Results for “concentration”
203 found

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.

Social security and trends in inequality

Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S., based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper revisits this conclusion by incorporating Social Security retirement benefits into measures of wealth inequality. Wealth inequality has not increased in the last three decades when Social Security is accounted for. When discounted at the risk-free rate, real Social Security wealth increased substantially from $5.6 trillion in 1989 to just over $42.0 trillion in 2016. When we adjust for systematic risk coming from the covariance of Social Security returns with the market portfolio, this increase remains sizable, growing from over $4.6 trillion in 1989 to $34.0 trillion in 2016. Consequently, by 2016, Social Security wealth represented 58% of the wealth of the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution. Redistribution through programs like Social Security increases the progressivity of the economy, and it is important that our estimates of wealth concentration reflect this.

That is from a new paper by Sylvain Catherine, Max Miller, and Natasha Sarin, I look forward to reading it soon.  It is at least possible that the Saez-Zucman results are coming under further question.

Just to repeat part of the abstract, I find this sentence striking: “When discounted at the risk-free rate, real Social Security wealth increased substantially from $5.6 trillion in 1989 to just over $42.0 trillion in 2016.”  That’s a lot.

And this one: “Consequently, by 2016, Social Security wealth represented 58% of the wealth of the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution.”  Wow.

My spring 2020 Industrial Organization reading list and syllabus

It is long, do note that many topics are covered in the other half of the class, I tried to put this beneath the fold, but today WordPress software is not cooperating…

  1. Productivity

American Economic Review Symposium, May 2010, starts with “Why do Firms in Developing Countries Have Low Productivity?” runs pp.620-633.

Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen, “Recent Advances in the Empirics of Organizational Economics,” http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0970.pdf.

Serguey Braguinsky, Lee G. Branstetter, and Andre Regateiro,The Incredible Shrinking Portuguese Firm,” http://papers.nber.org/papers/w17265#fromrss. 

Bloom, Nicholas, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. “Management as a Technology?” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 22327, June 2016.

David Lagakos, “Explaining Cross-Country Productivity Differences in Retail Trade,” Journal of Political Economy, April 2016, 124, 2, 1-49.

Dani Rodrik, “A Surprising Convergence Result,” http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2011/06/a-surprising-convergence-result.html, and his paper here http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/drodrik/Research%20papers/The%20Future%20of%20Economic%20Convergence%20rev2.pdf

Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class, chapter four, “Why Americans Stopped Creating,” 2017.

Ufuk Akcigit and Sina T. Ates, “Ten Facts on Declining Business Dynamism and Lessons from Endogenous Growth Theory,” NBER working paper 25755, April 2019.

Syerson, Chad “What Determines Productivity?” Journal of Economic Literature, June 2011, XLIX, 2, 326-365. 

Michael Kremer, “The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1993, 108, 3, 551-575.

Song, Jae, David J. Price, Fatih Guvenen, and Nicholas Bloom. “Firming Up Inequality,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis working paper 750, April 2018.  Do not bother with the very long appendix.

Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen, the slides for “Americans do I.T. Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle,” http://www.people.hbs.edu/rsadun/ADITB/ADIBslides.pdf, the paper is here http://www.stanford.edu/~nbloom/ADIB.pdf but I recommend focusing on the slides. 

Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood, “Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down?”, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEBsj18Y4NnVx5Qdu43cKEHMaVBODTTyfHBa8GIRSec/edit 

Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen, “Science is Getting Less Bang for its Buck,” Atlantic, November 16, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/ 

Decker, Ryan and John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda. “Where Has all the Skewness Gone?  The Decline in High-Growth (Young) Firms in the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 21776, December 2015.

Furman, Jason and Peter Orszag. “A Firm-Level Perspective on the Role of Rents in the Rise in Inequality.” October 16, 2015.

 

2. Competition and monopoly

Bresnahan, Timothy F. “Competition and Collusion in the American Automobile Industry: the 1955 Price War,” Journal of Industrial Economics, 1987, 35(4), 457-82.

