Results for “cohort” 216 found
Apply for Emergent Ventures
The application form is here, lists of previous cohorts of winners are here. And please note there are two special tranches:
Progress Studies tranche, and a tranche for:
“advancing humane solutions to those facing adversity – based on tolerance, universality, and cooperative processes”
And might anyone be interested in working on the issue of why production speeds for infrastructure and so many other projects have slowed down so much?
There has been a very impressive group of winners to date.
From Mark Lutter — charter city for Zambia?
I’m pleased to announce the Charter Cities Institute has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Zambian Development Agency. They are planning to propose changes to their special economic zone act to parliament, and we are working with them to improve their proposal and make it adhere closer to charter city best practices, namely, larger size, mixed use developments, deeper reforms, and local autonomy.The memorandum of understanding is an important step in piloting charter cities. We are proud to partner with the Zambia Development Agency and Nkwashi in bringing charter cities to reality.
Mark, along with Tamara Winter, was part of the first cohort of EV winners.
Model this East German crime
Following the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, the number of births halved in East Germany. These cohorts became markedly more likely to be arrested as they grew up in reunified Germany. This is observed for both genders and all offence types.
Here is the full article by Arnauld Chevalier and Olivier Marie, the authors seem to think the reunification event selects for risky parents, are there other possible explanations?
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Is U.S. average body temperature decreasing?
In the US, the normal, oral temperature of adults is, on average, lower than the canonical 37°C established in the 19th century. We postulated that body temperature has decreased over time. Using measurements from three cohorts–the Union Army Veterans of the Civil War (N = 23,710; measurement years 1860–1940), the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I (N = 15,301; 1971–1975), and the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (N = 150,280; 2007–2017)–we determined that mean body temperature in men and women, after adjusting for age, height, weight and, in some models date and time of day, has decreased monotonically by 0.03°C per birth decade. A similar decline within the Union Army cohort as between cohorts, makes measurement error an unlikely explanation. This substantive and continuing shift in body temperature—a marker for metabolic rate—provides a framework for understanding changes in human health and longevity over 157 years.
That is from a new paper by Protsiv, Ley, Lankester, Hastie, and Parsonnet. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Is the college wealth premium *zero*?
Now this one is a stunner:
The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college gra duate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. Using variables available for the first time in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that controlling for the education of one’s parents reduces our estimates of college and postgraduate income and wealth premiums by 8 to 18 percent. Controlling also for measures of a respondent’s financial acumen—which may be partly innate—, our estimates of the value added bycollege and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment. We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education.
That paper is by William R. Emmons, Ana H. Kent and Lowell R. Ricketts, and comes from the St. Louis Fed, not from some bunch of (college-educated) cranks.
Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Thursday Thanksgiving assorted links
1. Arizona pizzeria organist dies, make us realize more restaurants need organists.
2. Jiro sushi no longer open to the public.
3. Swiss asylum-seeker results: “Our baseline result is that cohorts exposed to civil conflict/mass killing during childhood are 35 percent more prone to violent crime than the average cohort.”
4. Will AI be a disaster for authoritarianism?
$1 billion in talent identification and support from Schmidt Futures
Eric Schmidt, that is:
Rise cohort members, who will apply between the ages of 15 and 17, will be eligible for various types of support. They will be invited to attend a residential fellowship before their final year of high school that will support them as they consider how to serve others, how to become leaders, and how to transition to higher education and careers. Participants may also receive scholarships to continue their education, mentorship and other assistance tailored to their specific needs and interests, and a variety of career services as part of the Rise network.
To encourage service, Rise will invite its community members to make service commitments together and develop a platform to match network members with common interests. Among a range of pursuits, we envision that Rise winners will create policy, build new enterprises that benefit the public, catalyze new interdisciplinary areas of study, and develop new solutions to the world’s hardest problems.
Here is more information.
Do the rich save more?
Yes, not a surprise but here are some details:
We identify a strong negative relationship between the consumption rate and the lifetime net resource. The predicted APC [average propensity to consume] of the highest net resource cohort about 0.03, which is two standard deviations smaller than the lowest resource cohort.
