Results for “the Labor Share” 286 found
My days as a teenage chess teacher
I’ve already blogged my earlier job working in the supermarket, so I thought I would add a few remarks on my very first job as chess teacher, which I did at ages 14-15.
I had three regular students, two adults (about 50 and late 20s) and one a younger chess prodigy himself, maybe 10 or 11, plus some other occasional students. I would have had more students if they (or the parents) did not have to pick me up and drive me to the lesson site. By the way, at that time no one thought it was strange that relative strangers would simply come and pick me up in their cars and take me away.
From this job, I learned a few things rather quickly:
1. At the time a 14-year-old paid chess teacher seemed odd. But if you just did something, the world might accept it. Make other people tell you no, don’t do that preemptively yourself.
2. Chess teaching isn’t mainly about chess. A chess teacher has to have a certain mystique above all, while at the same time being approachable. Even at 14 this is possible. Your students are hiring you at least as much for your mystique as for the content of your lessons.
3. Not everyone taking chess lessons wanted to be a better chess player. For some, taking the lesson was a substitute for hard work on chess, not a complement to it. The lesson for them was a fun social experience, and it kept the game of chess salient in their minds. They became “the kind of person who takes chess lessons.” I understood this well at the time. Some of the students wanted to show you their chess games, so that someone else would be sharing in their triumphs and tragedies. That is an OK enough way to proceed with a chess lesson, but often the students were more interested in “showing” than in listening and learning and hearing the hard truths about their play.
4. Students are too interested in asking your opinion of particular openings. At lower-tier amateur levels of chess, the opening just doesn’t matter that much, provided you don’t get into an untenable position too quickly. Nonetheless openings are a fun thing to learn about, and discussing openings can give people the illusion of learning something important, if only because you can share opening moves with the top players and thereby affiliate with them.
5. What I really had to teach was methods for hard work to improve your game consistently over time. That might include for instance annotating a game or position “blind,” and then comparing your work to the published analysis of a world-class player, a’ la Alexander Kotov’s Think Like a Grandmaster. I did try to teach that, but the demand for this service was not always so high.
6. The younger chess prodigy I taught was quite bright and also likable. But he had no real interest in improving his chess game. Instead, hanging out with me was more fun for him than either doing homework or watching TV, and I suspect his parents understood that. In any case, early on I was thinking keenly about talent and the determinants of ultimate success, and obsessiveness seemed quite important. All of the really good chess players had it, and without it you couldn’t get far above expert level.
7. I don’t remember exactly how much I was paid, but it felt like a lot of money at the time. But when I stopped playing chess, I also stopped giving chess lessons. I felt I had learned — and earned — from it what I could.
Should unemployment benefits be taxed?
A number of people on Twitter were mocking this earlier idea of Martin Feldstein’s, now a policy since 1986. But of course unemployment benefits should be taxed at the federal level. If your income that year was low, you won’t pay any tax anyway. As of 2018, about 44 percent of American households paid no federal income tax in any case, so that is covering quite a few of the lower earners.
if you are in the taxable range, in your choices you should be comparing taxable income to taxable unemployment benefits, otherwise there is a distortion in your labor supply decision. If need be, raise the level of unemployment benefits. No, that isn’t a wash, because different individuals and households face different possible rates of marginal taxation. The higher earners (at least potentially the higher earners) should face a higher tax on their unemployment benefits than the lower earners will. So it is in fact a “progressive” policy.
Marty was right, as indeed he was about many things. Here is a good CRS overview of the issue. Here is Marty’s (partially gated) 1974 piece on the issue. This is exactly the kind of issue Twitter is ill-suited to considering.
Federal minimum wage of $15?
It’s a slam-dunk case that doubling the federal minimum wage — it’s been $7.25 since 2009 — would lead to significant declines in employment opportunities for workers with few skills or little experience. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2019 (before the pandemic), in 47 states, at least one-quarter of all workers earn less than $15 per hour. In 20 states, half of all workers earn less than $18 per hour, and in 30 states, the median hourly wage is less than $19.
These statistics show that $15 is a very high wage floor. For employers to keep all their workers would require raising the wages of a huge share of the national workforce. But the number of workers affected would be so large that this wouldn’t happen. Instead, the number of jobs in the low-wage workforce would shrink.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirms this basic intuition, estimating that joblessness would increase by 1.3 million if the national hourly wage floor were hiked to $15 [TC: and that is pre-pandemic]. The CBO also concluded that this policy would reduce business income, raise consumer prices and reduce gross domestic product.
That is from Michael Strain at Bloomberg. I would add this. No matter what you think about the recent literature on the minimum wage, all economic theories imply that minimum wages should be decided at the state and local level, given the economic heterogeneity of the United States. That is the message that you as an economist should be carrying forward.
Do you think Puerto Rico should be a state? Should they have a $15 minimum wage too? Come on. Yes, it is easy enough to make an exception for them, and by the way the median manufacturing wage in Mississippi is below $15 as well. Rinse and repeat.
I am sorry to speak in such terms, but the reality is that an allied cabal of activists and left-wing economists have combined on social media to insist on a particular approach to minimum wage economics and to bully those who disagree.
