Selective reporting of placebo tests in top economics journals
Placebo tests, where a null result is used to support the validity of the research design, is common in economics. Such tests provide an incentive to underreport statistically significant tests, a form of reversed p-hacking. Based on a pre-registered analysis plan, we test for such underreporting in all papers meeting our inclusion criteria (n=377) published in 11 top economics journals between 2009-2021. If the null hypothesis is true in all tests, 2.5% of them should be statistically significant at the 5% level with an effect in the same direction as the main test (and 5% in total). The actual fraction of statistically significant placebo tests with an effect in the same direction is 1.29% (95% CI [0.83, 1.63]), and the overall fraction of statistically significant placebo tests is 3.10% (95% CI [2.2, 4.0]). Our results provide strong evidence of selective underreporting of statistically significant placebo tests in top economics journals.
That is from a new paper by Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, and Yifan Yang.
That was then, this is now
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will subject passengers on flights from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to to mandatory isolation for two weeks after efforts to curb gatherings in those states prompted residents to leave and head to Florida.
DeSantis made the announcement Monday during a hastily called news conference a day after Florida’s number of confirmed coronavirus cases surged past 1,000…
“We wish our friends in New York well, they have a tough fight,” he said, “but we also have to protect our folks here in the state of Florida.”
The order, beginning Tuesday, requires people arriving by air from any location with “substantial community spread” to isolate themselves for 14 days or the duration of their stay, whichever is shorter. Airline employees and professionals responding to the coronavirus emergency are exempt, including military and health officials.
A violation of the mandatory quarantine will be a criminal misdemeanor punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.
Here is the Politico article from March 23, 2020. Via Matt Y.
Saturday assorted links
Can the Shingles Vaccine Prevent Dementia?
A new paper provides good evidence that the shingles vaccine can prevent dementia, which strongly suggests that some forms of dementia are caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the virus that on initial infection causes chickenpox. The data come from Wales where the herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax) first became available on September 1 2013 and was rolled out by age. At that time, however, it was decided that the vaccine would only be available to people born on or after September 2 1933. In other words, the vaccine was not made available to 80 year olds but it was made available to 79 year and 364-day olds. (I gather the reasoning was that the benefits of the vaccine decline with age and an arbitrary cut point was chosen.)
The cutoff date for vaccine eligibility means that people born within a week of one another have very different vaccine uptakes. Indeed, the authors show that only 0.01% of patients who were just one week too old to be eligible were vaccinated compared to 47.2% among those who were just one week younger. The two groups of otherwise similar individuals who were born around September 2 1933 are then tracked for up to seven years, 2013-2020. The individuals who were just “young” enough to be vaccinated are less likely to get shingles compared to the individuals who were slightly too old to be vaccinated (as one would expect if the vaccine is doing it’s job). But, the authors also show that the individuals who were just young enough to be vaccinated are less likely to get dementia compared to the individuals who were slightly too old to be vaccinated, especially among women. A number of robustness tests finds no other sharp discontinuities in treatments or outcomes around the Sept 2, 1933 cut point.
The following graph summarizes. The top left panel shows that the cutoff led to big differences in vaccine uptake, the top right panel shows that there was a smaller but sharp decline in dementia in the vaccinated group. The bottom panel shows that was no discontinuity in a variety of other factors.
Read the whole thing.
I have had my shingles vaccine. As I have said before, vaccination is the gift of a superpower.
Are we evolving toward narrow banking?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
…the narrow banking model has long been plagued by two major problems. First, there have never been enough safe assets to satisfy the demands of depositors. Second, excessive investment in government securities tends to crowd out private investment. The rise of narrow banking can in part be explained by the mitigation of both these issues.
Alas government debt has gone up! But those new safe assets do have some advantages. And:
The shifting of private funds into Treasury bills could be problematic if that meant credit to the private sector was shrinking. But the rise of private equity and other forms of non-bank finance has made that less of a concern. While private equity growth has slowed since the second half of 2022, it has been on a steady rise since the financial crisis.
Private equity allows many new ventures to be financed, and a run on private equity firms is difficult to pull off, since they are not funding themselves by issuing liquid demand deposits. A private equity venture has a much greater ability to withstand swings in the market. By one metric, private equity measures at almost $12 trillion in value as of mid-2022 — another sign of the US economy advancing in its tools of financial intermediation.
These are not pure market developments, as they are partly a response to the growing regulatory burden on banks, most of all capital requirements. Again, the current regulatory dynamic is not entirely stable. Unstable banks do create trouble, and in return higher legal and regulatory burdens are placed on them, thereby diminishing their profitability. The cycle continues, and implementing tougher regulations hastens the changes rather than halting them.
New York state fact of the day
Federal individual income tax revenue is down a lot since last summer but is still 15% higher in real terms than before the pandemic. New York’s personal income tax revenue is almost 17% lower.
Here is more from Justin Fox at Bloomberg.