That is from a new paper by Ilin, Ye, and Yu (Yu is on the job market). Of course this relates to the recent wealth tax debate — almost all of that tax would fall on the investment of the wealthy, not their consumption. Note, however, that if the wealth tax induced more consumption by the wealthy, consumption inequality could quite easily go up.
The Formative Years
People born between 1963 and 1965 are less likely to drive a car to work, are more likely to commute using public transit and are even less likely to own a car than people born just before or after those years. Why? It’s a great puzzle. Give it a guess.
Severen and van Benthem have a compelling answer:
An individual’s initial experiences with a common good, such as gasoline, can shape their behavior for decades. We first show that the 1979 oil crisis had a persistent negative effect on the likelihood that individuals that came of driving age during this time drove to work in the year 2000 (i.e., in their mid 30s). The effect is stronger for those with lower incomes and those in cities. Combining data on many cohorts, we then show that large increases in gasoline prices between the ages of 15 and 18 significantly reduce both (i) the likelihood of driving a private automobile to work and (ii) total annual vehicle miles traveled later in life, while also increasing public transit use. Differences in driver license age requirements generate additional variation in the formative window. These effects cannot be explained by contemporaneous income and do not appear to be only due to increased costs from delayed driving skill acquisition. Instead, they seem to reflect the formation of preferences for driving or persistent changes in the perceived costs of driving.
Here’s a nice figure from an excellent piece covering the Severen and van Benthem paper in the Washington Post by Van Dam. Van Dam also covers a paper by Malmendier and Shen which shows how unemployment in formative years can change behavior through a lifetime even absent differences in income.
Economists study busing
This paper dates from 2012, but it is one of the best looks at what we know about busing, based on rigorous analysis of data, combined with natural experiments:
We study the impact of the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools (“CMS”) on academic achievement, educational attainment, and young adult crime. In 2001, CMS was prohibited from using race in assigning students to schools. School boundaries were redrawn dramatically to reflect the surrounding neighborhoods, and half of its students received a new assignment. Using addresses measured prior to the policy change, we compare students in the same neighborhood that lived on opposite sides of a newly drawn boundary. We find that both white and minority students score lower on high school exams when they are assigned to schools with more minority students. We also find decreases in high school graduation and four-year college attendance for whites, and large increases in crime for minority males. The impacts on achievement and attainment are smaller in younger cohorts, while the impact on crime remains large and persistent for at least nine years after the re-zoning. We show that compensatory resource allocation policies in CMS likely played an important role in mitigating the impact of segregation on achievement and attainment, but had no impact on crime. We conclude that the end of busing widened racial inequality, despite efforts by CMS to mitigate the impact of increases in segregation.
That is from Stephen B. Billings, David J. Deming, and Jonah E. Rockoff.
From the comments, on alcohol abuse
I refer you to Prevalence of 12-Month Alcohol Use, High-Risk Drinking, and DSM-IV Alcohol Use Disorder in the United States, 2001-2002 to 2012-2013. My apologies for not being able to locate the primary data sooner.
Key summary quotes below:
Twelve-month alcohol use significantly increased from 65.4% in 2001-2002 to 72.7% in 2012-2013, a relative percentage increase of 11.2%
The prevalence of 12-month high-risk drinking increased significantly between 2001-2002 and 2012-2013 from 9.7% to 12.6% (change, 29.9%) in the total population.
The prevalence of 12-month DSM-IV AUD increased significantly from 8.5% to 12.7% (change, 49.4%) in the total population.
Twelve-month DSM-IV AUD among 12-month alcohol users significantly increased from 12.9% to 17.5% (change, 35.7%) in the total population.
At the end of the day, I am still going to trust outcomes data over survey data. People lie, autopsies don’t. What I know is that acute alcohol poisoning increased by 700% in 20 years. You die from acute alcohol poisoning not because you slowly got sick over years, but because you drank so much so quickly that your body is overwhelmed. And this is in spite of the medical profession getting better at hemodialysis to bring down acutely toxic ethanol poisoning.
