Category: Uncategorized
The politics of CEOs
We find that more than 57% of CEOs are Republicans [defined by 2/3 or more campaign contributions to Republicans], 19% are Democrats…and the rest are Neutral [do not contribute 2/3 of their campaign spending to either of the two major parties]. Therefore, Republican CEOs are more than three times as Democratic CEOs. Furthermore, Republican CEOs lead companies with almost twice the asset value of companies led by Democratic CEOs.
That is from 2000-2017, across the S&P 1500. And:
We show that the median CEO directs 75% of his or her total contributions to Republicans.
And:
We find that companies led by Republican CEOs are less transparent to their investors on whether how, and how much they spend on politics.
The most Republican-leaning sectors are energy (89.1%), manufacturing, and chemicals. Business equipment and telecoms are the least-leaning R to D sectors for their CEOs, though still Republican by clear margins. In the Northeast and West the number of Democratic CEOS has almost caught up to the Republicans. As for female CEOs, they lean Republican 34.3% to Democratic 32.3%, a small margin but still more Republican donors.
That is all from a new paper The Politics of CEOs, by Alma Cohen, Moshe Hazan, Roberto Tallarita, and David Weiss, NBER link here.
Monday assorted links
Money lending and the origins of anti-Semitism
We study the role of economic incentives in shaping the coexistence of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, using novel data from Germany for 1,000+ cities. The Catholic usury ban and higher literacy rates gave Jews a specific advantage in the moneylending sector. Following the Protestant Reformation (1517), the Jews lost these advantages in regions that became Protestant. We show (i) a change in the geography of anti-Semitism with persecutions of Jews and anti-Jewish publications becoming more common in Protestant areas relative to Catholic areas; (ii) a more pronounced change in cities where Jews had already established themselves as moneylenders. These findings are consistent with the interpretation that, following the Protestant Reformation, Jews living in Protestant regions were exposed to competition with the Christian majority, especially in moneylending, leading to an increase in anti-Semitism.
That is from a new AER piece by Sascha O. Becker and Luigi Pascali.
Sunday assorted links
Is day care bad for kids, especially well-off kids?
Exploiting admission thresholds to the Bologna daycare system, we show using RDD that one additional daycare month at age 0–2 reduces IQ by 0.5% (4.7% of a s.d.) at age8–14 in a relatively affluent population. The magnitude of this negative effect increases with family income. Similar negative impacts are found for personality traits. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis from psychology that children in daycare experience fewer one-to-one interactions with adults, with negative effects in families where such interactions are of higher quality. We embed this hypothesis in a model that lends structure to our RDD.
Here is the forthcoming JPE article by Margherita Fort, Andrea Ichino and Giulio Zanella. And here are various ungated versions. (Do any of you have the links handy for other papers with similar results? They do exist.)
Quick quiz, we should:
a. Subsidize day care heavily
b. Not subsidize day care, or
c. Wait and see until more evidence is in.
Who is passing and failing this quiz? How about you?
Saturday assorted links
1. “Employing a comprehensive dataset on the incidence of hate crime across Germany, we first demonstrate that hate crime rises where men face disadvantages in local mating markets. Next, we deploy an original four-wave panel survey to confirm that support for hate crime increases when men fear that the inflow of refugees makes it more difficult to find female partners. Mate competition concerns remain a robust predictor even when controlling for anti-refugee views, perceived job competition, general frustration, and aggressiveness. We conclude that a more complete understanding of hate crime must incorporate mating markets and mate competition.” Link here.
2. Bryan Caplan on *Big Business* and crony capitalism.
3. Iceland fact of the day: “Sixty-four percent of students are women, the highest percentage of any European nation.”
4. How to get to ngdp targeting.
5. I’ve read so many bad or even absymal critiques of Facebook, but Bret Stephens (NYT) wrote a good one.
The progressive nature of big business
That is my new opinion piece for The Washington Post, derived from my Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. Here is one excerpt:
Yet big business often has been a strong progressive force in U.S. history, not only by providing jobs but also by spreading emancipatory practices and norms.
