Unemployment benefits and Google job search
I had not known of this Scott R. Baker and Andrey Fradkin paper until recently, here is the abstract:
The large-scale unemployment caused by the Great Recession has necessitated unprecedented increases in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI). While it is clear that the weekly payments are beneficial to recipients, workers receiving benefits have less incentive to engage in job search and accept job offers. We construct a job search activity index based on Google data which provides the first high-frequency, state-specific measure of job search activity. We demonstrate the validity of our measure by benchmarking it against the American Time Use Survey and the comScore Web-User Panel, and also by showing that it varies with hypothesized drivers of search activity. We test for search activity responses to policy shifts and changes in the distribution of unemployment benefit duration. We find that search activity is greater when a claimant’s UI benefits near exhaustion. Furthermore, search activity responses to the passage of bills that increase unemployment benefits duration are negative but short-lived in most specifications. Using daily data, we estimate that an increase by 1% of the population of unemployed receiving additional benefits results in a decrease in aggregate search activity of 1.7% lasting only one week.
One way (not the only way) of reading these results is to wonder if some of the unemployed feel they ought to increase their shirking in response to an extension of benefits, but they actually don’t really want to do so. They shirk a bit more, for a short while, not to feel like fools, and then return either to active search or fruitless despondent search, as the case may be. For better or worse, habit dies hard.
For the pointer I thank John Horton.
Conor Sen, by the way, tells us that “ask for a raise” is at a post-recession high on Google Trends.
Is ACA leading to less hiring?
There is a new study from West Michigan (pdf), by Leslie A. Muller, Paul Isely, & Adelin Levin, based on questionnaire responses. I would take this with a grain of salt, but still it is useful information to throw into the pot. Here is one excerpt:
Many firms have decided however to minimize their exposure to ACA costs by limiting the employees that must be covered. Questions 14a – 14c show that 36 percent of firms are considering (or using) temporary workers, 44 percent are considering or have reduced/limited hiring over the next 12 months, and 51 percent are considering or have already reduced/limited hours so that the employee is considered part-time.
You may find the tables on the last few pages of the paper of interest. The results are based on fewer than 180 observations and presumably involve some selection bias as well.
The pointer is from W.E. Heasley.
The Chemicals in Our Food
More here.
Assorted links
2. Joe Pass plays “Donna Lee” (video).
3. Booth School debate over Obamacare, with Gentzkow, Cochrane, and Notowidigdo (video).
4. “The driver presents the paperwork to the unsuspecting nut processor.”
5. “When is it normal to be weird?” (MR from 2006)
How much does America benefit from the growth of emerging nations?
Charles Kenny writes:
And growth in the developing world, even if it means that some populous economies may eventually grow larger than the United States, also means that there are more places for Americans to travel in security and comfort, and more places to learn, work or while away our retirement years. Americans can get health care at Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok — accredited by the Joint Commission International, which certifies health-care organizations worldwide — for a fraction of the cost they can in Bethesda. Or their kids can attend college at the University of Cape Town, rated higher than Georgetown University in international rankings but one-fifth as expensive. Or perhaps they can get jobs at one of the new breed of world-class multinational firms based in the developing world, such as Tata or Huawei.
I sometimes think of this issue in terms of the gravity equation and the inward-looking propensities of large countries. Relative say to Swedes, Americans are relatively unwilling to travel abroad, educate themselves abroad, or work abroad. Some of this may be misguided arrogance, and some of it is a rational response from those living in a large, prosperous country and (often) knowing only the global language, namely English. In other words, Americans benefit less (per capita) from the new opportunities abroad than do Swedes. We do benefit to the extent foreign countries generate innovations which make their way to the United States, but so far not so many of those have come from emerging economies. I expect that to change, although when is a very important and underexplored question.
I believe that for many educated but not super-elite Americans the best opportunities already are abroad, but most of that group is reluctant to exploit them, if only for reasons related to personal lifestyles and family connections and a general unfamiliarity with living abroad. We can expect to see more anecdotally-based feature stories on this theme, however. And there is some longer-run elasticity where the underlying American social norms change.
