Revisiting the Interest Rate Effects of Federal Debt
This paper revisits the relationship between federal debt and interest rates, which is a key input for assessments of fiscal sustainability. Estimating this relationship is challenging due to confounding effects from business cycle dynamics and changes in monetary policy. A common approach is to regress long-term forward interest rates on long-term projections of federal debt. We show that issues regarding nonstationarity have become far more pronounced over the last 20 years, significantly biasing the recent estimates based on this methodology. Estimating the model in first differences addresses these concerns. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio raises the 5-year-ahead, 5-year Treasury rate by about 3 basis points, which is statistically and economically significant and highly robust. Roughly three-quarters of the increase in interest rates reflects term premia rather than expected short-term real rates.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Michael Plante, Alexander W. Richter, and Sarah Zubairy.
Why is manufacturing productivity growth so low?
We examine the recent slow growth in manufacturing productivity. We show that nearly all measured TFP growth since 1987—and its post-2000s decline—comes from a few computer-related industries. We argue conventional measures understate manufacturing productivity growth by failing to fully capture quality improvements. We compare consumer to producer and import price indices. In industries with rapid technological change, consumer price indices indicate less inflation, suggesting mismeasurement in standard industry deflators. Using an input-output framework, we estimate that TFP growth is understated by 1.7 percentage points in durable manufacturing, 0.4 percentage points in nondurable manufacturing, with no mismeasurement in nonmanufacturing industries.
That is from a recent paper by Enghin Atalay, Ali Hortacsu, Nicole Kimmel, and Chad Syverson. Still, that seems low to me…
Via Adam Ozimek.
Tariff Shenanigans
In our textbook, Tyler and I give an amusing example of how entrepreneurs circumvented U.S. tariffs and quotas on sugar. Sugar could be cheaply imported into Canada and iced tea faced low tariffs when imported from Canada into the U.S., so firms created a high-sugar iced “tea” that was then imported into the US and filtered for its sugar!
Bloomberg reports a similar modern workaround. Delta needs new airplanes but now faces steep tariffs on imported European aircraft. As a result, Delta has been stripping European planes of their engines, importing the engines at low tariff rates, and installing them on older aircraft.
To what extent will factories return to cities?
Cities and small towns have tried to revitalize their downtowns by rolling back certain rules and requirements to help promote new developments and bring life to empty streets.
Now, they’re returning to an earlier era, when craftspeople such as food makers, woodworkers and apparel designers were integral parts of neighborhood life, and economic activity revolved around them.
New York City changed its zoning rules last year for the first time in decades to allow small-scale producers in neighborhoods where they had long been restricted. The City of Elgin, a suburb of Chicago, approved a code change last fall allowing retailers to make and sell products in the same space. In 2022, Baltimore passed a bill that allows small-scale food processing and art-studio-related businesses in commercial zones.
And Seattle’s City Council will vote in September on a plan that includes changing rules to allow artisan manufacturers in residential neighborhoods. Supporters said the proposal would help create the kind of walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that were common in an earlier era.
…Over the past decade, hundreds of U.S. cities and small towns have revised their land-use codes to allow small-scale producers — from coffee roasters to makers of jewelry and furniture — in downtowns and neighborhoods. Many small producers started to disappear from those areas around the turn of the 20th century with the advent of mass production; as large-scale factories generated enormous waste and pollution, cities restricted them near residences. Now, most of the businesses allowed to operate under the new rules employ between one and 30 people.
*Superman* (some general observations, no real spoilers)
The first half was more fun than I was expecting, though overall I cannot call it a good movie.
The core message is that AI, drones, biotech, and nanotech will elevate the power of private companies and individuals over states, and this is likely to prove unstable on an ongoing basis. Whether or not you agree, I found that a consistent and also important theme to pursue.
One should not conclude that Superman is obviously one of the good guys, no matter how noble his intent. I found that interesting too. The filmmakers hint at the logic of growth models, and Garett Jones.
Unlike what some commentators have suggested, I did not view the movie as intending much explicit commentary about either immigration or Israel vs. Hamas. Still, you can spot a few references to each.
