2010

Year: 2010

Moneyball at The Academy

It’s the middle of the summer, and it’s time to check in with the I&E Reading Group. This summer, we have Michael Lewis’ Moneyball and Louis Menand’s Marketplace of Ideas. If you need a copy of either, I know we have them at The Mudd.

For our first book, Lewis provides us with a look at the world of baseball management. I would suggest that the money point of Moneyball has to do with the tension between quantitative tools and “experts” watching and assessing potential. In the context of evaluating talent, for example, should teams look at the numbers or listen to the scouts? But that isn’t quite right, either, because there is a long, entrenched history of listening to the scouts, so putting too much stock in the college on base percentage is anathema to the whole process.  The scouts don’t believe the numbers, and management trusts the scouts.  So the conventional wisdom is that the numbers lie.

It doesn’t end there, either.  The type of quantitative analysis used for player evaluation has been extended to on-the-field strategy, again exposing a tension between what the numbers guys say and what various experts (i.e., managers, sportswriters, fans) think. (For a similar example in the context of American football, see here).

Continue reading Moneyball at The Academy

Surely make you lose your mind…

Our first edition of the summer mailbag is here with a contribution from the always ebullient “Mr. O,” who says he sees economics everywhere these days.  The article in question has to do with a congesting pricing scheme in Chicago, and of particular interest to Mr. O is the methodology in which people’s time is valued.  As you may recall from, well, from all of my classes, a classic study by Deacon and Sonstelie that valued time by watching how long people were willing to wait to fill up their gasoline at price-controlled stations rather than paying market prices across the street.

In Chicago, as the saying goes, there are two seasons: winter and construction. And all that construction [isn’t] free. So the program would benefit those who are willing to pay for a faster commute (in the so-called “Lexis Lanes”) and raise bucketloads of cash for the metro area.

What’s the down side?

Should the Government Target Specific Industries?

Since at least the era of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, economists and policy makers have debated about the appropriate role for industrial policy; that is, the use of subsidy, tax, and regulatory policy to allocate capital.  The alleged “success” of Japan’s Ministry of Industrial Trade and Industry in the 1950s and 1960s found many advocates for government directed allocation of capital and funding.  Most recently, Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel,  strongly advocated a targeted focus on manufacturing.  Many others, and the vast majority of economists, argue that  governments are not better than markets at allocating capital and that subsidies for some require higher taxes for others.  They also argue that entrepreneurial efforts are channeled at attracting politicians rather than producing new products and attracting customers.

The Economist recently completed an open debate on this subject.  I encourage all to read the two sides and see which you find most persuasive.

Bad Day for Environmental Economics, And the Environment

Almost unnoticed, this week marks a terrible week for advocates of market solutions to environmental problems, including various cap-and-trade systems. The Wall Street Journal reports that new federal air pollution rules have resulted in the tanking of the sulfur dioxide market, rendering extant permits worthless.

Often referred to as “the grand policy experiment,” (also here), the SO2 market was considered a success, and thought of as a model for potential global system to reduce greenhouse gases.  As with so many cases in economics, a credible commitment matters.  The Journal sums it up nicely:

The market’s collapse shows how vulnerable market-based approaches to reducing air pollution are to government actions. That could scare off investors, who won’t commit to a market where the rules can change at any minute.

Indeed.

One of the great benefits of using market instruments to address environmental problems is that they can substantial lower the costs.  The law of demand says that as price goes up, people buy less.  As a result of the collapses of this market, we will likely pay more to get less in terms of environmental quality.  This may well undermine efforts to implement market solutions elsewhere.  If investors are convinced the regulatory environment is unstable or uncertain, they are unlikely to make large capital investments, and are more likely to take stopgap measures.

Let’s Mis-Behave

Economists are often chided for their “unrealistic” behavioral assumptions, specifically rational self-interest.  An obvious direction for research was to relax some of these assumptions, often with surprising results.  Indeed, the Nobel Prize in economics has gone to scholars such as Herb Simon and Daniel Kahneman for work that took a hard look at the rational man assumption.  But I would probably point to the blockbuster, almost freakish success of Freakonomics and Super-Freakonmomics, texts that sometimes venture into this realm, that put behavioral economics in the public eye.

