Category Archive: Sources

  1. Group Formation

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    ADVANCE FORMATION

    Comparative development and social policy

    Among the diverse local and national policy responses undertaken to combat the pandemic in recent months, Kerala’s has been notable. Within the broader context of Indian economic development, Kerala’s government has a tradition of successful redistributive development policies, sometimes referred to as the Kerala model.

    In a 2005 article, MANALI DESAI traces Kerala’s unique post-independence record of welfare provision to its experience under indirect British rule. By comparing the trajectory of its policy successes to those of West Bengal, a state with a similar electoral history, Desai strikes a distinctive balance between path dependency and contingency, arguing that “the form and content of welfare policies are shaped by the exigencies of state formation, but political struggles are the decisive determining factors of the former.”

    From the article:

    “In the somewhat meager annals of comparable state action in third world societies, Kerala appears as a clear exception. Despite fierce party competition, a church-landlord coalition, and the imposition of presidents’ rule on two different occasions (in 1959 and 1965), the state has seen an array of policies aimed at redistributing land, and providing education, pension plans, minimum wage legislation, and housing for the poor. There have been few serious attempts at understanding these state actions as a form of historical agency. In particular, an issue that is consistently overlooked is the fact that Kerala’s post-independence policy regime was preceded by significant welfare expansion in the nineteenth century in its two southern princely states of Travancore and Cochin. In part under pressure from the British administration, both monarchies undertook significant land reforms and expanded education and health care. While reforms by princely states were not that unusual in the colonial era, the scale and scope of Kerala’s surpassed its peers.

    The extreme nature of the caste hierarchy in Kerala, perhaps the most oppressive across India, meant that Christian missionaries not only found a home in Kerala but fed and even stimulated caste insurgency. In particular, one crucial effect of British rule and Protestant missionary activity was the increased porosity of the state to social (lower caste) demands. Both dimensions of colonial power (colonial power as well as social resistance to this power) destroyed status privileges, primarily those based on caste, to a larger degree than found elsewhere in British India. Early welfare policies in Kerala were implemented in a dependent colonial context and aimed at warding off annexation by the British, but their unintended consequences were to stimulate what they were precisely designed to avoid—radical caste and class movements.”

    Link to the piece.

    • An edited volume from 2000 looks at the history of Kerala’s social policies. Link. (A 1991 exchange in the NYRB between Barbara H. Chasin and Richard W. Franke, and Amartya Sen discusses the nature of Kerala’s “exceptionalism.” Link.)
    • “This article addresses the welfare state in a global historical context. In the new societies of industrial capitalism, two powerful and opposite interests converged in generating public social policies. It uses the five-part model to ask what lessons, if any, it has for the likely emergence of welfare states in the developing world. It also recognizes the immense variety within the ‘global South’ and distinguishes the distinctive patterns of risk management within it.” A 2010 paper by Ian Gough and Göran Therborn. Link. (Ungated version here.)
    • A 2007 paper by Nita Rudra looks at the applicability of Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s welfare state typology in the developing context. Link. And Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman’s 2009 book provides a comparative account of welfare state development across Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. Link.
    ‡ welfare policy development

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Democratic Transitions and Industrial Policy

    JUAN VELASCO is a recent graduate of the PhD in International Development at King’s College. His dissertation uses electoral and legislative data, semi-structured elite interviews and process tracing to understand how interest coalitions in government shape the outcomes of industrial policy.

    From the abstract:

    “Why have the centre-left coalitions of two countries like Chile and Uruguay had different impacts on wage bargaining? I argue there are three elements that define wage policy outcomes. First, the nature of democratic transitions helps to shape the formation of redistributive or growth-oriented reform coalitions. Secondly, I look at whether government coalitions are embedded with trade unions agendas. Thirdly, I argue that legislative participation of constituency matters for ensuring the implementation of active wage policy. In the case of Chile, democratic transition shaped the willingness of Concertación to reform the collective bargaining legacy of the military regime. Consequently, minimum wages were used as active policies, benefiting low income workers but with no impact on income distribution. On the contrary, in Uruguay, where institutional restrictions were absent, wage policy fluctuated according to Governments’ preferences. With Frente Amplio in power, a coalition with strong linkage to trade union agendas, both minimum wages and collective bargaining were used actively in a context of a legislative majority with a high presence of trade union-linked legislators.”

    Link to the paper.

    ‡ wages institutions new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • New on the Phenomenal World: JFI researcher Francis Tseng’s report on renewable energy and the future of mining. Within: the present state of minerals production, near-future ploys for mining in space, and the persistent externalities of extraction. Link to the report, link to the blog post.
    • In a new briefing, Zachary Parolin and Christopher Wimer forecast the impact of Covid-19 on US poverty rates: “If unemployment rates rise to 30%, the annual poverty rate in the US will increase from 12.4% to 18.9%, the highest recorded rate of poverty since at least 1967.” Link to the report and link to coverage in the Times.
    • “Rising income inequality in the US has generated a substantial increase in saving by the top of the income distribution. This has not been associated with an increase in investment. Instead, it has been linked to the substantial dissaving and large accumulation of debt by the non-rich. Analysis using variation across states shows that the rise in top income shares can explain almost all of the accumulation of household debt held as a financial asset by the household sector.” New research linking weak demand and rising debt, by Atif R. Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi. Link.
    • “The success of the wartime supply system also showed how powerful international cooperation can be during a global crisis.” In the NYT, Jamie Martin argues the historical case for international cooperation to manage the medical supply chain. Link.
    • In a new Fed paper by Tomaz Cajner et al examine recent labor market developments using payroll data: “Cumulative losses in paid employment through April 4 are currently estimated at 18 million; just during the two weeks between March 14 and March 28 the U.S. economy lost about 13 million paid jobs.” Link.
    • Marcelo Vieta’s recent book on the tradition of worker-managed factories in Argentina. Link. And a paper by Brendan Von Briesen studies “the guilds of the seven maritime cargo handling trades” in early 19th century Barcelona. Link.
    • Alex Trew with new research on infrastructure investment and the Industrial Revolution. Link.
    • “In recent decades, middle-paid jobs have declined, replaced by a mix of high and low-paid jobs. This is labor market polarization. At the same time, initially skilled and typically larger cities have become even more skilled relative to initially less skilled and typically smaller cities. This is the great divergence. Using data on occupational growth for 117 French cities, we develop a theory that links these two phenomena.” A new working paper by Donald R. Davis, Eric Mengus, Tomasz K. Michalski. Link.
    • “The Trypillia megasites of the Ukrainian forest steppe formed the largest fourth-millennium BC sites in Eurasia and possibly the world. Discovered in the 1960s, the social structure of the megasites has yet to be understood. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary investigation of the Nebelivka megasite we analyze three research questions: (1) what was the essence of megasite lifeways? (2) can we call the megasites early cities? and (3) what were their origins? We model three different scenarios for life in the cities to show that megasites were so different from other coeval settlements that they could justifiably be termed ‘cities’. Looking at the development of these sites indicates that there were at least two pathways to early urbanism in Eurasia.” Link.

  2. Swallow Cave

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    BREAK POINT

    Complications in globalized food supply

    Scholars of the global food system unravel a vast web linking trade policy, public health, economic development, labor issues, supply chain logistics, and so on. The pandemic has already prompted states to break with the implicit rules underpinning global food governance, and changes in supply and prices have the potential to trigger a long term food-born crisis.

    It wouldn’t be the first of its kind. Less known than the 1973 oil crisis, but perhaps equally important, is the 1972 food price shock which fundamentally altered the structure of global markets. In a fantastically detailed 1995 article, HARRIET FRIEDMANN recounts the origins of the post-war “surplus food regime,” and its disintegration in the early 70s.

    From the article:

    “As the dominant economic power after World War II, the United States insisted on international rules consistent with its own national farm support programs. New Deal farm programs of the 1930s were retained despite widespread awareness that they generated chronic surpluses. U.S. commitment to mercantile agricultural trade practices led to the sacrifice of multilateral institutions which were central to the larger U.S. agenda for liberal trade: the World Food Board Proposal, which provided for global supply management and food aid through the Food and Agriculture Organization, was rejected by the U.S. in 1947; the Havana Treaty creating an International Trade Organization was never formally submitted to Congress because it contradicted mercantile clauses in U.S. domestic farm laws; even the GATT excluded agriculture from its ban on import controls and export subsidies. Postwar rules did not liberalize national agricultural policy, but created a new pattern of intensely national regulation.