In the meantime, homebody Americans pay more for gasoline, due to the demands from emerging economies, and pay less at Walmart, and otherwise wonder what the fuss is about.
For more on related points, read Charles’s new and excellent book The Upside of Down, not to be confused with Megan McArdle’s new and excellent The New Up Side of Down, a single space can make all the difference in the world.
Assorted links
1. Phone lets you send smells rather than texts.
2. Reports of the death of net neutrality are much exaggerated.
3. The Wall Street Journal reviews the new Tim Harford book, which is excellent and now out. And a good Pearlstein review of The Second Machine Age.
4. How has the Swedish housing market changed?
5. What is the best question to ask on a first date?
6. Short Term 12, set in a foster home, is in fact a good movie.
Tennis quant betting
For someone who says he bets millions of dollars on tennis a year, sports gambler Elihu Feustel doesn’t watch many matches.
“Which one is Granollers?” Feustel says, referring to Marcel Granollers, a Spaniard ranked 35th in the world. “Is he the one that’s good on clay courts?”
Feustel, from South Bend, Indiana, says he doesn’t need to pay attention to who the players on the men’s ATP World Tour are to double his money. He relies on an algorithm he created using data from 260,000 matches to make about 30 bets a day on Grand Slams such as the Australian Open, which started Jan. 13.
Gamblers and investment funds are increasingly vying for profits from tennis by using computer models to win money from more casual bettors, according to Scott Ferguson, a former Betfair Group Plc (BET) education officer. Such quantitative analysts, or so-called quants, are focusing on tennis in the same way their counterparts are employed by hedge funds to predict moves for stocks, bonds and other assets.
Betfair, a London-based company that enables bettors to wager against each other online, matched almost 50 million pounds ($82 million) of bets on the 2012 final in which Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal. Djokovic is an 8-11 favorite to win a fourth straight title in Melbourne with U.K. bookmaker William Hill Plc, meaning a successful $11 wager would return $8 plus the original stake.
Granollers prefers clay courts, according to his men’s tour profile, and lost his first-round match with Marin Cilic of Croatia in five sets on the second day of play on the hard courts of this year’s Australian Open.
…Tennis is an “attractive” sport to create an algorithm for because there are only two players in a singles match and statistics are freely available, according to William Knottenbelt, an associate professor of computing at London’s Imperial College. He co-wrote a tennis algorithm that he says would have made a 3.8 percent return on bets on 2,173 ATP matches in 2011.
Feustel, who says he puts in a 60-hour week checking and improving his model, works with a computer programmer and trader. The programmer trawls the Internet for data such as serve speed and break-point conversions. That’s plugged into the model which comes up with “fair” betting prices for scheduled games.
If those odds diverge from market prices, Feustel says, his trader — who lives outside the U.S. — will gamble as much as the market will allow at bookmakers including Pinnacle Sports, based on the Caribbean island of Curacao. That can be about $30,000 on a match result in later tournament rounds.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Hugo Lindgren, who is joining Hollywood Reporter as acting editor.
Markets in everything, 3-D printed babies
As far as I can tell, this is not from Japan:
The custom lifesize baby figurine is 8 inches (crown to rump). The lifesize baby is so called, because a 23-24 week old fetus is about 8 inches from crown to rump. It comes customized to resemble your baby. Provide between 1 and 5 images of your baby. For best results, include a portrait and a side view image.
Don’t forget the Grandparents. Order more than one 3D Baby and receive 10% off your order by using the Promotional Code LOVE.
Now if only they became taxpayers…
There are good pictures here. These pictures are even better. For the pointer I thank Samir Varma.
Early data on ACA enrollees
Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Matthews report:
Early signals suggest the majority of the 2.2 million people who sought to enroll in private insurance through new marketplaces through Dec. 28 were previously covered elsewhere, raising questions about how swiftly this part of the health overhaul will be able to make a significant dent in the number of uninsured.