Ask yourself a simple question: were any of them calling for a temporary two-year cut in the minimum wage for restaurants and small businesses during a devastating pandemic? If not, are they really carrying forward the banner of science?
From David Splinter, from my email
This is all David:
A related paper by BEA came out today with their updated distributional estimates of personal income. Marina Gindelsky has done a lot of work to produce these estimates.
I have a couple new papers on tax progressivity and redistribution that may be of interest to you. Both used CBO data to avoid the PSZ-AS differences. Abstracts below.
The first paper is about the ends of the distribution: tax progressivity has increased significantly since 1979 (and steadily since 1986) due to more generous tax credits for the bottom, while average tax burdens of the top have been relatively unchanged because lower marginal rates were offset by decreased use of tax shelters. The online appendix shows why the CBO estimates differ from those of Saez and Zucman (see Fig. B7 at the end; it’s mostly due to refundable credits at the bottom and imputed income at the top) and the Heathcote et al. paper you blogged about a couple months ago (it’s technical differences and their inclusion of some transfers, but their most similar measure of tax progressivity was not flat—it increased 21 percent since 1979).
The second paper, with Adam Looney and Jeff Larrimore, is about the middle of the distribution. Since 1979, we found that non-elderly middle-class market income increased 39 percent in real per person terms. The increase was 57 percent when accounting for taxes and transfers. This seems to fit with the “updated” view of stagnation—expanding male wages to also look at untaxed compensation and including female compensation and taxes/transfers shows larger median growth. But there was a structural break in 2000. Before then, middle-class incomes grew at the same rate before and after taxes and transfers, and since then income after taxes and transfers grew three times faster (Fig. 6 on page 19). We don’t discuss the recent market income slowdown (maybe related to the debated labor share break around 2000), but we show that the additional fiscal support that filled the gap looks like an unsustainable way to boost middle-class disposable incomes going forward.”
MIT graduate micro exam, 1961
From the archives of Irwin Collier (I won’t do any extra indentation):
Economics Candidates: Answer any FOUR questions (thirty minutes each).
S.I.M. Candidates: Answer any TWO questions (thirty minutes each).
- Within the framework of static, partial-equilibrium theory, indicate under what circumstances advertising will reduce product prices in the long run, (a) if the advertiser is a simple monopolist, (b) if the advertisers are members of a large, perfectly symmetrical, Chamberlinian group of suppliers of differentiated products (the number of firms being large enough to rule out oligopolistic relationships, and variable in accordance with a long-run-equilibrium condition of zero profit for all firms).
- How is a firm’s demand schedule for a particular factor of production derived (a) when that factor is the only variable one, and (b) when the quantities of all factors are variable? Show which of these demands is, if anything, the more elastic.
- The demands for two products are: q1 = q2 = 54 – p1 -p2. How would you characterize their relationship? If they are produced by separate sellers at constant average costs of c1 = 12 and c2 = 6, respectively, calculate each man’s equilibrium price, quantity, and profit under each of the following conditions:
- Each seller assumes that the other’s price is a constant;
- The second seller behaves that way and the first seller realizes that he does;
- Both sellers maximize their joint profit and share it equally.
- Two countries can produce food (F) and clothing (C) with labor (L) as the only factor of production. Country A has 20 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 5 units of F or 2 units of C. Country B has 10 billion units of L, each of which can produce either 8 units of F or 6 units of C. Everyone always spends half of his income on F and the other half on C. In a purely competitive equilibrium with balanced trade between the two countries (and no transportation costs), what is the effect on the quantities of F and C produced and consumed in each country? Could either country benefit by imposing a tariff on the imported good?
- What are the various reasons why a free-private-enterprise economy may fail to allocate its resources in an optimally efficient way? Explain.
- Discuss the roles of “real” and “monetary” elements in a satisfactory theory of interest. Is it logically possible to fashion an interest theory exclusively in terms of one or the other of those elements? Explain.
TC again: I don’t think current graduate students (outside of MIT and a few other places) would do very well on #1, nor do I think they would understand what is being asked on #6, much less have a good answer. On #5, I wonder how many would give a sufficiently analytical answer rather than just repeating a bunch of cliches from media and social media?
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.
Thursday assorted links
1. Should there be more cats in prison? (An installment of “Questions that are rarely asked.”)
2. AstraZeneca closer to a USA restart, not much further information however.
3. Is 5G overrated?
4. Jordan Schneider on what to do about Xinjiang.
5. The greatest stagnation?: “Decades of study at Olorgesailie by Potts’ team and collaborators at the National Museums of Kenya have determined that early humans at Olorgesailie relied on the same tools, stone handaxes, for 700,000 years. Their way of life during this period was remarkably stable, with no major changes in their behaviors and strategies for survival.”
6. German data: “Our main finding is that mandating shared governance does not lead firms to pay measurably higher wages.”
Paul Milgrom, Nobel Laureate
Most of all this is a game theory prize and an economics of information prize, including game theory and asymmetric information. Much of the work has had applications to auctions and finance. Basically Milgrom was the most important theorist of the 1980s, during the high point of economic theory and its influence.