For instance, McDonald’s, General Electric, Procter & Gamble and many of the big tech companies offered health care and other legal benefits for same-sex partners well before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015. In addition to dramatically improving the lives of thousands of Americans, the companies’ moves put a mainstream stamp of approval on the notion of same-sex marriage itself.
And:
The larger the business, the more tolerant the institution is likely to be of employee and customer personal preferences. A local baker might refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple for religious reasons, but Sara Lee, which tries to build very broadly based national markets for its products, is keen on selling cakes to everyone. The bigger companies need to protect their broader reputations and recruit large numbers of talented workers, including from minority groups. They can’t survive and grow just by cultivating a few narrow networks as either their workers or customers.
There are further arguments at the link.
Friday assorted links
1. Lighthouse provision in premodern Japan.
2. A paper full of data on economists signing petitions (pdf).
3. A new kind of mood affiliation markets in everything: Burger King meals focused on (bad) moods.
4. More markets in everything: “The Newest Trend in Bars: No Booze.” And chess coat rack, with a Caro-Kann position.
Thursday assorted links
Emergent Ventures, fourth cohort of award recipients
Kadeem and Savannah Noray, graduate students at Harvard, economics and HKS, general support and also to study how to identify undervalued, high potential K-12 students.
José Luis Ricón, for blogging and to develop further platforms for information dissemination.
Arun Johnson, high school student in the Bay Area, to advance his work in physics, chemistry, nuclear fusion, and for general career development.
Thomas McCarthy, undergraduate at Dublin, Trinity College, travel grant to the Bay Area, and for his work on nuclear fusion and running start-up programs to cultivate young Irish entrepreneurs.
Natalya Naumenko, economist, incoming faculty at George Mason University, to study the long-term impact of nuclear explosions on health, and also more broadly to study the history of health in the Soviet Union and afterwards.
Paul Novosad, with Sam Asher, assistant professor at Dartmouth, to enable the construction of a scalable platform for the integration and dissemination of socioeconomic data in India, ideally to cover every town and village, toward the end of informing actionable improvements.
Alexey Guzey, travel grant to the Bay Area, for blogging and internet writing, plus for working on systems for improving scientific patronage.
Dylan DelliSanti, to teach an economics class to prisoners, and also to explore how that activity might be done on a larger scale.
Neil Deshmukh, high school student in Pennsylvania, for general career support and also his work with apps to help Indian farmers identify crop disease and to help the blind interpret images.
Here is my previous post on the third cohort of winners, with links to the first and second cohorts. Here is my post on the underlying philosophy behind Emergent Ventures. You can apply here.
Caplan, Weinersmith, and Open Borders
Caplan and Weinersmith, in their splendid forthcoming graphic novel, present some rebuttals to the “cultural critique” of open borders. For instance (and here I am presenting their views):
1. The average immigrant has political views which poll as pretty close to those of the average American. They don’t even by huge margins favor more immigration. (The author do admit that low-skilled immigrants do favor significantly less free speech, in any case on all of these points they do present actual numbers and visuals.)
2. Support for the welfare state remains strong in Western European nations, even as they have taken in many more migrants.
3. Open borders once before produced American political culture.
4. In “deep roots” terms, the United States already has a mediocre ancestry score, yet America has very high gdp and relatively strong political institutions.
5. There is an extended response to Garett Jones on IQ which I do not feel I can summarize well. Toward the end, it is noted that babies adopted from poorer countries into richer countries typically do very well later in life.
6. The end of this chapter proclaims: “Open borders won’t destroy our freedom. It’s going to bring freedom to all of mankind.”