    After two decades, the replication of surpluses led to competitive dumping and potential trade wars, particularly between the European Economic Community and the United States. But the real catalyst of the 1973-74 food crisis was the massive Soviet-American grain deals of 1972 and 1973, which permanently broke the dam separating the capitalist and socialist blocs which had contained the ‘surplus food regime.'”

    Link to the piece.

    • “The sharp rise in prices of agricultural commodities in 1972-73 traces to five principal causes: a decline in world production of grains; rapid growth in the demand for meats in all developed countries; U.S. farm policies that discouraged expansion of soybean production; administrative lags and errors regarding export subsidies; and devaluation of the dollar.” Another look at the 1972-73 Food Price Spiral, by John A. Schnittker. Link. For greater context: Alan Blinder catalogues the food price spiral alongside energy and decontrol as the sources of ’70s inflation. Link.
    • An FAO report on global food price inflation from 2006-2008. Link. And another FAO report on the causes and prevention of food waste. Link.
    • “This article explores how the far-reaching plans of a World Food Board, advocated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization under John Boyd Orr, were abandoned and supplanted by a new approach that focused on technical aid and the distribution of surpluses.” Ruth Jachertz and Alexander Nützenadel on the multiple “visions of a global food system” developed between 1930-60. Link.
    • Forthcoming from the University of Washington Press, Thomas Fleischman’s Communist Pigs analyzes the trajectory of East German agricultural policy through the lens of the country’s pork industry. Link.
    ‡ food_system trade history

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Wealth taxes, savings, and labor supply

    Northwestern PhD candidate MARIUS RING’s job market paper analyzes the impacts of wealth taxation, exploiting uneven household exposure to wealth taxes after the introduction of a new wealth assessment tool in Norway in 2010.

    His findings:

    “I find that exposure to wealth taxes has a positive effect on saving as well as a positive effect on labor earnings. For each additional NOK (Norwegian krone) subject to a 1 percent wealth tax, households increase their yearly financial saving by 0.04 NOK. This increase in saving is largely financed by increased labor earnings. My results imply that income effects may dominate substitution effects in household responses to (net-of-tax) rate-of-return shocks, which has important implications for both optimal capital taxation and monetary policy.”

    Link to the paper, and to Ring’s website.

    ‡ wealth taxation new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • In the Boston Review, JFI’s Paul Katz and our partner Leandro Ferreira write on Maríca, Brazil, where a “set of initiatives represents the most ambitious city-level response to COVID-19 in Brazil, and one of the most notable in the world.” Link to the article. See also: Dylan Matthews’ coverage of Maríca’s basic income program and JFI’s research on the program, with comment from Katz and our director of research Sidhya Balakrishnan. Link.
    • A new paper on public debt and growth, by Michael Ash, Deepankar Basu, and Arindrajit Dube. Link.
    • “Thirty-three percent of voters have already lost their job, been furloughed, placed on temporary leave, or had hours reduced. Black Americans are feeling the worst of the financial crisis with almost half (45 percent) reporting they’ve lost jobs, hours, or been put on leave.” New report from Data for Progress. Link.
    • How the Fed Managed the Treasury Yield Curve in the 1940s, by Kenneth Garbade. Link.
    • Adam Tooze in the London Review of Books: “This is a global crisis, which affects virtually every community on the planet. And it has exposed stark differences between the major economic blocs, such that it is now more difficult than ever to understand how the thing we call the world economy actually fits together.” Link. (See also: Tooze in Foreign Policy, and on his blog.)
    • A report looks at Department of Commerce data to reveal import/export trends in masks and ventilators. “In February 2020, the value of U.S. mask exports to China was 1094.0% higher than the 2019 monthly average. In February 2020, the value of U.S ventilator exports to China was 292.2% higher than the 2019 monthly average.” Link.
    • From Abhijit Banerjee, Nils T. Enevoldsen, Rohini Pande, and Michael Walton: “In 2010, we informed a random set of Delhi councilors that a newspaper would report on their performance prior to the next elections. Using slum dwellers’ spending preferences, we created a councilor-specific index of pro-poor spending. Treated councilors increased pro-poor spending in high-slum wards.” Link. h/t Halah
    • A new CEPR paper by Hye Jin Rho, Hayley Brown, and Shawn Fremstad provides a demographic profile of workers in frontline industries. Link. (See also: a similar project in the UK context, from Autonomy. Link.)
    • “Using regional variation in bond payments to samurai and the introduction of railways in nineteenth century Japan, we find that together they are associated with persistent redistributive effects between regions and sectors.” Sergi Basco and John Tang on credit supply and market access in pre-war Japan. Link.
    • Suresh Naidu, Adam Reich, and Alex Hertel-Fernandez on the public opinion effects of the recent wave of teacher strikes. Link. See also their recent op-ed in the Washington Post about COVID-19 labor unrest, and Hertel-Fernandez’s post for Phenomenal World.
    • New article by Price V Fishback examines the history of social insurance and public assistance in the twentieth-century. Link.
    • “Specific combinations of energy flows, material flows and stocks are responsible for services that support societal function and development. We provide a material service case study, which identifies the level of lighting experienced by urban Ancient Romans relative to that enjoyed by inhabitants of 1820s London (the Georgians). Our results show that the average Roman experienced 41,102 lm-hour/year, which is more lighting than the Georgian value per capita (at 35,698 lm-hour/year). In terms of fuel consumption, Georgians were four times more efficient than their Roman counterparts, but there was a trade-off between materials and energy, given that stock efficiency was 53 times lower than that of the Romans. This trend of improving fuel efficiency at the expense of materials appears to have continued into the 21st century, which holds important implications for sustainable development.” Link. (See also: Brad DeLong on Thomas Jefferson’s candle expenditures. Link.)

  3. Big Horse

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    BOUND SPREAD

    Histories of public health

    Comparisons of responses to the Covid-19 crisis across national lines yield as many questions as answers. Divergent histories of public health programs, differences in cultural norms, population density, age distributions, and internal migration patterns create a muddy picture for causal understandings of the national variations in impact.

    PETER BALDWIN’s Contagion and the State in Europe 1830-1930 provides a fundamental historical study on these questions. The book explores the “reasons for the divergence in public health policies in Britain, France, Germany and Sweden” and the “spectrum of responses to the threat of contagious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis.”

    From the book’s conclusion:

    “Since at least the era of absolutism, preventing and dealing with contagious and epidemic disease have together been one of the major tasks of states. Given that, from the first European cholera epidemics to the cusp of the antibiotical era, the problem faced by each country has been much the same in biological terms, why have they responded in markedly different ways? Especially before the bacteriological revolution, etiological knowledge was inextricably bound up with political, administrative, economic, and geographic factors.

    The fundamental implication of a political interpretation of public health is that prophylactic strategy and ideology are correlated. Approaches to prevention may be expected to reflect common assumptions held in a society as to where group and individual interests diverge, how much autonomy citizens can rightfully claim, the power of the community over its members. The right to be spared prophylactic imposition was not the only measure of liberty; there was also the freedom from disease. Traditional conservative quarantinists argued this line. Conversely, liberals objected to such interventions when they impinged on personal liberties too drastically or for insufficiently redeeming purpose. There was, also an understanding of public health that transcended such sterile oppositions between community and individual, holding that society’s concern with public health was a positive freedom that, while limiting absolute individual autonomy, returned to each a higher measure of liberation from affliction.

    Such political interpretations of preventive strategies appear, however, to have inverted matters. It was not British liberalism or German interventionism (to take again the outliers) that, by themselves, determined prophylactic strategies, but the imperatives of geoepidemiology, and the associated factors identified here, that helped shape not only the preventive precautions they encouraged, but indeed the very political traditions of these nations.”

    Link to the book.

    • A new podcast from the Cambridge history department discusses Baldwin’s book as a guide for thinking through the present crisis. Link.
    • For the classic international history of public health, see George Rosen’s 1958 A History of Public Health. Link. And see his 1947 paper “What Is Social Medicine?” Link.
    • “After yellow fever was firmly ensconsed, it underpinned a military and political status quo, keeping South America under Spanish rule. After 1780, and particularly in the Hatian Revolution, yellow fever undermined the status quo by assisting independence movements in the America tropics.” A 1999 article by J.R. McNeill on “Ecology, Epidemics, and Empires.” Link.
    ‡ pubic_health history states

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    The health impacts of increasing wages for care workers

    PhD candidate in Public Policy at UC Berkeley KRISTA RUFFINI studies the health, education, and labor market outcomes of government policies. Her job market paper looks at the consequences of a 10% minimum wage increase for nursing home workers on on patient health.