Here is Milgrom’s (very useful and detailed) Wikipedia page. Most of his career he has been associated with Stanford University, with one stint at Yale for a few years. Here is Milgrom on scholar.google.com. A very good choice and widely anticipated, in the best sense of that term. Here is his YouTube presence. Here is his home page.
Milgrom, working with Nancy Stokey, developed what is called the “no trade” theorem, namely the conditions under which market participants will not wish to trade with each other. Obviously if someone wants to trade with you, you have to wonder — what does he/she know that I do not? Under most reasonable assumptions, it is hard to generate a high level of trading volume, and that has remained a puzzle in theories of finance and asset pricing. People are still working on this problem, and of course it relates to work by Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann on when people should rationally disagree with each other.
Building on this no-trade result, Milgrom wrote a seminal piece with Lawrence Glosten on bid-ask spread. What determines bid-ask spread in securities markets? It is the risk that the person you are trading with might know more than you do. You will trade with them only when the price is somewhat more advantageous to you, so markets with higher degrees of asymmetric information will have higher bid-ask spreads. This is Milgrom’s most widely cited paper and it is personally my favorite piece of his, it had a real impact on me when I read it. You can see that the themes of common knowledge and asymmetric information, so important for the auctions work, already are rampant.
Alex will tell you more about auctions, but Milgrom working with Wilson has designed some auctions in a significant way, see Wikipedia:
Milgrom and his thesis advisor Robert B. Wilson designed the auction protocol the FCC uses to determine which phone company gets what cellular frequencies. Milgrom also led the team that designed the 2016-17 incentive auction, which was a two-sided auction to reallocate radio frequencies from TV broadcast to wireless broadband uses.
Here is Milgrom’s 277-page book on putting auction theory to practical use. Here is his highly readable JEP survey article on auctions and bidding, for an introduction to Milgrom’s prize maybe start there?
Here is Milgrom’s main theoretical piece on auctions, dating from Econometrica 1982 and co-authored with Robert J. Weber. it compared the revenue properties of different auctions and showed that under risk-neutrality a second-price auction would yield the highest price. Also returning to the theme of imperfect information and bid-ask spread, it showed that an expert appraisal would make bidders more eager to bid and thus raise the expected price. I think of Milgrom’s work as having very consistent strands.
With Bengt Holmstrom, also a Nobel winner, Milgrom wrote on principal-agent theory with multiple tasks, basically trying to explain why explicit workplace incentives and bonuses are not used more widely. Simple linear incentives can be optimal because they do not distort the allocation of effort across tasks so much, and it turned out that the multi-task principal agent problem was quite different from the single-task problem.
People used to think that John Roberts would be a co-winner, based on the famous Milgrom and Roberts paper on entry deterrence. Basically incumbent monopolists can signal their cost advantage by making costly choices and thereby scare away potential entrants. And the incumbent wishes to be tough with early entrants to signal to later entrants that they better had stay away. In essence, this paper was viewed as a major rebuttal to the Chicago School economists, who had argued that predatory behavior from incumbents typically was costly, irratoinal, and would not persist.
The absence of Roberts’s name on this award indicates a nudge in the direction of auction design and away from game theory a bit — the Nobel Committee just loves mechanism design!
That said, it is worth noting that the work of Milgrom and co-authors intellectually dominated the 1980s and can be identified with the peak of influence of game theory at that period of time. (Since then empirical economics has become more prominent in relative terms.)
Milgrom and Roberts also published a once-famous paper on supermodular games in 1990. I’ve never read it, but I think it has something to do with the possible bounding of strategies in complex settings, but based on general principles. This was in turn an attempt to make game theory more general. I am not sure it succeeded.
Milgrom and Roberts also produced a well-known paper finding the possible equilibria in a signaling model of advertising.
Milgrom and Roberts also wrote a series of papers on rent-seeking and “influence activities” within firms. It always seemed to me this was his underrated work and it deserved more attention. Among other things, this work shows how hard it is to limit internal rent-seeking by financial incentives (which in fact can make the problem worse), and you will see this relates to Milgrom’s broader work on multi-task principal-agent problems.
Milgrom also has a famous paper with Kreps, Wilson, and Roberts, so maybe Kreps isn’t going to win either. They show how a multi-period prisoner’s dilemma might sustain cooperating rather than “Finking” if there is asymmetric information about types and behavior. This paper increased estimates of the stability of tit-for-tat strategies, if only because with uncertainty you might end up in a highly rewarding loop of ongoing cooperation. This combination of authors is referred to as the “Gang of Four,” given their common interests at the time and some common ties to Stanford. You will note it is really Milgrom (and co-authors) who put Stanford economics on the map, following on the Kenneth Arrow era (when Stanford was not quite yet a truly top department).
Not what he is famous for, but here is Milgrom’s paper with Roberts trying to rationalize some of the key features of modern manufacturing. If nothing else, this shows the breadth of his interests and how he tries to apply game theory generally. One question they consider is why modern manufacturing has moved so strongly in the direction of greater flexibility.
Milgrom also has a 1990 piece with North and Weingast on the medieval merchant guilds and the economics of reputation, showing his more applied side. In essence the Law Merchant served as a multilateral reputation mechanism and enforced cooperation. Here is a 1994 follow-up. This work paved the way for later work by Avner Greif on related themes.