Insurers, brokers and consultants estimate at least two-thirds of those consumers previously bought their own coverage or were enrolled in employer-backed plans.
The data, based on surveys of enrollees, are preliminary. But insurers say the tally of newly insured consumers is falling short of their expectations, a worrying trend for an industry looking to the law to expand the ranks of its customers.
I would emphasize that we still don’t really know quite what is going on here. But the view that everything is now in the clear simply is not warranted by the available evidence.
Hat tip goes to Megan McArdle.
Back to the Amazon future (sign me up)
Amazon.comAMZN +0.43% knows you so well it wants to ship your next package before you order it.
The Seattle retailer in December gained a patent for what it calls “anticipatory shipping,” a method to start delivering packages even before customers click “buy.”
There is more here. And here are our previous posts on Amazon.
The pointer is from @MattYglesias.
Assorted links
1. Plane eating in Ghana. Yum.
2. The future of jobs and work, a Ryan Avent survey from The Economist. And will a computer hire you?
3. What motivates young musicians to try to be great?
4. Why we like to watch rich people; the people writing these answers are mostly into total denial.
5. The “world’s biggest music store” — HMV in London — is no more.
Is technology driving us apart? And are there more women in public spaces?
It seems the answer is no. There is an interesting new NYT piece by Mark Oppenheimer, here is one excerpt:
Hampton found that, rather than isolating people, technology made them more connected. “It turns out the wired folk — they recognized like three times as many of their neighbors when asked,” Hampton said. Not only that, he said, they spoke with neighbors on the phone five times as often and attended more community events. Altogether, they were much more successful at addressing local problems, like speeding cars and a small spate of burglaries. They also used their Listserv to coordinate offline events, even sign-ups for a bowling league. Hampton was one of the first scholars to marshal evidence that the web might make people less atomized rather than more. Not only were people not opting out of bowling leagues — Robert Putnam’s famous metric for community engagement — for more screen time; they were also using their computers to opt in.
And:
According to Hampton, our tendency to interact with others in public has, if anything, improved since the ‘70s. The P.P.S. films showed that in 1979 about 32 percent of those visited the steps of the Met were alone; in 2010, only 24 percent were alone in the same spot.
And finally:
…this was Hampton’s most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It’s not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston’s Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. “The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles,” Hampton writes. Men seem to be “taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine.”
Across the board, Hampton found that the story of public spaces in the last 30 years has not been aloneness, or digital distraction, but gender equity. “I mean, who would’ve thought that, in America, 30 years ago, women were not in public the same way they are now?” Hampton said. “We don’t think about that.”
The piece is interesting throughout.
The Tyranny of the Now
Douglas Rushkoff writes:
Welcome to the world of “present shock,” where everything is happening so fast that it may as well be simultaneous. One big now. The result for institutions—especially political ones—has been profound. This transformation has dramatically degraded the ability of political operatives to set long-term plans. Thrown off course, they’re now often left simply to react to the incoming barrage of events as they unfold. Gone, suddenly, is the quaint notion of “controlling the narrative”—the flood of information is often far too unruly. There’s no time for context, only for crisis management.
Sure, the rate at which information spreads and multiplies has accelerated, but what’s taking place now is more than a mere speeding up. What we’re experiencing is the amplification of everything that happens to be occurring at the moment, and a diminishment of everything that isn’t. It’s not just that Google search results favor the recent over the relevant; it’s that suddenly an entire society does.
…It wasn’t always like this. As recently as the end of the 20th century, the zeitgeist was animated by a kind of forward-leaning futurism. There was a sense that we were accelerating toward a big shift fueled by new technologies, networks and global connectivity. Today, that shift may have finally occurred, but rather than encouraging us to look further ahead, it has instilled in us a pervading “presentism.” Our old obsession with the pace of progress has been drowned out by the onslaught of everything that is happening right now. It’s impossible even to keep up, much less to look ahead.
