My Fall 2017 Ph.d Industrial Organization reading list
It is long, and thus below the fold…
- Competition
Einav, Lira and Levin, Jonathan, “Empirical Industrial Organization: A Progress Report,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, (Spring 2010), 145-162.
Bresnahan, Timothy F. “Competition and Collusion in the American Automobile Industry: the 1955 Price War,” Journal of Industrial Economics, 1987, 35(4), 457-82.
Asker, John, “A Study of the Internal Organization of a Bidding Cartel,” American Economic Review, (June 2010), 724-762.
Bresnahan, Timothy and Reiss, Peter C. “Entry and Competition in Concentrated Markets,” Journal of Political Economy, (1991), 99(5), 977-1009.
Whinston, Michael D., “Antitrust Policy Toward Horizontal Mergers,” Handbook of Industrial Organization, vol.III, chapter 36, see also chapter 35 by John Sutton.
“Benefits of Competition and Indicators of Market Power,” Council of Economic Advisors, April 2016.
Klein, Benjamin and Leffler, Keith. “The Role of Market Forces in Assuring Contractual Performance.” Journal of Political Economy 89 (1981): 615-641.
Bogdan Genchev, and Julie Holland Mortimer. “Empirical Evidence on Conditional Pricing Practices.” NBER working paper 22313, June 2016.
Sproul, Michael. “Antitrust and Prices.” Journal of Political Economy (August 1993): 741-754.
McCutcheon, Barbara. “Do Meetings in Smoke-Filled Rooms Facilitate Collusion?” Journal of Political Economy (April 1997): 336-350.
Crandall, Robert and Winston, Clifford, “Does Antitrust Improve Consumer Welfare?: Assessing the Evidence,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 2003), 3-26, available at http://www.brookings.org/views/articles/2003crandallwinston.htm.
FTC, Bureau of Competition, website, http://www.ftc.gov/bc/index.shtml. Read about some current cases and also read the merger guidelines.
Parente, Stephen L. and Prescott, Edward. “Monopoly Rights: A Barrier to Riches.” American Economic Review 89, 5 (December 1999): 1216-1233.
Demsetz, Harold. “Why Regulate Utilities?” Journal of Law and Economics (April 1968): 347-359.
Armstrong, Mark and Sappington, David, “Recent Developments in the Theory of Regulation,” Handbook of Industrial Organization, chapter 27, also on-line.
Shleifer, Andrei. “State vs. Private Ownership.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1998): 133-151.
Farrell, Joseph and Klemperer, Paul, “Coordination and Lock-In: Competition with Switching Costs and Network Effects,” Handbook of Industrial Organization, vol.III, chapter 31, also on-line.
Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson, “Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=728545.
Strictly optional: Ariel Pakes and dynamic computational approaches to modeling oligopoly: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/pakes/files/Pakes-Fershtman-8-2010.pdf
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/pakes/files/handbookIO9.pdf
2. Organization
Gibbons, Robert, “Four Formal(izable) Theories of the Firm,” on-line at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=596864.
“Make Versus Buy in Trucking: Asset Ownership, Job Design, and Information,” by George P. Baker and Thomas N. Hubbard, American Economic Review, (June 2003), 551-572.
Van den Steen, Eric, “Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm,” American Economic Review, 2010, 100:1, 466-490.
Miller, Merton, and commentators. “The Modigliani-Miller Propositions After Thirty Years,” and comments, Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1988): 99-158.
Myers, Stewart. “Capital Structure.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2001): 81-102.
Hansemann, Henry. “The Role of Non-Profit Enterprise.” Yale Law Journal (1980): 835-901.
Optional: Charness, Gary and Kuhn, Peter J. “Lab Labor: What Can Labor Economists Learn From the Lab?” NBER Working Paper, 15913, 2010, Lazear, Edward P. “Leadership: A Personnel Economics Approach,” NBER Working Paper 15918, 2010, Oyer, Paul and Schaefer, Scott, “Personnel Economics: Hiring and Incentives,” NBER Working Paper 15977, 2010.
Cowen, Tyler, Google lecture on prizes, on YouTube.
3. Production
American Economic Review Symposium, May 2010, starts with “Why do Firms in Developing Countries Have Low Productivity?” runs pp.620-633.
Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen, “Recent Advances in the Empirics of Organizational Economics,” http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0970.pdf.
Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen, the slides for “Americans do I.T. Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle,” http://www.people.hbs.edu/rsadun/ADITB/ADIBslides.pdf, the paper is here http://www.stanford.edu/~nbloom/ADIB.pdf but I recommend focusing on the slides.
Bloom, Nicholas, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. “Management as a Technology?” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 22327, June 2016.
Syerson, Chad “What Determines Productivity?” Journal of Economic Literature, June 2011, XLIX, 2, 326-365.
Diego Restuccia and Richard Rogerson, “The Causes and Costs of Misallocation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017, 31, 3, 151-174.
Dani Rodrik, “A Surprising Convergence Result,” http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2011/06/a-surprising-convergence-result.html, and his paper here http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/drodrik/Research%20papers/The%20Future%20of%20Economic%20Convergence%20rev2.pdf
Serguey Braguinsky, Lee G. Branstetter, and Andre Regateiro, “The Incredible Shrinking Portuguese Firm,” http://papers.nber.org/papers/w17265#fromrss.
David Lagakos, “Explaining Cross-Country Productivity Differences in Retail Trade,” Journal of Political Economy, April 2016, 124, 2, 1-49.
Casselman, Ben. “Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted.” FiveThirtyEight, August 8, 2014.
Decker, Ryan and John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda. “Where Has all the Skewness Gone? The Decline in High-Growth (Young) Firms in the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 21776, December 2015. NB: This paper and the three that follow have some repetition, so read them selectively rather than exhaustively.
Decker, Ryan and John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda. “The Secular Business Dynamism in the U.S.” Working paper, June 2014.
Haltiwanger, John, Ian Hathaway, and Javier Miranda. “Declining Business Dynamism in the U.S. High-Technology Sector.” Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, February 2014.
Haltiwanger, John, Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda. Where Have All the Young Firms Gone? Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, May 2012.
Song, Jae, David J. Price, Fatih Guvenen, and Nicholas Bloom. “Firming Up Inequality,” CEP discussion Paper no. 1354, May 2015.
Andrews, Dan, Chiara Criscuolo and Peter N. Gal. “Frontier firms, Technology Diffusion and Public Policy: Micro Evidence from OECD Countries.” OECD working paper, 2015.
Furman, Jason and Peter Orszag. “A Firm-Level Perspective on the Role of Rents in the Rise in Inequality.” October 16, 2015.
Mueller, Holger M., Paige Ouimet, and Elena Simintzi. “Wage Inequality and Firm Growth.” Centre for Economic Policy Research, working paper 2015.
http://evansoltas.com/2016/05/07/pro-business-reform-pro-growth/
Furman, Jason. ”Business Investment in the United States: Facts, Explanations, Puzzles, and Policy.” Remarks delivered at the Progressive Policy Institute, September 30, 2015, on-line at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20150930_business_investment_in_us_facts_explanations_puzzles_policies_slides.pdf
Scharfstein, David S. and Stein, Jeremy C. “Herd Behavior and Investment.” American Economic Review 80 (June 1990): 465-479.
Chen, Peter, Loukas Karabarbounis, and Brent Neiman. “The Global Rise of Corporate Saving.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 23133, February 2017.
4. Incentives
Edmans, Adam, Xavier Gabaix, and Dirk Jenter, “Executive Compensation: A Survey of Theory and Evidence,” NBER Working Paper 23596, July 2017.
Kaplan, Steven N. “Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance in the U.S.: Perceptions, Facts and Challenges.” Working paper, July 2012.
Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, “Unresolved Issues in the Rise of American Inequality,” http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~idew/papers/BPEA_final_ineq.pdf
Stein, Jeremy C. “Efficient Capital Markets, Inefficient Firms: A Model of Myopic Corporate Behavior.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 104 (November 1989): 655-670.
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=short-termism
Ben-David, Itzhak, and John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey, “Managerial Miscalibration,” NBER working paper 16215, July 2010.
5. Sectors: finance, health care, tech, others
Gorton, Gary B. “Slapped in the Face by the Invisible Hand: Banking and the Panic of 2007,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1401882, published on-line in 2009.
Erel, Isil, Nadault, Taylor D., and Stulz, Rene M., “Why Did U.S. Banks Invest in Highly-Rated Securitization Tranches?” NBER Working Paper 17269, August 2011.
Philippon, Thomas. “Has the U.S. Finance Industry Become Less Efficient? On the Theory and Measurement of Financial Intermediation.” Working paper, September 2014.
Gompers, Paul and Lerner, Josh. “The Venture Capital Revolution.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2001, 145-168.