Another undervalued Milgrom piece is with Sharon Oster (mother of Emily Oster), or try this link for it. Here is the abstract:
The Invisibility Hypothesis holds that the job skills of disadvantaged workers are not easily discovered by potential new employers, but that promotion enhances visibility and alleviates this problem. Then, at a competitive labor market equilibrium, firms profit by hiding talented disadvantaged workers in low-level jobs.Consequently, those workers are paid less on average and promoted less often than others with the same education and ability. As a result of the inefficient and discriminatory wage and promotion policies, disadvantaged workers experience lower returns to investments in human capital than other workers.
With multiple, prestigious co-authors he has written in favor of prediction markets.
He was the doctoral advisor of Susan Athey, and in Alex’s post you can read about his auction advising and the companies he has started.
His wife, Eva Meyersson Milgrom, is herself a renowned social scientist and sociologist, and he met her in 1996 while seated next to her at a Nobel Prize dinner in Stockholm. Here is one of his papers with her (and Ravi Singh), on whether firms should share control with outsiders. Here is the story of their courtship.
Emergent Ventures India, second cohort of winners
Praveen Mishra
Praveen Mishra when he was 16 started the Power of Youth, a non-profit aimed at empowering rural students by giving them mentorship and conducting competitions to highlight their potential. He since has been building a ‘YouTube of e-commerce’. He is the founder of ByBuy, an omni-channel retail platform, and he received his EV grant to help with this launch.
Akash Bhatia and Puru Botla
Akash and Puru are the co-founders of Infinite Analytics (IA), a Boston-based company whose proprietary AI platform analyzes customers’ data. They received their EV grant to repurpose their platform for Covid containment to help governments and authorities in India with contact tracing and mobility analyses. They have since helped millions of users, and their Containment Zone analyses are becoming the bedrock for lockdown exit strategy in Mumbai and Pune. Here is a video about the project.
Mohammed Suhail Chinya Salimpasha
Suhail is a 19-year-old senior grade homeschooler. He dropped out of high school to work on finding new ways to quantify protein in serum applied on a faster diagnosis of malnutrition. This is his TedX talk on the project. He diverted his efforts towards Covid, to create India’s first multi-language Covid symptom checker, which was adopted by some local authorities before the Government mandated an alternative. He is currently working on solving problems in containerizing applications, Enterprise Cloud, low latency API communication, and 5G In Social Tech Democratization.
Manasseh John Wesley
Manasseh John Wesley is a 21-year-old from Hyderabad, India, studying engineering and technologies like embedded systems megatronics/machine learning/data science/digital communication systems. He is the founder of River Bend Data Solution, a data science company with health care applications. He received an EV grant to create a platform for hospitals to provide X-rays and CT scan images and to use AIML to identify at risk districts in Andhra Pradesh.
Vidya Mahambare and Sowmya Dhanaraj
Dr. Vidya Mahambare is a Professor of Economics at Great Lakes Institute of Management working in macroeconomics as well as cultural and social economics issues. Dr. Soumya Dhanaraj is an assistant professor of economics at the Madras School of Economics, working in Development Economics and Applied Microeconomics. Their grant is to support their work in labor market and migration distortions.
Onkar Singh
Onkar Singh Batra is a fourteen-year-old web developer from Jammu and Kashmir. He developed and published his first website at the age of seven and holds the record for the World’s Youngest Webmaster. Furthermore, his book ‘When the Time Stops’ made him hold the record for the record of ‘World’s Youngest Theoretical Author.’ Recently, responding to the Covid pandemic, he received his EV grant for the web applications named –‘COVID Care Jammu’ and ‘COVID Global Care’, which connects doctors with users and helps users do a free anonymous Covid Risk Assessment test. Onkar built his website keeping in mind slow internet speed and limited access. He has plans for many future projects, including working on a bio shield for 5G radiation technology.
Nilay Kulkarni
Nilay Kulkarni is a 20-year old software developer and he previously worked on a project to prevent human stampedes at the world’s largest gathering – the Kumbh Mela. His project’s implementation at the 2015 edition of the event in Nashik, with over 30 million attendees, led to the first stampede-free Kumbh Mela in the city’s history. Nilay has also spoken at TEDx New York about the project. He has worked on assistive technology for people with ALS enabling them to control phones using their tongues. He received his EV grant for the tech development of the MahaKavach App, the official quarantine monitoring and contact tracing platform adopted by the state government of Maharashtra. So far, the platform has helped reduce the time needed for contact-tracing from 3-4 days to 25-30 minutes, and he is now working on open-sourcing the platform for greater impact.
Data Development Lab
Drs. Paul Novosad and Sam Asher are previous EV grantees for creating the SHRUG database at Data Development Lab. The SHRUG is an ultra-clean geocoded database describing hundreds of dimensions of socioeconomic status across 8,000 towns and 500,000 villages in India. Everything in the SHRUG is carefully linked, extensively vetted and documented, and ready for immediate application. In addition to continually expanding the SHRUG, they recently received another EV grant for a second platform oriented toward informing the COVID-19 response in India. This platform has a wealth of linked pandemic-related data (e.g. hospital capacity, health system use, agricultural prices) not available anywhere else and is directly feeding several COVID response research and policy teams.