George Lowenstein
George Lowenstein

Despite the success of behavioral economics and finance, we have to be careful how far we want to push it. “[I]t’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address,” says Carnegie Mellon’s George Lowenstein, one of the giants in the field. Writing a cautionary op-ed in today’s  New York Times, Lowenstein and his co-author give a number of examples where reliance on behavioral results can miss the forest through the trees.

A “gallons-per-mile” bill recently passed by the New York State Senate is intended to help drivers think more clearly about the fuel consumption of the vehicles they purchase; research has shown that gallons-per-mile is a more effective means of getting drivers to appreciate the realities of fuel consumption than the traditional miles-per-gallon.

But more and better information fails to get at the core of the problem: people drive large, energy-inefficient cars because gas is still relatively cheap. An increase in the gas tax that made the price of gas reflect its true costs would be a far more effective — though much more politically painful — way to reduce fuel consumption.

I think the LU economists are with Lowenstein on this one.  We believe that you need to be grounded with a clear understanding of the fundamentals in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the discipline.

Know Your LU Econ Bloggers

I came across a research note on how bloggers reveal their personality types through their word choices.

More neurotic bloggers used more words associated with negative emotions; extravert bloggers used more words pertaining to positive emotions; high scorers on agreeableness avoided swear words and used more words related to communality; and conscientious bloggers mentioned more words with achievement connotations. These were all as expected. More of a surprise was the lack of a link between the Big Five personality factor of ‘openness to experience’ and word categories related to intellectual or sensory experience. Instead openness was associated with more use of prepositions, more formal language and longer words.

I wasn’t really sure of what to make of that (did they misspell extrovert?), but fortunately, the comments section directed me to the www.typealyzer.com site — a site that allows me to take a look for myself.  A few clicks later and it turns out that we fall into the category, The Thinkers.

The logical and analytical type. [LU Econ Bloggers] are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. [LU Econ Bloggers] are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. (emphasis added)

That sounds about right.  And it continues…

[LU Econ Bloggers] enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality.

Wow, they sure have us pegged.

Since [LU Econ Bloggers] are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Well, you can’t win ’em all.

Didje See that Dean Pertl Article?

Speaking of careers in business, Dean of the Conservatory, Brian Pertl, poses the question, “What on earth could playing a Mozart symphony have to do with leading a budget proposal meeting?”

Plenty is his response at the Entrepreneur The Arts blog.

Coming on the heels of the successful Entrepreneurship in the Arts and Society class this past term, this is a very encouraging message indeed.  And especially so for those of us who believe in the mission and the viability of the liberal arts.

Don’t forget, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan was a clarinet student at Julliard before dropping out to tour with Stan Getz. Is that why they called him Maestro?

Don’t Feel Like You *Have* To Become a CEO

News from the research front that (some) economics majors are going places. To wit, “the share of graduates who were Economics majors who were CEOs in 2004 was greater than that for any other major, including Business Administration and Engineering.”

Here’s the paper, appropriately titled “Economics: A Good Choice of Major for Future CEOs,” and here’s from the abstract:

We find evidence that Economics is a good choice of major for those aspiring to become a CEO. Economics ranked third with 9% of the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies in 2004 being undergraduate Economics majors, behind Business Administration and Engineering majors, each of which accounted for 20% of the CEOs. When adjusting for size of the pool of graduates, those with undergraduate degrees in Economics are shown to have had a greater likelihood of becoming an S&P 500 CEO than any other major. That is, the share of graduates who were Economics majors who were CEOs in 2004 was greater than that for any other major, including Business Administration and Engineering. The findings also show that a higher percentage of CEOs who were Economics majors subsequently completed a graduate degree – often an MBA – than did their counterparts with Business Administration and Engineering degrees.

