Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 543

Assorted links

1. China markets in everything, fake iPhone signature.

2. Remastering music for the iPod age.

3. It appears the Slovaks will name a bridge after Chuck Norris.

4. Incorporating physiological observations into economics.

5. Via The Browser, predictions about Syria.

6. Sam Bowman reviews Daniel Klein.

China Fact of the Day: China Outsources to Europe

Spiegel: Great Wall this week became the first Chinese automobile manufacturer to open an automobile assembly plant inside the European Union…

…Bulgaria, the EU's poorest country, is attractive as a labor market because it is an oasis of cheap wages and low taxes. Workers are considered well educated and the country is ideal as the site for a company like Great Wall to launch. Given that wages for factory workers have risen considerably in China in recent years, assembly sites abroad have become increasingly attractive for some manufacturers.

Expect to see a lot more of this in coming years.. As wealth and consumption increases, China will also begin to import more from developed countries, including more finished goods.

Markets in everything, Friday cat blogging edition

Jordana Serebrenik may be New York City's only for-hire pet-cat catcher. Her service, Catch Your Cat, Etc., does what it suggests: Ms. Serebrenik, a Murray Hill resident, will go to your home and corral your cat in situations when you cannot do so or prefer not to.

Her clients range from the old or physically impaired to those distraught at the idea of having to force their cat to go somewhere they do not want to go: the vet, for example.

"Some people just need someone who isn't emotionally attached," Ms. Serebrenik said.

Her business card — which asks, "Can't get Fluffy into a carrier?" — is in veterinarians' waiting rooms and pet supply stores around the city. Testimonials on her Facebook page are effusive.

A catch goes for about $80, and the video at the beginning is good.  Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Richard Herron.

Is charity a major source of deadweight loss?

From the excellent Stefano DellaVigna, John List, and Ulrike Malmendier:

Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.80 for an in-state charity and $1.40 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower the utility of the potential donors.

Do read the whole thing, superb research design.  What percentage of human activity might be well-described by a similar hypothesis?

Here is my 2006 NYT column on John List's work on charity, he is one of the leading economists today.

Hans-Werner Sinn on the "green paradox"

The period of real [energy] price declines coincided with the emergence of the "green" movement and the re-orientation of the world energy policies by way of inducing direct demand restraints and introducing incentive systems to foster the development of "green" replacement technologies.  Thus, the threat of market destruction may indeed have increased the supply of fossil fuels enough to more than offset the growing world demand, thereby inducing real energy prices to fall, contrary to what a forward-looking explanation along the lines of Hotelling's theory would have suggested prima facie.

That is from Sinn's new book The Green Paradox: A Supply-Side Approach to Global Warming.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson are now blogging

Really, find them here!  They promise me there will be plenty to come and soon.  The blog is related to their very good forthcoming book Why Nations Fail.  It is no exaggeration to place their work at the very very top of "institutional economics" in today's profession.  They are now in my RSS feed.

Immigration fact of the day

From Dan Griswold, via Bryan Caplan:

The typical foreign-born adult resident of the United States today is more likely to participate in the work force than the typical native-born American. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2011), the labor-force participation rate of the foreign-born in 2010 was 67.9 percent, compared to the native-born rate of 64.1 percent. The gap was especially high among men. The labor-force participation rate of foreign-born men in 2010 was 80.1 percent, a full 10 percentage points higher than the rate among native-born men.

Labor-force participation rates were highest of all among unauthorized male immigrants in the United States. According to estimates by Jeffrey Passell (2006) of the Pew Hispanic Center, 94 percent of illegal immigrant men were in the labor force in the mid-2000s.

Assorted links

1. Will China be the last to emerge from the global economic crisis?

2. Which English-speaking country is most likely to be overrun by Spanish speakers?, and claims about the poverty trap which I do not believe.

3. Cleaner fish.

4. One metric of which professions are the most sleep-deprived.

5. The Google glasses, and Ozimek here.

*Fairness and Freedom*

The author is David Hackett Fischer and the subtitle is A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States.  Excerpt:

They do not all climb mountains, play rugby, raise sheep, and consume large platters of Pavlova for dessert.

So far it is the best non-fiction book of the year, by a clear mark, I will read more of it soon.

The economics of TV pundit panels

@ModeledBehavior tweets:

Who'll write "the economics of CNNs extremely, extremely ****ing banal pundit panel". Surely, there must be a reason for it?

Except he spelt out the entire word.

The goal is to keep people on the same channel, by whatever means possible.  The true end of the debate event means the TV will be turned off or the channel switched.  It's not like the old days when on Saturday night the people who wanted to see "Mary Tyler Moore Show" then wanted to watch Bob Newhart afterwards.  There is no real sequel to these "debates," or at least no appropriate sequel which can be enacted with the aid of a television.

So they will do everything possible to stretch out the event.  Furthermore, the viewers actually want to talk to each other about the debates, so the continuation should be something which does not command too much viewer attention.  No Evil Knievel.  The panel is a signal of "now is the focal time to make fun of these guys with the other people on your sofa," don't stop, keep up the jokes guys, and the panel members, perhaps unintentionally, try to stretch out that period of your witty mockery for as long as possible.  Which isn't that long, but hey they have to try.