Deepak VS
Deepak VS is a 23-year-old Mechatronics Engineer from Bangalore, India and he has worked on traffic and communications projects. He also founded a college club called 42 Labs that eventually grew into a startup company called Tilt, a shared mobility platform designed for Indian campuses but now in corporate parks, colleges, townships, and cities across India. Working primarily with electric bikes, Tilt is partnering with companies to help provide alternate mobility solutions to people who typically use crowded and unsafe public transport.
Amit Varma and Vivek Kaul
Amit Varma is one of the most influential podcasters in India, and the winner of the Bastiat Prize in Journalism for his writing. He is the host of the iconic longform interview podcast The Seen and the Unseen, my chat with him on Stubborn Attachments is here and Alex’s appearances on the show here and here. Vivek Kaul is a prominent journalist and writer covering finance and economics. His most recent book, “Bad Money: Inside the NPA Mess and How It Threatens the Indian Banking System” was released earlier this month.
Amit and Vivek received their Emergent Ventures grant for their new podcast “Econ Central.” You can find Econ Central episodes here.
Raman Bahl
Raman Bahl is a 2012 Teach For India Fellow. He has worked over the last decade in different capacities to teach students, train teachers, create curricula, and create systems of teaching and learning in the Indian education system. In the light of the pandemic, rural communities in India are not getting access to quality learning at home. In particular, students from poorer and marginalized groups cannot access to remote/online education launched by local schools because they lack internet access, televisions, and/or learning materials. Raman received his EV grant for creating a Voice-based Academic System for students in rural communities, to enable access to learning at home, through mobile phones. He is launching the system in Purkhas Rathi in Haryana and hopes to scale the system to more villages and states.
PickMyWork
Vidyarthi Baddireddy, Utsav Bhattacharya and Kajal Malik are Indian entrepreneurs focused on the employability of graduating students in India. In 2017 they founded Reculta to digitize campus placements. In 2019, they launched PickMyWork, a platform for onboarding gig workers and getting them to complete tasks for client organizations through a pay-per-task model. In light of the manpower crisis during the Covid pandemic, especially on the frontlines, they want to enable matching of volunteers to emergency situations. They received their EV grant for adapting PickMyWork as a local volunteer response system to emergency situations like Covid by using the platform to source, train and deploy volunteers across various projects and locations.
Harsh Patel and Hiten Patel
Harsh Patel is an undergraduate student in electronics and communication engineering; his interests are in components, coding, and robotics. Hiten Patel is an electrical engineer interested in robotics, coding, and designing. They received their EV grant to develop robot prototypes that they call ‘E-Bot: Arogya Sahayak’ to potentially support hospitals, hotels, airports, workplaces, etc., to assist with basic tasks while maintaining social distancing.
Vinay Débrou
Vinay Débrou studied computer science and is a self-taught data scientist interested in psychology, data science, and new applications of network science for collaboration-generating contexts. He has also built resources for aspiring location-independent free-agents including a curated resources library and a weekly newsletter. Vinay received his Emergent Ventures grant to accelerate his ongoing project to build a network visualization/mapping tool (v0.1 here) to catalyze cross-disciplinary expertise-sharing and collaboration in Yak Collective – an open, networked community of 300+ (and growing) independent creators, consultants, and researchers.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. EV India announcement here. To apply for EV India, use the EV application click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected]. I believe we are seeing a blossoming of talent from India comparable to that from Central Europe in the early part of the 20th century.
Stansbury and Summers respond on worker bargaining power, and more on monopsony
Both to my earlier points and to some other discussions, here is the link. Here is one excerpt related to a point I had not understood in the paper proper:
5. If corporate profits are so high, how is this consistent with the persistently low demand postulated by Summers’ “secular stagnation” hypothesis?
Secular stagnation as we think of it is the product of a rising gap between the desire to save and the desire to invest (which, in an IS-LM type framework, would push down the neutral real interest rate). Falling worker power redistributes income from lower and middle-income people to the rich. The rich have a higher propensity to save. Thus, falling worker power increases the desire to save relative to the desire to invest. Rising inequality has been posited by several authors as a contributor to the declining neutral real interest rate (see e.g. Smith and Rachel 2015). Under this view, secular stagnation is exemplified by low private return to capital investment – but, in a noncompetitive world, this may or may not be the same thing as an abnormally low profit rate or capital share.
There is much more at the link, and on other issues as well. I would say I found the whole paper and discussion very clarifying.
While we are on the topic, here is a new paper by Stansbury (with Schubert and Taska) on monopsony. I haven’t read through it, but just based on the description of what they did it seems to get closer to finding the truth than the other works I have seen in this area:
Abstract: In imperfectly competitive labor markets, the value of workers’ outside option matters for their wage. But which jobs comprise workers’ outside option, and to what extent do they matter? We the effect of workers’ outside options on wages in the U.S, splitting outside options into two components: within-occupation options, proxied by employer concentration, and outside-occupation options, identified using new occupational mobility data. Using a new instrument for employer concentration, based on differential local exposure to national firm-level trends, we find that moving from the 75th to the 95th percentile of employer concentration (across workers) reduces wages by 5%. Differential employer concentration can explain 21% of the interquartile wage variation within a given occupation across cities. In addition, we use a shift-share instrument to identify the wage effect of local outside-occupation options: differential availability of outside-occupation options can explain a further 13% of within-occupation wage variation across cities. Moreover, the two interact: the effect of concentration on wages is three times as high for occupations with the lowest outward mobility as for those with the highest. Our results imply that (1) employer concentration matters for wages for a large minority of workers, (2) wages are relatively sensitive to the outside option value of moving to other local jobs, and (3) failure to consider the role of outside-occupation options in the concentration-wage relationship leads to bias and obscures important heterogeneity. Interpreted through the lens of a Nash bargaining model, our results imply that a $1 increase in the value of outside options leads to $0.24-$0.37 higher wages.