Asker, John, “A Study of the Internal Organization of a Bidding Cartel,” American Economic Review, (June 2010), 724-762.

Tim Sablik and Nicholas Trachter, “Are Markets Becoming Less Competitive?” Economic Brief, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, June 2019.

Susanto Basu, “Are Price-Cost Markups Rising in the United States? A Discussion of the Evidence,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019, 33, 3, 3-22.

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Pierre-Daniel Sarte, and Nicholas Trachter, “Diverging Trends in National and Local Concentration,” NBER Working Paper 25066, Septemmber 2018.

David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, Christina Patterson, John Van Reenen, “The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms,” https://economics.mit.edu/files/12979, make sure you get the Oct. 2019 version, not the earlier NBER paper.

Whinston, Michael D., “Antitrust Policy Toward Horizontal Mergers,” Handbook of Industrial Organization, vol.III, chapter 36, see also chapter 35 by John Sutton.

Jan De Loecker and Jan Eeckhout, “The Rise of Market Power and its Macroeconomic Implications,” http://www.janeeckhout.com/wp-content/uploads/RMP.pdf.  My comment on it is here: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/08/rise-market-power.html and see also me on intangible capital, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/09/intangible-investment-monopoly-profits.html.

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, “The Industrial Revolution in Services, September 20, 2019, on-line.

Klein, Benjamin and Leffler, Keith. “The Role of Market Forces in Assuring Contractual Performance.”  Journal of Political Economy 89 (1981): 615-641.

Breit, William. “Resale Price Maintenance: What do Economists Know and When Did They Know It?” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (1991).

Bogdan Genchev, and Julie Holland Mortimer. “Empirical Evidence on Conditional Pricing Practices.” NBER working paper 22313, June 2016.

Sproul, Michael.  “Antitrust and Prices.”  Journal of Political Economy (August 1993): 741-754.

McCutcheon, Barbara. “Do Meetings in Smoke-Filled Rooms Facilitate Collusion?”  Journal of Political Economy (April 1997): 336-350.

Crandall, Robert and Winston, Clifford, “Does Antitrust Improve Consumer Welfare?: Assessing the Evidence,”  Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 2003), 3-26, available at http://www.brookings.org/views/articles/2003crandallwinston.htm.

FTC, Bureau of Competition, website, http://www.ftc.gov/bc/index.shtml, an optional browse, perhaps read about some current cases and also read the merger guidelines.

Parente, Stephen L. and Prescott, Edward. “Monopoly Rights: A Barrier to Riches.”  American Economic Review 89, 5 (December 1999): 1216-1233.

Demsetz, Harold.  “Why Regulate Utilities?”  Journal of Law and Economics (April 1968): 347-359.

Armstrong, Mark and Sappington, David, “Recent Developments in the Theory of Regulation,” Handbook of Industrial Organization, chapter 27, also on-line.

Shleifer, Andrei. “State vs. Private Ownership.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1998): 133-151.

Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson, “Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets,”http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=728545.

Strictly optional, most of you shouldn’t read this: Ariel Pakes and dynamic computational approaches to modeling oligopoly:

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/pakes/files/Pakes-Fershtman-8-2010.pdf

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/pakes/files/handbookIO9.pdf

 

III. Economics of Tech

 

Farrell, Joseph and Klemperer, Paul, “Coordination and Lock-In: Competition with Switching Costs and Network Effects,” Handbook of Industrial Organization, vol.III, chapter 31, also on-line.

Weyl, E. Glenn. “A Price Theory of Multi-Sided Platforms.” American Economic Review, September 2010, 100, 4, 1642-1672.

Gompers, Paul and Lerner, Josh. “The Venture Capital Revolution.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2001): 145-168.

Paul Graham, essays, http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html, to browse as you find useful or not.

Acemoglu, Daron and Autor, David, “Skills, Tasks, and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings,” http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/5607

Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, “Unresolved Issues in the Rise of American Inequality,” http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~idew/papers/BPEA_final_ineq.pdf

Browse through the first issue of Nakamoto.com on blockchain governance, read (or not) as you find useful.

