also possible congestion costs arising from more YIMBY. Here are a few results of the paper:
1. If you restricted New York City and Los Angeles to the size of Chicago, 18.9 million people would be displaced and per capita rural income would fall by 3.6%, due to diminishing returns to labor in less heavily populated areas.
2. The average reduction in real income per person, from this thought experiment, would be 3.4%. You will note that NIMBY policies are in fact running a version of this policy, albeit at different margins and with a different default status quo point.
3. If you were to force America’s 11 largest cities to be no larger than Miami, real income per American would fall by 7.9%.
4. If planning regulations were lifted entirely, NYC would reach about 40 million people, Philadelphia 38 million (that’s a lot of objectionable sports fans!), and Boston just shy of 30 million (ditto).
5. Output per person, under that scenario, would rise in NYC by 5.7% and by 13.3% in Boston. That said, under this same scenario incumbent New Yorkers would see net real consumption losses of 13%, whereas for Boston the incumbent losses are only about 1.1%.
6. The big winners are the new entrants. On average, real income would rise by 25.7%.
7. Alternatively, in their model, rather than laissez-faire, if America’s three most productive cities relaxed their planning regulations to the same level as the median U.S. city, real per capita income would rise by about 8.2%.
8. In all of these cases the authors calculate the change in rural per capita income, based on resulting population reallocations.
Recommended, I am very glad to see more serious work in this area.
The U.S. cultural elite
Overall I do not regard this as good news:
We examine the educational backgrounds of more than 2,900 members of the U.S. cultural elite and compare these backgrounds to a sample of nearly 4,000 business and political leaders. We find that the leading U.S. educational institutions are substantially more important for preparing future members of the cultural elite than they are for preparing future members of the business or political elite. In addition, members of the cultural elite who are recognized for outstanding achievements by peers and experts are much more likely to have obtained degrees from the leading educational institutions than are those who achieve acclaim from popular audiences.
That is from a new paper by Steven Brint, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The economic importance of the Middle East?
Or lack thereof?:
Even beyond Iran, the region scarcely registers on multinationals’ profit-and-loss statements. The Middle East and Africa accounted for 2.4% of listed American firms’ revenues in 2019, according to Morgan Stanley, a bank. For European and Japanese companies it was 4.9% and 1.8%, respectively. Middle Easterners still buy comparatively few of the world’s cars (2.3m out of 86m sold globally in 2018). Peddlers of luxury goods like Prada, an Italian fashion house, and L’Oréal, a French beauty giant, book 3% of sales in the Middle East (not counting sheikhs’ shopping trips to Milan or Paris).
The overall regional footprint of Western finance appears equally slight. At the end of 2018 big American banks had $18.5bn-worth of credit and trading activity in the region, equivalent to 0.2% of their assets. This includes JPMorgan Chase’s $5.3bn business in Saudi Arabia and Citigroup’s $9.6bn exposure to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). European banks have, if anything, been retreating. BNP Paribas of France sold its Egyptian business seven years ago and earned a footling €121m ($143m) in the Middle East in 2018. HSBC reports a substantial $58.5bn in Middle Eastern assets, though that is still a rounding error in the British lender’s $2.7trn balance-sheet.
Here is more from The Economist, noting that energy does play a larger role in other economic sectors. If there is any part of the world that could use more multinational activity…
Africa Luxembourg Ethiopia Congo state capacity facts of the day
Government revenues average about 17% of gdp in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the IMF. Nigeria has more than 300 times as many people as Luxembourg, but collects less tax. If Ethiopia shared out its tax revenues equally, each citizen would get around $80 a year. The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo is so penurious that its annual health spending per person could not buy a copy of this newspaper.
That is from The Economist.
Facts about deaths of Roman emperors
Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 62% suffered violent death. This has been known for a while, if not quantitatively at least qualitatively. What is not known, however, and has never been examined is the time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors…
Nonparametric and parametric results show that: (i) emperors faced a significantly high risk of violent death in the first year of their rule, which is reminiscent of infant mortality in reliability engineering; (ii) their risk of violent death further increased after 12 years, which is reminiscent of wear-out period in reliability engineering; (iii) their failure rate displayed a bathtub-like curve, similar to that of a host of mechanical engineering items and electronic components. Results also showed that the stochastic process underlying the violent deaths of emperors is remarkably well captured by a (mixture) Weibull distribution.
That is from a new paper by Joseph Homer Saleh, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Is U.S. average body temperature decreasing?
In the US, the normal, oral temperature of adults is, on average, lower than the canonical 37°C established in the 19th century. We postulated that body temperature has decreased over time. Using measurements from three cohorts–the Union Army Veterans of the Civil War (N = 23,710; measurement years 1860–1940), the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I (N = 15,301; 1971–1975), and the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (N = 150,280; 2007–2017)–we determined that mean body temperature in men and women, after adjusting for age, height, weight and, in some models date and time of day, has decreased monotonically by 0.03°C per birth decade. A similar decline within the Union Army cohort as between cohorts, makes measurement error an unlikely explanation. This substantive and continuing shift in body temperature—a marker for metabolic rate—provides a framework for understanding changes in human health and longevity over 157 years.
That is from a new paper by Protsiv, Ley, Lankester, Hastie, and Parsonnet. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Is scholarly refereeing productive at the margin?
No, basically:
In economics many articles are subjected to multiple rounds of refereeing at the same journal, which generates time costs of referees alone of at least $50 million. This process leads to remarkably longer publication lags than in other social sciences. We examine whether repeated refereeing produces any benefits, using an experiment at one journal that allows authors to submit under an accept/reject (fast-track or not) or the usual regime. We evaluate the scholarly impacts of articles by their subsequent citation histories, holding constant their sub-fields, authors’ demographics and prior citations, and other characteristics. There is no payoff to refereeing beyond the first round and no difference between accept/reject articles and others. This result holds accounting for authors’ selectivity into the two regimes, which we model formally to generate an empirical selection equation. This latter is used to provide instrumental estimates of the effect of each regime on scholarly impact.