    From the abstract:

    “I find that a ten percent increase in the minimum wage raises low-skilled nursing home workers’ earnings one to two percent, reduces separations, and increases stable hires. These earnings gains and increases in firm-specific human capital translate into marked improvements in patient health and safety. A ten percent increase in the minimum wage would prevent at least 15,000 deaths, lower the number of inspection violations by one to two percent, and reduce the cost of preventable care. Considering costs elsewhere in the health system, savings from pressure ulcer treatment alone offsets up to half of the increased wage bill, and if the social value of increased longevity for nursing home residents is at least $21,000, well below existing estimates, higher wages in this sector are fully offset by improvements in care.”

    Link to the paper, and to Ruffini’s website.

    ‡ policy wages new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • “The US was unprepared for a labor market crisis of this magnitude.” On the blog, historian Aaron Benanav enumerates the underlying problems laid bare by this crisis. Link.
    • To have open alongside Benanav’s post: the latest BLS report on the employment situation was released yesterday morning, revealing the tip of the unemployment spike. Link. And, relatedly, a new EPI analysis concludes that “3.5 million workers likely lost their employer-provided health insurance in the past two weeks.” Link.
    • A dizzying report on the export blocking, clandestine operations, and missing shipments proliferating in global markets for PPE and testing kits, as states adopt increasingly questionable measures to edge out competition in access to lifesaving goods. Kim Willsher et al in the Guardian. Link.
    • “If the frugal four continue to obstruct a common fiscal response to this crisis, the remaining eurozone countries will be right to ask if they are not better off going their own way.” On the topic of last week’s newsletter, David Adler and Jerome Roos analyze the consequences of the Dutch-led opposition to corona bonds. Link.
    • “This document proposes a system for secure and privacy-preserving proximity tracing at large scale.” A framework for secure contact tracing, by Carmela Toncoso et al. Link.
    • Mariana Mazzucato on the growing need for public investment: “Government should be supporting businesses to continue paying wages even when workers are not working–simultaneously helping households retain their incomes, preventing the virus from spreading, and making it easier for businesses to resume production once the crisis is over. When it comes to households, governments should look to the possibility of debt relief.” Link.
    • “In the 2000s, newly-analyzed tax data revealed that top incomes had begun a dramatic upward climb in the early 1980s. I explain why it took two decades for this increase to become salient.” Daniel Hirschman on the relationship of theory to observation in social scientific analysis. Link.
    • Bill Freund with a labor history of East Africa, from 1500- post independence. Link.
    • “Drawing on archival records from the ‘Standing Committee on the Euro-currency Market,’ we trace the expansion of the Eurodollar market during the 1970s to present a theory of financial globalization that emphasizes ‘positive integration.'” Benjamin Braun, Arie Krampf and Steffen Murau offer an alternative history of globalization. Link.
    • At Autonomy, Lukas Kikuchi and Ishan Khurana map the risk of contracting a virus at more than 250 different occupations. Link.
    • “This paper describes broad regional and temporal trends in the evolution of international trade and international factor flows between 1700 and 1870, including key differences in trade costs across space and time.” A new paper by Carol H. Shiue, Wolfgang Keller, and Markus Lampe on the relationship between trade and global economic divergence. Link.
    • 3P on improving the current crisis response: administer payrolls through the government, institute a small basic income, and add a universal child benefit. Link. At VoxEU, Camille Landais, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman propose a Europe-wide progressive wealth tax. Link.
    • “Both economic historians and historians of capitalism see economic structure and organization as historically specific. Both challenge the economist’s conception of an ideal, rarified market. Both seek to denaturalize the economic order. Yet the two sides are engaged in a dialogue of the deaf, where no communication, much less synthesis, takes place.” A 2019 article by Barry Eichengreen bridges disciplinary gaps in the study of economic history. Link.
    • “This dissertation argues for the importance of intelligence-gathering, including espionage, for understanding the relationship between the Russian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and European actors, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It relies on archival sources from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Rome, as well as published materials. I begin by investigating how seventeenth-century Siberians compiled information about China, and how maps and documents were transmitted first to Moscow and then to Western Europe to be republished for wider audiences. I then examine the post-Petrine shift to more specialized forms of intelligence-gathering, focusing on industrial espionage in the Moscow-Beijing trade caravan. On the mid-eighteenth-century Russo-Qing border, the dissertation follows the building of a robust Russian intelligence network in Qing Mongolia amid unprecedented inter-imperial tension, and its ultimate failure to achieve desired geopolitical ends. These intelligence failures are shown to provide a compelling new explanation for the collapse of European imperial attempts at diplomacy in East Asia in the last third of the eighteenth century.” Gregory Afinogenov’s 2016 PhD dissertation. Link. (See also: Afinogenov’s forthcoming book, Spies and Scholars.)

  4. Duel

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    COMMON PROCESS

    Historical comparisons of European monetary unions

    The need to formulate a unified COVID response has placed pressure on European integration in recent days, with Germany and the Netherlands resisting Southern European calls for the issuing of “coronabonds.” A 2018 paper by John Ryan and John Loughlin assesses the history of the Latin Monetary Union (LMU), the Scandinavian Monetary Union (SMU), and the Austro-Hungarian Monetary Union (AHMU) in order to glean lessons for EU policymakers in the present.

    From the paper:

    “The LMU was originally envisaged as a bimetallic agreement, though it transitioned into an effective gold standard in 1878. French economist and politician Félix Esquirou de Parieu saw such a union as the first step in a process of European (even global) integration, which he hoped would culminate in the creation of a full common currency, and, as he predicted somewhat precociously, a ‘European Union’ directed by a ‘European Commission’. The disintegration of the union with the Great War illustrates the danger of insufficient coordination among member states. Partially inspired by the LMU, the SMU was deeply tied to the rise of a political Scandinavism. Like the LMU, it foundered as a result of the impact of the First World War. The conditions were propitious in the Scandinavian countries as they imitated each other’s policy approaches. There were, however, great economic disparities across the different countries, and this points to the dangers of a monetary union without sufficient economic convergence among its member states. Finally, The AHMU was created through an agreement known as the 1867 Compromise which ensured that Austria and Hungary shared a common currency while remaining fiscally sovereign. The main lesson of the AHMU is about the nature of institutional structures. Because of the relative size and power of Austria and Hungary, the union’s disintegration illuminates the game theoretic interaction of nations within a monetary union, including their asymmetric ability to exert power and influence over the terms of the supranational agreement.”

    Link to the piece.

    • “The decision to create the monetary union, the decision of whom to admit, and the decision of whom to appoint to run the ECB are political decisions, taken by political leaders, subject to political constraints, not the social-welfare maximizing decisions of some mythical social planner.” Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden analyze “The Political Economy of European Monetary Unification.” Link.
    • A 2019 Max Weber lecture by Philippe Van Parijs discusses notions of justice and their (in)operability within the monetary union framework, featuring discussion from Rawls on the EU and a reading of Hayek on monetary unions. Link.
    • “Many regional currency institutions were established in sub-Saharan Africa under colonial rule. Surprisingly, a number of these colonial institutions survived the transition to national independence, and several have survived to the present day.” Scott Cooper and Clark Asay on the colonial legacy of the West African franc zones and the Southern African rand zone. Link.
    ‡ history supply_chains economics

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    When do policymakers listen to experts?

    In his job market paper, Stanford political science PhD candidate Nathan Lee provides survey evidence of the impact of expertise on policymaking, finding a striking effect of expert evidence on policymaker’s beliefs.

    From the paper:

    “Across policies and empirical strategies, I find that providing the expert evidence causes an increase in belief accuracy of between eight and sixteen percentage points and an increase in preference congruence (i.e., congruence with the implied stance of the expert community) of between four and sixteen percentage points. These effects are not moderated by party affiliation but are moderated by the respondent’s prior attitude: the further the respondent’s prior attitude is from the expert evidence, the more the respondent updates in response to the message.”

    Link to the paper, and to Lee’s website.

