Economics

The Credibility Revolution: A Nobel for Taking (some of) the CON out of Econometrics

James Bailey1 Comment

Yesterday Jeremy pointed out that while the 2021 economics Nobelists have reached various conclusions in their study of labor economics, the prize was really awarded to the methods they developed and used.

I find the best explanation of the value of these methods to be this 2010 article by Angrist and Pischke in the Journal of Economic Perspectives: The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design Is Taking the Con out of Econometrics

Like Jeremy, they think that empirical economic research (that is, research using econometrics) was most quite bad up to the 1980’s; as Ed Leamer put it in his paper “Let’s take the CON out of Econometrics”:

This is a sad and decidedly unscientific state of affairs we find ourselves in. Hardly anyone takes data analyses seriously. Or perhaps more accurately, hardly anyone takes anyone else’s data analyses seriously.

Angrist and Pischke argue that the field is in much better shape today:

empirical researchers in economics have increasingly looked to the ideal of a randomized experiment to justify causal inference. In applied micro fields such as development, education, environmental economics, health, labor, and public finance, researchers seek real experiments where feasible, and useful natural experiments if real experiments seem (at least for a time) infeasible. In either case, a hallmark of contemporary applied microeconometrics is a conceptual framework that highlights specific sources of variation. These studies can be said to be design based in that they give the research design underlying any sort of study the attention it would command in a real experiment.

The econometric methods that feature most prominently in quasi-experimental studies are instrumental variables, regression discontinuity methods, and differences-in-differences-style policy analysis

Our field still has big problems: the replication crisis looms, and the credibility revolution’s focus on the experimental ideal leads economists to avoid important questions that can’t be answered by natural experiments. But I do think that the average empirical economics paper today is much more credible than one from 1980, and that the 3 Nobelists are part of the reason why, so cheers to them.

A Nobel for What?

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

The Nobel Prize in Economics was announced this week. As usual, Alex Tabarrok has a great description of the contributions of the winners. But I have seen a number of commentators, mostly on “the right,” question this award, especially for David Card. Mostly they have focused on the highlighting of Card’s paper (with the late Alan Krueger) on minimum wages, saying that this paper has been heavily criticized and debunked, or as evidence that “economics has degenerated into socialist propaganda.”

Yikes! If true, these are serious charges against a profession in decline.

But hang on. What’s really going on with the award for David Card? Again, Tabarrok sums it up nicely: “what really made the paper great was the clarity of the methods that Card and Krueger used to study the problem.” What was this clarity?

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Growing/Shrinking Jobs of Next Decade: Good Times Ahead for Nurse Practitioners, Wind Turbine Technicians, and Animal Trainers

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

The good folks at Visual Capitalist have put together a big juicy infographic depicting employment trends over the next decade, based on projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The vertical axis is % decadal growth for each category, the horizontal axis is 2020 median annual wage for that category, and the size of the bubble indicates the absolute numbers of change. The color of each bubble is keyed to “Occupational Group”, i.e.,  “Health related”, “Computer and mathematical”, etc.

Below I snipped part of the infographic which shows occupations which will be growing. The horizontal positioning (median annual wage) runs from $20,000 on the left to $120,000 on the far right; nurse practitioners fall in the $105,000-120,000 range. The fastest growing, percentagewise, are wind turbine service technicians (68%), followed by nurse practitioners and solar installers tied at about 52%. The biggest absolute numbers of job growth are in “Home health and personal care aides”, to tend aging baby boomers.

From the color coding, we can see at a glance that job growth is mainly in the Health Related and Computer and Mathematical categories, with a smattering of “Other”, including Animal Trainers (for dog obedience schools ??) and Crematory Operators, as those baby boomers age all the way out.

Some of the losing professions are shown below. Most of these are in the “Office and Admin Support” (purple) category and Production workers (including nuclear power reactor operators). Some “Other” categories will get hit hard, such as parking officers and door-to-door salesmen.