I nicked that from Marginal Revolution, and I’m certain there will be plenty of snarky commentary over there about it.

Some other interesting data over there. For example, the total number of business majors is split pretty evenly between males and females, but economics is 70% male. Of course, females now make up 60% of the undergraduate population.

Partial Financial Regulation

The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki claims the financial reform bill pending in Congress has some real teeth, yet somehow it exempts a major chuck of the consumer credit market — auto dealers.

There are close to eight hundred and fifty billion dollars’ worth of auto loans outstanding in the U.S.—about as much as our total credit-card debt—and car dealers broker about eighty per cent of them. Since the central task of the new consumer financial-protection agency is to oversee the market for consumer credit, which has become something of a cesspool in recent years, it would have been natural for car dealers to fall under its jurisdiction. Instead, the dealers won a special exemption: the agency can’t touch them.

Now that’s an interesting.

Do you buy his explanation for why car dealers succeeded in dodging where others failed? Not everyone agrees.

Henry George Rises from the Dead

Who is Henry George? you might ask.  A good question.  A simple answer would be a 19th century printer who believed that a single tax on land would be an effective social liberator.  As students of Urban Economics might recall, George argued that rises in land value (as distinct from the structures put on land) come largely from social rather than private investments; thus, such rises should be taxed and used to meet various public purposes.

In today’s Financial Times, Martin Wolf opines that we (at least policy makers in the US and UK)  provide both cheap capital and insufficient taxation on these “unearned” increments in land value.  Furthermore, he believes that such value increments should be taxed if we seek to avoid credit cycles of the sort we have recently experienced.  One might view existent policies as the opposite of  “think global, act local” since the resulting credit booms and busts (based on securitized loan packages sold to an integrated, world financial system) have spread well beyond their their initial homes.  “Freemarketeer” Wolf, acting as a reincarnated “socialist” Henry George, sees the need to halt these land and credit cycles with a land increment tax.

As noted in my comment on Michael Spence’s opinion piece, also in today’s FT,  in the previous LU Econblog entry, it’s not clear to me how political logic will help us to break these destructive cycles.

America Needs a Growth Strategy

Michael Spence, 2001 Nobel Prize winner and chair of the Commission on Growth Development established by the World Bank, has just authored a sobering editorial on the lack of a growth strategy in the United States.  Students in both Econ 200 and Econ 430 will  have the opportunity to read and discuss the summary report of the Growth Commission this fall.

Spence, similar to Raghu Rajan in the recently published book Fault Lines, argues that America’s social contract is breaking done.  That “contract” married a flexible open economy with the promise of improved living standards for the “motivated and diligent.”   Its foundation based on a stable, growing economy seems very much in question.  Economists debate about what the “New Normal” might look like, but most argue it won’t be as attractive as the old (or at least perceived old) normal.  They differ as to why things are coming undone and what one should do about it, but Spence argues persuasively that without well thought out and implemented policy, “the new normal may be as unpleasant as the journal.”

In my view, this means we must transcend the vacuous discussion that arises from Krugman vs. the Tea Party.  In a world of 30 second sound bites (except for vavuzelas and LeBron James announcements), it’s not clear how we will do so.

Gambling on the Economy

I saw an interesting bit over at Bloomberg Businessweek about how to think about the trajectory.  It’s colorful, gangsta-esque title is “Krugman or Paulson: Who You Gonna Bet On?” On the one hand, you have Paul Krugman warning of a depression without very tall cash-on-the-barrelhead government spending monetary outlays.  On the other, you have billionaire Henry Paulson literally putting his money on a recovery:

Paulson’s latest 13f filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission indicates nearly $2.995 billion of Bank of America common stock and $2.052 billion of Citigroup common. Despite healthy advances from their spring 2009 lows, banks may have more room to run, particularly if Paulson is correct in the estimate he made to investors that housing prices will rise as much as 10 percent next year.