    ‡ policy politics new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • At the Phenomenal World, Gabriel Mathy diagnoses the present crisis as the “first services recession.” Link.
    • “War-economic production is often conceived of as a national enterprise. But most war economies in the 20th century were deeply international in their supply lines. The medical mobilization against COVID-19 will have to be similarly global.” Nicholas Mulder in Foreign Policy. Link.
    • New and timely research from Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett at the SHIFT project: 53% of hourly service sector workers at 91 large companies lack access to paid sick leave. Link.
    • “Using Charity Commission Reports for England and Wales, I document a dramatic mid-eighteenth-century shift by donors and trustees from investments in real estate and rent charges to perpetual government annuities. The heavy investment in this public debt product is what ultimately prompted the creation of the London Stock Exchange in 1801.” Carole Shammas on “Government Securities Investment in Early Modern England and Wales.” Link.
    • Matthew Klein: “Don’t ‘reopen’ the economy. Don’t let it crash. Put it on ice.” Link.
    • Spencer Strub in the New York Review: “Illness & Crisis, from Medieval Plague Tracts to Covid-19.” Link.
    • Nathan Nunn in Science with a review piece on the origins of economic development, and what the surging role of economic historical work on the causes of development means for policy-minded researchers. Link.
    • In Agrarian South, two articles on the theoretical legacy of Samir Amin. Link and link.
    • At VoxEU, a proposal for eurobonds as part of a coronavirus response package by Francesco Giavazzi and Guido Tabellini. Link.
    • “Drawing on geographic variation in mortality during the 1918 Flu Pandemic in the U.S., we find that the pandemic reduced manufacturing output by 18%. We also use variation in the timing and intensity of non-pharmaceutical interventions across U.S. cities to study their economic effects. We find that cities that intervened earlier and more aggressively grow faster after the pandemic is over.” Brand new paper by Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner collects evidence on the economic impact of health interventions in the 1918 flu. Link.
    • The role of statistical testimony as evidence in civil cases. Link. h/t reader Jeff J
    • A new article by Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Thomas K. J. McDermott, Guy Michaels, and Ferdinand Rauch “studies the economic impact of large urban floods using spatially detailed inundation maps and night lights data spanning the globe’s cities.” Link.
    • A report by Caitlin Rivers et al from Johns Hopkins on strengthening outbreak science capacity: “use of infectious disease modeling to support public health decision making.” Link.
    • “In the context of the plague and influenza epidemics of the early modern period, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has coined the expression of the unification of the globe by disease. He argued that in this time a ‘common market of bacilli’ was created along trade routes and through the movement of troops. The phrase is even more suitable to describe the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, in which diseases could travel at a new speed from place to place and profit from the revolution in transport achieved by the development of steamships and railways. The international sanitary conferences mark the first attempt to tackle the problem of the propagation of disease through international co-operation and the standardization of procedures.” Valeska Huber on the International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera. Link.

  5. Tilted Ark

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    PRODUCTION MAINLINE

    Wartime economic planning

    This week, reports swirled regarding President Trump’s invocation of the Defense Production Act—a 1950 law passed to manage production in the context of the Korean War—to meet the coming demand of crucial medical supplies to treat people with COVID-19. Much of the ensuing commentary has elided necessary distinctions between the Cold War–era DPA and the more memorable interventions into the productive capacity of the US economy that defined the Second World War. (For a helpful disaggregation, see this essay by Tim Barker; for a rundown of the DPA’s history, see this summary from the Congressional Research Service.)

    In his book, Arsenal of World War II (the fourth in a five-volume series on the political economy of American warfare), PAUL KOISTINEN provides a uniquely comprehensive and detailed account of the often misunderstood economics and administration of America’s World War II mobilization effort.

    From the book’s introduction:

    “An ironic legacy of the New Deal was that it helped create the partnership between corporate and military America that was destructive to reform. In the defense and war years, New Dealers took the lead in preparing the nation for World War II. Once hostilities ensued, the same reformers were at the center of devising the structure and controls essential for successfully harnessing the economy for war under stable economic conditions. Many of those same New Dealers became victims of the industry-military alliance that their mobilization policies and methods had assisted in bringing into being.

    Despite advancement in weaponry, massive output was the critical World War II development, and that depended on successful economic mobilization policies. The political economy of warfare involves the interrelations of political, economic, and military institutions in devising the means to mobilize resources for defense and to conduct war. In each war, the magnitude and the duration of the fighting have dictated what the nation had to do to harness its economic power, but prewar trends have largely determined how this mobilization took place.”

    Link to the book page.

    • Mark Wilson’s 2016 book, Destructive Creation, also on the business-government relationships that defined the World War II mobilization effort. Link.
    • A few recent articles on medical supplies: on the ventilator shortage; on mask production in China; on Taiwan’s response to the virus; on the EU’s plans to airlift masks; on China’s increasing medical supply delivery to Europe.
    • From Otto Neurath’s 1919 “War Economy”: “The main result of our investigation may be expressed as follows: war forces a nation to pay more attention to the amount of goods which are at its disposal, less to the available amounts of money than it usually does.” Link to Neurath’s collected writings on economics.
    ‡ history supply_chains economics

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Industrialization and precarious work in Egypt and India

    Newly appointed Assistant Professor of Economics at the American University of Paris PETER H. BENT studies economic history and the history of economic thought. His 2017 paper challenges the belief that precarious work is a result of deindustrialization, taking the industrial developments of colonial-era Egypt and India as case studies.

    From the article:

    “This paper argues that precarious work can take a variety of forms, beyond those seen in the transition from the stable post-WWII era to the neoliberal era in the West. Egypt and India offer instructive case studies. In the beginning in the nineteenth century, large-scale sugar and cotton production disrupted traditional agricultural and industrial commercial practices in Egypt. As efforts toward industrialisation became more widespread in the early twentieth century, these developments brought further changes to the ways Egyptians earned their living. These changes resulted in new and precarious working arrangements for Egyptians, especially in the industrial sectors. As in the Egyptian case, the transition from rural agricultural lifestyles to urban industrial living and working environments had wide-ranging effects on workers in India. The hand spun cotton industry was devastated by British free trade policies in the nineteenth century. Changes to small-scale weaving and metal industries also brought the rise of uncertain and precarious working arrangements, as previously stable and full-time work was subject to competitive pressures.”

    Link to the paper, and to Bent’s website.

    ‡ labor economic_history new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • A selected batch of analysis on the economic impact of COVID-19, and the appropriate policy responses: Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman urge government to act as a “buyer of last resort.” Link. At VoxEU, Richard Baldwin and Beatrice Weder di Mauro introduce an e-book of 14 essays on “Economics in the Age of COVID-19.” Link. Adam Tooze surveys existing indicators to assess the extremity of the crisis ahead. Link. At New Consensus, Robert Hockett proposes a range of debt-free mechanisms similar to those used during the Great Depression and WWII. Link. And Yakov Feygin and Skanda Amarnath advocate for the Fed buying munis. Link.
    • Another roundup, of recent cash transfer bills: Reps. Ro Khanna and Tim Ryan proposed a universal, $1000 monthly disbursement to all adults, and an additional $500 per child, to be phased out at $140k annual income. Link. Josh Hawley’s bill proposes $1,288 per 2-person household with a phase-out at $100k. Link. Mitt Romney’s is a one-time transfer of $1,000 to all adults, and Steve Mnuchin’s is monthly for two months. Link and link. Tom Cotton adds an additional $500 per dependent, but limits aid to families who have been directly impacted by the crisis. Link. Senators Booker, Brown, and Bennet propose a one-time $2,000 transfer to all adults, supplemented with additional $1,000–$1,500 monthly disbursements until the crisis ends. Link. And finally, Maxine Waters advocates $2,000 per adult and $1,000 monthly per child until the end of the crisis. Link. h/t Halah for the detailed policy comparison.
    • At 3P, a new post on inflation and UBI: When critics say, “a UBI is inflationary, they mean that ‘disbursing UBI payments without collecting offsetting taxes is inflationary.'” Link. Relatedly, see a recent JFI working paper by Khalil Esmkhani and Jack Favilukis which predicts no housing market inflation resulting from a guaranteed income. Link to the paper and link to the accompanying blog post by Stephen Nuñez.
    • Norman Fenton, Martin Neil, and Daniel Berger “review the potential and actual use of Bayesian statistics in legal theory.” Link.
    • “In this study, we use administrative data on county-level economic conditions from 1969 to 2018 and election results across multiple levels of government to examine the effect of the local economy on elections for local, state, and federal offices in the United States.” By Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and Christopher Warshaw. Link.
    • Rolando E. Díaz-Caravantes et al. compare patterns of urban growth and water security in Hermosillo, Mexico; Mendoza, Argentina; and Tucson, USA. Link.
    • “This article traces the origin of too-big-to-fail policy in modern US banking to the bailout of the $1.2b Bank of the Commonwealth in 1972. During this period, market concentration due to interstate banking restrictions is a factor in most of the bailouts, and systemic risk concerns were raised to justify the bailouts of surprisingly small banks.” George C. Nurisso and Edward Simpson Prescott consider the changes in legislative constraints on policymaking over time. Link.
    • From 2018, Brian Melican on “How Spanish flu helped create Sweden’s modern welfare state.” Link.
    • “Inflation in the United States has remained remarkably stable since 1990, even in the face of pronounced cycles in economic activity.” A new Brookings report by Marco Del Negro, Michele Lenza, Giorgio E. Primiceri, and Andrea Tambalotti asks, “What’s up with the Phillips Curve?” Link.
    • “Although the Ottomans were quick to adopt advancements in military technology, they waited almost three centuries to sanction printing in Ottoman Turkish (in Arabic characters). Printing spread relatively rapidly throughout Europe following the invention of the printing press in 1450 despite resistance by interest groups and temporary restrictions in some countries. We explain differential reaction to technology through a political economy approach centered on the legitimizing relationships between rulers and their agents (e.g., military, religious, or secular authorities). The Ottomans regulated the printing press heavily to prevent the loss it would have caused to the ruler’s net revenue by undermining the legitimacy provided by religious authorities. On the other hand, the legitimizing relationship between European religious and political authorities was undermined over a century prior to the invention of the press. European rulers thus had little reason to stop the spread of printing as public policy, nor could the Church have stopped it had it wanted to.” Metin M. Coşgel, Thomas J. Miceli, and Jared Rubin, “The political economy of mass printing: Legitimacy and technological change in the Ottoman Empire.” Link.

