Results for “chetty” 74 found
Wednesday assorted links
2. Lindsey Lohan chooses Dubai (NYT).
3. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter summarize their results on race and economic opportunity.
4. The Red Hen and the Resistance (NYT, Douthat).
5. Jean Tirole on antitrust and tech. Whether or not you agree with everything he says, it is striking how much more intelligent his discussion is than what you will find in traditional MSM, even the higher-quality outlets. And it is not excessively technical.
Why Matthew E. Kahn is optimistic about microeconomics
1. Applied micro researchers have access to more data than ever and have access to more computing power and more easy to use and sophisticated econometric methods than ever before. Improved canned software in Stata allows applied researchers to relax many of the statistical assumptions that researchers made in previous years. Such “robust” estimates allow us to march towards learning the truth.
2. Due to “natural experiments”, discontinuities, and explicit randomizations, we now have more variation in “cause variables” (the X’s) than ever before.
3. The advent of Google and the rise of Economics in Europe and outside of Western nations means that the current set of applied micro researchers are aware in “real time” about what findings are emerging in the top 5 journals and NBER and IZA and CEPR working papers. Now that there are so many applied micro economists working around the world, this competition fosters innovation and progress.
4. Replication is rising as an important piece of our advance as a “science”.
5. Leading firms such as Amazon highly value quantitative training. Undergraduates are aware of this and they are investing in the math/computer programming and economics and stats training to have the option to pursue this. Some of these young people will opt into doing a PHD in economics and applied micro grows stronger due to this influx of talent.
6. Thanks to scholars such as Raj Chetty, the power of using administrative data (such as IRS tax data) are now more clearly seen all over the world. I expect that more government officials who “know that they do not know” the answers for unlocking economic development will increasingly partner with the J-PAL and other economists to help them to experiment and learn. This is Hayek as applied microeconomist at its best.
The rest of his post lists four concerns.
How much do schools mediate the international transmission of income?
Not that much. From Jesse Rothstein:
Chetty et al. (2014b) show that children from low-income families achieve higher adult incomes, relative to those from higher income families, in some commuting zones (CZs) than in others. I investigate whether children’s educational outcomes help to explain the between-CZ differences. I find little evidence that the quality of schools is a key mechanism driving variation in intergenerational mobility. While CZs with stronger intergenerational income transmission have somewhat stronger transmission of parental income to children’s educational attainment and achievement, on average, neither can explain a large share of the between-CZ variation. Marriage patterns explain two-fifths of the variation in income transmission, human capital accumulation and returns to human capital each explain only one-ninth, and the remainder of the variation (about one-third) reflects differences in earnings between children from high- and low-income families that are not mediated by human capital. This points to job networks and the structure of local labor and marriage markets, rather than the education system, as likely factors influencing intergenerational economic mobility.
Here is the NBER working paper.
Tuesday assorted links
1. The international transmission of monetary policy.
3. Is there a rise in self-proclaimed time travelers?
4. How much does family structure matter for black boys? On interpreting the new Chetty-Hendren study.
Monday assorted links
1. Europe is dropping the ball on AI and in some ways positively discouraging it. And too many crummy firms in Europe: “Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and countries would raise EU GDP by at least 25 percent.”
2. Remember when Clearchannel was going dominate all radio, forever?
3. Marcel Gauchet on democracy and the sweep of history.
4. How two economists got access to IRS tax data. Bravo to them I say, but it’s worth noting that the shift from regression-driven to data set-driven economics has been a remarkably inegalitarian development, widely praised by most top academic economists. So often progress means a willingness to disregard or even stomp on egalitarian norms.
5. The economics of why some restaurants need to leave Queens.
6. Kling on the new Chetty-Hendren-Jones-Porter results.
7. Those new service sector jobs: Iraqi war architect Paul Bremer now a ski instructor in Vermont.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The lice culture that is Dutch (America). Is this representative?
2. A thread on the new Chetty result.
3. Francis Bator was killed by a car with a human driver (NYT obituary).
4. How to stay healthy on a plane?
5. A useful Cambridge Analytica/Facebook story. Here is the most analytical paragraph: “At its core, according to a former Facebook executive, the problem is really an existential one. The company is very good at dealing with things that happen frequently and have very low stakes. When mistakes happen, they move on. According to the executive, the philosophy of the company has long been “We’re trying to do good things. We’ll make mistakes. But people are good and the world is forgiving.”” And Clickhole on Facebook.
The sons of well-off black families do not do so well
White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households…
Gaps persisted even when black and white boys grew up in families with the same income, similar family structures, similar education levels and even similar levels of accumulated wealth.
This is pathbreaking work by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter [full paper here].
The study, based on anonymous earnings and demographic data for virtually all Americans now in their late 30s, debunks a number of other widely held hypotheses about income inequality. Gaps persisted even when black and white boys grew up in families with the same income, similar family structures, similar education levels and even similar levels of accumulated wealth.
The disparities that remain also can’t be explained by differences in cognitive ability, an argument made by people who cite racial gaps in test scores that appear for both black boys and girls. If such inherent differences existed by race, “you’ve got to explain to me why these putative ability differences aren’t handicapping women,” said David Grusky, a Stanford sociologist who has reviewed the research.
A more likely possibility, the authors suggest, is that test scores don’t accurately measure the abilities of black children in the first place.
If this inequality can’t be explained by individual or household traits, much of what matters probably lies outside the home — in surrounding neighborhoods, in the economy and in a society that views black boys differently from white boys, and even from black girls.
“One of the most popular liberal post-racial ideas is the idea that the fundamental problem is class and not race, and clearly this study explodes that idea”…
The NYT piece is by Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce, and Kevin Quealy. And from the paper itself:
Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women.
