J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 289
October 14, 2018
On My Bedside Table: A Baker's Dozen (2018-10-14)...
Aliette de Bodard: Master of the House of Darts https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1625671628
Miguel Leon-Portillo: The Broken Spears: Aztec Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0807055018
Tristram Hunt: Marx���s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1429983558
Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer: A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0691184925
Martha Wells: Exit Strategy: The Murderbot diaries https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1250185467
Garett Stefan Jones: Karl Marx https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674974808
Whit Stillman: Love and Friendship: In Which Jane Austen���s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0316294152
Ashoka Mody: Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0199351392
James Shapiro: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0061840904
Gary Gorton and Ellis Tallman: Fighting Financial Crises: Learning from the Past https://books.google.com/books?isbn=022647951X
Maury Klein: The Genesis of Industrial America: 1870 to 1920 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1139465988
Mark Kurlansky: Salt: A World History https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0698139151
#books
Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Ro...
Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing: "The rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension of work, a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from ���rms...
...To date, a lack of suitable existing data has precluded empirical investigation of how such precarious scheduling practices affect the health and wellbeing of workers. We use an innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of the US workforce: hourly workers in the service sector. These data reveal relationships between exposure to routine instability in work schedules and psychological distress, poor sleep quality, and unhappiness. While low wages are also associated with these outcomes, unstable and un-predictable schedules are much more strongly associated. Further, while precarious schedules a���ect worker wellbeing in part through the mediating in���uence of household economic insecurity, a much larger proportion of the association is driven by work-life con���ict. The temporal dimension of work is central to the experience of precarity and an important social determinant of worker wellbeing....
#shouldread
#equitablegrowth
#labormarket
October 13, 2018
"P-hacking is a substantial problem in research employing...
"P-hacking is a substantial problem in research employing DID and (in particular) IV": Abel Brodeur: Methods Matter: P-Hacking and Causal Inference in Economics: "The economics ���credibility revolution��� has promoted the identification of causal relationships using difference-in-differences (DID), instrumental variables (IV), randomized control trials (RCT) and regression discontinuity design (RDD) methods. The extent to which a reader should trust claims...
...about the statistical significance of results proves very sensitive to method. Applying multiple methods to 13,440 hypothesis tests reported in 25 top economics journals in 2015, we show that selective publication and p-hacking is a substantial problem in research employing DID and (in particular) IV. RCT and RDD are much less problematic. Almost 25% of claims of marginally significant results in IV papers are misleading...
#shouldread
#statistics
Yes, "overeducation" is a thing: Ammar Farooq: The U-Shap...
Yes, "overeducation" is a thing: Ammar Farooq: The U-Shape of Over-Education? Human Capital Dynamics nd Occupational Mobility Over the Life Cycle: "The proportion of college degree holders working in occupations that do not require a college degree is U-shaped over the life cycle and that there is a rise in transitions to non-college jobs among prime age college workers...
...The downward trend at initial stages of the life cycle is consistent with workhorse models of labor mobility, however, the rising trend at middle stages of the career is not. Such movements down the occupation ladder are also accompanied by average wage losses of 10% from the previous year. I develop an equilibrium model of frictional occupation matching featuring skill accumulation and depreciation along with worker and firm heterogeneity that can match the life cycle profile of downward occupational mobility. The model shows that skill depreciation is the key driver of transitions to low skill jobs with age. Using the model, I simulate the impact of different types of structural change in the labor market and find that the welfare consequences of long term changes depend on the interaction of the life cycle and human capital investment dimension...
#shouldread
#education
#labormarket
#equitablegrowth
Yes, the relationship between the unemployment rate and t...
Yes, the relationship between the unemployment rate and the vacancy rate is back to its pre-2008 normal. But the relationship between the prime-age employment rate and the vacancy rate is not. Whether the U.S. is now at "full employment" is thus a very dicy and unsettled question: Will McGrew: JOLTS Day Graphs: July 2018 Report Edition: "The Beveridge Curve maintains its levels near those last seen during the expansion of the early 2000s: The relationship between the U.S. unemployment rate and the open job rate is back to its pre-recession normal:
#shouldread
#monetarypolicy
#labormarket
Jeffrey Frankel: The New and Not Improved NAFTA: "US Pres...
Jeffrey Frankel: The New and Not Improved NAFTA: "US President Donald Trump has called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which succeeds NAFTA, 'the single greatest agreement ever signed'. In reality, it is not as good as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, from which Trump withdrew The U.S.... While this outcome is better than an end to free trade in North America, the USMCA is no improvement over the status quo.Of course, this is Trump���s modus operandi: threaten to do something catastrophic, so people are relieved when things get only a little bit worse...
#shouldread
#orangehairedbaboons
#globalization
Silvia Merler: Economy of Intangibles: "Over the past 20 ...
Silvia Merler: Economy of Intangibles: "Over the past 20 years, there has been a steady rise in the importance of intangible investments.... Intangibles share four economic features: scalability, sunkenness, spillovers, and synergies. Haskel and Westlake argue that���taken together���these measurements and economic properties might help us understand secular stagnation...
...The first link between intangible investment and secular stagnation is,according to Haskel and Westlake, mismeasurement. If we mismeasure investment, then measured investment, GDP, and its growth might be too low. Secondly, since intangibles tend to generate more spillovers, a slowdown in intangible capital services growth would manifest itself in the data as a slowdown in total-factor productivity (TFP) growth. Thirdly, intangible-rich firms are scaling up dramatically, contributing to the widening gap between leading and lagging firms. Fourthly, TFP growth could be slower because intangibles are somehow generating fewer spillovers than they used to....