  6. Study for a Club Scene

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    BUNDLED SPREAD

    Supply chains and geographical dispersion

    At present it’s difficult to think of much else beyond the fragility of our global economic infrastructure. A 2012 discussion paper by RICHARD BALDWIN looks at global supply chains: their history, future, and policy implications.

    From the paper:

    “Globalization’s second unbundling and the global supply chains it spawned have produced and continue to produce changes that alter all aspects of international relations: economic, political and even military. Supply chain fractionalization—the functional unbundling of production processes—is governed by a fundamental trade-off between specialization and coordination costs. Supply chain dispersion—the geographical unbundling of stages of production—is governed by a balance between dispersion forces and agglomeration forces.

    The future of global supply chains will be influenced by four key determinants: 1) improvements in coordination technology that lowers the cost of functional and geographical unbundling, 2) improvements in computer integrated manufacturing that lowers the benefits of specialization and shifts stages toward greater skill-, capital, and technology-intensity, 3) narrowing of wage gaps that reduces the benefit of North-South offshoring to nations like China, and 4) the price of oil that raises the cost of unbundling.”

    Link to the paper.

    • “If the virus continues to spread at the same rate, supply chains will inevitably break apart and factories will start to close.” From February, the FT editorial board on the “decoupling of global trade.” Link.
    • A paper from the Institute for Global Law and Policy “asserts the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and governance of global value chains.” Link. See also: a LPE Blog symposium based on the paper. Link.
    • “Capital is thoroughly globalized. Could it now be labor’s turn?” Peter Evans on a global strategy for organized labor. Link. And a new paper by Adrien Thomas “looks at strategies adopted by trade unions to unionize migrant workers, and discusses tensions related to the diversification of trade union policies and organizational structures in response to labor migration.” Link.

    h/t the one and only Francis Tseng for many of these links.

    ‡ supply_chains logistics globalization

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Hospital Closures, medicare revenues, and rural mortality rates

    Recently appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health CAITLIN CARROLL studies variations in healthcare provider markets. Her job market paper analyzes Medicare claims to assess the impact of hospital closures on quality of healthcare in rural markets.

    From the abstract:

    “I compare enrollees who lost their closest hospital as a result of closure to enrollees who lost their second closest hospital, as a result of the same closure. I show that rural hospital closure led to both a decrease in Medicare spending and an increase in mortality among enrollees with time-sensitive health conditions. I study implications of forestalling hospital closure in the context of the Critical Access Hospital (CAH) program, a large-scale payment reform that increased Medicare revenues for nearly half of all rural hospitals. I show that the CAH program led to a reduction in hospital closures and an improvement in mortality, but the program’s expenditures were substantial relative to these effects.”

    Link to the paper, and to Carroll’s website.

    ‡ health policy new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • We hosted a Twitter discussion on Wednesday in response to our recent interview with historian Kim Phillips-Fein, with Marshal Steinbaum, Erik Loomis, Anastasia Wilson, David Walsh, Daniel Kuehn, and Laura Beamer. Link to a thread discussing the public/private good debate in higher ed; link to three threads on financial and fiscal crises and fear; and link to several threads on the influential ideological movements that emerged in opposition to the New Deal. (Search #JFIChat on Twitter to find more.)
    • Emanuele Arcà, Francesco Principe, and Eddy van Doorslaer study the effects of an austerity program imposed on the Italian health sector in 2019. The findings: “The Piano di Rientro alleviated deficits by reducing expenditure, mainly in the southern regions, but also resulted in a 3% rise in avoidable deaths among both men and women, a reduction in hospital capacity and a rise in south-to-north patient migration.” Link.
    • Philip G. Curtis et. al draw on satellite imagery to develop a new classification for forest loss, finding that “27% of global forest loss can be attributed to deforestation through permanent land use change for commodity production.” Link.
    • “Over the past 30 years, a broad reconstruction of the market order has gone hand in hand with a more active state.” A new piece by Chris Howell challenges predominant narratives which associate market liberalization with weakening the state, arguing that the transition away from wage-led growth necessitated powerful state intervention. Link. (And for the earliest iteration of this argument: Andrew Gambles 1988 book, The Free Economy and the Strong State. Link.)
    • Laura Bucci and Joshua Jansa “question the conventional wisdom that unified Republican states, with help from conservative political networks, are more likely to adopt restrictive labor policy” using “new estimates of state-level public support for unions by income thirds” across the US. Link.
    • In the Chinese Journal of Sociology, James Raymo and Hao Dong consider how regional differences, non-monetary resources, shadow education, gender differences, and the proximity of grandparents impact child wellbeing in China, Japan, and Korea. Link.
    • From 2018, Kieran Healy uses “average monthly birth rates between 1938 and 1991 for the United States, England and Wales” to “Visualize the Baby Boom.” Link.
    • In a brief video, Trevon Logan traces the legacy of an 1869 study which “found that black Union soldiers had lower lung capacity than white soldiers.” Link.
    • “Between 1993 and 2015 the land planted to oil palm in Colombia increased fourfold. This rapid growth coincided with a period of extreme armed conflict and displacement, with inequality in land distribution reaching the highest levels in Latin America.” Lesley Potter analyzes the political and economic forces behind the expansion of Colombian oil palm production. Link.
    • In the International Review of Social History, a special issue on “urban slavery in the Atlantic world during the age of abolition (c.1770s–c.1880s).” Link.
    • “Credit cooperatives were first introduced in Germany during the 1850s. By 1914 they were, collectively, a major financial force: the 19,000 credit cooperatives existing in that year had issued some 7 percent of all German banking liabilities. This is surprising given the country’s highly developed banking system. One general explanation for the success of credit cooperatives emphasizes their ability to capitalize on superior information and to impose inexpensive but effective sanctions on defaulters. These features supposedly permit cooperatives to lend to individuals whom banks would spurn, and to tailor loan terms more closely to borrowers’ needs. I use the manuscript business records of several German credit cooperatives in the period 1880-1914 to test this claim. The results show that real efficiency advantages are at least part of the explanation for their success.” Timothy W. Guinnane, “Cooperatives as Information Machines: German Rural Credit Cooperatives, 1883-1914.” Link.

  7. Flanked by Two Dolphins

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    SYSTEM CIRCULATE

    An ecosocial theory of disease

    The correlation between health, income, and wealth is widely recognized in contemporary research and policy circles. This broadly social understanding of public health outcomes has its origins in a theoretical tradition dating back to the 1970s and 80s, in which scholars began to embed medical research within a political and economic framework.

    In a 2001 paper, epidemiologist NANCY KRIEGER seeks to strengthen the theoretical foundations of epidemiological research by linking them back to biological study.

    From the paper:

    “If social epidemiologists are to gain clarity on causes of and barriers to reducing social inequalities in health, adequate theory is a necessity. Grappling with notions of causation raises issues of accountability and agency: simply invoking abstract notions like ‘society’ and disembodied ‘genes’ will not suffice. Instead, the central question becomes who and what is responsible for population patterns of health, disease, and well-being, as manifested in present, past and changing social inequalities in health?