The marginal cost of cryptocurrency — does the price of Bitcoin have to fall so much from contestability?
Robert Sams writes:
This is also why it doesn’t make sense to speak of new cryptocurrencies expanding the aggregate crypto money supply without limit (or limited only by the fixed costs of creating one). What matters is how the aggregate hashing power, which is scarce, gets distributed over the set of extant cryptocurrencies. The above reasoning predicts that hashing power will not spread itself arbitrarily thinly, keeping MC well-above 0. (The distribution currently looks more like a power law.)
Much (something?) hinges on this point. If I understand the argument correctly, the claim is that the market will not consist of a large number of thinly hashed cryptocoins, because those coins will not be secure. There is an aggregate amount of hashing power, and it gets distributed in a quite concentrated fashion and that helps prop up the value of Bitcoin and limit the number of truly viable alternatives. Sams emailed me:
Ignoring any desired technical differences among the various coins, it’s optimal for users to coordinate on one, not b/c of some network effect but b/c spreading hashing costs over lots of coins eventually results in no coin having much security. At the margin, a user will choose the higher hashing coin between two otherwise identical ones.
In the (implicit) model of my earlier post, there is always a bribe to be paid to new cryptocurrency adopters — out of the seigniorage created by the founders of new cryptocoins — that will encourage a larger number of active cryptocoins. (And total hashing power is somewhat elastic in supply, contrary to how I am interpreting Sams.) How actively will those coins be hashed? I am not sure it matters. There will be two margins: the cost of doing more hashing of existing coins, and the cost of creating additional cryptocurrency through “bribing out of seigniorage.” In equilibrium those two marginal costs should be equal, adjusting of course for the possible heterogeneity of outputs, as you are not getting exactly the same services. To the extent “security” is an issue, the initial bribe for using a new cryptocurrency needs to be that much larger. If no bribe is big enough to induce some defection, I wonder how Bitcoin got started in the first place (which didn’t even have the benefit of the same kind of explicit upfront bribery).
My view is that if bootstrapping can happen once — as it did with Bitcoin — it can and will happen again. In which case we are back to contestability limiting the value of Bitcoin. I am not sure how much Sams and I are disagreeing. At the end he coins (sorry) a new theorem:
So maybe here is a new theorem: the value of a cryptocurrency will converge to its optimal level of hashing costs?
In any case, do read Sams’s entire post, it covers many cryptocurrency issues of interest.
The effects of QE on emerging economies: a new study
There is a new paper on this topic, and I have not yet had time to digest it properly, but it is worth passing along. Jamus Jerome Lim, Sanket Mohapatra, and Marc Stocker, all of the World Bank, wrote a guest blog on their paper for Econbrowser, here are excerpts:
Visual evidence (see figure below) suggests that cumulative gross inflows into the developing world displayed substantial gains during QE episodes, rising from $192 billion in mid-2009 to $598 billion by the first quarter of 2013…
Rather than ascribe a specific, quantitative estimate to the total effect of QE—which would require us to first establish the impact of QE on a range of fundamental variables—our strategy is to begin by accounting for potential QE spillover effects through observable transmission channels identified in the literature—those associated with liquidity, portfolio balancing, and confidence—followed by identifying whether QE episodes saw any additional effects on financial inflows that may be attributable to unobservables.
We find evidence in favor of QE transmission all three potential observable channels (see figure). Our estimates suggest that a one standard deviation change in U.S. short-term interest rates (the liquidity channel) is associated with changes in inflows of around 0.29 standard deviations, while that of changes in the yield curve (the portfolio balance channel) and the VIX (the confidence channel) are around 0.24 and 0.15 standard deviations, respectively. Perhaps more importantly, we also find evidence for a QE effect attributable to unobservables; this effect can account for around 0.26 standard deviation of the increase in inflows.
As I’ve said before, and as Bernanke remarked about QE today, this is all data in search of a theory. Still, the effects appear to be very real indeed. The paper itself is here (pdf), much there to ponder, but little chance you will reach a certain conclusion.