That is from a new NBER paper by Aboozar Hadavand, Daniel S. Hamermesh, and Wesley W. Wilson. This is exactly the kind of work — critical, data-driven self-reflection about science — what Progress Studies wishes to see more of.
How much did the bailouts cost?
Deborah Lucas has studied this question, and here is the core of her results:
This review develops a theoretical framework that highlights the principles governing economically meaningful estimates of the cost of bailouts. Drawing selectively on existing cost estimates and augmenting them with new calculations consistent with this framework, I conclude that the total direct cost of the 2008 crisis-related bailouts in the United States was on the order of $500 billion, or 3.5% of GDP in 2009. The largest direct beneficiaries of the bailouts were the unsecured creditors of financial institutions. The estimated cost stands in sharp contrast to popular accounts that claim there was no cost because the money was repaid, and with claims of costs in the trillions of dollars. The cost is large enough to suggest the importance of revisiting whether there might have been less expensive ways to intervene to stabilize markets. At the same time, it is small enough to call into question whether the benefits of ending bailouts permanently exceed the regulatory burden of policies aimed at achieving that goal
Here is the paper, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
You will note that 3/4 of that sum comes from the bailouts of the government mortgage agencies. I am myself uncertain how to think about this problem. First, is it useful to think of the additional bailout expenditure as being monetized, if only indirectly through the mix of Fed/Treasury policy? If yes (debatable), and the monetization itself limits a harmful further deflation, can it be said that this monetization is not a transfer away from citizens in the usual sense that an inflation in Zimbabwe might be? But rather a net gain for citizens or at least a much smaller loss? Is the interest paid on those monetized reserves the actual cost?
In any case, where exactly does the “3.5% of gdp” loss “come from”?
I do not know!
New evidence that YouTube doesn’t radicalize
The role that YouTube and its behind-the-scenes recommendation algorithm plays in encouraging online radicalization has been suggested by both journalists and academics alike. This study directly quantifies these claims by examining the role that YouTube’s algorithm plays in suggesting radicalized content. After categorizing nearly 800 political channels, we were able to differentiate between political schemas in order to analyze the algorithm traffic flows out and between each group. After conducting a detailed analysis of recommendations received by each channel type, we refute the popular radicalization claims. To the contrary, these data suggest that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm actively discourages viewers from visiting radicalizing or extremist content. Instead, the algorithm is shown to favor mainstream media and cable news content over independent YouTube channels with slant towards left-leaning or politically neutral channels. Our study thus suggests that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm fails to promote inflammatory or radicalized content, as previously claimed by several outlets.
That is from a new paper by Mark Ledwich and Anna Zaitsev. That hardly settles the matter, but you may recall the last serious papers on this topic also indicated that YouTube does not radicalize. So if you are still believing that YouTube radicalizes, you will need to come up with additional facts for your point of view.
There is now a NIMBY index
Check out the new NBER paper by Joseph Grourko, Jonathan Hartley, and Jacob Krimmel:
We report results from a new survey of local residential land use regulatory regimes for over 2,450 primarily suburban communities across the U.S. The most highly regulated markets are on the two coasts, with the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan areas being the most highly regulated according to our metric. Comparing our new data to that from a previous survey finds that the housing bust associated with the Great Recession did not lead any major market that previously was highly regulated to reverse course and deregulate to any significant extent. Moreover, regulation in most large coastal markets increased over time.
One embedded lesson is that the number of veto points over new construction is increasing. And “By our metric, about one half of all communities in the Regulation Change index increased regulation, one-third decreased, while only 18 percent showed no net change.”
Here is a graph of housing affordability vs. their index of restrictiveness:
Here is my earlier Bloomberg column calling for more indices — this is exactly what I wanted.
Which researchers really work long hours?
No, not work smart but put in what would appear to be lots of extra hours. Why not measure who submits papers to journals in the off-work hours?:
Main outcome measures Manuscript and peer review submissions on weekends, on national holidays, and by hour of day (to determine early mornings and late nights). Logistic regression was used to estimate the probability of manuscript and peer review submissions on weekends or holidays.
Results The analyses included more than 49 000 manuscript submissions and 76 000 peer reviews. Little change over time was seen in the average probability of manuscript or peer review submissions occurring on weekends or holidays. The levels of out of hours work were high, with average probabilities of 0.14 to 0.18 for work on the weekends and 0.08 to 0.13 for work on holidays compared with days in the same week. Clear and consistent differences were seen between countries. Chinese researchers most often worked at weekends and at midnight, whereas researchers in Scandinavian countries were among the most likely to submit during the week and the middle of the day.
Emphasis added. Get this, you lazy bastards:
The average probability of a manuscript being submitted at the weekend for both journals was 0.14, and for a peer review it was 0.18. Peer review submissions during holidays had average probabilities of 0.13 (The BMJ) and 0.12 (BMJ Open), which were higher than the probabilities for manuscripts of 0.08 (The BMJ) and 0.10 (BMJ Open).
For weekend paper submission, China appears to be at about 0.22, India at about 0.09, see Figure 1. France, Italy, Spain, and Brazil all submit quite late in the afternoon, often a bit after 6 p.m.
That is from a new paper by Adrian Barnett, Inger Mewburn, and Sara Schroter. They do not tell us when they submitted it, but I wrote this blog post a wee bit after 8 p.m.
Via Michelle Dawson.