It also would be interesting to see what these parameter values imply for the effects of minimum wage hikes.
The new economics of chess
I just finished watching one of Chess24.com’s Magnus Carlsen-affiliated rapid on-line chess tournaments, when today (a day later?) I see that another tournament has started. And with Magnus himself playing, as well as other world-class players. Note that Magnus both plays in these tournaments as the #1 attraction, and he owns an equity share in them, albeit with other investors.
So I’ve been trying to model the production of chess services in my mind.
I start with the point that viewers care much more about live, fresh games than games from a week ago. Many sports of course operate on this same basis.
The second point is that most chess players have a relatively low opportunity cost of time, Rogoff and Kasparov excepted, plus some chess players can substitute into poker for profit (and may have quit chess already). In fact what they do in their spare time is to…play chess! Often with each other, and often on-line. So if you offer to pay them some amount for doing basically the same, they will sign up. Especially during a pandemic when many of them are trapped under relatively severe quarantines.
It is also the case that a chess player can play many days in the year, perhaps not every day, but you really can play a lot without tearing your rotator cuff.
It then seems the equilibrium is a much higher supply of chess tournaments, especially since on-line play removes some of the previous barriers to entry, such as needing a venue and some physical infrastructure.
You might even end up with a kind of Malthusian equilibrium, where the supply keeps on expanding to meet a fairly low marginal cost.
But this is a “superstars” kind of competition, and so the returns will go to the scarce factor. That scarce factor is Carlsen himself, who garners far more attention than any other player. And as noted he is an equity holder in this venture and as a player he has been winning the #1 prize money. Over time, you might expect the returns of some of the other players — maybe in the top ten but not so famous or glamorous — to approach the Malthusian level. Perhaps much of the public doesn’t care if Magnus plays #9 or #16, who in any case are only a small number of rating points apart.
Notice how well Magnus Carlsen understands reputation and internet production. He keeps on posting “Banter Blitz” videos on YouTube, which show him playing speed chess on-line and commenting on the games as they proceed. He dramatically expanded the supply of chess tournaments, which he earns income from. He already was “the scarce factor,” and he has dramatically expanded the supply of attention aimed his way. He understands that successful internet production is frequent production.
On-line chess viewing is way up (NYT) with the pandemic, and also because of these efforts.
Do not underestimate Magnus Carlsen. He has been #1 in classical chess, rapid, and blitz, all at the same time. He is a huge YouTube star in chess. He has won a tournament about chess trivia, and he has been #1 in fantasy football for the whole world (not an easy feat).
And now he is bringing an economic revolution to chess, with himself as the #1 labor and equity earner at the same time.
Human Challenge Trials
What if we develop a vaccine for COVID-19 but can’t find enough patients to run a randomized clinical trial? It sounds absurd, but this problem has happened in the past. Ebola was identified in 1976, and candidate vaccines were proven safe and effective in mice and primates in 2004 and 2005, respectively. But no human vaccine was produced [at that time] because it was extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, to trial an Ebola vaccine. The problem? Ebola is so deadly that people take precautionary measures long before a vaccine can be tested.
A few pieces have been written about human challenge trials, clinical trials in which healthy people are infected with a disease in order to see if a treatment or vaccine works, but most of them focus on the ethical issues. I don’t think there are serious ethical issues so writing at The National Interest I focus on why challenge trials are useful statistically and why they may even be necessary.
Even health care workers, however, have a low enough infection rate that you either need many months to determine if there is a significant effect, or you need large populations. In Italy, about 6,000 doctors were infected over two months, out of a population of about 241,000 Italian doctors. This is a monthly infection rate of 1.2 percent. If the vaccine is 50 percent effective, then to detect this within a month, you need a sample size of 7,776 people equally divided between a vaccinated group and a non-vaccinated group. You could run the test in a smaller sample of 1,322 but then the trial would take six months. A more effective vaccine would make detecting an effect easier, but flu vaccines work at 40 to 60 percent effectiveness, so an assumption of 50 percent is not unreasonable.
But will Italian doctors still be getting infected at a rate of 1.2 percent per month when a vaccine becomes available for trial in six months or a year? We hope not. The hope is that social distancing and the use of personal protective equipment will have greatly lowered the infection rate. A low infection rate is great, unless you want to properly test a vaccine.
…The virtue of a challenge trial is that the results would be available very quickly, within a few weeks, and using only a small population. If the vaccine is 50 percent effective, for example, then we would need around 100 volunteers or perhaps even fewer depending on how many people exposed to the virus in laboratory conditions contract the disease.
