Category: Economics

Oh, yes, it is time for that again.

Alex thought that Brad DeLong and I should be cheerier over the prospects for vouchers. My previous post had cited a study of vouchers in Chile, showing no real educational improvement over twenty years.

Like Alex, I am willing to give vouchers a try, but I think he is overselling the idea. Why I am not convinced by Alex’s pep talk?

First, Alex cites a study of Colombian vouchers, which showed improvement from a voucher program. Point granted, but I think that correct conclusion is simply that sometimes vouchers improve schooling, sometimes they don’t. The most convincing Chilean evidence, not cited by Alex, is simply that overall educational performance, on the international scale, did not improve after twenty years of vouchers.

Second, Alex argues that Chile did not have a pure vouchers scheme. Again, point granted, but no implementable vouchers scheme will be pure, let us take this for granted. Have you read about the Washington D.C. voucher proposals, which would force private schools to admit a certain percentage of “voucher students” by lot? Not surprisingly, the good private schools don’t want to participate in the program, if it passes.

Alex overestimates how far the Chilean system deviates from a pure voucher model. True, the Chilean system makes the payment to the private school, rather than to the family. But according to most theories of tax incidence, this should not matter. The private school will lower tuition accordingly, hoping to capture more students, and thus a greater payment from the government.

Overall, what is going on? Education is not just another commodity. Some of it is signaling, in which case subsidizing it doesn’t bring great gains. Another big part of education is selecting peers for our child. A school filled with bad kids is a bad school, whether it is private or public. It is not obvious how much a private school can make bad kids good. As experience in Eastern Europe and around the world shows, certain kinds of education may be a prerequisite for well-functioning markets, the right values don’t follow from markets automatically.

Most generally, educational performance varies with many factors, not all of them depending on the scope of the market. There are, in fact, very many good public schools, whether in the U.S. or abroad. Now Chile is a relatively homogeneous and urbanized country, with 13 million plus inhabitants. The country also has a reputation for discipline, order, and strong family structure. Is it plausible to think that such a region can have reasonably good public schools, so good that vouchers won’t elevate their youth to another level? Yes.

Vouchers would give U.S. urban youths another educational chance, but let us not expect too much from this reform.

I sell bonsai by the roadside. The best sign I have discovered so far is “One day only”

Some good signs I display before the motorist gets to my truck include:”50% off”, “$15-500”, “bonsai for Mom”, “bonsai” (written in chinese). “See the 300 year old bonsai”
What other signs would your [Industrial Organizaton] class suggest?

How quickly can IO students come up with the three main reasons why “for Mom” works better than “for Dad”, even though any bonsai club is predominantly male?

From BonsaiDave, an avid reader, responding to my earlier post on Persian carpet sales.

Here are MIT lecture notes for a wide variety of economics courses, mostly at the undergraduate level but often technical nonetheless. Here is the more general site for many fields.

Thanks to Nheiva Cowen (hi mom!) for the pointer to this web site.

Have you ever wondered why Persian carpets always seem to be for sale? Why the stores are always having “liquidations”? Why the stores are always “going out of business”?

I presented this conundrum to my Industrial Organization class, they came up with two possible explanations.

First, most consumers have little or no idea what the pieces are worth. So you can tell them you are having a sale when you really are not. A few people might be fooled, and you don’t lose anything with the more knowledgeable customers, or with the more skeptical customers. One student called a relative who was a carpet dealer, he appeared to confirm this hypothesis. Note, by the way, that some localities limit how often stores can claim to have sales.

Second, most customers demand only a small number of such carpets. Repeat business may not be so common. Plus the stores buy large quantities of carpets at a time, receiving discounts in the process. The stores end up holding almost all of their capital in the form of inventory, and very little in the form of reputation. The stores then seek to play the Ronald Coase “durable goods monopoly” game, whereby you start with high prices, hope to sell some, and then keep lowering the price repeatedly, until the stock is gone (then you can buy more and start the process over again). Almost all of the time prices will be falling, which is precisely what we observe.

The highest quality textile dealers, as you might find on Madison Avenue, do not pursue this strategy, and they do not have perpetual sales. They sell to better informed buyers, and they have a greater need to maintain their reputational capital. They are certifying higher valued pieces, and pieces which are bought as investments, not just mere decorations. They will keep price steadier, and build a reputation for reliability, rather than always preparing for the next liquidation.

As always, your thoughts on this matter are welcome.

Read David Warsh on the new Nobel Prize selections. There has been a paucity of interesting press on these picks, in part because the contributions are so technical. But this commentary, like everything else by David, is worth reading.

Here is one good point:

It was the third time in four years that the award was given for contributions to the tool-kit of empirical economists…The committee seems to be buttressing the case for the Nobel award itself…coming so quickly on the heels of the earlier award, this year’s prize may be directed less at the lay public, which is always hoping to understand what is going on in economics, than at the award’s real constituency – the scientists of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, mainly physical scientists, who actually vote the award.

At the end of the link you will find a separate bit, comparing Arnie to Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Consider this hypothesis: In the past, such as the nineteenth century, resources were far less mobile. So corrupt officials had to keep their ill-gotten gains at home. This (supposedly) helped the growth prospects of those economies:

In the relatively closed economies of the 19th century, the gains from corruption remained inside the country and became part of the economy’s productive capital. In contrast, in today’s open economies, corrupt agents smuggle stolen money abroad depleting their country’s stock of capital.

Here is a link to the paper. Here is a recent and slightly misleading summary from The New Scientist.

My take: This can’t be right. Most corrupt agents hold and want money, they do not keep capital goods under their pillow. Let’s say that those agents simply burned the money. This would not destroy any real capital for the economy; co-blogger Alex and I used to call this the “Junker fallacy” (recall the mistaken old view that early Germany did not grow because the Junkers bought land instead of investing in capital). So sending money abroad should not be the fundamental problem. Furthermore the distorting effects of corruption are more important than any so-called loss of capital.

The authors do have an interesting empirical result, namely that corruption damages wealth more when the economy is open. But even if this relationship is causal, we have to look for another mechanism. My best intuitive shot is the following: if the economy is open, international investors will, sooner or later, punish it for the corruption, a’ la Indonesia or Argentina.