Most of these shrinking jobs are lower paid, while many of the growing jobs are better paid. Bottom line: advise your kids to consider careers like data security/analysis, or a health care specialty, including management.

Forecasting that Job Growth Would Continue

Joy BuchananLeave a comment

The number of new jobs is being heralded (example in picture) as disappointing relative to the expectation that we would march steadily back to pre-Covid employment levels. (Ben Casselman is a good Twitter source for the data.)

One of the reasons for a slow recovery is that the Delta variant of Covid hit hard at the end of the summer and people are not getting vaccinated, so the health threat of going out to work and consume did not decline as much as we had expected. Covid was hard on family caregivers, often women. The disruptions to childcare from Covid still are not over. We are seeing a reversal of the massive influx of women into the formal workforce that started in the previous century.

Some people are saying that workers no longer want “dead end jobs,” and there has been a permanent shift in the labor supply, although it is hard to disentangle that from the effect of temporary Covid subsidies.

I am reminded of two very different sources who claimed, before 2019, that what we had in the early 21st century was not sustainable.

First, there were agitators for a $15/hr minimum wage. They marched in the streets while leading Democrats voiced approval. They were pointing out that families in America who depend on $8/hr jobs do not feel like they have a part of the American Dream.

Someone who, I am certain, would be against a federally mandated $15/hr minimum wage was also pointing this out. Tyler Cowen published Average is Over in 2013, when unemployment was still high following the Great Recession. Chapter 1 of Average is Over is called “Work and Wages”. Tyler was concerned that market forces were creating a world where some people have the best jobs that humanity has ever conceived of, by virtue of their compatibility with intelligent machines, while the rest of the workforce is left with jobs that are not so great. At the time, I don’t think people realized how many jobs could be done from the comfort of home or from a hip coffee shop. Covid exposed that. The “not so great” jobs feel especially crappy when you know that people in your city get paid 6 figures to sit at a laptop.

Tyler might have been surprised when unemployment dropped so low in 2019, right after he had written The Complacent Class, which warns us that America isn’t working well for a large group of people.

We are not great at predicting the future.* Some of Tyler’s predictions have come true already, but even he did not try to put a date on things. The point is that maybe the latest job numbers are not as surprising for the reason that the forecasts were more wrong than we thought. Covid has moved us far out of equilibrium, so it is still hard to tell where we are going to land.

Personally, I thought prices at the grocery store, one of the few places you could go in early 2020, would shoot up faster. It seemed to me like we would need to start paying cashiers more as hazard pay.

*In one of my experiments, I asked subjects in the role of employers to predict what their employees would do. They failed to predict how strongly employees would respond to wage cuts. We are not great at predicting.

Weigh costs, benefits, and evidence quality

James Bailey1 Comment

Living means making decisions with imperfect information. But Covid provides many examples of how people and institutions are often still bad at this. A few common errors:

  1. Imperfect evidence = perfect evidence. “Studies show Asprin prevents Covid”. OK, were the studies any good? Did any other studies find otherwise?
  2. Imperfect evidence = “no evidence” or “evidence against”. In early 2020, major institutions like the WHO said “masks don’t work” when they meant “there are no large randomized controlled trials on the effectiveness of masks”
  3. Imperfect evidence = don’t do it until you’re sure Inaction is a choice, and often a bad one. If the costs of action are low and the potential benefits of action high, you might want to do it anyway. Think masks in 2020 when the evidence for them was mediocre, or perhaps Vitamin D now.
  4. Imperfect evidence = do it, we have to do something Even in a pandemic, it is possible to over-react if the costs are high enough and/or the evidence of benefits bad enough (possibly lockdowns, definitely taking up smoking)

