Alice Evans on female labor force participation and appreciation of female talent
Abhay Aneja and colleagues reveal that daughters of civil servants who were more exposed to female co-workers during WWI were significantly more likely to work. For each standard deviation increase in exposure to female co-workers, the gender gap in labor force participation for children narrowed by over 4 percentage points. This represents a 9% decline in the average labor force participation gap. Importantly, these effects were
- Driven by increased labor force participation of daughters (sons are unaffected)
- Strongest for children who, at the time of exposure, were teenagers
- Present even for children who moved away from their parents’ original city
Here is the full post.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Religious membership aided post-hurricane recovery growth.
2. Anna Gát Hope Axis podcast with Noah Smith.
3. Peter Gray on social media and depression.
4. Intellectual courage as the scarcest resource.
5. Richard Ngo on counterproductive activism.
U.S: elevators are much more expensive
Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs, and inspections all cost more in America too.
The first thing to notice about our elevators is that, like many things in America, they are huge. New elevators outside the U.S. are typically sized to accommodate a person in a large wheelchair plus somebody standing behind them. American elevators have ballooned to about twice that size, driven by a drip-drip-drip of regulations, each motivated by a slightly different concern — first accessibility, then accommodation for ambulance stretchers, then even bigger stretchers.
Large Firms in the South Korean Growth Miracle
We quantify the contribution of the largest firms to South Korea’s economic performance over the period 1972-2011. Using firm-level historical data, we document a novel fact: firm concentration rose substantially during the growth miracle period. To understand whether rising concentration contributed positively or negatively to South Korean real income, we build a quantitative heterogeneous firm small open economy model. Our framework accommodates a variety of potential causes and consequences of changing firm concentration: productivity, distortions, selection into exporting, scale economies, and oligopolistic and oligopsonistic market power in domestic goods and labor markets. The model is implemented directly on the firm-level data and inverted to recover the drivers of concentration. We find that most of the differential performance of the top firms is attributable to higher productivity growth rather than differential distortions. Exceptional performance of the top 3 firms within each sector relative to the average firms contributed 15% to the 2011 real GDP and 4% to the net present value of welfare over the period 1972-2011. Thus, the largest Korean firms were superstars rather than supervillains.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Jaedo Choi, Andrei A. Levchenko, Dimitrije Ruzic, and Younghun Shim.
Monday assorted links
New Ross Douthat book
Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, pre-order here. Self-recommending, some would say God recommends it too. Here is the chain of links to my earlier exchange with Ross on whether one should believe in God.
Agricultural Productivity in Africa
If you look at total output, Peter Coy notes that sub-Saharan Africa looks quite impressive with gains in total output exceeding that in the rest of the world.
But almost all of this has come from using more inputs, especially land. If you look at output per unit of input, i.e. total factor productivity (TFP) then sub-Saharan Africa not only trails the rest of the world, it’s falling behind.
Things get much worse if you look at agricultural productivity by country. Alice Evans points us to “the most important graph” from work by Suri et al. (2024) which shows shockingly that since ~2010 agricultural productivity has plummeted in many African nations. I found this graph hard to believe.
The numbers are correct based on data from the USDA but digging deeper, I noted that the two worst performing countries are Djibouti and Botswana–two small countries where agriculture is less than 5% of GDP and where climate and land mean that agriculture has no hope of ever being a great success. Moreover, Djibouti is growing rapidly and Botswana is a middle-income country with a booming economy. I suspect that what is going on here is that a growing economy is pulling the best (unmeasured) people and resources out of agriculture which leads what was already a small sector to become less productive on paper, albeit at no great loss to the economy.
In contrast, the countries where Ag TFP is rising the most are Zimbabwe and Senegal where agriculture is a much larger share of GDP and employment (Zimbabwe ~11-14% of GDP, 70% of employment and Senegal 16% of GDP, 30% of employment). So the good news is that agricultural productivity is growing in places where it is important.
Bottom line is that agricultural productivity in Africa is low. I see the primary cause as being small firms which means there are few opportunities for economies of scale, mechanization and R&D (see Suri et al. (2024) for a longer discussion.). Climate change is a threat and developing climate-resistant crops, especially for Africa where heat stress will become increasingly important, has high potential returns.
Overall, however, my conclusion is that although agricultural productivity in Africa is low and there are threats on the horizon the situation is getting modestly better rather than dramatically worse.
Sierra Leone update
An addiction crisis is gripping Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest nations, driven by a surge in use of “kush”, a toxic blend of psychoactive substances. As the West African nation struggles to boost its economy, thousands of unemployed young adults have turned to the potent alternative to marijuana to fill their days.
The kush crisis is part of a growing trend of substance abuse across Africa, particularly among the continent’s youth.
“People are addicted to escape,” said Abass Wurie, a biomedical scientist in Freetown who is studying the effects of the drug on the heart and kidney.
Here is more from Aanu Adeoye at the FT. Is this a new trend for very poor countries, as the prices of escapist, addictive drugs fall all the more?
Incentives matter, for childbirth too
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
There is in fact a pronounced “baby bump” in December. The numbers show that induced deliveries and scheduled Caesarian section deliveries are higher than average toward the very end of the year.
Why? In the US, there are significant tax advantages to having a child. If you are a single parent with an adjusted gross income below $112,500, an extra child brings you a $3,600 child tax credit per year.