 

IV. Organization and capital structure

 

Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson on the firm, if you haven’t already read them, but limited doses should suffice.

Gibbons, Robert, “Four Formal(izable) Theories of the Firm,” on-line at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=596864.

Van den Steen, Eric, “Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm,” American Economic Review, 2010, 100:1, 466-490.

Lazear, Edward P. “Leadership: A Personnel Economics Approach,” NBER Working Paper 15918, 2010.

Oyer, Paul and Schaefer, Scott, “Personnel Economics: Hiring and Incentives,” NBER Working Paper 15977, 2010.

Tyler Cowen chapter on CEO pay in big Business, to be distributed.

Ben-David, Itzhak, and John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey, “Managerial Miscalibration,” NBER working paper 16215, July 2010.

Glenn Ellison, “Bounded rationality in Industrial Organization,” http://cemmap.ifs.org.uk/papers/vol2_chap5.pdf 

Miller, Merton, and commentators.  “The Modigliani-Miller Propositions After Thirty Years,” and comments, Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1988): 99-158.

Myers, Stewart. “Capital Structure.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2001): 81-102.

Hansemann, Henry.  “The Role of Non-Profit Enterprise.” Yale Law Journal (1980): 835-901.

Kotchen, Matthew J. and Moon, Jon Jungbien, “Corporate Social Responsibility for Irresponsibility,” NBER working paper 17254, July 2011.

Strictly optional but recommended for the serious: Ponder reading some books on competitive strategy, for MBA students.  Here is one list of recommendations: http://www.linkedin.com/answers/product-management/positioning/PRM_PST/20259-135826

Furman, Jason. ”Business Investment in the United States: Facts, Explanations, Puzzles, and Policy.” Remarks delivered at the Progressive Policy Institute, September 30, 2015, on-line at https://m.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20150930_business_investment_in_the_united_states.pdf.

Scharfstein, David S. and Stein, Jeremy C.  “Herd Behavior and Investment.”  American Economic Review 80 (June 1990): 465-479.

Stein, Jeremy C. “Efficient Capital Markets, Inefficient Firms: A Model of Myopic Corporate Behavior.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 104 (November 1989): 655-670.

 

V. Sectors: finance, health care, education, international trade, others 

Gorton, Gary B. “Slapped in the Face by the Invisible Hand: Banking and the Panic of 2007,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1401882, published on-line in 2009. 

Erel, Isil, Nadault, Taylor D., and Stulz, Rene M., “Why Did U.S. Banks Invest in Highly-Rated Securitization Tranches?” NBER Working Paper 17269, August 2011. 

Healy, Kieran. “The Persistence of the Old Regime.” Crooked Timber blog, August 6, 2014.

More to be added here, depending on your interests.

Maybe local monopsony isn’t such a big problem

I’ve been pawing through this topic, and the best paper I can find does not villify recent trends in local monopsony power:

Using data from the Longitudinal Business Database and Form W-2, I document trends in local industrial concentration from 1976 through 2015 and estimate the effects of that concentration on earnings outcomes within and across demographic groups. Local industrial concentration has generally been declining throughout its distribution over that period, unlike national industrial concentration, which declined sharply in the early 1980s before increasing steadily to nearly its original level beginning around 1990. Estimates indicate that increased local concentration reduces earnings and increases inequality, but observed changes in concentration have been in the opposite direction, and the magnitude of these effects has been modest relative to broader trends; back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the 90/10 earnings ratio was about six percent lower and earnings were about one percent higher in 2015 than they would have been if local concentration were at its 1976 level. Within demographic subgroups, most experience mean earnings reductions and all experience increases in inequality. Estimates of the effects of concentration on earnings mobility are sensitive to specification.

That is from Kevin Rinz at the U.S. Census Bureau.

Words of wisdom, man the rooftops

While the prediction that rising market toughness could generate an increase in concentration and the profit share may seem counterintuitive, the ambiguous relationship between concentration, profit shares, and the stringency of competition often arises in industrial organization.