Any intro microeconomics class will explain the importance of weighing both costs and benefits. But how do we know what the costs and benefits are? For many everyday purchases they are usually obvious, but in other situations like medical treatments and public policies they aren’t, particularly the benefits. We have to estimate the benefits using evidence of varying quality. This creates more dimensions of tradeoffs- do you choose something with good evidence for its benefits, but high cost? Or something with worse evidence but lower costs? Graphing this properly should take at least 3 dimensions, but to keep things simple lets assume we know what the costs are, and combine benefits and evidence into a single axis called “good evidence of substantial benefit”. This yields a graph like:

Applied to Covid strategies, this yields a graph something like this:

This is not medical advice- I say this not merely as a legal disclaimer, but because my real point is the idea that we should weigh both evidence quality and costs, NOT that my estimates of the evidence quality or costs of particular strategies are better than yours

Judging the strength of the evidence for various strategies is inherently difficult, and might go beyond simply evaluating the strength of published research. But when evaluating empirical studies on Covid, my general outlook on the evidence is:

Of course, details matter, theory matters, the number of studies and how mixed their results are matters, potential fraud and bias matters, and there’s a lot it makes sense to do without seeing an academic study on it.

Dear reader, perhaps this is all obvious to you, and indeed the idea of adjusting your evidence threshold based on the cost of an intervention goes back at least to the beginnings of modern statistics in deciding how to brew Guinness. But common sense isn’t always so common, and this is my attempt to summarize it in a few pictures.

China Cracks Down on Cryptocurrencies

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is all about control. In the well-known words of Chairman Mao:

Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.

These days political power is linked to economic power and control of information, as well as raw military firepower. Cryptocurrencies have assumed financial importance and they entail information processing and tracking.

On the other hand, a key driver for cryptocurrencies is precisely to escape from the domination of big central authorities, such as the CCP. Proponents of crypto revel in the fact that anyone with a PC can get in on “mining” and that the crypto universe does indeed operate on the web as a largely democratized enterprise. Anybody can transact large sums with anybody, with a moderate degree of anonymity.

These two different visions of life collided on Sept. 28 when the Chinese government banned nearly all crypto-related transactions:

China’s central bank said on Friday that all cryptocurrency-related transactions are illegal in the country and they must be banned, citing concerns around national security and “safety of people’s assets.” The world’s most populated nation also said that foreign exchanges are banned from providing services to users in the country.

In a joint statement, 10 Chinese government agencies vowed to work closely to maintain a “high pressure” crackdown on trading of cryptocurrencies in the nation. The People’s Bank of China separately ordered internet, financial and payment companies from facilitating cryptocurrency trading on their platforms.

The central bank said cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Tether, cannot be circulated in the market as they are not fiat currency. The surge in usage of cryptocurrencies has disrupted “economic and financial order,” and prompted a proliferation of “money laundering, illegal fund-raising, fraud, pyramid schemes and other illegal and criminal activities,” it said.

Offenders, the central bank warned, will be “investigated for criminal liability in accordance with the law.”

The Chinese government will “resolutely clamp down on virtual currency speculation, and related financial activities and misbehaviour in order to safeguard people’s properties and maintain economic, financial and social order,” the People’s Bank of China said in a statement.

Well, those are the bare facts. It’s good to know the CCP is so diligently safeguarding people’s assets and public order. And as noted, Mao’s successors would not naturally favor systems that allow people to just do what they want to do, free from guidance from the Party. But inquiring minds want to know or at least speculate further regarding the reasons for this move and its consequences.