Monday assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
1. Markets in everything: Sol LeWitt sports bra. And there is no great stagnation.
2. Canadian documentary about Jordan Peterson. Covers gnosticism, the Heideggerian side, Jung, etc. Not so much about the anti-PC stuff or the personality psychology.
4. Chetty’s on-line Stanford class.
5. The drone wars heat up, this time in Syria and against Russia.
6. Dylan Matthews on Auten and Splinter and inequality debates.
The Geography of Family Differences and Intergenerational Mobility
That is the title of a new paper by Robert Kaestner, Ryan Gallagher, and Joseph Persky. Here is the abstract:
A recent series of studies by the Equality of Opportunity Project has documented substantial geographical differences in intergenerational income mobility. These spatial differences are important because they suggest that place matters more than previously thought in determining economic well-being. In this paper, we show that family characteristics vary widely across areas and simulations indicate that differences these family characteristics can explain a substantial share of the variation in intergenerational income mobility across places documented by the Equality of the Opportunity Project. Additionally, we show that the characteristics of families that move differ substantially from families that do not move, which raise doubts about the external validity of causal inferences based on the Equality of Opportunity Project’s analysis of movers.
And from the paper:
…we find that differences in the income of adult children associated with mother’s race, age, education, marital status and nativity explain 80 to 120 percent of the difference in intergenerational income mobility between the lowest and next lowest quintiles of absolute mobility in Chetty et al.’s (2014) place-based distribution of intergenerational income mobility.
I am wondering to what extent this is a criticism of Chetty et.al., or simply a disaggregation. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what exactly are the differences between place-level characteristics and family- or person-level characteristics. I don’t take Chetty’s original story about places to concern what kind of molecules are in the dirt, or what is the climate, but rather how people in a particular place interact with each other. In that sense the result always was about family- or person-level characteristics. Does the ability of family-level characteristics to pick up these interaction effects mean that place-level effects are not operating?
Anyway, regardless of interpretation this paper does seem to me to make some very real progress toward figuring out what is going on in those mobility studies.
Sunday assorted links
2. “The Alt-Knights were originally conceived as a paramilitary wing of the Proud Boys…” (NYT)
3. Freddie on the chat with Chetty; I can’t speak for Raj, but I would gladly pay the better teachers more, if that meant firing the lemons (and I don’t read him as denying this). And many lemons there are, FD doesn’t provide evidence against that by now rather well-established claim, furthermore it is one any high schooler would agree with.
4. Scott Sumner on the two new Fed picks. I view these as very good news.
Has intergenerational mobility finally been shown to have declined?
If you recall, Robert D. Putnam, in his last book, expressed surprise that Chetty and Hendren, et.al. (2014) did not find evidence of a decline in intergenerational mobility. Putnam predicted that researchers would find such evidence soon enough. After all, it seems the returns to education have been rising, geographic mobility has been falling, market concentration is up slightly, life expectancy is behaving in funny ways, and regional disparities seem to have grown. Chetty and Grusky, et.al. (2016) seemed to paint a more pessimistic picture than did his work from a few years ago, and now we have a new paper by Jonathan Davis and Bhashkar Mazumder:
We demonstrate that intergenerational mobility declined sharply for cohorts born between 1942 and 1953 compared to those born between 1957 and 1964. The former entered the labor market prior to the large rise in inequality that occurred around 1980 while the latter cohorts entered the labor market largely afterwards. We show that the rank-rank slope rose from 0.27 to 0.4 and the IGE rose from 0.35 to 0.51. The share of children whose income exceeds that of their parents fell by about 3 percentage points. These findings suggest that relative mobility fell by substantially more than absolute mobility.
So far this seems to be the current version of the final word. The authors also argue, by the way, that Chetty (2016) is somewhat too pessimistic, though correct in suggesting mobility has indeed fallen.
By the way, this seems to be the best link for a download.
Sunday assorted links
1. Good thread on Tillerson. Steve Coll tries to make Tillerson sound bad, I am not sure he succeeds. Here is Rob Stavins on Tillerson. I disagree with what seems to be Trump’s intended Russia policy, but I’ve known plenty of businessmen who have done deals with unpleasant foreign powers and I have never doubted their loyalties to the United States. I see those issues being blurred and smushed together in a new kind of odd reverse McCarthyism.
2. Redux of my earlier post “Modeling Vladimir Putin.”
3. Westworld and the American Civil War.
4. “A person born in 1940 was, by the time he was 30, close to his peak earning point. A person born in 1980, by the time he is 30, is further away from a higher peak earning point. Thus, you are not comparing the same type of birth cohorts.” Link here, and a bit more here.
5. “”I put out early,” she says.” (NYT)
For many people, the American dream has been vanishing
About 92 percent of 1940 babies had higher pretax household earnings at age 30 than their parents had at the same age. (The results were similar at older ages and for post-tax earnings.)
…For babies born in 1980 — today’s 36-year-olds — the index of the American dream has fallen to 50 percent: Only half of them make as much money as their parents did.
That is from David Leonhardt at the NYT, channeling new research by Raj Chetty. Here is more from Jim Tankersley. Here is Brookings coverage. Here is Vincent Geloso considering various adjustments to the data.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Economist Peter Navarro endorses Trump.
2. Olivier Blanchard is worried about Japan.
3. “Dallas, with the highest concentration of [Craigslist] missed connections, has an impressive spread from Monday to Friday, with its inhabitants posting throughout the workday and late into the evening.” For the country as a whole, the most lovelorn days seem to be Mondays.
4. Is Hillary likely to be prosecuted? I’ve tried to avoid this topic, but I found this article both realistic and full of actual information.
5. Jonathan Haidt responds to critics. And one interpretation of the new Chetty results.