Paul Graham, essays, http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html.
Optional: consider subscribing to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, periodic emails on the tech industry, note it is expensive.
Friedman, Milton. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970.
Healy, Kieran. “The Persistence of the Old Regime.” Crooked Timber blog, August 6, 2014.
More to be added, depending on your interests.
Virginia is a multicultural success story
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
Virginia is the location of the Pentagon, and military and national intelligence establishment have been a cash cow for the state. That has boosted prosperity and minimized cyclical downturns, two factors that help alleviate racial and interethnic tensions, in turn raising upward mobility for immigrants. The state has also encouraged real estate growth and created a favorable environment for small and midsize businesses. For all the criticism of ugly strip malls, they are an ideal place for immigrants to start a new business.
The result has been a strong upper middle class rather than a playground for billionaires. That offers immigrants a good chance to move up the social and income ladders fairly quickly.
Almost 70 percent of Virginia immigrants have settled in Northern Virginia, very close to Washington and Maryland. The D.C. metropolitan area, due to the primacy of politics, has attracted migrants and temporary residents for a long time, including American-born citizens from other states. There is little stigma to being an outsider or new arrival.
When I first moved to Northern Virginia in 1980, it was common to see Confederate flags and to hear “good ol’ boys” talk with racist overtones. Today the region is a multicultural success, has some of the best schools in the country, and is renowned for its globe-spanning ethnic food.
Another big part of the Virginia economy has been the significant naval presence in the Norfolk area. In addition to creating lots of jobs, the U.S. military long has been one of the most successfully integrated and tolerant institutions in the country, setting a good workplace and cultural precedent.
It also helps that Virginia’s immigrants are a mix of nationalities, with no one dominant ethnic group. That has encouraged broad-based assimilation, and prevented any single, easily identifiable group from being a source of social tensions.
Do read the whole thing.
Monday assorted links
Rewatching *Enter the Dragon* (some minor spoilers)
Yana and I saw this Bruce Lee movie last night over Dan Klein’s house, for me it was my first viewing since my undergraduate days. A few points struck me:
1. Hong Kong is portrayed as a poor, dumpy ghetto; this was 1973. The Technicolor shots of the city are gorgeous.
2. Black Power, in the character of Williams [Jim Kelly], is shown to be a fundamentally moral and emancipatory force. And as was so common in movies from the 1970s and 80s, the black guy “gets it.”
3. The main villain, Han, reminded me of Chairman Mao, except that the role of the West in the opium trade is inverted and placed on Mao [Han] himself. It is no surprise that Mao’s China banned the movie.
4. Bruce takes on and defeats a whole group of unimpressive karate experts — was that intended as an anti-Japanese slam?
5. Angela Mao, who played Bruce Lee’s sister, steals the show. She now lives in Flushing, Queens (NYT).
6. The American male heroes seem not to mind that the women they are given to sleep with are essentially slaves, held under coercion or otherwise dubious circumstances. The movie seems not to mind that the male heroes do not mind. And an analogous film today would not have nude scenes, for several reasons, one being the desire to sell it to…China.
6b. The politically incorrect ranking in terms of libido is black > white > Asian, without any apology or attempt at subtlety.
7. Many scenes reminded me of the James Bond flick You Only Live Twice, and also Dr. No. It is a common theme in movies from that time that a hero can use a diversion to take over a command center; is that still done? The final mirrors trick seemed to be taken from Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. Yana remarked that many of the underground sets looked like they were borrowed from Star Trek, and that the “turn the corner” suspense scenes seem to have anticipated Star Wars.
8. “Jackie Chan appears as a guard during the underground lair battle scene and gets his neck snapped by Lee.”
9. The score by Lalo Schifrin remains compelling and Bruce dominates every scene he is in.
10. As was often the case in those times, the exposition is relatively slow, much of the action is saved for the last half hour, and finally the film just ends.
What I’ve been reading
1. Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Technique. Dense but carefully argued and consistently insightful, perhaps the best introduction to its subject matter. It is especially strong on how Kierkegaard’s Lutheranism informed his critique of Hegel, his supernaturalism, and his strong opposition to complacency.
Kierkegaard also was an influence on my Stubborn Attachments, as Hampson writes: “Given that faith is to look beyond ourselves to Christ, the ‘future’ is for Lutheranism a critical category. In the thought of the 20th-century Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann ‘future’ and ‘God’ become concomitant. The relation to this future, to God, takes one outside oneself, whereas to rest on my laurels (my past) is of the essence of sin. As we shall see, for Kierkegaard, relating to the idea of eternal life is existentially life-transforming. It follows that in this tradition there is little continuity of person, for one and again I must break myself open (in my self-satisfaction) as I consent to dependence on God.”