Since his initial forays in banks, Paulson has ventured into riskier assets like casino stocks and vacant residential land in the utterly busted Florida and Southern California markets. As a private hedge fund manager, Paulson is not obliged to provide a complete picture of his investments; long positions could be hedged with shorts and derivatives that he does not have to divulge. But nothing in either his statements or reports about what he’s buying suggests he is anything less than upbeat about the economy right now.

I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison, because Paulson is simply betting on certain sectors, some of which benefit handsomely from government policies.  So his bets don’t necessarily represent a “stimulus v. no stimulus” type of comparison.

What is it about people wanting to bet Krugman? Last year, in what New York Magazine hailed as “the nerdiest bet ever,” Greg Mankiw threw down and bet Krugman about the administration’s GDP forecast.

Paul Krugman suggests that my skepticism about the administration’s growth forecast over the next few years is somehow “evil.” Well, Paul, if you are so confident in this forecast, would you like to place a wager on it and take advantage of my wickedness?

Who knew economists could be so catty?

Safety First

“The safer they make the cars, the more risks the driver is willing to take. It’s called the Peltzman effect.” — Some CSI Episode

The basic idea is so simple that it’s hardly controversial.  If you reduce the cost of doing something, you would expect more of it.  The classic Sam Peltzman paper has to do with making cars safer, which reduces the costs (in terms of potential injury or fatality) and hence increases “driver intensity,” as Peltzman puts it.  The startling result is that the behavioral changes completely offset the technological improvements, though this does not have to be so.

This is similar to the “rebound effect,” where improving energy efficiency or fuel economy, for example, causes people to set their thermostats more aggressively or to drive more miles (that is, because the marginal costs go down).

The Peltzman effect has crept into my RSS feed twice in the past week.  From this morning’s Marginal Revolution:

The NHTSA had volunteers drive a test track in cars with automatic lane departure correction, and then interviewed the drivers for their impressions. Although the report does not describe the undoubted look of horror on the examiner’s face while interviewing one female, 20-something subject, it does relay the gist of her comments.

After she praised the ability of the car to self-correct when she drifted from her lane, she noted that she would love to have this feature in her own car. Then, after a night of drinking in the city, she would not have to sleep at a friend’s house before returning to her rural home.

Well, that certainly makes me feel safer.

One of the classic jokes associated with the Peltzman effect is that NHTSA should put a spear extending out of the steering column, making the driver exercise extra caution so as not to be impaled. In that vein, the good folks at Organizations & Markets alerted me to this cartoon:

Pretty funny.

Peltzman is one of the most prominent empirical economists ever.  Certainly, having an “effect” named after you is a pretty big deal.  Some of the more astute of you also recall Peltzman from the Stigler-Peltzman capture theory. Love him or hate him, he is an interesting character.  I recommend this interview at EconTalk.

800 Years of Ineptitude

For today’s recommended reading, The New York Times profiles Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, authors of This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

You may recall this title from our summer reading recommendations that we posted a few weeks ago.  You can find a paper approximation of the book here and a summary of its principal findings here.

Both of these economists seem to be pretty interesting characters and the article is a fun read.

Whatever Works

The misery accompanying the U.S. recession / depression manifests itself firstly, I think, through the job market.  There seems to be an increasing perception that policymakers in Washington and at the Fed aren’t taking the unemployment situation seriously enough. Nonetheless, jobs are certainly on the minds of people who have them and, even moreso, people who don’t have them. We learned yesterday that the declining unemployment rate is actually bad news. Why? Well, in order to be counted as unemployed, a person has to be seeking employment, and consequently so-called discouraged workers, people who are no longer looking for work, do not count as unemployed.  And would-be workers are pretty darned discouraged.

This gives us a fundamental measurement problem, how can we determine how bad the employment situation really is?  One common way to tackle it has been to track the total adult population in the workforce.