    Arising in part as a critique of proliferating theories that emphasize individuals’ responsibility to choose healthy lifestyles, the political economy of health school explicitly addresses economic and political determinants of health and disease, including structural barriers to people living healthy lives. Yet, despite its invaluable contributions to identifying social determinants of population health, a political economy of health perspective affords few principles for investigating what these determinants are determining. I propose a theory that conceptualizes changing population patterns of health, disease and well-being in relation to each level of biological, ecological and social organization (e.g. cell, organ, organism/ individual, family, community, population, society, ecosystem). Unlike prior causal frameworks—whether of a triangle connecting ‘host’, ‘agent’ and ‘environment’, or a ‘chain of causes’ arrayed along a scale of biological organization, from ‘society’ to ‘molecular and submolecular particles’—this framework is multidimensional and dynamic and allows us to elucidate population patterns of health, disease and well-being as biological expressions of social relations—potentially generating new knowledge and new grounds for action.”

    Link to the piece.

    • Krieger’s 1994 article takes a closer look at epidemiological causal frameworks, questioning the adequacy of multiple causation. And her 2012 paper asks: “Who or what is a population?” and articulates the analytical significance of this definition for epidemiological research. Link and link.
    • “Disease epidemics are as much markers of modern civilization as they are threats to it.” In NLR, Rob and Rodrick Wallace consider how the development of the global economy has altered the spread of epidemics, taking the 2014 Ebola outbreak as a case study. Link.
    • Samuel S. Myers and Jonathan A. Patz argue that climate change constitutes the “greatest public health challenge humanity has faced.” Link.
    • A history of epidemics in the Roman Empire, from 27 BC – 476 AD, by Francois Relief and Louise Cilliers. Link. And a 1987 book by Ann Bowman Jannetta analyzes the impact of disease on institutional development in early modern Japan. Link.
    ‡ epidemiology metaresearch health

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    The industry wage premium of STEM composition in India

    In a 2019 paper, NYU Sociology PhD candidate BHUMIKA CHAUHAN explores how differences in labor composition contribute to inter-industry wage differentials.

    From the abstract:

    “Research on inter-industry wage differentials offers explanations ranging from ‘unobserved labor quality’, capital intensity, uneven technology change, and profitability to efficiency wages, discrimination and unionization. However, an aspect that remains under-explored is differences in labor composition, specifically STEM composition, that could contribute to productivity and generate positive returns to working in hi-tech industries independently of the role played by physical capital or embodied technology. This study empirically demonstrates the importance of STEM composition using a dataset from India constructed by merging individual-level data from the National Sample Survey with industry-level data from CMIE’s Prowessdx. It shows that workers in industries with a high proportion of STEM workers earn an industry-specific wage premium irrespective of their own individual characteristics, and despite controlling for industry-level capital intensity and profitability. However, the analysis also suggests that this positive STEM composition effect might depend on the bargaining power of workers.”

    Link to the paper.

    ‡ wages labor new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • The latest installment of our Phenomenal Works series comes from economist Nathan Lane, a researcher to watch whose work we’ve featured previously. “As contemporary trade and development economists, we tend to be very much ‘in the weeds,’ and often take for granted this recent period of development. Intellectual and global histories have been inspirational for helping me grasp the complexity of the last century.” Link to the post.
    • A correction from last week’s letter: we mistakenly included a repeat link to Theda Skocpol’s excellent report on cap and trade, where there should’ve been a link to Nancy Cartwright and Jacob Stegenga’s essay theorizing evidence for evidence-based policy. Link to Cartwright and Stegenga’s paper.
    • A collaborative project tracking the novel coronavirus outbreak using public data. Link.
    • “New problems now challenge the content of our introductory economics courses: mounting inequalities, climate change, concerns about the future of work, and financial instability. The tools required to address these problems (strategic interaction, limited information, principal-agent models, new behavioral foundations, and dynamic processes) are available.” Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin call for a re-writing of contemporary economics education. Link.
    • Josh Angrist et al look at “extramural citations” between economics and the other social sciences: citations to empirical work have increased in non-economic social sciences, and economists are increasingly citing other social sciences at increasing rates. Link.
    • From the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, a special issue analyzing recent elections results in India, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia. Link.
    • In the Cambridge Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, historian Gabriel Winant gives a critical overview of analogies drawn between the “gilded age” and our own. Link.
    • At EPI, new analysis from Josh Bivens finds that a guaranteed health care program is likely to “boost wages and jobs and lead to more efficient labor markets.” Link.
    • In a new article, Julian Gewirtz examines the “how the Chinese Communist Party interpreted HIV/AIDS in the period from 1984, when the Chinese government first introduced policies reacting to the disease’s emergence, to 2000, when China’s devastating epidemic began to receive worldwide media attention.” Link.
    • At the Times, David Leondhart and Stuart Thompson report on and visualize the growth of deaths of despair in the United States. Link.
    • In honor of the book’s 75th anniversary, Fred Block and Margaret Somers reflect on the legacy of Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. Link.
    • A methods paper by Susan Athey, Raj Chetty, Guido Imbens, Hyunseung Kang: “A common challenge in estimating the long-term impacts of treatments (e.g., job training programs) is that the outcomes of interest (e.g., lifetime earnings) are observed with a long delay. We address this problem by combining several short term outcomes (e.g., short-run earnings) into a ‘surrogate index,’ the predicted value of the long-term outcome given the short-term outcomes.” Link. h/t Sidhya
    • A January Oxfam report estimates that women and girls globally perform about $10.9 trillion worth of unpaid labor. Link to the report, and link to an informative data visualization in the NYT.
    • AI as central banker? Jon Danielsson et al look at the increased use of AI systems in central banks. Link.
    • “We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part caused by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In an environment with weak state presence, this socialist threat triggered landowners, estate managers and local politicians to turn to the Mafia to resist and combat peasant demands. We show that the location of the Peasant Fasci is significantly affected by a severe drought in 1893, and using information on rainfall, we estimate the impact of the Peasant Fasci on the location of the Mafia in 1900.” By Daron Acemoglu, Giuseppe De Feo, and Giacomo De Luca. Link.

  8. Honeysuckle

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    CLEAR MEANS

    Evaluating evidence-based policy

    Over the past two decades, “evidence-based policy” has come to define the common sense of research and policymakers around the world. But while attempts have been made to create formalization schemes for the ranking of evidence for policy, a gulf remains between rhetoric about evidence-based policy and applied theories for its development.

    In a 2011 paper, philosophers of science NANCY CARTWRIGHT and JACOB STEGENGA lay out a “theory of evidence for use,” discussing the role of causal counterfactuals, INUS conditions, and mechanisms in producing evidence—and how all this matters for its evaluators.

    From the paper:

    “Truth is a good thing. But it doesn’t take one very far. Suppose we have at our disposal the entire encyclopaedia of unified science containing all the true claims there are. Which facts from the encyclopaedia do we bring to the table for policy deliberation? Among all the true facts, we want on the table as evidence only those that are relevant to the policy. And given a collection of relevant true facts we want to know how to assess whether the policy will be effective in light of them. How are we supposed to make these decisions? That is the problem from the user’s point of view and that is the problem of focus here.

    We propose three principles. First, policy effectiveness claims are really causal counterfactuals and the proper evaluation of a causal counterfactual requires a causal model that (i) lays out the causes that will operate and (ii) tells what they produce in combination. Second, causes are INUS conditions, so it is important to review both the different causal complexes that will affect the result (the different pies) and the different components (slices) that are necessary to act together within each complex (or pie) if the targeted result is to be achieved. Third, a good answer to the question ‘How will the policy variable produce the effect’ can help elicit the set of auxiliary factors that must be in place along with the policy variable if the policy variable is to operate successfully.”

    Link to the paper.

    • Cartwright has written extensively on evidence and its uses. See: her 2012 book Evidence Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing it Better; her 2011 paper in The Lancet on RCTs and effectiveness; and her 2016 co-authored monograph on child safety, featuring applications of the above reasoning.
    • For further introduction to the philosophical underpinnings of Cartwright’s applied work, and the relationship between theories of causality and evidence, see her 2015 paper “Single Case Causes: What is Evidence and Why.” Link. And also: “Causal claims: warranting them and using them.” Link.
    • Obliquely related, see this illuminating discussion of causality in the context of reasoning about discrimination in machine learning and the law, by JFI fellow and Harvard PhD Candidate Lily Hu and Yale Law School Professor Issa Kohler-Hausmann: “What’s Sex Got To Do With Machine Learning?” Link.
    • A 2017 paper by Abhijit Banerjee et al: “A Theory of Experimenters,” which models “experimenters as ambiguity-averse decision-makers, who make trade-offs between subjective expected performance and robustness. This framework accounts for experimenters’ preference for randomization, and clarifies the circumstances in which randomization is optimal: when the available sample size is large enough or robustness is an important concern.” Link.
    ‡ philosophy metaresearch philosophy_of_science

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    The Gold Standard and the Great Depression in Spain

    Postdoctoral Fellow in Economic History ENRIQUE JORGE SOTELO researches the history of monetary policy. His PhD thesis analyzes the impact of currency depreciation on Spain’s financial sector between 1921-1935.