What I also know is that alcohol related hepatic deaths bottomed out in 2003 and have since been rising rapidly (~50% increase). This is due to the fact that the generation socialized by prohibition had lower lifetime alcohol use and problematic alcohol use than the generations before or after. As that generation died off, or aged out, successive generations who drank more started refilling the hepatic wards. Even more fun for every age bracket, we are seeing more alcohol related hepatic death than we saw a decade ago for those same age brackets excepting only the youngest cohorts.
These are basically impossible to square with a thesis of no substantial change in drinking patterns. They fit quite nicely with formal epidemiological surveys showing more problematic drinking and a shift in alcohol consumption.
That is from “Sure,” see also his/her other comments in the longer thread.
How much of education is signaling? — yet again
The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning framework of Farber and Gibbons (1996) and Altonji and Pierret (2001). What an instrumental variable identifies depends crucially on whether the instrument is hidden from or observed by the employers. If the instrument is hidden, it identifies the private returns to education, but if the instrument is observed by employers, it identifies the social returns to education. Interestingly, however, among experienced workers the instrument identifies the social returns to education, regardless of whether or not it is hidden. We operationalize this approach using local variation in compulsory schooling laws across multiple cohorts in Norway. Our preferred estimates indicate that the social return to an additional year of education is 5%, and the private internal rate of return, aggregating the returns over the life-cycle, is 7.2%. Thus, 70% of the private returns to education can be attributed to education raising productivity and 30% to education signaling workers’ ability.
That is from a new NBER Working Paper by Gaurab Aryal, Manudeep Bhuller, and Fabian Lange. You can enter “education signaling” into the MR search function for much more on this ongoing debate.
Might Facebook boost wages?
In this paper, I estimate the causal effect of increased exposure to online social networks during college on future labor market outcomes.
Using quasi-random variation from Facebook’s entry to college campuses during its infancy, I exploit a natural experiment to determine the relationship between online social network access and future earnings.
I find a positive effect on wages from Facebook access during college. This positive effect is largest in magnitude for female students, and students from lower-middle class families.
I provide evidence that this positive effect from Facebook access comes through the channel of increased social ties to former classmates, which in turn leads to strengthened employment networks between college alumni.
My estimates imply that access to Facebook for 4 years of college causes a 2.7 percentile increase in a cohort’s average earnings, relative to the earnings of other individuals born in the same year. This translates to an average nominal wage increase of $3,000-$5,000 in 2014.
To be clear, some of that could be a wage distribution effect. Still, this paper points to the possibility of some very real networking and matching gains from the use of Facebook, and perhaps those gains do not favor traditional elites.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Friday assorted links
1. Megan McArdle on Roe vs. Wade.
3. WalkAway: Observational Data on 150 Erstwhile Democrats.
4. New TWA hotel at JFK airport.
5. Yonatan Berman: “We also find that absolute mobility decreases with income. Individuals and families occupying thelower ranks of the income distribution have a higher probability of increasing their income over short time periods than those occupying higher ranks. This also occurs during periods of in-creasing inequality. Our findings stem from the importance of the changes in the composition of income percentiles. These changes are over and above mechanical labor market dynamics and life cycle effects. We offer a simplified model to mathematically describe these findings.” More here.
It is the slacker writers who need agglomeration most of all
Do note the latter part of the last sentence, but the entire thesis is interesting:
This paper utilises a unique, purpose-built panel dataset on prominent authors in the UK and Ireland born 1700–1925 to estimate the productivity gains associated with agglomeration of an industry with few capital requirements and no apparent need to cluster geographically. I find the average author experiences productivity gains of 11.94% per annum when residing in London, the only major literary cluster – a gain not associated with living in any of the minor literary clusters. I find evidence of negative selection with respect to productivity, indicating the results are not driven by the self-selection of highly productive authors to London. I find heterogeneity of returns to living in London by birth cohort and Impact Index quartile (a measure of author quality) and that the cohorts who receive the greatest gains from locating in London are those for which there is the strongest evidence of negative selection with respect to productivity.
That is by Sara Mitchell in the Journal of Urban Economics, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.