Brian Liu and Raquel Leslie highlighted two other motivations for this crackdown. One motivation  concerns China’s desire to launch its own state-controlled digital currency. This will give the government heightened ability to track every single transaction by every single user. It would also provide China with a new means of exerting influence over other nations and corporations:

The ban comes as the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, is piloting its own digital currency, the eCNY or “digital yuan.” Unlike private cryptocurrencies, the eCNY is issued directly by the central government and is being designed to provide the PBOC with near-real-time financial data on user transactions. Some observers fear that the eCNY will be used as a tool to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic surveillance. Others worry that the eCNY will be used to retaliate against international companies that speak out on human rights issues. Fan Yifei, a deputy governor of the PBOC, announced last week that the eCNY has entered a “sprint stage” ahead of the February 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Another motivation may be to help prevent wealthy Chinese from taking their money abroad:

The crypto ban may also be intended to deter capital flight. Despite past crypto crackdowns and strict capital controls, wealthy Chinese have used cryptocurrencies to funnel more than $50 billion overseas in 2020. As China is in the middle of an economic slowdown that has been exacerbated by other regulatory crackdowns on the tech and education sectors, China may be redoubling its efforts to ward off skittish entrepreneurs from exporting their money overseas.

Will this crackdown fully succeed? Many observers doubt it. They think that people will find ways to do what they want to do, using platforms that are hosted outside China.

As for the digital yuan, well, it kind of goes against most of the reasons people have gravitated to crypto. It represents a move back to government control and surveillance. It is not really a “crypto” currency at all, but simply another form of regular money.  It could get traction, however, in international trade among countries who have reasons to try to escape from the current U.S. dollar dominance. Also, China could hand out its digital currency like candy to impoverished nations, to get them on board. Millions, maybe billions of people live without regular banking access, and so a medium of exchange and store of value that requires only a cell phone to move funds around town or around the world could be attractive. At any rate, count on China to make the digital yuan a big “thing” for international visitors due at the February 2022 Olympics.

The price of Bitcoin took this news in stride. It continues to bounce around in the same $40,000-$50,000 range that it has been in for the past three months. And being banned by China is not a death-knell for a financial entity.  Indeed, it could be a contrarian indicator. Consider that China has also banned Youtube, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Pinterest, and even (because of his uncanny resemblance to President Xi) Winnie the Pooh.

Tyler Cowen, Talent Curator

James Bailey1 Comment

Everyone else at EWED has been too classy (or earnest?) to post it, since it would implicitly be bragging.

But I’m home with a quarantined kid today and need the win. So here is biotech founder Tony Kulesa‘s article on how Tyler Cowen is the Best Curator of Talent in the World.

Highlights:

Tyler has identified talent either earlier than or missed by top undergraduate programs, the best biotech startups, and the best biotech investors, all without any insider knowledge of biotech. In comparison, Forbes 30U30, MIT Tech Review TR35, or Stat Wunderkind, and other industry awards that highlight talent are lagging indicators of success. It’s hard to find an awardee of these programs that was not already widely recognized for their achievements among insiders in their field. The winners of Emergent Ventures are truly emergent. 

What explains Tyler’s ability to do this?

1. Distribution: Tyler promotes the opportunity in such a way that the talent level of the application pool is extraordinarily high and the people who apply are uniquely earnest. 

2. Application: Emergent Ventures’ application is laser focused on the quality of the applicant’s ideas, and boils out the noise of credentials, references, and test scores. 

3. Selection: Tyler has relentlessly trained his taste for decades, the way a world class athlete trains for the olympics. 

4. Inspiration: Tyler personally encourages winners to be bolder, creating an ambition flywheel as they in turn inspire future applicants.

This seems right as far as it goes, and there is more depth in the article, but there has to be more to the story than we can see from the outside. Luckily Tyler has said he is writing a book on identifying talent.

The Half-Life of Policy Rationales

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

Bryan Caplan recently wrote about public goods theory, how we teach it, and the unrealistic nature of how we classify goods as either/or, rather than on a continuum. I explored similar themes in a blog post that I wrote back in January, but Caplan brings up another important point about public goods theory that I forget.

In a short 2002 paper, and then in a 2003 book with the same title, Foldvary and Klein proposed the idea of “the half-life of policy rationales.” In brief, the justification for many market failure arguments is contingent on the current state of technology. They apply this to concepts such as natural monopoly and information asymmetries, but for public goods theory the most important application is to the concept of excludability.

