Sunday assorted links
1. They wouldn’t let Barbara Hannigan and Simon Rattle do this in the U.S. today (ten minute music video).
2. What the Chinese say. If you are really for diversity, why don’t we give that writer a NYT column? Why not a CCP columnist for every major outlet? Isn’t that the alternative perspective we should care about the most?
3. The public sector wrestling culture that is Uzbekistan.
Graduating in a Recession Can Be Rough
Graduating in a recession can be rough. Wages start lower and advance more slowly. It’s hard to get hired at a top firm which means it takes longer to get on a rapid ascent career path. As Till von Wachter notes in a review of the long-term consequences of initial labor market conditions, failure to takeoff leads to choices which often makes things worse.
…initial labor market conditions persistently increases excessive alcohol consumption (Maclean 2015) and leads to higher obesity and more smoking and drinking in middle age (Cutler, Huang, and Lleras-Muney 2015)…College graduates entering during the 1980s recession experience higher incidence of heart attacks in middle age (Maclean 2013). Following all labor market entrants from these cohorts, Schwandt and von Wachter (2020) find that starting in their late 30s, unlucky entrants begin experiencing a gap in mortality compared to luckier peers that keeps increasing in their 40s, driven by higher rates of heart disease, liver disease, lung cancer, and drug overdoses.
…Marital patterns of unlucky cohorts are affected from the time they enter the labor market up into middle age, when these cohorts have fewer children (Currie and Schwandt 2014), are more likely to have experienced a divorce, and are more likely to live on their own (Schwandt and von Wachter 2020). Initial labor market conditions also have been found to have effects on attitudes towards economic success and the role of the government (Giuliano and Spilimbergo 2014) and to lead to increasingly lowering individuals’ self esteem (Maclean and Hill 2015).
Don Peck had a good popular survey of these effects in The Atlantic in 2010 that remains vital:
Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.
Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility.
Of course, most people who graduate during a recession do just fine in the grand scheme of things.You could have graduated in Sierra Leone. But if you want to be on a rapid ascent career path remember that your first job is not your last job, look for opportunity, and be prepared to take a risk and switch jobs early. Stay off drugs and alcohol.
Secularization and the Tribulations of the American Working-Class
That is a work in progress by Brian Wheaton, job market candidate from Harvard University. Here is the abstract:
Over the past several decades, working-class America has been plagued by multiple adverse trends: a sharp increase in social isolation, an even sharper increase in single parenthood, a decline in male labor force participation rates, and a decline in generational economic mobility – amongst other things. Material economic factors have been unable to fully explain these phenomena, often yielding mixed results or – in some cases, such as that of single parenthood – lacking explanatory power altogether. I study the decline in religiosity and, using a shift-share instrument leveraging the fact that different religious denominations are declining at different rates, I find that religious decline has a strong adverse effect on the aforementioned variables. The effects are not weakened by including other potential explanatory factors (such as China trade shocks and variation in public assistance). I present evidence that, to the extent reverse causality exists, it creates bias in the opposite direction of my estimates. These findings are also robust to several alternative instruments, including the repeal of the state blue laws banning retail activity on Sundays and the Catholic church scandals of the 2000s. Two instruments – the blue laws and the state anti-evolution laws mandating teaching of creationism in school – allow me to ascertain whether the effect proceeds through religious attendance or beliefs. I find that, for most outcomes, the bulk of the effect is driven by religious attendance.
To be clear, that is not Brian’s job market paper, which covers “Laws, Beliefs, and Backlash.” Or you might wish to try these results on corporal punishment in schools (with Maria Petrova and Gautam Rao):
We find that the presence of corporal punishment in schools increases educational attainment, increases later-life social trust and trust in institutions, and leads to less authoritarian attitudes toward child-rearing, and greater tolerance of free speech. Additionally, exposure to corporal punishment in school decreases later-life crime. We find no effects on mental or physical health.
Here is his paper about flat tax reform in Eastern Europe:
Using static and dynamic difference-in-differences approaches, I find that the flat tax reforms increase annual GDP growth by 1.36 percentage points for a transitionary period of approximately one decade.
I praise the scholarship and courage of Brian N. Wheaton.