That is from Autor, Dorn, Katz, Patterson and Van Reenen.  In essence, rising market toughness reallocates a greater share of output toward highly productive superstar firms, which are more productive but also have higher fixed costs and mark-ups over marginal cost.

Have you ever wondered how “rising Chinese competition devastated parts of the American working class” and “market power is up” both could be true?  Well, this paper is the best available attempt to square that circle.  Market power is up as measured by price to marginal cost ratios, or concentration ratios, but in fact competition is much tougher than it used to be and the antitrust authorities should not (at least in this regard) be blamed for their laxness.

Very few people have put in the time to understand this point, which I should add comes from some of the top IO economists in the field.

Have I mentioned that changes in concentration are correlated with the most dynamic economic sectors?

The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, and IQ

The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, an authoritative review with well-over a dozen distinguished co-authors, is unusually forthright on the effect of pollution, most especially lead, on IQ. I think some of their numbers, especially in paragraph three, are too large but the direction is certainly correct.

Neurotoxic pollutants can reduce productivity by impairing children’s cognitive development. It is well documented that exposures to lead and other metals (eg, mercury and arsenic) reduce cognitive function, as measured by loss of IQ.168

Loss of cognitive function directly affects success at school and labour force participation and indirectly affects lifetime earnings. In the USA, millions of children were exposed to excessive concentrations of lead as the result of the widespread use of leaded gasoline from the 1920s until about 1980. At peak use in the 1970s, annual consumption of tetraethyl lead in gasoline was nearly 100 000 tonnes.

It has been estimated that the resulting epidemic of subclinical lead poisoning could have reduced the number of children with truly superior intelligence (IQ scores higher than 130 points) by more than 50% and, concurrently, caused a more than 50% increase in the number of children with IQ scores less than 70 (figure 14).265 Children with reduced cognitive function due to lead did poorly in school, required special education and other remedial programmes, and could not contribute fully to society when they became adults.

Grosse and colleagues 46 found that each IQ point lost to neurotoxic pollution results in a decrease in mean lifetime earnings of 1·76%. Salkever and colleagues 266 who extended this analysis to include the effects of IQ on schooling, found that a decrease in IQ of one percentage point lowers mean lifetime earnings by 2·38%. Studies from the 2000s using data from the USA 267,268 support earlier findings but suggest a detrimental effect on earnings of 1·1% per IQ point.269 The link between lead exposure and reduced IQ 46, 168 suggests that, in the USA, a 1 μg/dL increase in blood lead concentration decreases mean lifetime earnings by about 0·5%. A 2015 study in Chile 270 that followed up children who were exposed to lead at contaminated sites suggests much greater effects. A 2016 analysis by Muennig 271 argues that the economic losses that result from early-life exposure to lead include not only the costs resulting from cognitive impairment but also costs that result from the subsequent increased use of the social welfare services by these lead-exposed children, and their increased likelihood of incarceration.

https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/1755ebf7-a99e-4e30-837f-2cb1846c9e66/gr14_lrg.jpg

Growing cooperation and inequality

Didn’t everyone used to wish for more and better cooperation?  The 1960s left in particular, but pretty much everyone.  And isn’t that what we got?  And didn’t that — in fact — lead to rather spectacular rises in income inequality?

Consider one implication of the Garett Jones model, which is that more talented people gain more, in percentage terms, from cooperating and working with each other than do less talented people.  The mere existence of a (non-universal) export sector is enough to establish this conclusion, but you can see why it is true using other arguments as well.  If there are non-linear synergies from bringing together talent, those synergies with be stronger with greater amounts of talent by the very nature of the initial assumptions.

Organizing a high school band brings a modest boost in quality entertainment, but forming the Beatles or Rolling Stones a much much larger gain, again in both absolute and percentage terms.  So if it is easier to organize bands of all sorts, income inequality likely will rise.

You are probably aware of the results that the higher wages in super-firms — clusters of lots of talent — relative to normal firms, account for a major share of income inequality.  In other words, additional cooperation boosted income inequality.