    From the abstract:

    “Spain experienced a severe economic contraction during the 1930s, especially during 1931, when depositors ran on banks and the exchange rate continued to deteriorate rapidly. My argument is in contrast with the traditional account that depicts Spain as having escaped the Great Depression because its currency was not convertible to gold and because it did not experience widespread bank failures. I argue instead that exchange rate depreciation multiplied the effects of the 1931 banking crisis, creating fragilities in the banking sector. It is a fact that the Banco de Espa˜na intervened as a lender of last resort during 1931, and that this was a necessary step, but this is not enough to explain why Spain was exceptional in terms of bank stability during the Great Depression. Instead, it was a combination of policy measures—that were either absent or came much later in a number of other countries—that kept the banking system afloat. This, however, did not translate in the resumption of economic growth or price stability. The Spanish economy contracted as sharply as the Italian, the French or the German did, and deflation kicked in from 1933. As a result, the Spanish experience does not seem to be a reliable counterfactual for other countries when discussing the links between exchange rate regimes and financial stability during the Great Depression.”

    Link to the paper, link to Sotelo’s website.

    ‡ monetary_policy banks new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • On the blog, Kyle Moore explores the import of stratification economics for studying race: “The neoclassical and stratification approaches disagree over the causes of and remedies for racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes and differ substantially in their understanding of income, education, wealth, and health. Link.
    • From Marco Ranaldi, a proposal for a new way to measure inequality: income composition inequality, which “allows for (i) novel political economy analysis of the evolution of economic systems and (ii) the technical assessment of the relationship between the functional and personal distribution of income.” Link.
    • “While the first business organizations to reach large size in the late nineteenth century did so through the route of vertical integration—formal ownership of assets and direct employment of workers—mid-twentieth-century franchising firms pioneered a new path to bigness, relying on restrictive contracts rather than formal integration to control their business organizations.” A brand new paper by Brian Callaci: “Control Without Responsibility: The Legal Creation of Franchising, 1960–1980.” Link.
    • At Vox, an interview with Jessica Lovering of the Energy for Growth Hub about nuclear power—as technology and as policy. Link.
    • The influence of 1930s populist radio demagogue Father Coughlin: “Exploiting variation in the radio signal strength as a result of topographic factors, I find that a one standard deviation increase in exposure to Coughlin’s broadcast opposing FDR reduced FDR’s vote share by about two percentage points in the 1936 presidential election.” By Tianyi Wang. Link.
    • “Is there a gender-equality paradox in STEM?” New from the Harvard GenderSciLab, a paper by Sarah Richardson et al, and blog series by the authors. h/t Milo
    • On the “true” fiscal multiplier during the European sovereign debt crisis. By Lucyna Gornicka et al. Link.
    • “The knowledge commons, as we implemented it through the free and open source software licenses, and through those creative commons licenses that many of us worked on in different jurisdictions were a mistake, because they rest on the wrong assumptions, and are permeated by the wrong ideologies.” Balázs Bodó suggests that the knowledge commons is a “curse in disguise.” Link.
    • “Peasant aristocrats? Wealth, social status and the politics of Swedish farmer parliamentarians 1769-1895.” New work by Erik Bengtsson and Mats Olsson. Link.
    • Sam Asher and Paul Novosad on rural road development: “Nearly one billion people worldwide live in rural areas without access to national paved road networks. We estimate the impacts of India’s 40 billion USD national rural road construction program.” Among the findings: batter market connections, but no major changes in agricultural outcomes, income, or assets. Link.
    • On Supply Chain Dive, a series on the impact of coronavirus on global supply chains. Link. h/t Francis
    • A visualization of RePEc economists on Twitter, from Christian Mongeau. “Edges (links) show whether a user follows or is followed by another user. Colors represent the user’s main research area, based on an aggregation of their main NEP field.” Link.
    • “One of the challenges that need to be overcome in policy evaluation studies is that there is hardly any experimental evidence related to R&D grants… more focus should be placed on researching the optimal design of policies. Which features of an R&D subsidy program are essential for maximizing its impact? And what types of firms benefit most from receiving a grant?” A short paper from Paul Hünermund and Dirk Czarnitzki suggests pilot studies on R&D. Link.
    • From the AI Ethics lab, an interactive map shows ethics guidelines around the world. Link.
    • “This paper exploits exogenous variation in the adoption of copyrights within Italy—as a result of the timing of Napoléon’s military victories—to examine the effects of copyrights on the creation of new operas. Although the primary purpose of copyrights is to encourage creativity, systematic evidence on the causal effects of copyrights continues to be scarce, primarily due to a lack of exogenous variation in modern copyright laws. Because opera is a public art form, new works are exceptionally well-documented, offering unique opportunities to observe changes in creativity. Difference-in-differences analyses show that basic copyrights increased both the number and the quality of operas, measured by their immediate success and durability.” By Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser. Link.

  9. Encore

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    STRANGE PUSH

    A retrospective look at cap & trade

    Of the various issues mired in severe and ongoing party polarization, climate crisis is among the most puzzling. Despite longstanding discussions of bipartisan market-based policy proposals like carbon taxes and cap and trade, large-scale government and industry action remains elusive.

    In a masterful 2013 book-length report, Harvard political scientist THEDA SKOCPOL offers an autopsy of the 2009-10 push for cap and trade legislation. The detail-rich account illuminates not just the legislation’s failure, and its leaders in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), but the innumerable complexities of the broader Washington policymaking apparatus.

    (h/t to climate economist Gernot Wagner, associate professor at NYU and founder of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Lab, for bringing this piece back up in a recent newsletter and column.)

    “If environmental politics in America was ever a matter of working out shared bipartisan solutions to expert-assessed problems, it is now far from that—but in what ways and why? And what is to be done? My report ponders these matters.

    The corporations that participated in USCAP could double their bottom-line bets—by participating in the “strange-bedfellows” effort to hammer out draft climate legislation that was as favorable as possible to their industry or their firms. But heads of the leading environmental organizations in USCAP had to stick by whatever commitments they made in the internal coalitional process, or else it would fall apart.

    The USCAP campaign was designed and conducted in an insider-grand-bargaining political style that, unbeknownst to its sponsors, was unlikely to succeed given fast-changing realities in U.S. partisan politics and governing institutions.”

    Link to the full report.

    • In the footnotes: Eric Pooley’s 2010 book The Climate War, which provides an in-depth account of the activities of USCAP. Link to an excerpt from the book, link to the publisher page.
    • A 2011 paper by Michele Betsill and Matthew Hoffman examines the “contours” of cap and trade, through an analysis of 33 distinct policy venues. Link. And a 2015 paper tracks climate adaptation planning across 156 U.S. municipalities. Link.
    • A previous newsletter highlighted Skocpol’s essential work on US welfare history. Link to the archived letter. And link to a recent blog post featuring climate academic Leah Stokes’s recommended readings on climate-related research.
    ‡ policy climate history

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Climate change and educational attainment

    Recently appointed Assistant Professor of Public Policy R. JISUNG PARK studies the welfare effects of climate related externalities. His job market paper considers the impact of rising temperatures on education-based inequalities.

    From the paper:

    “Within the US, individuals face vastly different risk of heat exposure, and such risk appears to be changing over time. I combine local daily weather data with test scores of 1 million US students taking synchronized high-stakes exams over the course of several days each year. Drawing on administrative records from the largest public school district in the United States (New York City), I find that hot temperature during a test reduces a student’s likelihood of graduating from high school. For the average student, taking an exam on a 90◦F day results in a roughly 10 percent lower likelihood of passing a particular subject, which in turn reduces the probability of graduation. A one standard deviation increase in average exam-time temperature (+4.4◦F) reduces a student’s likelihood of graduating on time by approximately 3 percentage points, or 4.5 percent relative to a mean on-time graduation rate of 68 percent. Given well-documented correlations between climate and income, it is possible that lower income students may be subtly but systematically penalized on standardized assessments. Such equity concerns are likely of heightened policy relevance given the additional correlation between expected extreme heat events and income or race.”

    Link to the paper, link to Park’s website.

