Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 597

School Report Cards Work

Simon Burgess, Deborah Wilson and Jack Worth look at what happened after school report card were abolished in Wales.

We test the hypothesis that the publication of school performance tables raises school effectiveness. Our data allow us to implement a classic difference-in-difference analysis comparing outcomes in England and Wales, before and after the abolition of the tables in Wales. We find significant and robust evidence that this reform markedly reduced school effectiveness in Wales. There is significant heterogeneity across schools: schools in the top quartile of the league tables show no effect. We also test whether the reform reduced school segregation in Wales, and find no systematic significant impact on either sorting by ability or by socioeconomic status.

Hat tip: Economic Logician who also notes this study on report cards in the Netherlands.

Assorted links

1. Yuck (but why?) markets in everything.

2. World freehand circle drawing champion (video).

3. Chess music.

4. What David Leonhardt has learned about higher education.

5. Why have pickpockets become less common?

6. My old review of Naomi Klein.

7. Brink Lindsey on TGS, demographics, and Robert Gordon.  And see the top two Robert Gordon links here.

State tax revenue fact of the day, or "the new normal"

GDP has now recovered to pre-crash levels, but how about state revenue?

On average it has returned to 89% of peak levels.  In Louisiana it is about 72 percent of peak levels, the lowest figure in the group.  In North Dakota it is over 110 percent.  Only New Hampshire and North Dakota are above 100 percent of peak levels.

I take these numbers to be one measure (not the only measure) of how much we had been overvaluing our actual wealth, pre-crisis.

Here is the on-line version of the WSJ article, it does not reproduce all of the information in the paper edition, pp.A6-7.

Eleven things you can learn from the very best economics papers

An excellent post.  By the way:

The 20 best papers in the AER's history average about 1.3 numbered equations per page.

At a recent Sacramento jobs fair

Some companies have even gone as far as posting signs, stating you must have a job just to fill out an application.

The article is here and the pointer is from Chris F. Masse.

What counts as enough progress?

Bruce Cleaver asks:

Pondering your thesis in TGS, (which has some evidence to back it up; the change in society from the early part of the 1900's to 1973 does seem sharper than subsequent change, irrespective of the status of median income),  I would ask you (in all seriousness) what changes/inventions now, today, if they were to exist, would cause you to say "The change from 1973 onward was just as sharp".  Flying cars? Affordable interplanetary space travel? Teleportation?

Teleportation is not required, though it would...suffice.  Alleviating traffic congestion would have been a significant advance, though we are moving in the opposite direction.  Add in a cure for cancer, 3-D printing, seventy percent green energy, life expectancy of ninety-five, a Segway that people want to use, and higher graduation rates than we had in the late 1960s, and we are getting there.  Median family income of $90,000.  As it stands, it seems we will be getting 3-D printing, although I am not sure exactly when or for how many items.

Coming at this from another direction, a few years in the late 1990s genuinely did not exhibit "great stagnation" numbers and this is consistent with on-the-ground observations at the time.  Think of the last forty years, and imagine that thirty or thirty-five of them were like that period. 

The Lucas critique and twin adoption studies

My response to Alex's last post again goes under the fold...

What are the incentives here?

Although inmate labor is helping budgets in many corners of state government, the savings are the largest in corrections departments themselves, which have cut billions of dollars in recent years and are under constant pressure to reduce the roughly $29,000 a year that it costs to incarcerate the average inmate in the United States.

Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, introduced a bill last month to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. Creating a national prison labor force has been a goal since he went to Congress in 1995, but it makes even more sense in this economy, he said.

Not that this could ever affect parole or imprisonment decisions...  I prefer a situation where each prisoner costs the state government a good deal.

The full story is here.

On-line juries

Is your spouse hogging the new car? Or refusing to do the dishes? Now you can take your dispute to an online jury of your peers at a new website called JabberJury.com.

Fast Company calls the website "The People's Court for the Facebook generation," while a press release dubs it "a true people's court." It's the brainchild of Chicago entrepreneurs Kevin Wielgus and Angelo Rago, who came up with the idea after Rago settled an argument with his girlfriend by asking bar patrons to weigh in. The dispute: Did his girlfriend have a right to be mad when he refused to visit her father in the hospital? (He was suffering from hemorrhoids, not a life-threatening disease.)

Recent cases posted at the website raise age-old questions such as: Are dogs superior to cats? What's the need for all those decorative pillows on the bed? And what's the big deal about chewing with your mouth open?

The full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Eapen Thampy.

Markets in everything

Turtlecalls.

...for two (2) dollars i will call your friend or enemy or boss or whoever and pretend to be a turtle for two (2) minutes

I am the first and best company for your turtlecall needs - the copycats may be cheaper but they barely even sound like real turtles

For the pointer I thank Hudson Collins.