This election’s winners and losers
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and no I do not mean the politicians. Here is one excerpt:
…the political-science hypothesis of “retrospective voting” took a whacking. Retrospective voting suggests that the electorate evaluates incumbents by recent economic performance and votes accordingly, regardless of whether the incumbents are actually at fault. Yet Trump presided over about 320,000 excess deaths related to Covid-19, as well as huge contractions in GDP and employment. Even if he loses, as now seems likely, those failures didn’t knock him out of the race. A lot of his supporters still seem to have felt he would cope better with matters moving forward.
And to close:
American democracy: Maybe this one is premature, but so far the U.S. has held a closely contested election under pandemic conditions. Turnout was much higher than usual, and so far there hasn’t been much election-related violence. Could it be that the system really works?
And when will the “money in politics” people admit they were wrong?
The poor people
They can put their poor little comments in this poor little thread right here…
Saturday assorted links
1. Scholars of civilizational collapse (NYT).
2. Paying people to get vaccinated.
3. Harvard’s Stephanie D. Cheng: another job candidate focused on the economics of science.
4. Yang You, Harvard job market candidate.
5. From the Korean War: ” I show that a one standard deviation increase in wartime racial integration caused white veterans to live in more racially diverse neighborhoods and marry spouses with less distinctively white names.” That is from Daniel Indacochea, job candidate at the University of Toronto.
San Diego on the mind
Arthur Johnston emails me:
Back in 2013 you wrote a post “What has San Diego Contributed to American Culture” I published an answer that I hope you find satisfactory.
Here is an excerpt from that interesting post:
In the Cities and Ambition model this means that San Diego ‘discourages’ you from producing cultural artifacts. Which means San Diego has fewer cultural artifacts that are legible to people not living here. Its contribution to the wider American culture is instead encouraging people to be more active and social.
A concrete example, a few weeks ago on a Monday I asked what everyone did over the weekend and the answers were:
- sailing lessons
- jumping from an airplane with a parachute I packed myself
- surfing
- brewing beer [to share with friends]
- “just” hiking [with family]
Some things to note, first that four of those five things involve interacting with other human beings for enjoyment, which is a fundamental part of what we define as culture. “surfing” the lone solitary activity was mine the person who created a cultural artifact you’re currently consuming.
Secondly those activities are all ephemeral.
For one thing, I would think this means well-being during the pandemic declined less in San Diego.
Are body cameras effective for constraining police after all?
Controversial police use of force incidents have spurred protests across the nation and calls for reform. Body-worn cameras (BWCs) have received extensive attention as a potential key solution. I conduct the first nationwide study of the effects of BWCs in more than 1,000 agencies. I identify the causal effects by using idiosyncratic variation in adoption timing attributable to administrative hurdles and the lengthy process to the eventual adoption at different agencies. This empirical strategy addresses limitations of previous studies that evaluated BWCs within a single agency; in a single-agency setting, the control group officers are also indirectly affected by BWCs because they interact with the treatment group officers (spillover), and agencies that give researchers access may fundamentally differ from other agencies (site-selection bias). Overcoming these limitations, my multi-agency study finds that BWCs have led to a substantial drop in the use of force, both among whites and minorities. Nationwide, they reduce police-involved homicides by 43%. Surprisingly, I do not find evidence that BWCs are associated with de-policing. Examining social media usage data from Twitter as well as data on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, I find that after BWC adoption, public opinion toward the police improves. These findings imply that BWCs can be an important tool for improving police accountability without sacrificing policing capabilities.
That is from a new paper by Taeho Kim, on the job market from the University of Chicago, a Steve Levitt student. The piece has a revise and resubmit from ReStat.
Is research productivity declining in China and Germany?
In a recent paper, Bloom et al. (2020) find evidence for a substantial decline in research productivity in the U.S. economy during the last 40 years. In this paper, we replicate their findings for China and Germany, using detailed firm-level data spanning three decades. Our results indicate that diminishing returns in idea production are a global phenomenon, not just confined to the U.S.
Here is the full paper by Phillip Boeing and Paul Hünermund. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
2. All the good news in one place. And my March column on the Progressive Left having peaked.
3. My 2016 post on the male nature of current populism, recommended. And Peloton is now worth more than Ford.
4. “The movement [#MeToo] increased reporting of sexual crimes by 10% during its first six months.” From Martin Mattsson, job market candidate from Yale.
5. Zeynep Tufekci on masks (NYT). Very good piece.
6. “AR 70-28 required that Army aircraft had to be named after “Indian terms and names of American Indian tribes and chiefs.” It also directed that tanks would be named after American generals, infantry weapons “would receive names for famous early American pioneers,” and assault weapons would have “fearsome reptile and insect names,” according to the press release.” Link here.
