At the Margin: 2016

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Link fiesta 3.27.16

Some post-Holy Week readings:

A crusade against multiple regression analysis (video by Richard Nisbett)
Divorce laws and the economic behavior of couples
The World Bank is transforming from a "lending bank" to a "knowledge bank"
Time series graphs moving through XY space
An insider look into PhD admissions committees: "Ph.D. programs are one of the few parts of higher education where admissions decisions are made without admissions professionals.Small groups of faculty members meet, department by department, to decide whom to admit. And their decisions effectively determine the future makeup of the faculty in higher education. Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion."
The state of US infrastructure (by Timothy Taylor): "Ultimately, the way out of traffic congestion involves some combination of "congestion pricing," which means charging drivers for being on the road at peak times, or the future of driverless cars. These steps involve specific kinds of infrastructure spending, but just fixing up the existing roads and bridges, or adding some traffic lanes, isn't likely to make much of a dent in congestion."
More Americans are seeing foreign trade as an opportunity, not a threat
Hong Kong's port is in decline
Rural-urban migration in India is unusually low
Interstate migration in the US has declined: "The usual story is that in-and-out migration equalizes wage, unemployment and employment rates across the nation. Some places may be harder hit than others but movement quickly makes the US into one labor market. In the aftermath of this recession, however, that isn’t happening for employment rates. Using a clever research design that looks at workers with similar education and skills doing the same jobs at the same large firms but in different locations, Yagan finds that location continues to matter years after the recession has ended. Workers who worked in the places hardest hit in the 2007-2009 recession have employment rates today that are 1% lower than similar workers in regions that were less hard hit."
Global energy outlook 2015: "These projections agree that global energy consumption growth in the coming 25 years is likely to be substantial, with the global demand center shifting from Europe and North America to Asia, led by China and India."
The changing nature of trade agreements: "The old trade agenda under first the GATT and then its successor the World Trade Organization was focused on reducing tariffs and other trade barriers. The new generation of trade agreements are about assuring that interlocking webs of production that cross international borders will be enabled to function.
Russ Roberts on his struggles to make economics interesting
Jon Levin on his struggles as an economist: "I had another period after I’d started as an Assistant Professor where I was having trouble finding ideas and didn’t feel my research was going that well. That went on for longer, and my solution was to find co-authors. The great thing about working with co-authors, apart from learning from them, is that even if a project isn’t going great or a paper gets rejected, it’s a shared experience... In general, one feature of being a researcher is that your performance (or at least your research output) is very measurable – which is great when things are going well, but pretty tough when you are struggling, so you need to find ways to deal with that challenge and keep working hard.
The changing nature of globalization and international trade (from flows of final goods to intermediate goods to data goods): "It's already true that international trade in goods has shifted away from being about final products, and instead become more a matter of intermediate products being shipped along a global production chain. Now, information in all its forms (design, marketing, managerial expertise) is becoming a bigger share of the final value of many physical products. Moreover, a wired world will be more able able to buy and sell digital products."
Sketches of the future of economic theory (by Noah Smith)
Stable marriage without the deferred acceptance algorithm (Al Roth):

Economists aren't welcome in hell (Timothy Taylor):

Monday, January 11, 2016

Econ links fiesta

Latest research on the effects of the minimum wage (Jeffrey Clemens): "My baseline estimate is that this period's full set of minimum wage increases reduced employment among individuals ages 16 to 30 with less than a high school education by 5.6 percentage points."
Does Tinder boost assortative mating? "In sum, I expect Tinder to boost assortative mating, at least at the top end of the distribution in terms of IQ and education."
Quadratic voting: an alternative to democracy? "In Glen's voting mechanism, every voter can vote as many times as he or she likes. The catch, however, is that you have to pay each time you vote, and the amount you have to pay is a function of the square of the number of votes you cast. As a consequence, each extra vote you cast costs more than the previous vote."
"What makes an academic paper useful for health policy?" [Whitty 2015] From the abstract: "Academics underestimate the speed of the policy process, and publish excellent papers after a policy decision rather than good ones before it. To be useful in policy, papers must be at least as rigorous about reporting their methods as for other academic uses. Papers which are as simple as possible (but no simpler) are most likely to be taken up in policy.... The accurate synthesis of existing information is the most important single offering by academics to the policy process.... Models should, wherever possible, allow policymakers to vary assumptions."