Here’s the basic idea: it is costly to exclude non-payers for using some goods. If it is so costly that it would not be profitable for a private enterprise to produce the good in question, it won’t be produced privately. But it still may be efficient for government to produce the good, if the benefit from the good exceeds the cost of raising the revenue to pay for it (likely out of general revenue, since we have already admitted it is infeasible to charge the users directly).

But here’s the Foldvary and Klein point: all of the above paragraph is dependent on the current state of technology! Take roads for example. When you had to pay someone to physically take a few coins for a toll road, plus force all motorists to slow down to a complete stop to pay the toll, it was probably cost prohibitive to operate limited-access private toll roads. But technology changes. We now have the technology for electronic tolling done at highway speed (and even coin buckets were slightly faster than handing some dude your change). The argument for government provision of highways, which was strong when technology was ancient, is significantly weakened now that technology has reached its modern state.

(There may be lots of other reasons you think that roads should be publicly provided, such as equity, but these are separate questions and distinct from the argument made in standard public goods theory.)

Foldvary and Klein go through many more examples in their book, but we can already see the key insight. And I think this is extremely important for teaching public goods to undergraduates. It’s normal for us to say that goods are either excludable (in which private provision is best) or non-excludable (in which there is a strong case for some government intervention). But this either/or framing is wrong (a continuum is a better way to think about it), and crucially it can change over time depending on technological changes. Excludability is not some inherent feature of a good or service, it is a function of the state of technology.

Europe Natural Gas Shortage: Factories Shut, Maybe Worse to Come

Scott Buchanan2 Comments

Shut down your old reliable coal and nuclear power plants. Replace them with wind turbines. Count on natural gas fueled power plants to fill in when the breeze stops blowing. Curtail drilling for your own natural gas, and so become dependent on gas supplied by pipeline from Russia or by tankers chugging thousands of miles from the Middle East. What could possibly go wrong?

That is what Europe is discovering now as natural gas prices have quintupled, taking electricity prices up with them. Europe is having a hard time finding enough gas supply to fill up storage facilities to get them through the winter. If consumers are prioritized, widespread industry shutdowns are possible if there is a cold winter. Prices for many things will rachet up, with implications for inflations and in turn for central banks’ response to inflation. (The Fed’s Powell has been talking down the current inflation as merely transitory).

 In the UK, energy companies are going bankrupt because the wholesale price that at which they purchase gas is higher than the government-mandated cap on gas price they can charge consumers. Plants which use natural gas as a feedstock like fertilizer plants are shutting down, which impacts farmers. Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of some of these operations, and the resulting shortage of CO2 is affecting meat-packers who use it in their operations. Indeed, a food producer has warned that the Christmas dinner could be “cancelled.” That’s just how bad it is. The Brits are even delaying the shutdown of the country’s largest remaining coal-burning power plant.

Jason Bordoff of the Columbia Climate School and the Center on Global Energy Policy just published a long article giving his perspective on all this. He identifies several contributing factors:

( 1 ) Cold and hot weather affected gas consumption this year. Winter in much of the Northern Hemisphere was unusually cold earlier this year, which boosted gas demand for heating. And then a hot summer consumed more gas to make electricity for air conditioning. 

( 2 ) Other sources of electricity have been hampered. “Wind generation in Europe has been far below average this year due to long periods of less windy weather. …Demand for fossil fuels is set to spike further as Germany takes another three nuclear reactors off the grid this year as part of its nuclear shutdown. Meanwhile, drought conditions in China and South America have led to reduced hydropower output, drawing supplies of globally traded gas into those markets instead.”

( 3 ) The post-COVID economic recovery has boosted industrial demand.

( 4 ) Russia has restricted gas deliveries to Europe though the existing pipeline that runs through Ukraine. (Many observers see this as a pressure tactic to get Europe to switch over to a northern pipeline route, which would then remove the importance of Ukraine for Russian gas marketing, which would then give Russia a freer hand to resume military harassment of that country.) Also, European countries have restricted their own gas production. The Dutch are curtailing the production rate at their big Groningen gas field because local residents fear earthquakes from ground subsidence, and the Brits have restricted fracking of promising gas fields due to public protests.

