Results for “age of em”

15637 found

It's hard to summarize, so read the whole thing.  But he is calling for a closer look at the evidence and the application of RCT [randomized control trial] standards.  Here is an excerpt:

First, the fact that a technology has been scientifically proven in isolation–such as a certain fertilizer proven to raise crop yields–does not mean that it will improve people’s well-being amidst the complexities of real villages. Recent research by Esther Duflo, CGD non-resident fellow Michael Kremer, and Jonathan Robinson shows that fertilizer use is scientifically proven highly effective at raising farm yields and farmers’ profits in Kenya. But for complex reasons very few farmers wish to adopt fertilizer, even those well trained in its use and usefulness. This means that this proven technology has enormous difficulty raising farmers’ incomes in practice. The gap between agronomy and development is very hard to cross.

Second, it is not sufficient to compare treated villages to untreated villages that were chosen ex-post as comparison villages because they appear similar. Many recent research papers have shown this conclusively. A long list of studies conducted over decades showed that African and other children learned much more in schools that had textbooks than in schools that appeared otherwise similar but did not have textbooks. Paul Glewwe, Michael Kremer, and Sylvie Moulin evaluated a large intervention in some of the neediest schools in Kenya (ungated version here, published here). Schools that received textbooks were randomly chosen from an initial pool of candidates. The problem: Children did not learn more in the treated schools than in the untreated schools.

Chris Blattman comments.

Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside.

With 140 empty shops in the borough, council bosses think they have come up with a unique way of ensuring shopping areas remain as vibrant as possible.

The rest of the story is here.  For the pointer I thank Bob Cottrell, at The Browser.

Here are some recent results:

In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon
sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in
a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under
local management stored more carbon than government-owned forests.
There are exceptions, says Chhatre, "but our findings show that we can
increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of
forests from governments to communities".

One reason may be that locals protect forests best if
they own them, because they have a long-term interest in ensuring the
forests' survival. While governments, whatever their intentions,
usually license destructive logging, or preside over a free-for-all in
which everyone grabs what they can because nobody believes the forest
will last (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905308106).

The authors suggest that locals would also make a better job
of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies. They
argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental
idea, called the "tragedy of the commons", which says that natural
resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal,
"communities are perfectly capable of managing their resources
sustainably".

If you turn to the first page of the paper itself, the header reads:

Edited by Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, and approved September 4, 2009 (received for review July 22,
2009)

Of course this sort of result is inspired by her work as well.  For the pointer I thank Andrew Grant.

Here is my latest NYT column.  It starts as follows:

The financial crisis is a result of many bad decisions, but one of them hasn’t received
enough attention: the 1998 bailout of the Long-Term Capital Management
hedge fund. If regulators had been less concerned with protecting the
fund’s creditors, our current problems might not be quite so bad.

Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers were all major creditors of LTCM.  Given that regulation is inevitably imperfect, and cannot foresee or prevent every firestorm in advance, this was one chance to send a very stern message to those creditors.  Perhaps no LTCM bailout would have meant dire consequences at the time, but still:

…Fed inaction might have had graver economic consequences,
especially if a Buffett deal had fallen through. In that case, a rapid
financial deleveraging would have followed, and the economy would have
probably plunged into recession. That sounds bad, but it might have
been better to have experienced a milder version of a downturn in 1998
than the more severe version of 10 years later.  In 1998, there was no collapsed housing bubble, the government’s budget
was in surplus rather than deficit, bank leverage was much lower, and
derivatives markets were smaller and less far-reaching.

I’ve been reading much about LTCM in recent times, and in so many ways it was a micro- dress rehearsal for our later problems.  This column also criticizes the current now-standard practice of "regulation by deal."

Addendum: Matt Yglesias adds: " At the time I think everyone was clear on the idea that if
institutions such as LTCM were “too big to fail” that they had to be
brought into a regulatory umbrella. But as soon as it was clear that
disaster had been averted, a lot of people became complacent about
operationalizing this determination to expand the scope of regulation
and some of the key participants – especially Alan Greenspan – in the
bailout only redoubled their opposition to regulation."

Ezra Klein, in his response to my post on the union wage premium, directed our attention to this article about the union wage premium in service industries.  The paper does find a wage premium, and in doing so offers up some juicy bits:

Our
research suggests that unions usually have little power to inhibit subcontracting
altogether, but that they can sometimes mitigate its negative effects
on their members.  The
hardest trend to fight has been the outsourcing of labor-intensive kitchen
tasks – baking, cleaning and chopping produce, making stocks and sauces. 
The purchasing of prepared foods has become such a ubiquitous and fundamental
business strategy in the industry that it has been almost impossible
for unions to stop it.  In the end, the economics of using pre-prepared
food are simply too compelling, and because the outsourcing is usually
done piece-meal, the union would have to fight over just one or two
jobs at a time.  However, when the numbers of jobs involved are bigger
and the economic advantages less clear – for example, subcontracting
an entire laundry unit – unions have been able to focus their efforts
and have had somewhat more success, slowing the process down or limiting
it.

Yes I can see the resulting wage premium within the union, but is this a good way to advance the state of the working man in the United States?

Rick Hartenstein is the Pharmacy Director at Ochsner Clinic Foundation in New Orleans.  He writes me with a question:

An article in our local paper this morning discussed the phenomenon of  sign-on bonuses at fast food restaurants.  Since this will almost certainly drive up wages in the area, and hospitals are highly dependent upon low wage jobs, I was wondering what you would advise our Human Resources VP to do.  I am an almost daily reader of MR and really appreciated the blogs during the hurricane (I was here at the hospital for 8 days).  Any other observations on wages and prices for us?  One thing is sure – the areas of the city that housed the majority of lower wage workers are obliterated.  We have massive vacancies in these types of jobs as do other employers. 

My response was as follows:

The rise in wages is a good sign because it means that employers are trying to draw workers back to New Orleans.  If employers were packing up and leaving then wages would be falling so there is some hope.  For the hospital Human Resources VP I would suggest that the situation is probably temporary so rather than higher wages he or she may want to follow the lead of the restaurants and offer "signing bonuses" and/or bonuses to be paid after say 6 months on the job.  The reason for this is that it may be very difficult to reduce wages later on – reducing wages typically causes a lot of discontent.  Furthermore, if you keep the wages of older employees constant but, as wages fall, offer newer employees lower wages you will have two people doing the same job being paid different wages.  That is not good for morale either.  In addition, to signing bonuses the hospital might want to think about what it can offer in terms of relocation services, housing, transportation and so forth.  Again, these would be useful temporary measures to draw workers to the hospital without creating a permanent expectation of higher future wages.

Comments are open if you have other suggestions for Rick.