Friday assorted links
Rising markups, rising prices?
Sad to see this issue is still being debated so much. If you need an empirical antidote, you can find one from Christopher Conlon, Nathan H. Miller, Tsolmon Otgon, and Yi Yao in the May issue of the AER. Ungated here. Here is one bit:
Our exercise does not provide empirical support for a strong correlation between markup and price changes…
Therefore, our interpretation is that the results do not support a hypothesis that the increase in the DLEU markups is driven primarily by reductions in competition, keeping in mind that a “false negative” is possible.
DLEU stands for this well-known piece. This result would seem to lower the chance that the rising mark-ups came from diminished competition, as opposed to higher costs, better service, or other features of the market, such as changing scale elasticities.
Gender Roles and the Misallocation of Labour Across Countries
This paper asks whether the gendered division of work inside and outside the home leads to the misallocation of labor. Using personnel data of a multinational firm covering 100K employees in 101 countries over 5 years together with labor force participation data we show that women are more positively selected than men: the productivity of the average female worker is higher than that of the average male worker, and this gap is decreasing in women’s participation in the labor force. Structural estimates indicate that equalising barriers to labor force participation would increase firm productivity by 32% keeping employment and the wage bill constant.
That is from a recent paper by Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni, and Víctor Quintas-Martínez.
I remain puzzled, but more are flirting with this idea…
If I truly believed the average of GDP + GDI (and I mostly do believe it) then one could reasonably describe the economy as having been in recession for some time, but a very very strange recession with strong employment gains and low unemployment–so a productivity decline.
— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) May 25, 2023
The rise of Louise Perry
I am pleased to see Bryan Caplan reviewing the new Louis Perry book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. He opens with this:
I read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century in a single day. If you want a page-turner, look no further. The sentences are gripping, the anecdotes are shocking, and the thesis is eyebrow-furrowing. For pure entertainment, I honestly don’t think I can compete with this book, which strives to convert today’s young feminists to a heretical syncretic creed of sex-negative feminism and social conservatism.
On Amazon the book has a five-star average with 716 ratings, and I strongly suspect it still will be read and referenced in ten or twenty years. I disagree with much of what Bryan says on this topic, but am glad to see he recognizes the importance of the book. In my view, Bryan is insufficiently Freudian, unwilling to see both “sexual freedom” and “sexual repression” as embodying a complex bundle of options, with no unproblematic way out and with no truly stable solution. I read Perry (who is an Emergent Ventures winner, by the way) as embodying the Freudian perspective, and not denying it, but not willing to emphasize it either. She has chosen her side, and would rather tell the woman not to let the guy choke you for his own fun.
On that I can agree. I am pleased to see this book doing so well.
Thursday assorted links
1. Things we’ve changed our mind about, including New Jersey.
2. In fact I linked to this recently, it is one of my favorite videos (some very real lessons about eroticism in there), but since Tina Turner has passed away here it is again. RIP.
3. “Creators”? WTF? What is wrong with you people??
4. Ten-year gilts back up to Truss/Kwarteng levels.
5. Twelve-minute John Cochrane Bradley award acceptance speech.
6. Update on the prospects for AI regulation. And Nabeel on Waluigi, Carl Jung, and the Case for Moral AI.
7. Robert Zimmer, RIP (NYT).
My Conversation with a Nairobi urban dweller
I will be recording a Conversation with a Nairobi urban dweller, who perhaps will not be identified by name. Not a famous person, simply someone who lives in Nairobi and is willing to discuss matters frankly. What should I ask this person?
*Why Congress*
By Philip A. Wallach, of the American Enterprise Institute. Here is the book’s home page. Here is a review of the book. A very good book. As I read Phil, he is suggesting that Congress is even a wee bit underrated. You can buy it here.
How D.C. densified
DC’s relative success can be traced to a few decisions made decades ago. In the 1970s, policymakers in Arlington County made a decision to adopt what’s known as ‘transit-oriented development planning’ ahead of the opening of DC’s Metro Orange Line, which runs between Arlington and Prince George County, Maryland (via DC). Arlington policymakers identified that zoning for apartment construction in commercial areas could bring in property taxes and help balance the budget without the level of controversy of changing zoning in existing residential areas. Some nearby jurisdictions followed suit, learning from Arlington’s example, helping the DC region stay more affordable than the country’s other superstar cities.
Here is the full essay by Emily Hamilton of Mercatus, serving up a very good short economic history of Arlington. And this on the District:
The District itself has permitted extensive redevelopment of formerly industrial neighborhoods when they received new Metro stations, including Navy Yard and NoMA. In the years since the 2010 financial crisis, DC has permitted thousands of apartments each year, a high rate compared to peer cities. As in Arlington, they’ve primarily been permitted on land that previously housed industrial or low-value commercial development where there are few or no existing residents to oppose new construction.
Interesting throughout. I am pleased to live in the land of partial YIMBY.
That is all from the new and excellent issue of Works in Progress.