So — speaking strictly about the tax implications, of course — a New Year’s Eve baby is better than New Year’s baby: You can claim that little bundle of joy as a dependent for the entire year, even though they were only there for a day of it. Yet further benefits could come from state-level earned income tax credit and child tax credit programs.
You might argue that the parents, not the kids, gain the most from these tax benefits. You might also ask if there are some costs to these newly born children. In fact, the study shows that these children have lower birthweights. Further research shows that the accelerated births had noticeable impacts on the children, again finding lower birthweights.
The good news, however, is that those same kids have accelerated weight gains over the course of subsequent examinations. The further good news is that those children reach early development milestones at a faster pace than average. That may reflect the extra income the parents have, since higher income and other positive parental features do predict better developmental outcomes for the kids.
Don’t wait until April!
How democratic are the French results?
Here is the source tweet.
The French left is now winning
This is a big surprise to many people, as in the first round the right was doing much better in terms of votes and seats. We’ll learn more soon, but in the meantime I am reminded of one of the paradoxes in the theory of expressive voting. You might want to send a protest vote, but you don’t want too many other people sending the same protest vote. For instance, some people voting for Ralph Nader didn’t really want him to win. And the same may be true for the French right. So the very show of force from the right, in the first round, may have limited their subsequent numbers. More generally, you could say that an equilibrium, when there is a lot of expressive voting, is super-sensitive to expectations about the voting behavior of others. Especially when the receives of the expressive votes come close to holding real power.
Do you know the apocryphal story of the economics department that wanted to decide, unanimously, to vote 18-3 on the tenure case of a junior professor? That was not allowed, and so everyone voted in favor.
I wonder what this all means for a possible Democratic mini-primary!?
Sunday assorted links
1. Esther Duflo calls for a new French left (FT). And South African power generation is improving (FT).
2. Bukele says keep your prices down. And here is some possible context. If you read, do read both. But reading this yet further explanation, I don’t think it is much of a save.
3. DEI chess?
4. Are smarter people more left-wing? And comment from Garett Jones: “The clearest of the “genetic politics” results here is that people with genes that predict higher IQ are less likely to be politically authoritarian.”
6. Sorkin interviews Peter Thiel. That this has become such a normal event and dialogue shows something significant about how the world is evolving?
7. Canadian yikes.
Time Preference, Parenthood and Policy Preferences
Using a small sample of couples before and after they have children, Alex Gazmararian finds that support for climate change policy increases after people have children. People also become more future-orientated when primed to think of children.
The short time horizons of citizens is a prominent explanation for why governments fail to tackle significant long-term public policy problems. Actual evidence of the influence of time horizons is mixed, complicated by the difficulty of determining how individuals’ attitudes would differ if they were more concerned about the future. I approach this challenge by leveraging a personal experience that leads people to place more value on the future: parenthood. Using a matched difference-in-differences design with panel data, I compare new parents with otherwise similar individuals and find that parenthood increases support for addressing climate change by 4.3 percentage points. Falsification tests and two survey experiments suggest that longer time horizons explain part of this shift in support. Not only are scholars right to emphasize the role of individual time horizons, but changing valuations of the future offer a new way to understand how policy preferences evolve.
It’s a little tricky to say that the driving force is time preference per se, maybe it’s just caring about (some) future people. Suppose a white man marries an African American woman. He subsequently may become more interested in civil rights, just as having children may make people more interested in the(ir) future. Or suppose that medical technology extends life expectancy, leading people to save more. Is this due to lower time preference or increased-self love?
We do see more parenthood driving future-oriented behavior on many margins. I am reminded, for example, of More Pregnancy, Less Crime which showed huge drops in criminal activity as people learn that they will be mothers and fathers. Criminals are very present-oriented so this effect is also consistent with parenthood driving lower time preference, although other stories are also possible. It’s difficult to distinguish these explanations and as far as policy and behavior is concerned perhaps the distinction between caring about the future and caring about future people doesn’t really matter.
AI teaching assistants?
“Morehouse College is planning to use AI teaching assistants to help crack the code of education.
Why it matters: Morehouse professor Muhsinah Morris says every professor will have an AI assistant in three to five years.
- Morris says the technology has taken off in the last 24 months faster than it has in the last 24 years. Meanwhile, baby boomers are leaving the workforce amid national teacher shortages and burnout.
How it works: Morehouse professors will collaborate with technology partner VictoryXR to create virtual 3D spatial avatars. The avatars use OpenAI to have two-way oral conversations with students.
- The avatars use professor-created content and 3D models for lessons, such as molecules for chemistry lessons, to help students.
- Avatars can also respond to unrelated topics raised by students and redirect the students back to the lesson.
- Students will have 24/7 online access to the avatar, which can communicate in a student’s native language.
What they’re saying: Morris called the avatars the world’s first spatial AI teaching assistants.”
That is all from Axios. Via Anecdotal.
Fernand Pajot’s list of best documentaries ever
I know most of them, a very good list:
So far I have as S Tier:
The Act of Killing
Apollo 11
Planet Earth 1/2
The Beatles Get Back
Searching for Sugar Man
Free Solo (?)
Citizenfour (?)Anything else?
Did not make the list, but great:
Herzog stuff
Blue Planet
Our Planet Behind the Scenes
The Last Dance
The Vietnam War
My Octopus Teacher
Meru
Man on Wire
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Honeyland
The Century of the Self
The Elephant Queen
Magnus
Exit Though the Gift Shop
I suggest adding Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, and also that Strauss-sympathetic movie about fans of The Shining, room something or other it is called? What else?