By advancing a vaccine by many months, a challenge trial could save many thousands of lives and spare the world the huge economic costs of the lockdowns and social distancing that we will be using to combat the virus.
Challenge trials, however, don’t solve all problems. In particular, to limit the risk we would want to restrict the patients in a challenge trial to be young and healthy. But that raises a problem of external validity. We also want the vaccine to be safe and effective in less healthy and elderly people which requires secondary challenge trials or field testing in that population. Nevertheless, as Athey, Kremer, Synder and myself argue in our NYTimes op-ed, the high risk of vaccine failure means that we would like 15-20 vaccine candidates and challenge trials could help us whittle this number down to the best two to three substantially speeding up the vaccine discovery process.
One more point is worth bearing in mind.
[A]n ordinary vaccine trial is not without risk—a vaccine could backfire and make the disease worse—so exposing fifty or so volunteers to the virus in a challenge trial must be balanced against exposing thousands to a potentially dangerous vaccine in an ordinary clinical trial.
Thus, the total risk may be lower with a combination of challenge trials and longer, larger field trials.
Challenge trials have a long history in medicine and their statistical advantages make them powerful and even necessary. As The Guardian notes:
Scientists, however, increasingly agree that such trials should be considered, and the WHO is the latest body to indicate conditional support for the idea.
“There’s this emerging consensus among everyone who has thought about this seriously,” said Prof Nir Eyal, the director of Rutgers University’s Center for Population-Level Bioethics in the US.
A vaccine from Oxford?
In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University.
Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety. But scientists at the university’s Jenner Institute had a head start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations — including one last year against an earlier coronavirus — were harmless to humans. That has enabled them to leap ahead and schedule tests of their new coronavirus vaccine involving more than 6,000 people by the end of next month, hoping to show not only that it is safe, but also that it works.
The Oxford scientists now say that with an emergency approval from regulators, the first few million doses of their vaccine could be available by September — at least several months ahead of any of the other announced efforts — if it proves to be effective.
Here is more from the NYT. I do not have a personal opinion on the specifics of this development, but it seems worth passing along.
Zachary Booker on bridge loans and bankruptcy
This is an email, all from him, I won’t add in any other formatting:
“Like you, I have an extraordinarily deep concern about the capacity for businesses – not only SMBs, but also larger, capital-intensive firms – to weather this path of suppression. I was quite surprised to hear Russ take a lighter note.
…I am deeply sceptical of the efficacy of bridge loans that you spoke about early this morning. While Brunnermeier, Landau, Pagano, and Reis have laid out the best transmission mechanism, I can not possibly envision it will move the needle enough for the majority of those businesses while also not leaving a wake of loss provisions for future generations. I suppose you could say I am partial to point two in your piece.
I also simply can’t understand the legal logistics of bridge loans in this scenario. Most companies will have a capital structure of some kind (perhaps without the most sophisticated lenders). How are you cramming down those who you are priming in the capital structure? You need consent. Who will be managing this incredibly laborious process of gaining consent and creating the terms? Cash grants are one thing, but bridge loans that aren’t unsecured at the bottom of the capital structure are an entirely different matter.”
“While the benefit of hindsight can be a hindrance to pontificating on novel circumstances, it strikes me as unequivocally true that the GFC had a much simpler – intellectually, if not politically – solution. Namely a solution that at its core involved taking known, marketable securities out of the system at haircuts or depressed valuations to abate panic, settle markets, and of course eventually sell at a profit.
In short, I’m partial to the view that mark-to-market accounting was both a central impetus for why the crisis was so severe and why action could be taken so decisively without burdening tax payers for generations to come (see Ball’s very good book here and Fragile by Design, both of which you’re likely familiar with). This crisis provides no such “simple” solutions that can be concentrated against a singular sector of the economy by taking decisive action.
I, of course, have no grand unified theory to share with you. However, I did want to pass along some thoughts I had upon reading your bridge loan piece that came to mind.
Like you, I am also worried about how broad the demand shock is currently and will be moving forward. Affecting not only every industry severely, but also every locality in the economy (e.g. leaving no state or municipality without deep, painful bruises). This raises the question of how the economy – when this is all said and done – reconstitutes itself in an orderly, efficient fashion.
While I’m partial…I believe one of the incredible strengths of the United States is its bankruptcy code. In particular, the out-of-court and Chapter 11 processes.
I would perhaps mull over how the United States can leverage the bankruptcy code to provide support, both out-of-court (e.g. before filing) and to expedite the process while in-court (e.g. by utilizing pre-packs, which are very popular, very quick, and incredibly effective at providing sustainable balance sheets).
The United States could explore offering – or backstopping – DIP Financing for firms that file Chapter 11 (see explainer on DIP financing from Davis Polk here). DIP Financing has been around for many decades, is incredibly safe, and deeply effective.
- The US could offer DIP Financing at favourable terms directly and automatically under preset conditions (e.g. a firm that was FCF positive in 2018 with EBITDA +$[10]mln, but needing to file Chapter 11 in 2020, would immediately get a facility at L+[100]). This would also give the US the highest seniority in the cap stack with very favourable terms upon a potential future Chapter 11 (Chapter 22) or a future Chapter 7 (liquidation). For firms that have not been in distress prior to the crisis, this would have the US assuming very little real credit risk.
