Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
1. “His job market paper, “Inflation, Risk Premia, and the Business Cycle”, proposes a novel macro-finance model to rationalize the risk price puzzle — the previously undocumented empirical disconnect between inflation and risk premium shocks.” J.R. Scott of MIT Sloan.
2. Oregon no longer requires a bar exam to practice law.
3. Ten minute video from hu.ma.ne. The new AI pin, some call it. Here is NYT coverage. And an NYT review. What do you all think?
4. The economics of visa-free travel to Kenya?
5. A 1599 view on how the moderns were outdoing the ancients.
6. Don’t waste your time reading this stuff. Because, of all pieces, it comes closest to what I hear from insiders.
Unraveling the female thinness premium
That is a paper by Shasha Wang, who is on the job market from the University of Pennsylvania. Here is the abstract:
This paper studies two mechanisms that jointly contribute to thinness premium in the marriage market: the economic mechanism and the non-economic mechanism. My empirical findings from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) reveal that all else being equal, thinner females are more likely to marry richer males. A one-unit increase in BMI (Body Mass Index), roughly equivalent to a six-pound increase for a 5’6″ figure, is associated with a 3.9% decrease in the husband’s annual labor income for noncollege wives and a 4.3% decrease for college-educated wives. Using the Simulated Method of Moments to estimate a two-stage static matching equilibrium model, this paper determines whether the observed preference for thinner female partners in the marriage market is a result of assortative mating due to the thinness premium in the labor market or is driven by non-economic factors such as a preference for smaller body sizes or other traits associated with smaller body sizes, such as self-discipline, active social interactions, and positive social image. The estimation results indicate that the positive correlation between a husband’s income and his wife’s thinness is primarily attributed to a male preference for thinner spouses. Women with a BMI below 25 only earn 4% more income than those with a BMI above 25 (assuming all other factors are equal), but having a wife with a BMI below 25 significantly enhances a husband’s utility, akin to a 1.15 times increase in his consumption.
Please note that is not her job market paper. Her main paper is a very interesting piece on when/where STEM gaps arise across men and women.
Claims about extinction and evolution
Advances in evolutionary theories (the Extended Synthesis) demonstrate that organisms systematically modify environments in ways that influence their own and other species’ evolution. This paper utilizes these theories to examine the economic consequences of human dispersal from Africa. Evidence shows that early humans’ dispersal affected the adaptability of animal species to human environments and, through this, the extinction of large mammals during Homo sapiens’ out-of-Africa migration. Empirical analyses explore the variation in extinction rates as a source of exogenous pressure for cooperation and innovation among hunter–gatherers and examine the impact of extinction on long-run development. The results indicate that extinction affects economic performance by driving continental differences in biogeography, disease environments, and institutions. Eurasia’s location along the out-of-Africa migratory path provided human and animal populations with coevolutionary foundations for domestication and agriculture, which gave Eurasians technological and institutional advantages in comparative development.
That is from a recent paper by Ideen A. Riahi, published in The Economic Journal. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Thursday assorted links
1. “Let’s start with strawberries. I have a trio of questions on strawberries. Is it feminine to eat strawberries? Why do we eat strawberries with cream? And do you think the British consider strawberries a very British fruit and maybe the most British fruit we have?” Here is the rest of the podcast, with transcript.
2. FT interview with Claudia Sahm.
3. University of Austin now accepting undergraduate applications, with some fellowships too.
4. Dan Klein on the history of the word “liberalism.”
5. New Iceland puffin documentary (New Yorker).
China estimate of the day
According to a report by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, more than 80% of China’s 1 billion private enterprises are family-owned, with about 29% of these businesses in traditional manufacturing. From 2017 to 2022, around three-quarters of China’s family businesses are in the midst of a leadership transition, marking the largest succession wave in Chinese history.
Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey.
My Conversation with the excellent Brian Koppelman
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Brian Koppelman is a writer, director, and producer known for his work on films like Rounders and Solitary Man, the hit TV show Billions, and his podcast The Moment, which explores pivotal moments in creative careers.
Tyler and Brian sat down to discuss why TV wasn’t good for so long, whether he wants viewers to binge his shows, how he’d redesign movie theaters, why some smart people appreciate film and others don’t, which Spielberg movie and Murakami book is under appreciated, a surprising fact about poker, whether Jalen Brunson is overrated or underrated, Manhattan food tips, who he’d want to go on a three-day retreat with, whether movies are too long, how happy people are in show business, his unmade dream projects, the next thing he’ll learn about, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Thank you. I have some very simple questions for you about the history of television to start with. I grew up in the 1970s and I’ve long wondered, “Why was TV so bad for so long before the so-called Golden Age?” Maybe you could date that to the 90s or the noughties, but why weren’t shows in the 70s and 80s better than they were? Would you challenge that premise?