Recommended.
2. Johnny Rogan, Byrds: Requiem for the Timeless: Volume 2: The Lives of Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, Kevin Kelley, Gram Parsons, Clarence White and Skip Battin. Full of amazing and loving detail, this volume covers the less famous of the Byrds, and why their careers did not go further; whether in business or the arts, we spend too much time studying the winners. Here are my earlier remarks on Rogan’s earlier editions as an extended essay on management theory and career advice.
3. Michael D. Barr, The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence. From 2013, but all the more relevant today. Barr’s coverage is insufficiently appreciative of good results, but nonetheless offers an invaluable “how things really work” guide to Singaporean government, most of all on where accountability lies and where it does not. There is guesswork involved, but this book offers plenty of details and analysis you won’t get elsewhere.
4. Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon: The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age. Published in 1964, before Kissinger became Kissinger, although he is a war criminal this volume shows the quality of his thought: “…an equilibrium based on considerations of power is the most difficult of all to establish, particularly in a revolutionary period following a long peace. Lulled by the memory of stability, states tend to seek security in activity and to mistake impotence for lack of provocation.” The person who recommended this volume to me told me it would explain why the internal and external requirements for foreign policy on the Continent are much more in accord than they are for either England or America. It does no such thing, so I still would like to read on that question.
Jack Schneider, Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality. Under a true value added measure, the schools in Somerville, Massachusetts turn out to be quite good, even though their raw test scores are not impressive.
David Osborne, Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Education System, covers how charter schools are transforming the American educational landscape.
Who is winning with the fiduciary rule?
Remember the fiduciary rule, the one that “requires brokers to act in the best interests of savers and went into partial effect in June”? Who could be opposed to such a thing? But of course when a regulation sounds so very good, there is usually some other consideration around the corner, perhaps involving secondary consequences. And, as some of us had predicted, it is not working out so well:
The rule requires brokers to act in the best interests of retirement savers, rather than sell products that are merely suitable but could make brokers more money. Financial firms decried the restriction, which began to take effect in June, as limiting consumer choice while raising their compliance costs and potential liability.
But adherence is proving a positive. Firms are pushing customers toward accounts that charge an annual fee on their assets, rather than commissions which can violate the rule, and such fee-based accounts have long been more lucrative for the industry. In earnings calls, executives are citing the Department of Labor rule, known varyingly as the DOL or fiduciary rule, as a boon.
“Primarily because of DOL” and market appreciation, assets are growing in fee-based accounts, said Stifel Financial Corp. SF 0.40% Chief Executive Ronald Kruszewski, on a call in July. In an interview, he said such accounts can be twice as costly for clients.
That is from Lisa Beilfuss at the WSJ. Allison Schraeger is one who saw this coming.
Sunday assorted links
Charter cities in Honduras update
The Economist has a lengthy and very informative article on this, here is one bit:
Another candidate to be the first ZEDE is a public-private partnership with Canadian investors to create an “energy district” in Olancho department, where wood would be harvested for fuel. The ZEDE itself would be confined at first to a 1.6 square km (0.6 square mile) patch, which will be occupied by a power station. But it could eventually expand to an area covering 8% of Honduras’s territory and including 380,000 people. HOI, a Christian NGO based in the United States, is to provide health care and education from the outset in this “area of influence”.
…Even now, just how ZEDEs will work is a matter of argument among their supporters. The law places effective control in the hands of investors and a “technical secretary” who will administer each zone (and must be a Honduran citizen). They are answerable to an independent “commission for best practices” (CAMP). Civil and criminal cases will be adjudicated by special ZEDE courts, though it is not clear whether each zone will have its own or whether they will join a single parallel system. They could employ foreign judges to hear civil and criminal cases, just as Honduran football teams hire foreign players, suggests Mr Díaz. A “tribunal of individual rights”, guided by international conventions, will protect residents. Its decisions can be appealed to international courts.
But this governance structure is not settled; participants do not agree on what has been decided or even on who is part of it. The original CAMP, appointed by Mr Lobo, had 21 members, including Grover Norquist, an American anti-tax campaigner, Richard Rahn, then of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and Mark Klugmann, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. This body met just once, in March 2015, on the resort island of Roatán.