Or maybe you saw the recent stories “90 percent of growth in high-tech jobs happened in just 5 metro areas.”  That too is an instance of greater cooperation, and it has led to more income inequality, with the biggest gains coming in New York City and the Bay Area and a few other places.

More cooperation  → → greater income inequality.  Think about it.

Be careful what you wish for!  Though I very much appreciate the virtues of additional cooperation.

Air Pollution Reduces IQ, a Lot

The number and quality of studies showing that air pollution has very substantial effects on health continues to increase. Patrick Collison reviews some of the most recent studies on air pollution and cognition. I’m going to post the whole thing so everything that follows is Patrick’s.

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Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented. However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in most EPA materials.

World Bank data indicate that 3.7 billion people, about half the world’s population, are exposed to more than 50 µg/m³ of PM2.5 on an annual basis, 5x the unit of measure for most of the findings below.

  • Substantial declines in short-term cognitive performance after short-term exposure to moderate (median 27.0 µg/m³) PM2.5 pollution: “The results from the MMSE test showed a statistically robust decline in cognitive function after exposure to both the candle burning and outdoor commuting compared to ambient indoor conditions. The similarity in the results between the two experiments suggests that PM exposure is the cause of the short-term cognitive decline observed in both.” […] “The mean average [test scores] for pre and post exposure to the candle burning were 48 ± 16 and 40 ± 17, respectively.” – Shehab & Pope 2019.
  • Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days: “We find that an increase of 10 µg/m³ raises the probability of making an error by 1.5 percentage points, and increases the magnitude of the errors by 9.4%. The impact of pollution is exacerbated by time pressure. When players approach the time control of games, an increase of 10 µg/m³, corresponding to about one standard deviation, increases the probability of making a meaningful error by 3.2 percentage points, and errors being 17.3% larger.” – Künn et al 2019.
  • A 3.26x (albeit with very wide CI) increase in Alzheimer’s incidence for each 10 µg/m³ increase in long-term PM2.5 exposure? “Short- and long-term PM2.5 exposure was associated with increased risks of stroke (short-term odds ratio 1.01 [per µg/m³ increase in PM2.5 concentrations], 95% CI 1.01-1.02; long-term 1.14, 95% CI 1.08-1.21) and mortality (short-term 1.02, 95% CI 1.01-1.04; long-term 1.15, 95% CI 1.07-1.24) of stroke. Long-term PM2.5 exposure was associated with increased risks of dementia (1.16, 95% CI 1.07-1.26), Alzheimer’s disease (3.26, 95% 0.84-12.74), ASD (1.68, 95% CI 1.20-2.34), and Parkinson’s disease (1.34, 95% CI 1.04-1.73).” – Fu et al 2019. Similar effects are seen in Bishop et al 2018: “We find that a 1 µg/m³ increase in decadal PM2.5 increases the probability of a dementia diagnosis by 1.68 percentage points.”
  • A study of 20,000 elderly women concluded that “the effect of a 10 µg/m³ increment in long-term [PM2.5 and PM10] exposure is cognitively equivalent to aging by approximately 2 years”. – Weuve et al 2013.
  • “Utilizing variations in transitory and cumulative air pollution exposures for the same individuals over time in China, we provide evidence that polluted air may impede cognitive ability as people become older, especially for less educated men. Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 µm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 µg/m³) would move people from the median to the 63rd percentile (verbal test scores) and the 58th percentile (math test scores), respectively.” – Zhang et al 2018.
  • “Exposure to CO2 and VOCs at levels found in conventional office buildings was associated with lower cognitive scores than those associated with levels of these compounds found in a Green building.” – Allen et al 2016. The effect seems to kick in at around 1,000 ppm of CO2.

Alex again. Here’s one more. Heissel et al. (2019):

“We compare within-student achievement for students transitioning between schools near highways, where one school has had greater levels of pollution because it is downwind of a highway. Students who move from an elementary/middle school that feeds into a “downwind” middle/high school in the same zip code experience decreases in test scores, more behavioral incidents, and more absences, relative to when they transition to an upwind school”

Relatively poor countries with extensive air pollution–such as India–are not simply choosing to trade higher GDP for worse health; air pollution is so bad that countries with even moderate air pollution are getting lower GDP and worse heath.