As might be expected in our interconnected world, the European supply crunch has affected U.S. prices, which are at their highest level in five years. America exports gas via liquified natural gas (LNG) tankers, but U.S. gas supplies so far have not responded much to the price increase. The hostility of the Biden administration and pressure from green-leaning investors has discouraged petroleum companies from expanding drilling.

Meanwhile, California is running its own experiment in green energy  adoption:             

California, for example, is having trouble keeping the lights on as it rapidly scales the use of intermittent solar and wind power. It recently requested an emergency order from the U.S. federal government to maintain system reliability by, among other actions, allowing the state to require certain fossil fuel plants scheduled to retire to stay online and by loosening pollution restrictions. California is also proposing to build several temporary natural gas plants to avoid blackouts, even as the state shuts down the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which produces more zero-carbon electricity than all the state’s wind turbines combined.

Professor Bordoff notes that “Many projections for how quickly and how much clean energy can be scaled are based on stylized models of what is technically and economically possible”, and unsurprisingly calls for policies which mitigate volatility, e.g., “…regulatory and infrastructure policies can facilitate more integration, flexibility, and interconnectedness in the energy system—from power grids to pipelines—so there are more options to pull energy supplies into a market when needed.”

Oh, and this restatement of the obvious:  

Uncertainty about the pace of transition may lead to periodic shortfalls in supply if climate action shutters traditional fossil fuel infrastructure before alternatives can pick up the slack—as may be starting to happen in some places now. And if fossil fuel supply is curbed faster than the pace at which fossil fuel demand falls, shortfalls can result in market crunches that cause prices to spike and exacerbate existing geopolitical risks. In fact, this is what the International Energy Agency just warned is happening in oil markets—a striking contrast to what it said only a few months ago, when it warned that new fossil fuel supplies would not be needed if nations were on track to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

Me? After working through  all this material, I’m going to go buy me some shares of ExxonMobil, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S.

Clemens and Strain on Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes

Joy Buchanan2 Comments

In my Labor Economics class, I do a lecture on empirical work and the minimum wage, starting with Card & Kreuger (1993). I’m going to quickly tack on the new working paper by Clemens & Strain “The Heterogeneous Effects of Large and Small Minimum Wage Changes: Evidence over the Short and Medium Run Using a Pre-Analysis Plan”.

The results, as summarized in the second half of their abstract are:

relatively large minimum wage increases reduced employment rates among low-skilled individuals by just over 2.5 percentage points. Our estimates of the effects of relatively small minimum wage increases vary across data sets and specifications but are, on average, both economically and statistically indistinguishable from zero. We estimate that medium-run effects exceed short-run effects and that the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage is substantially more negative for large minimum wage increases than for small increases.

The variation in the data comes from choices by states to raise the minimum wage.

A number of states legislated and began to enact minimum wage changes that varied substantially in their magnitude. … The past decade thus provided a suitable opportunity to study the medium-run effects of both moderate minimum wage changes and historically large minimum wage changes.

We divide states into four groups designed to track several plausibly relevant differences in their minimum wage regimes. The first group consists of states that enacted no minimum wage changes between January 2013 and the later years of our sample. The second group consists of states that enacted minimum wage changes due to prior legislation that calls for indexing the minimum wage for inflation. The third and fourth groups consist of states that have enacted minimum wage changes through relatively recent legislation. We divide the latter set of states into two groups based on the size of their minimum wage changes and based on how early in our sample they passed the underlying legislation.

The “large” increase group includes states that enacted considerable change. New York and California “have legislated pathways to a $15 minimum wage, the full increase to which firms are responding exceed 60 log points in total.” Data comes from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS).

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