In short, the prognosis is still unclear, which I take to be bad news. In any case, there is much more at the link.
Saturday assorted links
1. Does cutting the corporate income tax boost the demand for labor?
2. “By threatening to sabotage their own interests but hurt the impatient state even more, citizens can compel the state to deliver broader policy benefits. We illustrate this logic with the case of polio vaccination in northern Nigeria, where entire communities have resisted the vaccine as a strategy to bargain for more desired services.” Link here.
3. Germans who swim to work. And Bill Kristol will interview me Sept.13 in Chicago. And apply to become new host of NPR’s Planet Money.
4. The quickest and slowest economics journals.
5. When the government (Venezuela) loots checked luggage.
6. Why democracy is safe in America. And are we overrating those North Korean ICBMs?
Immigration flows are well below their postwar peaks
From Lyman Stone:
…the survey-based immigration method finds essentially no increase in immigration after the immigration reforms of the 1960s: indeed inflow rates may have declined. The implication here is that rising foreign-born population has its roots well before any changes to immigration law, and may be as much about declining outflows as it is about rising inflows.
Notably, both estimates give a similar 1940-Present estimate of average annual migration: 0.51% for the survey method, 0.57% for the category method. The category method is inflated by that bump around the 1950s, which was largely temporary, seasonal illegal immigration. Adjusted for that, it’s about 0.52%. In other words, both methods give similar long-run migration rates, at a long-run average level somewhat lower to the long-run average level in the previous migration period.
But the trend is different. The survey-based method suggests immigration rates peaked around 1970 and have fallen since. The category-based method suggests that immigration rates peaked in the 1990s, and have fallen since.
The longer piece covers a variety of other related topics, including stocks in addition to flows (longer lives and lower native fertility skew the stock), and the connection between immigration and pro-natalist policies. Via Ross Douthat.
Can You Short the Apocalypse?
If the probability of nuclear war just went up why isn’t the stock market down? The stock market also didn’t fall during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Lars Christensen points out:
If indeed we were on the brink of a nuclear exchange, one would certainly have expected the stock market to drop like a stone. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the S&P500 was little changed during the 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Lars argues that the market must have figured out that MAD was a brilliant policy and thus the nuclear risk wasn’t anywhere near as large as most people thought (and nuclear war didn’t happen so the markets were right, right?)
Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who was in the White House at the time, thought the Cuban Missile Crisis was the “most dangerous moment in human history.” None of the participants thought it was a yawn. I am inclined to accept their judgment. So why didn’t the market drop like a stone? It’s not so obvious that the apocalypse is priced into the stock market.
Let’s remember why markets are good at forecasting events. If you think IBM’s dividends are going to fall then you sell IBM stock and the fall in price signals the future event. But what do you do with the proceeds from the sale of IBM stock? You buy some other asset. Since IBM is only a small share of the market there are lots of other assets to buy.
If you think a nuclear war is likely, and you sell your stocks, what do you buy? It’s pointless to buy other assets like bonds–the bond markets probably won’t exist. You could buy land but who will enforce your property right? Even cash might be useless following a nuclear war. Maybe some gold coins and canned goods would be useful but you may not be around to enjoy them.
If the apocalypse really is coming your best bet is to cash out and spend it all now. But really how much fun would that be? Sure, you could have a great week of hookers and coke but I suspect a lot of people might prefer the cheaper option of a walk in the forest.
If the apocalypse were coming, I would have a second helping of chocolate cake and maybe a third helping but utility diminishes. Since utility diminishes you get a lot less enjoyment by consuming all your wealth now than by spreading it over a lifetime.
Diminishing marginal utility means that the optimal strategy to meet the apocalypse is very costly. Suppose you expect IBM dividends to fall and so you sell your IBM stock and use the proceeds to buy something else. If IBM dividends don’t fall, you haven’t lost much. But if you expect a nuclear war, cash out and blow it all, then you’ve lost a lifetime of consumption in return for a momentary buzz.
The bottom line is that selling stock doesn’t really help you to deal with a nuclear war or even to improve your life much before the nuclear war happens. The problem isn’t markets. An information market could still be used to produce information about the probability of a nuclear war it’s just that I wouldn’t necessarily expect that probability to correlate with the broader markets. Since any actions you might take in the broader markets are fruitless or very high cost, knowing that the probability of a nuclear war has increased is mostly useless information. You might as well ignore useless information and proceed to buy and sell stock as if the information didn’t exist.