KOPPELMAN: Well, I also grew up in the ’70s. I was born in ’66. I’m not sure that the hypothesis that it was bad is correct. It certainly wasn’t, in general, as an art form, operating on the level that cinema was operating on or the level that music, in part, was operating on during that time.
But if we look at, say, children’s television, I could argue that Jim Henson and Sesame Street, for what it was and aimed at what it was aimed at, was as important as any television that’s on today. I would say that Jim Henson moved the art form forward. He figured out a use case for TV that hadn’t really been done before, and he created a way of thinking about the medium that was really different.
Then, look, Hill Street Blues shows up in the ’80s and, I think, figures out how to use certain techniques of theater and cinema and novels to tell these TV stories. Like any other business, when that started to connect, then people in the business started to become aware of what was possible.
Yes, it was a function of three channels, to answer your question. Yes, in the main, of course, TV was worse. No doubt about it, but there were high points. I think those high points pointed the way toward the high points that came later. For me, NYPD Blue is the network show that’s fully on the level of any of these shows that came after. David Milch cut his teeth on Hill Street Blues.
There’s a wonderful book by Brett Martin, called Difficult Men, that’s about showrunners. It starts, in a way, with Bochco and Milch in that time period. It’s a great look into how this idea of showrunners created modern television. HBO needing something, all these business reasons underneath it, but how people who came up through, originally, Hill Street were able to go on and start this revolution.
COWEN: In your view, how good, really, was I Love Lucy? Is it just a few memorable moments, like Vitameatavegamin? Or is it actually a show where it’d be good episode after good episode, like The Sopranos?
And from Brian:
I don’t know Wes Anderson. I don’t know him, but I met him once. I love his movies, and I love that his movies are 90 minutes. The one time I met him, we were screening a film. He invited some people who happened to be in town, who he knew were film people, so I got to watch a movie with him. Afterwards, we were just talking about movies, and I said, “These movies of yours — they are 90 minutes,” and he said, “Yes. I found that the concepts I’m interested in don’t really support a journey that lasts longer than that.” He’s an incredibly disciplined filmmaker. I was like, “That makes total sense.”
Recommended, interesting and entertaining throughout.
Will we see less comovement in global economic growth?
That is the question behind my latest Bloomberg column. China is now, and looking forward, less of a common growth driver around the world. Oil price shocks may not be less important for humanitarian outcomes, but they matter less for many of the largest economies. America is now an oil exporter, and the EU just made some major adjustments in response to the Russia shock. More renewable energy is coming on-line, most of all solar.
The column closes with this:
In this new world, with these major common shocks neutered, a country’s prosperity will be more dependent on national policies than on global trends. Culture and social trust will matter more too, as will openness to innovation — and, as fertility rates remain low or decline, so will a country’s ability to handle immigration. A country that cannot repopulate itself with peaceful and productive immigrants is going to see its economy shrink in relative terms, and probably experience a lot of bumps on the way down.
At the same time, excuses for a lack of prosperity will be harder to come by. The world will not be deglobalized, but it will be somewhat de-risked.
Dare we hope that these new arrangements will produce better results than the old?
Or perhaps a more general rising tide was the only way many countries were going to make progress?
Wednesday assorted links
1. Jeff Holmes of Mercatus explains in detail “How we built econgoat.” In this case “we” means he!
2. China Foreign Direct Investment fact of the day.
3. The first full-time Taylor Swift reporter what would Adam Smith say?
4. Why protests in Panama right now?
5. Which journals are cited the most by central banks?
6. Iran is now decoupling from Hamas (FT).
What I’ve been reading
1. Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing, and not the sort of anti-capitalist mentality snark you might be expecting from the title. Recommended, for those who care.
2. Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World. It’s not the same kind of deep explanation as Toulmin or Schorske, nonetheless an excellent survey and introduction to the miracles of Viennese science, philosophy, and culture, earlier in the 20th century. I enjoyed this very much.
3. Peter Kemp, Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction. Is this an actual book, or just some smart guy running off at the mouth and writing what he really thinks? Would I prefer the former? No!
4. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It is getting harder and harder to find good popular science books, due to exhaustion of the major topics, but this is one of them. I kept on seeing reviews of this book, and not buying it due to fears of pandering. But most of this book is genuinely illuminating and on a wide range of biological topics, most of all how the female body is different. Ovaries, menopause, differences in brains — you’ll find it all here. Furthermore, the book does not drown in political correctness. Recommended.
5. Larry Rohter,
Note also that Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence is coming out in April, likely to be very good. I haven’t seen it yet.
Tuesday assorted links
1. “I find that having an additional birth causally increases desired fertility by 0.15-0.30. Further, I find the result is unlikely to be driven by experiential learning but can be explained through either a model of reference-dependent preferences or ex-post rationalization.” From Prankur Gupta, job market candidate from UT Austin.