EmpPop

As you can see, the picture isn’t a pretty one. Continue reading Whatever Works

To Spend or Not To Spend…

Most economists haven’t really been thinking about this issue, they haven’t really focused on it. It’s not their specialty. Most economists today, they haven’t really been thinking about this kind of multiplier issue… I don’t think most economists are focused on this, or that they’re familiar with the empirical evidence. I don’t think they’ve really worked on the theory. So I don’t know, maybe they have some opinion that they got from graduate school or something. — Robert Barro in The Atlantic Monthly

Even if by accident, you’ve probably noticed that there is an on-going debate on whether a massive government spending campaign is needed to “prime the pump” to stimulate the economy (the Keynesian route), or whether fiscal discipline (austerity) is in order. Last week, most members of the G-20 (but not the US) came down on the side of austerity.

As a trained economist, I know the basic institutional details and understand the basic arguments, but as Barro suggests, I have no great insight on the empirics or which side of the debate is likely to be correct.

Certainly, the primary mouthpiece for the pro-spend crowd is recent Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman.  In a recent column, he tears into those who promote “austerity”:

So the next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good.

Of course, not all economists agree with Krugman’s assessment. In addition to our friend Hayek, Robert Barro is pretty clearly on the austerity side. This interview with Barro is a good place to see a sketch of the battle lines in the debate, and certainly indicates that he and Krugman are not on particularly friendly terms.  This week, Harvard professor Alberto Alesina is getting some press for his advocacy of austerity measures. And, as for the regime uncertainty argument that Krugman caricatures, I would recommend Robert Higgs as the central proponent of that idea.

As for me, I am not sure exactly what I learned in grad school that prepares me to take a side in this debate. What I find interesting is that most people who engage me in a discussion seem to think the Keynsian spending route is the way to go, and many of these folks invoke Krugman on this point as if Krugman is the voice of the profession. As today’s Krugman piece indicates, he seems to think that many in the profession are moving in quite the opposite direction. It’s not clear to me whether this boils down to pre-conceived ideology or not, but that is certainly his claim.

I guess I will leave it at that.

UPDATE: Keynes v. Hayek in print. Commentary here.

A Prescription for Innovation

A Sign of the Times

ANYONE who thinks it would be easy to get rich selling marijuana in a state where it’s legal should spend an hour with Ravi Respeto, manager of the Farmacy, an upscale dispensary here that offers Strawberry Haze, Hawaiian Skunk and other strains of Cannabis sativa at up to $16 a gram.

The illicit drug market seems to me to be an excellent place to think about the nature of markets and competition (e.g., how much does it dampen demand? How do suppliers emerge and compete? What is the effect of a major bust on industry-wide prices and profits?). And, as we all know, many of those folks make very tall dollars.

But what what would if those drugs were suddenly legal? As the above quotation, taken from a New York Times article on medical marijuana in Colorado, suggests, competition has a funny way of making it hard to make money. So, I suspect that liberalization of drug laws will make for a fascinating route to explore market processes, including the role of innovation and entrepreneurship in these markets. There is also a an excellent piece from The New Yorker on “how medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry” in California.

We’ll be on the lookout for how this all shakes out.

Political Economy of Regulation, Final Exam Question

With new financial regulations (potentially, yes, potentially) imminent, today’s question is why Congress is delegating so much of the authority to regulators to craft the actual rules of governance:

Consumer and financial lobbyists alike are marshalling the troops on K Street to impact the decisions regulators make in setting new rules after Congress finished writing the Dodd-Frank Act on Friday. The 2,000-page financial overhaul bill is expected to face a final vote this week, but despite its length, it leaves many specific directives to regulators. Regulators are left with the freedom to decide what kinds of trading are included in the prohibition against banks’ investment of their own money and “how much money banks have to set aside against unexpected losses.”

Now, the first question is, why would Congress delegate so much authority? Is it in deference to regulators’ superior knowledge? Or do you think it has something to do with not taking responsibility? Or do you have another explanation?

The second question has to do with the relationship between industry and regulators. If you believe in the capture theory (and many of you do), what type of explanation would you give for delegation? And, what sort of outcomes might you expect from this round of legislative reform?

Wait, the term is over? What?