Caggese and P��rez-Orive��argued that low interest rates can hurt capital reallocation in addition to reduce aggregate productivity and output in economies that rely strongly on intangible capital.... Productive credit-constrained firms can only borrow against the collateral value of their tangible assets.... Kiyotaki and Zhang��examine how aggregate output and income distribution interact with accumulation of intangible capital over time and across generations.... Doettling and Perotti��argue that technological progress enhancing the productivity of skills and intangible capital can account for... long term financial trends.... As creating intangibles requires a commitment to human capital rather than physical investments, firms need less external finance....
Intangibles raise questions on the policy side too.... Martin Wolf... argues that...��they subvert the familiar functioning of a competitive market economy, most importantly because intangible assets are mobile and thus hard to tax.... Guntram Wolff��has a chart showing that Germany is under-performing in intangible investments compared to its peers.... Roger Farmer��thinks that intangible investments influence company profitability. If technology companies��� profits are continually reinvested as intangibles, earnings may never appear as output in GDP statistics, but they will affect the company���s market value. For government leaders concerned with providing goods and services during a period of slow growth, getting a handle on this unmeasured GDP is essential...
#shouldread
#riseoftherobots
October 12, 2018
Marco Arment: Why It���s Hard to Read the Time on Infog...
Marco Arment: Why It���s Hard to Read the Time on Infograph: "Across a wide variety of brands, styles, and price points, a few key design principles are clear: (1) The hour markers for 12 (and often 3/6/9) are more prominent. (2) The hour indices are much larger than the minute markings. (3) The hour hands nearly touch the hour indices. These all improve legibility...
...by making it as fast and easy as possible to know which hour is being indicated (and minimize the chance of an off-by-one error), first by orienting your eyes to the current rotation with the 12 marker, then by minimizing the distance between the hour hand and the indices it���s between. Apple Watch���s analog faces all fail to achieve these principles.... Infograph is similar, but even worse: its hour indices are more faint, it uses 30-second markings instead of minute markings, and its default Calendar display wipes out the top three indices. (At least you can tell which way is up.)... When it���s being used as Apple seems to intend, time-telling at a glance is so difficult that many people have actually suggested setting the digital time as the center complication, at which point the hands are just a nuisance and we should stop pretending it���s an analog face....
We���re three years and four generations into the Apple Watch, and almost every Watch owner I know still uses the same handful of ���good��� faces.... Modular.... Utility.... If you want indices instead of numerals���probably the most popular analog watch style in the world���I don���t think there is a good option.... And we���re restricted to the handful of good watch faces that Apple makes, because other developers aren���t allowed to make custom Watch faces.
The Apple Watch is an amazing feat of technology. It���s a computer. It can display anything. With no mechanical or physical limitations to hold us back, any watch-face design from anyone could plausibly be built, enabling a range of creativity, style, and usefulness that no single company could ever design on its own. But they won���t let us. In a time when personal expression and innovation in watch fashion should be booming, they���re instead being eroded, as everyone in the room is increasingly wearing the same watch with the same two faces. Open this door, Apple...
#shouldread
#riseoftherobots
#ux
Daniel Little: Social Mobility Disaggregated: "Valuable c...
Daniel Little: Social Mobility Disaggregated: "Valuable contribution from the research group around Raj Chetty, Nathan Hendren, and John Friedman... on... neighborhood-level social mobility.... Children born in Highland Park, Michigan earned an average individual income as adults in 2014-15 of $18K; children born in Plymouth, Michigan earned an average individual income as adults of $42K...
....These differences in economic outcomes are highly racialized; in many of the tracts in the Detroit area there are "insufficient data" for either black or white individuals to provide average data for these sub-populations in the given areas. This reflects the substantial degree of racial segregation that exists in the Detroit metropolitan area. (The project provides a special study of opportunity in Detroit, "Finding Opportunity in Detroit".) This dataset is genuinely eye-opening for anyone interested in the workings of economic opportunity in the United States...
#shouldread
#equitablegrowth
I still have a hard time believing the U.S. is launching ...
I still have a hard time believing the U.S. is launching a trade war that no domestic interest group wants: Barry Eichengreen, Sean Randolph, and Jonathan R. Visbal: A War of Trade? Protectionist Policies Under Trump: "1,300 Chinese products... a 25% tariff... over $46 billion worth of goods. In response, China produced its own list...
...Already, solar panels, washing machines, steel, and aluminum have been subject to new tariffs, falling in line with key campaign promises made by candidate Trump to negotiate ���better deals��� on trade agreements and put "America first." Yet, the International Monetary Fund chief, Christine Lagarde, when speaking about the dangers of protectionism for the global economy, recently warned that ���The system of rules and shared responsibility is now in danger of being torn apart. This would be an inexcusable, collective policy failure.��� How deep of an impact will these current policy shifts have on the United States and on our trade partners? What kinds of ���bad deals��� are Trump and the US administration pursuing? What will the United States��� economy look like in the future if Trump does go full protectionist and who benefits from a trade war?... Discuss the implications of protectionism on the economy, how other countries are reacting to these potential regulations, and what impact an international trade war might have on the global economy.
#shouldread
#globalization
#orangehairedbaboons
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