2. Leave ChatGPT Voice on while reading a book.
3. Niall Ferguson on the economic impact of the Middle East war (Bloomberg). And on non-economic issues Yarvin.
4. Can Microsoft use tech to accelerate progress in chemistry?
5. Elites in sub-Saharan Africa are also seeing low fertility.
Persistence in policy: evidence from close votes
That is the job market paper by economist Zach Freitas-Groff of Stanford University. Here is the abstract:
Policy choices sometimes appear stubbornly persistent, even when they become politically unpopular or economically damaging. This paper offers the first systematic empirical evidence of how persistent policy choices are, defined as whether an electorate’s or legislature’s decisions affect whether a policy is in place decades later. I create a new dataset that tracks the historical record of more than 800 state policies that were the subjects of close referendums in U.S. states since 1900. In a regression discontinuity design, I estimate that passing a referendum increases the chance a policy is operative 20, 40, or even 100 years later by over 40 percentage points. I collect additional data on U.S. Congressional legislation and international referendums and use existing data on state legislation to document similar policy persistence for a range of institutional environments, cultures, and topics. I develop a theoretical model to distinguish between possible causes of persistence and present evidence that persistence arises because policies’ salience declines in the aftermath of referendums. The results indicate that many policies are persistently in place—or not—for reasons unrelated to the electorate’s current preferences.
Impressively original. Zach has several interesting papers (see the first link), some from an EA-adjacent point of view.
Monday assorted links
1. “Director of new Godzilla film pursuing ‘Japanese spirituality’ of 1954 original.”
3. “Additionally, WFH has the largest detrimental impact on mental health of individuals with lower social abilities relative to WP, and it confers the most substantial benefits on those with higher cognitive abilities compared to NW.” From the job market paper of Jacqueline Nguyen, University of Maryland.
4. 300 Americans have been able to leave Gaza (NYT, it receives some coverage but just an ordinary story not at the top of the page. Not dominating the news anywhere else that I can see).
5. Ian Leslie on the new song (NYT). His book will be excellent.
Is fear a bigger problem than hate?
I deploy this protocol as a lab-in-the-field experiment in Jos, Nigeria, to study the region’s ongoing conflict between Christians and Muslims. I find that fear explains 76% (and hate 24%) of the non-cooperative behavior I observe in a coordination game played between Christians and Muslims. Moreover, this fear is mostly unwarranted, as non-cooperators grossly exaggerate the percentage of hateful people in the outgroup. I then estimate a structural model to determine what type of policy intervention would most effectively increase cooperation. My counterfactual analysis suggests that interventions that correct unwarranted fears would be highly effective. In contrast, interventions that reduce hate would not because hateful people also have high levels of fear. Finally, I study an actual policy intervention with an RCT in which I provide participants access to a radio drama that promotes intergroup cooperation. Using my experimental protocol, I find that the radio drama decreases hate but not fear and thus does not translate into increased cooperation, as my model predicts.
That is from Migual Ortiz, an economics job market candidate from UC Berkeley.
Das Adam Smith Problem
The second set of advocates for the book [Theory of Moral Sentiments] I usually find in media outlets, sophisticated media outlets at that, or I hear it over lunch table conversation. These claims suggest that Wealth of Nations covers the commercial, selfish side of human behavior, while Theory of Moral Sentiments is an account of the caring, empathetic side, or something like that. I wish I had a nickel for every time I read or heard that contrast. Maybe it is harmless enough, but – and I don’t completely understand why — it kind of makes me sick. It is simultaneously an attempt to claim a bland centrist middle ground, to snidely distance oneself from capitalism and selfishness, and reduce Smith to a series of empty clichés. It is trying to be pat rather than insightful. It is trying to give everything its place in a manner that we can then safely ignore.
Just for a start, I view Smith’s portrait of human nature in Wealth of Nations as rich and multi-faceted, a piece of behavioral economics, in modern terminology, rather than narrow, commercial, and purely selfish. And in Theory of Moral Sentiments yes people are empathetic, and show sympathy for others, but they are often caring in…pretty narrow and selfish ways. I just don’t think the “each book carves out its own sphere” understanding of the pair works very well.
My biggest takeaway from TMS is that humans beings make evaluations, including sympathetic evaluations but not only, based on local rather than global information. They put a lot of weight on what is right before their eyes and neglect the bigger picture. The very opening passage of TMS expresses how we can understand the emotions of others only through our own. We cannot look around corners to understand other minds directly, so we make inferences from our own experience. Smith demonstrates and then demonstrates that point again throughout the book.
That is a passage from my generative book, written by me, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does It Matter?
Sunday assorted links
1. Rumors about Grōk AI. And the announcement. And new version of Twitter search.
2. Taylor Swift and BTS fans against Milei (NYT, is this the new politics of coordination?).
3. Are people especially impatient for information?
6. “Africa needs to think big.” (David Pilling, FT).