Addendum: Patrick has added a few more.

Friday assorted links

1. The excellent Ben Westhoff on Joe Rogan.

2. A Canadian pro experiences the world and management system of Russian hockey.

3. The Cato study on wealth inequality.  And why did the UK Labour government abandon the wealth tax idea in the 1970s?

4. Kocherlakota argued in Econometrica that optimal wealth taxes should be zero on average.

5. David McCabe at NYT: “The debate can take on a heated and personal tone. At a conference this spring, the soft-spoken legal academic Tim Wu responded to doubts raised by Tyler Cowen, an economist, about whether America has dangerous levels of corporate concentration by saying it was like arguing with someone who believes the earth is flat.”

6. “An inmate claimed his life sentence ended when he died and was revived.

7. Megan McArdle on the historical importance of the Church.

Monday assorted links

1. Local concentration and monopsony.

2. Better-looking children achieve more schooling.

3. Noah on the Chilean miracle.

4. Fukushima: “We estimate that the increase in mortality from higher electricity prices outnumbers the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting the decision to cease nuclear production has contributed to more deaths than the accident itself.”

5. Costa and Rucker on Trump impeachment.

Does regulation have a role in the repo rise?

Fed data show large banks are keeping a disproportionate amount in reserves, relative to their assets. The 25 largest US banks held an average of 8 per cent of their total assets in reserves at the end of the second quarter, versus 6 per cent for all other banks. Meanwhile, the four largest US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — together held $377bn in cash reserves at the end of the second quarter this year, far more than the remaining 21 banks in the top 25.

Since the financial crisis, large banks have been obliged to meet a liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) — a portion of high-quality assets such as cash reserves and Treasuries that can be sold quickly to keep the lights on for a month in a crisis. But regulations also require them to track intraday liquidity — cash they can immediately access — which does not include Treasuries. This additional requirement can vary depending on their business models, which in turn inform supervisors’ and examiners’ bank-specific demands. Executives at several large banks say this puts a de facto premium on reserves that varies by bank..

Second-quarter data from the four largest reserve holders show Wells Fargo held 39 per cent of its high-quality liquid assets in reserves. JPMorgan held 22 per cent, Bank of America held 15 per cent and Citigroup 14 per cent.

“If you have a very large concentration in a few institutions and you lose one or two on any day, then you are losing a major portion of your funding,” said Jim Tabacchi, chief executive at South Street Securities, a broker dealer active in short-term debt markets. “Rates have to skyrocket. It’s simple math.”

Here is the full FT article.

The rise of niche consumption

Here is a new and neat paper which, to the extent it is true, would appear to address several significant puzzles at once.  From Brent Neiman and Joseph S. Vavra:

We show that over the last 15 years, the typical household has increasingly concentrated its spending on a few preferred products. However, this is not driven by “superstar” products capturing larger market shares. Instead, households increasingly focus spending on different products from each other. As a result, aggregate spending concentration has in fact decreased over this same period. We use a novel heterogeneous agent model to conclude that increasing product variety is a key driver of these divergent trends. When more products are available, households can select a subset better matched to their particular tastes, and this generates welfare gains not reflected in government statistics. Our model features heterogeneous markups because producers of popular products care more about maximizing profits from existing customers, while producers of less popular niche products care more about expanding their customer base. Surprisingly, however,our model can match the observed trends in household and aggregate concentration without any resulting change in aggregate market power.

This is related to what I called “matching” in The Complacent Class.

*The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets*

That is the new book by Thomas Philippon, and perhaps the title is a bit misleading, as the book covers both regulatory barriers and natural economic forces behind higher concentration levels.  I am a big fan of Philippon’s work, but I am not so convinced by his arguments in this book.  Most of all, he is trying to argue for systematically greater monopoly power in the American economy, but he is reluctant to provide much evidence for output restriction, the sine qua non of market power.