I will again repeat my earlier point: the value and import of this new book does not very much depend on your actual opinion of open borders. Still, if you would like to hear my views, I’ll repeat my earlier discussion:
And no I do not favor open borders even though I do favor a big increase in immigration into the United States, both high- and low-skilled. The simplest argument against open borders is the political one. Try to apply the idea to Cyprus, Taiwan, Israel, Switzerland, and Iceland and see how far you get. Big countries will manage the flow better than the small ones but suddenly the burden of proof is shifted to a new question: can we find any countries big enough (or undesirable enough) where truly open immigration might actually work?
In my view the open borders advocates are doing the pro-immigration cause a disservice. The notion of fully open borders scares people, it should scare people, and it rubs against their risk-averse tendencies the wrong way. I am glad the United States had open borders when it did, but today there is too much global mobility and the institutions and infrastructure and social welfare policies of the United States are, unlike in 1910, already too geared toward higher per capita incomes than what truly free immigration would bring. Plunking 500 million or a billion poor individuals in the United States most likely would destroy the goose laying the golden eggs. (The clever will note that this problem is smaller if all wealthy countries move to free immigration at the same time, but of course that is unlikely.)
In any case, do buy the Caplan and Weinersmith book. I have now begun to think there should be a book like this, or two, for every major political issue of import.
Wednesday assorted links
1. How much depression is there in poor countries?
2. “Indeed, both studies revealed that while social liberals were overall more sympathetic to poor people than social conservatives, reading about White privilege decreased their sympathy for a poor White (vs. Black) person. Moreover, these shifts in sympathy were associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor White person’s plight. We conclude that, among social liberals, White privilege lessons may increase beliefs that poor White people have failed to take advantage of their racial privilege—leading to negative social evaluations.” Link here.
3. Noah Carl has been sacked. And more information.
4. “What compelled you to put a waterfall of this size inside an airport?” (Singapore)
5. A review of neuroeconomic gameplay in psychiatric disorders.
Measurement for everything
One of the most widely used screenplay programs in Hollywood has a new tool to help with gender equality and inclusion.
In an update announced Thursday, Final Draft — software that writers use to format scripts — said it will now include a proprietary “Inclusivity Analysis” feature, allowing filmmakers “to quickly assign and measure the ethnicity, gender, age, disability or any other definable trait of the characters,” including race, the company said in a statement.
It also will enable users to determine if a project passes the Bechdel Test, measuring whether two female characters speak to each other about anything other than a man. The Final Draft tool, a free add-on, was developed in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, which has been at the forefront of studying the underrepresentation of women on screen.
Here is the full Melena Ryzik NYT story.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Shade.
2. Bryan Caplan reviews *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*.
3. Why did the great cathedrals take so long to build?
4. Ross Douthat on Trump’s Fed pick (NYT). Endorses the idea of Ramesh Ponnuru, Karl Smith, Scott Sumner or David Beckworth.
5. “Contrary to popular accounts, this study finds that cross-national diffusion [of Google searches] is surprisingly rare—and seldom U.S. led—but occurs through a multichannel network with many different centers.” And here is a picture.
*Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration*
That is the already-bestselling graphic novel by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, and I would just like to say it is a phenomenal achievement. It is a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration of economic analysis and graphic visuals. I picked it up not knowing what to expect, and was blown away by the execution.
To be clear, I don’t myself favor a policy of open borders, instead preferring lots more legal immigration done wisely. But that’s not really the central issue here, as I think Caplan and Weinersmith are revolutionizing how to present economic (and other?) ideas. Furthermore, they do respond in detail to my main objections to the open borders idea, namely the cultural problems with so many foreigners coming to the United States (even if I am not convinced, but that is for another blog post). Even if you disagree with open borders, this book is one of the very best explainers of the gains from trade idea ever produced, and it will teach virtually anyone a truly significant amount about the immigration issue, as well as economic analytics more generally.
There is more actual substance in this book than in many a purely written tome.
It will be out in October, you can pre-order it here.