- The US could backstop private DIP providers – to get credit rolling again – by guaranteeing [95] cents on the dollar for any facility extended within the next [X] months. Historically, DIPs have returned much more than this so this is reasonably safe from a credit perspective. Note: this could also be done for TL1s or revolvers out-of-court. Same principle applies regarding seniority, lessened credit risk, etc. although you’d need consent down the capital structure.
- The United States could explore offering participation in pre-packs whereby:
- The US would inject $[X]mln in senior secured notes if;
- Existing Senior Secured take a [5]% haircut
- Unsecured take a [15]% haircut
- Equity take a [50]% haircut
- Again, the idea would be for pre-packs to be, well, pre-done. The idea would be that if your business is hurling towards bankruptcy, it may be best to bite the bullet and recapitalize (via the US notes) while re-working your balance sheet right now. If your firm meets the FCF, EBITDA, or whatever criteria is determined then the US would offer this package automatically. Contingent only on those within the capital structure consenting to taking at least [X]% haircuts (as consent is required by law). Note: you may want to say that any financing put in – or backstopped by – the US will not be additive to the covenant ratios underpinning the rest of the capital structure (or these covenants can just be amended, if necessary, to allow for this new capital injection as is commonplace anyway).
- The United States could explore offering participation in pre-packs whereby:
One would hope that if The United States does something like this it could serve three useful functions:
- Providing confidence to market participants that there will be a financing backstop – for otherwise healthy firms blindsided by COVID-19 – by the United States, which will likely have the paradoxical affect of freeing up credit from private participants and stopping the explosion in credit spreads and the halting of credit extension we’re currently seeing.
- Allowing firms, without much relative credit risk to the United States, to obtain a runway through the fresh injection of capital along with a modest restructuring that will help them weather the storm if it is to be prolonged.
- Providing an automatic, guaranteed solution that is widely accessible to firms as all qualifications and terms would be preset and thus remove any uncertainty as to what firms would be able to qualify for or ultimately obtain.
Using the bankruptcy code in this way would allow the United States to help firms (albeit, likely slightly larger ones than mom-and-pops) in a predictable, known, guaranteed way while also protecting tax payers from taking significant downside risk positions in an ad-hoc and convoluted matter via bridge loans (if they are feasible at all, which I doubt). In short, the United States would leverage the incredibly strong institutional and intellectual framework of its existing bankruptcy code.
I believe – as I believe you do as well – that we are in for a much lengthier protraction than many anticipate…I do not believe Goldman’s forecast…that we’ll see 13% GDP growth in Q3. I do not believe demand will return so quickly or in such force, because I do not believe we will return to normalcy as quickly as we have just departed it.
As I said previously, I have no grand unified theory to get American business through this crisis. However, we both agree in the general goodness of Big Business as a driver of America. What I’ve just laid out is perhaps the most politically palpable solution (because it involves bankruptcy, even if only in name only) that can give a strong life line to those currently in need while not exposing taxpayers to absurd (albeit still large) credit risk. This solution also can be worked to protect pension liabilities and other essential worker benefits.
I think it’s inevitable that we have mass insolvencies, dislocations, and mismatches moving forward. For small businesses, there are solutions around the edges, but I simply cannot comprehend how the United States would be able to figure out and then extend the appropriate levels of credit via bridge loans en masse to these folks. It is surreal to imagine it possibly working and I worry deeply about what such a program – if tried, almost certainly with less dollars than would be required – would do to the social fabric and psyche of the American people when firms inevitably still buckle and break.
I haven’t given much thought to how to leverage the institutional framework of America to best ameliorate this crisis, but I’ve seen no one speak much about how out-of-court or in-court restructuring could be a partial solution. So I figured I’d pass this along as something to keep in the back of your mind and mull over.”
Zachary tells me you can reach him at [email protected].
What US Government should do regarding Covid-19
This is (by far) the best document I have seen on what to do on the medical side. It is about 3 pp. long and I believe it will be updated periodically. Excerpt:
- Consider guaranteeing top tier treatment and ICU beds for people directly working on treatments or vaccines. We need to keep relevant science labs open. (They’re likely to be closed as things stand.)
- No doubt logistically challenging but may be necessary. Can you get scientists to keep going without this?
- Announce $10B prizes for first vaccine and for first cure.
- Think about mechanics. Should there be awards for second place, too? How should collaboration be factored in?
- Issue $1B of research grants to all competent labs and organizations that could plausibly use them. They just have to report on progress every 30 days and require that they actively share all progress with other labs.
- Proposed structure: $100M to each of 5 companies.
- $10M to each of 40 labs.
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- Remainder based on discretion.
- Take what’s required for treatment cases and make an “open source” version whose bill of materials costs less than $1,000. Commit to purchasing at least 100k. Even if US turns out not to need them, donate to other countries.
The author is anonymous, but I know that he/she has followed the issue very closely from the beginning, and his/her predictions have been largely on the mark. If you are in USG I am happy to put you in touch, just write me.
Again, here is the document, highly recommended.