You can’t short the apocalypse. As a result, I am not much comforted by the fact that markets appear steady in the face of apocalyptic risk.
Why isn’t Mexico growing more rapidly?
From Levy and Rodrik:
What is striking is that this dualism has worsened during the period of Mexico’s liberalizing reforms. Research by one of us (Levy) shows that informal firms have absorbed a growing share of the economy’s resources. The cumulative growth of employment between 1998 and 2013 in the informal sector was a whopping 115%, compared to 6% in the formal economy. For capital, cumulative growth was 134% for the informal sector and 9% for the formal sector.
The short article is interesting throughout.
I’m with the Mormons on this one — how about you?
One in eight American adults are alcoholics. Here are some more details:
The article by Grant et al describes substantial increases in alcohol use and related problematic behaviors that occurred between the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions evaluations in 2001-2002 and in 2012-2013. The validity of the results is underscored by the impressive methodology, which at each time applied virtually identical well-validated face-to-face interviews and analytic approaches to about 40 000 nationally representative participants 18 years and older. The concept of high-risk drinking demanded 5 drinks per occasion for men (4 for women) at least weekly, with a standard drink defined as 14 g of ethanol, and alcohol use disorders (AUDs) were defined by the DSM-IV.
The results documented substantial increases in the prevalence of past 12-month drinking, high-risk drinking, and AUDs. The largest increase related to the rate of the most serious problems, AUDs overall, which shot up by 49.4%, from 8.5% in 2001/2002 to 12.7% about a decade later. These figures are limited to the past 12-month, or current, diagnoses and do not include individuals who are in potentially temporary remissions. Respondents with lifetime but not current AUDs are also likely to carry future health care costs through enhanced vulnerabilities for cancers, cardiac disease, and other serious disorders associated with histories of heavy drinking.
The overall changes in prevalence over the decade were even greater for several population subgroups including women (an 83.7% increase in AUDs over the 11 years), African American individuals (a 92.8% increase in AUDs), individuals aged 45 years to 64 years and 65 years and older (with 81.5% and 106.7% increases in AUDs, respectively), those with only high school educations (a 57.8% increase in AUDs), and individuals with incomes less than $20 000 (a 65.9% increase in AUDs). During that same period, high-risk drinking, described using the previously mentioned criteria, increased from 9.7% to 12.6% (a change of 29.9%), with similar subgroups as reported for AUDs demonstrating the greatest increases. The proportion of drinkers increased from 65.4% to 72.7% (an enhancement of 11.2%). Similar results have been reported in other national surveys, indicating that the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions findings are not anomalies.
As noted by the authors, in 2010, the cost to society for alcohol-related problems was estimated at $250 billion per year.
That is from JAMA, hat tip goes to Anecdotal. Is limiting alcohol use one of your main issues? If not, why not? And what about causes? Here is some media coverage:
There’s no single explanation for the increase. Researchers point to economic stress in the aftermath of the Great Recession; more easily available alcohol at restaurants and retailers; and the diminished impact of alcohol taxes. As a percentage of average income, than at any point since at least 1950.
Pervasive marketing by the alcohol industry and new products such as flavored vodkas or hard lemonade and iced tea may also be driving some of the increases among women and other demographics, says Jernigan.
Of course this also has implications for future health care costs, although whether higher yearly care costs will offset lower life expectancy I do not know. In any case, it is unlikely to boost productivity.
Not from The Onion
‘BitCoen’ to become first electronic currency specifically for Jews
And this:
While anyone can purchase tokens, the company will be managed by a ‘Council of Six’ made up solely of Jewish representatives. The representatives will likely be prominent leaders in both public and private sectors, though there is no word yet as to the planned demography of the leaders.
As the currency is aimed specifically at Jewish communities, there will be an automation option so that trading operations may take place on Shabbat, when the handling of money is prohibited by Jewish law.
Just to be clear, I don’t think that all or even most of these new coins are viable entities…
Hat tip goes to Irrelevant Investor.
Friday assorted links
1. The body language of Angela Merkel.
2. University of Georgia limits professorial stress reduction policies for students.
4. Why is American chess great again?
5. Josh Barro of BI.
6. How reliable are North Korean nuclear weapons?
7. From the Philip Tetlock people: “It’d be fantastic if you could share the signup link – https://www.hybridforecasting.com/ – with your readers, to whom I can promise a rare chance to work with a range of prototype human-machine hybrid forecasting systems in the experimental stage…”