The main flaws of the film are a) stupidity, b) excess reliance on multiple climactic yet never compelling supposedly climactic battle scenes, c) lame portrayals of villains, and d) lack of interest in being truly cinematic.
I can report that I did not walk out, but it does not come close to the dramatic impact of the original Christopher Reeve installment.
Sunday assorted links
1. AI and government debt. If real resources go up enough (a big if, admittedly), I think we are set. I would not worry so much about the transfers embedded in real interest rates. Furthermore, the key issues are those of political economy, namely whether U.S. repayment remains credible. In the major scenarios, the debt-wealth remains doable even without AI.
2. Grok predicts the next Nobel Prize in economics.
4. LLMs calling each other names.
6. “If everyone hypothetically went from having five kids to having four kids, that would mean one less sibling for each child. But it would yield a much bigger decrease in first cousins: Instead of a child having four aunts or uncles who each have five kids—20 cousins—they would have three aunts or uncles who each have four kids, for a total of 12.” Atlantic link here. And: “Only about 6 percent of adult cousins live in the same census tract (typically about the size of a neighborhood); the rest live an average of 237 miles apart.”
*The Monastic World*
The author is Andrew Jotischky, and the subtitle is A 1,200-Year History. He writes very well and also can think in terms of organizations. Excerpt:
As such, monasteries were complex institutions. The demands of property ownership included systems for collection and receipt of rents, and thus methods of accountancy and management of finances and human resources. But even the fulfilment of their spiritual functions of communal worship required internal systems and management. The correct performance of the liturgy required training in chant and sacramental theology. It also required service books and specific sacred objects for celebration of the eucharist. In order to fulfil the expectation of constant prayer and praise, the liturgical offices were spread across day and night, which in turn meant that light — from candles or oil, depending on the region — was needed for several hours. All of these items had to be produced or procured. Monasteries thus needed supplies ranging from bread to wine to wax and parchment, and the technical know-how to process these. Moreover, the schools that monasteries developed to train their own monks also provided opportunities for a largely non-literate society to educate their young.
An excellent book, Yale University Press, and currently priced below $15 in hardcover.
Greater Bias Toward Transgender People Compared to Gay Men and Lesbian Women Is WEIRD
The greater acceptance of gay, compared with transgender, people in Western countries may be a result of a specific trajectory—where queer rights was centered by and around White, middle class, gender-conforming gay men—and may not generalize to other places. Two surveys of respondents in 23 countries (Ns∼ = 500 or 1,000 per country) showed that bias toward gay and transgender people is lower in Western (vs. non-Western) countries, but that the relative bias changes as a function of region: there is greater acceptance of gay (vs. transgender) people in most Western countries, whereas the reverse is true in most non-Western countries. Analyses of legal frameworks (N = 193) show that recognition of same-gender unions is prevalent in Western countries but virtually nonexistent elsewhere, whereas recognition of gender marker changes is prevalent throughout the world. Overall, in the most intolerant places, transgender people are relatively more accepted than gay people.
Here is the recent article by Jaimi L. Napier. Via a loyal MR reader.
Saturday assorted links
1. Ludwig Mises papers collection, now online.
2. FAA academy pay to increase thirty percent.
3. “The average South African woman weighs more than the average South African man.”
4. What Dean Ball wants to write about.
5. First new class of antibiotics in thirty years?
6. Singapore Michigan UP fact of the day. And fine that it is legal!
Blame Canada! Measles Edition
Polimath has a good post on measles. The recent spike in U.S. cases has drawn alarm. As the New York Times reports:
There have now been more measles cases in 2025 than in any other year since the contagious virus was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, according to new data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The grim milestone represents an alarming setback for the country’s public health and heightens concerns that if childhood vaccination rates do not improve, deadly outbreaks of measles — once considered a disease of the past — will become the new normal.
But as Polimath notes, U.S. vaccination rates remain above 90% nationally. The problem isn’t broad domestic anti-vax sentiment but rather concentrated gaps in coverage, often within insular religious communities. These local shortfalls do explain how outbreaks spread once they begin—but how do they begin in the first place, given these communities are islands within a largely vaccinated country? Polimath says blame Canada! (and Mexico!)