Our regulatory state is failing us, FAA edition
The Federal Aviation Administration has for months been weighing whether to allow the nation’s more than 500 federally subsidized airports to spend their money on screening passengers for the coronavirus, an issue teed up by a plan developed by a fairly small airport in Iowa.
Lenss worked with a local hospital to craft a plan to quickly screen travelers before they passed through security. He figured he could cover the $800,000 cost by using some of the $23 million the airport received under the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package known as the Cares Act.
The local airport commission signed off on the plan in July, agreeing to make the screening mandatory. At a public meeting shortly before the vote, Lenss predicted he would have the program up and running by September.
But months after Lenss started work, no passengers have been screened. Airport funds are tightly controlled by federal rules, so Lenss started asking the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in May if his plan qualified. He’s still waiting for an answer.
“We would have started the FAA conversation much earlier if we’d anticipated the time it’s been taking,” Lenss said. “At this point, I really don’t have a timeline when we might hear. We’re in limbo.”
Here is the full story, outrages throughout.
Optimizing the tie-breaker regression discontinuity design
Also known as “how to approve a vaccine and still continue with stage III trials.” From Art B. Owen and Hal Varian:
Motivated by customer loyalty plans and scholarship programs, we study tie-breaker designs which are hybrids of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and regression discontinuity designs (RDDs). We quantify the statistical efficiency of a tie-breaker design in which a proportion Δ of observed subjects are in the RCT. In a two line regression, statistical efficiency increases monotonically with Δ, so efficiency is maximized by an RCT. We point to additional advantages of tie-breakers versus RDD: for a nonparametric regression the boundary bias is much less severe and for quadratic regression, the variance is greatly reduced. For a two line model we can quantify the short term value of the treatment allocation and this comparison favors smaller Δ with the RDD being best. We solve for the optimal tradeoff between these exploration and exploitation goals. The usual tie-breaker design applies an RCT on the middle Δ subjects as ranked by the assignment variable. We quantify the efficiency of other designs such as experimenting only in the second decile from the top. We also show that in some general parametric models a Monte Carlo evaluation can be replaced by matrix algebra.
Published version here. Whether or not you agree with that particular approach, you can view 2020 in the following terms. Public health experts have told us that:
1. We citizens have to lock down many of our schools and sometimes jobs.
2. We citizens have to significantly change many of our commercial and retail and travel habits.
3. We citizens have to significantly limit or cut off many of our contacts with other human beings.
At the same time, they also are saying that:
4. “We public health experts do not have to come up with a way of approving a vaccine and simultaneously continuing to conduct our other clinical trials.”
And they wonder why people do not have greater faith in science.
How are things in North Jutland these days?
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced special restrictions for more than 280,000 people in the north of Denmark on Thursday after a mutated version of the new coronavirus linked to mink farms was found in humans.
Copenhagen warned that the mutation could threaten the effectiveness of any future vaccine.
“From tonight, citizens in seven areas of North Jutland are strongly encouraged to stay in their area to prevent the spread of infection,” Frederiksen told a news conference, adding that people were being ordered not to travel there, while bars and restaurants would also shut.
“We are asking you in North Jutland to do something completely extraordinary,” Frederiksen said, talking of a “real closure” of the region.
“The eyes of the world are on us,” she added.
Here is the story, here is further analysis, and some analysis from bioscientists, does anyone know more?
The local amenities effect of Prohibition
Comparing same-state early and late adopters of county dry laws in a difference-in-differences design, we find that early Prohibition adoption increased population and farm real estate values. Moreover, we find strong effects on farm productivity consistent with increased investment due to a land price channel. In equilibrium, the amenity change disproportionately attracted immigrants and African-Americans.
That is from a new paper by Greg Howard and Arianna Ornaghi, revise and resubmit at Journal of Economic History. Arianna is on the job market from MIT, here is her job market paper and broader portfolio. Here is her paper on civil service reforms for U.S. police departments.
Thursday assorted links
1. Novovax: did you have moth cells and Gaithersburg on your 2020 bingo card?
2. And here is one version of the Danish mink news. Its import remains unclear.
3. Mongolian heavy metal video with 60 million views, good visuals and lyrics too.
4. Carolyn Stein papers on the economics of science and the biosciences. She is an economics job market candidate from MIT.
5. Married vs. unmarried women. And how Stanford voted.
6. Why electoral fraud is difficult (NYT).