First note that market power does not seem to be up at the level of actual market competition.  And capital’s share of income does not seem to be rising in a manner consistent with the monopoly theory, see here and here.

I agree with him about health care, and also (highly regulated) cable television and thus internet connections.  I agree with all of his suggestions for removing regulatory barriers to entry, for instance by allowing foreign airlines to serve domestic U.S. markets.  From a policy point of view, I am quite close to his perspective.

But when it comes to monopoly power too much of his evidence is circumstantial. OK, there is greater stability for market leaders in many sectors, and weak investment aggregates, but all the time antitrust suits find evidence for output restrictions — so why doesn’t this book offer more of such evidence?  Here is one passage (p.39) that caught my attention:

…we see a sharp increase in concentration in the airline industry after 2010.  That is enough to trigger our interest, but not enough to conclude that competition has weakened.  We must first check that concentration has also increased at the route level.  We find that it has.  We can further show that it came together with higher prices and higher profits.

I have only a pre-publication copy, and perhaps some of the book is missing in my edition, but I don’t see the cited evidence presented, nor is it in the airlines section starting on p.137 (which does document increasing concentration at the national level).  To consider the contrary evidence, here is an excerpt from an earlier MR post:

As for output restrictions, here is the DOT series on aggregate miles flown.  No doubt, there are problems around the time of 9/11 and also the Great Recession, with 2008-2012 being a period of slight quantity contraction.  But in 1985 there were 275,864 [million] total miles flown, in 2006 it was 588,471, and 641, 905 in 2015.  I’ll ask again: if there is so much extra monopoly, where are the output restrictions?

Or look at the price index.  Overall prices are down considerably since 2008, and from about 2000 to 2016 they run from about 250 (eyeballing) to about 270, noting 1998-2010 saw a huge run-up in oil prices.

Since I wrote that post there is clearer evidence for a steady price decline since 2012 (he is claiming higher concentration since 2010), just look at the price index, which is FRED channeling BLS.  Now maybe those are the wrong numbers for some reason, but I don’t see anything in the Philipson book to counter them.  I don’t see output restriction considered at all.  I don’t see a price series presented at all.

That is only one sector, but it reflects my deeper worries about the book.  I just don’t see the evidence for output restrictions, or, in many cases I don’t see the evidence for higher prices.

The most sustained discussion of prices comes on pp.114-122, where it is shown that PPP-adjusted prices are higher in America than in Europe, and furthermore the gap is growing.  That is far too much aggregation for my tastes (“Europe”), PPP adjustments are not exactly scientific, it is not very direct evidence for market concentration being the culprit, and furthermore if I understand him correctly, the Big Mac index also has the United States becoming relatively more expensive, even though McDonald’s clearly has faced massive competition in recent years.

To be sure, if you believe in a productivity slowdown, as I do, you also have to feel that America’s economic sectors, in some counterfactual sense, could be much more dynamic, more prone to disruption, and yes more competitive.  It is a great disappointment to me that is not the case.  But that is far from the view that monopoly power is increasing in the American economy in an economically significant manner, across a wide variety of sectors (health care caveat noted, and even that is selective, as there has been a significant cost slowdown).

So I remain skeptical about the main claims in this book.

Those new service sectors jobs — lots of ’em!

…we find that total employment rises substantially in industries with rising concentration.  this is true even when we look at total employment of the smaller firms in these industries.  This evidence is consistent with our view that increasing concentration is driven by new ICT-enabled technologies that ultimately raise aggregate industry TFP.  It is not consistent with the view that concentration is due to declining competition or entry barriers…as those forces will result in a decline in industry employment.

That is from a new paper by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg.  The paper presents a larger picture too:

…the secular changes the U.S. economy has experienced for the last four decades…amount to a new industrialization process.  One that allows firms to expand geographically and deliver its goods and services to customers locally.  We have argued that this evolution was the result of an underlying technological change that led to reductions in variable costs (and establishment-level fixed costs) in exchange for larger firm-level fixed costs.

Recommended.