The greater concern in my mind is not the problem of low measles vaccination coverage in the United States, but among our immediate neighbors. In Ontario, the MMR vaccination rate among 7-year-olds is under 70%. As in the examples above, this rate seems to be particularly low “in specific communities”, whatever that is supposed to mean. This has resulted in the ongoing spread of measles such that Ontario’s measles infection rate is 40 times higher than the United States. Canada officially “eliminated” measles in 1998. But with vaccine rates as low as they are, it seems like Canada is at risk for losing that “elimination” status and becoming an international source for measles.
Similarly, Mexico is having a measles outbreak that is substantially worse than the US outbreak. Importantly, the Mexican outbreak has been the worst in the Chihuahua province (over 3,000 cases), which borders Texas and New Mexico.
I’m less interested in blame than in the useful reminder that not all politics is American politics. Vaccination rates have dipped worldwide and not in response to U.S. politics or RFK Jr. In fact, despite RFK Jr. the U.S. is doing better than some of its North American and European peers. Outbreaks here may be triggered by cross-border exposure, not failures in U.S. public health alone. Not all politics is American—and not all American outcomes are made in America.
Hat tip: the excellent Stephen Landry.
Kimimania?
kimi.com, from China.
Technology Transfer and Development Economics
Polymarket on the next Fed chair
Scott Bessent, Kevin Warsh, and Kevin Hassett are the clear leaders, in that order.
A Unifying Framework for Robust and Efficient Inference with Unstructured Data
This paper presents a general framework for conducting efficient inference on parameters derived from unstructured data, which include text, images, audio, and video. Economists have long used unstructured data by first extracting low-dimensional structured features (e.g., the topic or sentiment of a text), since the raw data are too high-dimensional and uninterpretable to include directly in empirical analyses. The rise of deep neural networks has accelerated this practice by greatly reducing the costs of extracting structured data at scale, but neural networks do not make generically unbiased predictions. This potentially propagates bias to the downstream estimators that incorporate imputed structured data, and the availability of different off-the-shelf neural networks with different biases moreover raises p-hacking concerns. To address these challenges, we reframe inference with unstructured data as a problem of missing structured data, where structured variables are imputed from high-dimensional unstructured inputs. This perspective allows us to apply classic results from semiparametric inference, leading to estimators that are valid, efficient, and robust. We formalize this approach with MAR-S, a framework that unifies and extends existing methods for debiased inference using machine learning predictions, connecting them to familiar problems such as causal inference. Within this framework, we develop robust and efficient estimators for both descriptive and causal estimands and address challenges like inference with aggregated and transformed missing structured data-a common scenario that is not covered by existing work. These methods-and the accompanying implementation package-provide economists with accessible tools for constructing unbiased estimators using unstructured data in a wide range of applications, as we demonstrate by re-analyzing several influential studies.
That is from a recent paper by Jacob Carlson and Melissa Dell. Via Kevin Bryan.
Surveillance is growing
California residents who launched fireworks for the 4th of July have tickets coming in the mail, thanks to police drones that were taking note. One resident, for example, racked up $100,000 in fines last summer due to the illegal use of fireworks. “If you think you got away with it, you probably didn’t,” said Sacramento Fire Department Captain Justin Sylvia. “What may have been a $1,000 fine for one occurrence last year could now be $30,000 because you lit off so many.” Homeowners who weren’t even present at the property also have tickets coming in the mail due to the social host ordinance.
Here is the source. Elsewhere (NYT):
Hertz and other agencies are increasingly relying on scanners that use high-res imaging and A.I. to flag even tiny blemishes, and customers aren’t happy…
Developed by a company called UVeye, the scanning system works by capturing thousands of high-resolution images from all angles as a vehicle passes through a rental lot’s gates at pickup and return. A.I. then compares those images and flags any discrepancies.
The system automatically creates and sends damage reports, Ms. Spencer said. An employee reviews the report only if a customer flags an issue after receiving the bill. She added that fewer than 3 percent of vehicles scanned by the A.I. system show any billable damage.
I await the next installment in this series.