    ‡ climate inequality new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • On the blog: Mark Blyth writes the fifth entry in our Phenomenal Works series, recommending a title by Hermann Mark Schwartz on dollar centrality, intellectual property rights, and international infrastructure development. Link.
    • A fascinating article by Philip Heijmans, Hannah Dormido and Adrian Leung looks at the Indonesian government’s plans to build a brand new capital on Borneo, a major site of Indonesia’s dominant coal mining industry, as flooding in Jakarta increases in severity with each passing year. Link.
    • María Eugenia Longo writes on the various forms of “informality” in youth employment in Argentina. Link.
    • A new data visualization and report by EdBuild “identifies which of America’s school district boundaries create the steepest degree of economic segregation,” tying together labor market trends, demographic shifts, and the public education system. Link.
    • “We model US household debt accumulation from 1990–2007. A key result is that distributional change alone will not make the contemporary US economy financially sustainable.” Mark Setterfield and Yun K Kim. Link.
    • A paper by reader Max Ajl on the fascinating work of Slaheddine el-Amami, a Tunisian agronomist who “wrote technical studies ranging from the agricultural capacities of the unjustly-marked-as-barren Kerkennah Islands, to possibilities for drip irrigation, to attempts to quantify the energy use of Tunisian agriculture, to a wide-ranging investigation of indigenous hydraulic systems.” Link.
    • On the benefits of midday sleep among the rural poor in Chennai. Pedro Bessone, Gautam Rao, Frank Schilbach, Heather Schofield, and Mattie Toma. Link.
    • The impact of tax cuts on public spending, with evidence from Germany. By Clemens Fuest, Florian Neumeier, Daniel Stöhlker. Link.
    • New work by Trevon Logan in the Cambridge Journal of Economic history “exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the effect of politician race on public finance. Consistent with the stated policy objectives of black officials, I find positive effects of black politicians on land tenancy and black literacy. These results suggest that black political leaders had large effects on public finance and individual outcomes over and above electoral preferences.” Link.
    • Research on EITC take-up from the California Policy Lab: “None of the outreach campaigns aimed at increasing awareness of the state and federal Earned Income Tax Credits in California in 2018 and 2019 had demonstrable impacts on tax filing or EITC claiming.” Link.
    • A testimony from Shye-Shing Huang of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities Policy on declining and maldistributed rates of IRS enforcement. Link.
    • By Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington: “We reexamine one of the largest partisan shifts in a modern democracy: Southern whites’ exodus from the Democratic Party. We show that defection among racially conservative whites explains the entire decline from 1958 to 1980.” Link.
    • “We show that characteristics of Brazilian municipalities related to institutional quality and distribution of political power are partly inherited from the colonial histories experienced by different areas of the country. Municipalities with origins tracing back to the sugar-cane colonial cycle—characterized by a polarized and oligarchic socioeconomic structure—display today more inequality in the distribution of endowments (land). Municipalities with origins tracing back to the gold colonial cycle—characterized by a heavily inefficient presence of the Portuguese state—display today worse governance practices and less access to justice. The colonial rent-seeking episodes are also correlated with lower provision of public goods and lower income per capita.” A 2009 paper by Joana Naritomi, Rodrigo Soares, and Juliano Assunção. Link.

  10. The Importance of Being Evergreen

    Comments Off on The Importance of Being Evergreen

    ADMINISTRATION PRIMARY

    A comparative overview of national healthcare systems

    In an employer-sponsored healthcare system like that of the United States, deteriorating labor market protections have immediate consequences for access to healthcare. Democratic primary candidates have presented a number of proposals to address declining rates of insurance, ranging in degrees of accessibility, coverage, and number of providers.

    In her 1992 book, Healthcare Politics, ELLEN M. IMMERGUT seeks to explain America’s healthcare system through a comparison of its history to Switzerland’s, France’s, and Sweden’s. From the author’s preface:

    “I compare the politics of three countries where national health insurance had been proposed, but where, as a result of political struggles, the final policy results are diverse. Medical associations in all three countries had opposed national health insurance on the grounds that doctors preferred to work as private practitioners and not as government employees. How then could one explain the fact that Switzerland rejected national health insurance, France accepted it, and Sweden not only enacted national health insurance, but later converted its health system to a de facto national health service? The history of each case pointed insistently to the role played by standard political institutions. The Swiss referendum, the French parliament, and the Swedish executive bureaucracy emerged as key elements in an explanation of national health insurance politics in those countries.

    The resulting book argues for the primacy of these institutions in explaining policy outcomes precisely because they facilitate or impede the entry of different groups into the policy-making process. In Switzerland, the public interest on any specific policy issue is viewed as the sum of the demands of individual citizens as expressed in national referenda. In Sweden, on the other hand, proper representation for policy issues is a matter of consensual agreements between interest groups, whose large memberships and democratic procedures ensure their responsiveness to the public. In France, the rules of representation stress the importance of an impartial executive standing above the particularistic claims of interest groups. But there is no linear relationship between a specific set of political institutions and the interest groups that will succeed or the health system that results. These histories are filled with unexpected events, sudden about faces, and new strategies. This book is a call to look at these histories, not just at the broad sweep of major events, but also at the seemingly minor struggles that make up daily political life. These are the battles that establish the constraints on politics, but they are also the junctures that extend the limits of the possible.”

    Link to a downloadable copy of the book.

    • “The postwar growth of public expenditures in the health sector and the growth of universalism in coverage of benefits is tied to the strength of the labor movement in each country.” Vincent Navarro’s influential 1989 paper situates healthcare policies within a broader distributional framework. Link.
    • “The idea of a British hospital system funded by its users is one which emerged only late in the 19th century. Before this, care was provided through thousands of voluntary hospitals.” Martin Gorsky, John Mohan, and Tim Willis on “Mutualism and Healthcare” in the UK. And in a similar vein, David T. Beito’s 2000 book on the fraternal societies which provided healthcare to millions of Americans throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Link and link.
    • A recent paper by Stefan Bauernschuster, Anastasia Driva, and Erik Hornung uses “the introduction of compulsory health insurance in the German Empire in 1884 as a natural experiment to study the impact of social health insurance on mortality,” finding that “Bismarck’s health insurance generated a significant mortality reduction.” Link.
    ‡ healthcare history welfare

    New Researchers

    The effects of food assistance take-up on infant health

    UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate LEAH SHIFERAW examines both the mechanisms of cash transfer program take-up and their effects on health, using the adoption of the Electronic Benefit Transfer card in California as a case study.

    From the paper:

    “Throughout the decline of traditional cash assistance and movement towards in-work tax credits and transfers, SNAP has remained an essential source of income support, currently lifting more children out of deep poverty than any other federal means-tested program. Yet despite its centrality in the safety net, take-up of program benefits has been persistently incomplete. Almost half of the individuals estimated to be eligible for the program in 2001 were not enrolled, and although participation has risen over time, there are still over 7 million people annually who are eligible to enroll in SNAP and do not participate. I estimate event study regressions using the county level rollout of EBT in California between 2002 and 2004 and find that EBT adoption led to a large and persistent increase in caseloads and applications for the program, as well as higher retailer participation in high poverty neighborhoods. I document that this rise in food stamp benefit take-up led to a meaningful increase in average birth weight for births most likely impacted by the policy, with effects concentrated in the bottom half of the birth weight distribution. These estimates provide new evidence that reducing the barriers to participation in food assistance programs can lead to potentially large gains in health for disadvantaged children.”

    Link to the paper, link to Shiferaw’s website.

    ‡ welfare poverty new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

    + + +

    • At the Phenomenal World: Marshall Steinbaum and Jack Gross interview Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Pulitzer finalist Fear City, about austerity politics and public goods at the height of NYC’s 1970s fiscal crisis. Link.
    • “We find that $10,000 in higher tuition causally reduces the probability of graduating with a graduate degree by 6.2 percentage points and increases student debt by $2,961.” New research on “Tuition, Debt, and Human Capital,” by Rajashri Chakrabarti, Vyacheslav Fos, Andres Liberman, and Constantine Yannelis. Link.
    • Andreas Bergh looks at pensions in Sweden to theorize the coexistence of economic freedom and big government—“in the Hayekian sense of requiring knowledge that is difficult to acquire from a central authority.” Link.
    • “For centuries, maps have codified human geographic knowledge and shaped economic decision-making.” In the Winter issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Abhishek Nagaraj and Scott Stern on “The Economics of Maps.” Link. (Also in the issue, global employment composition, electrification & development, and refugee labor market integration. Link, link, and link.)
    • Three new briefs on the effects of guaranteed income, from Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy: the first on feasibility, the second on design, and the third on financing. Link. h/t Steve
    • A December article by Arun Kumar “examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by unprecedented labor mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers’ literacy.” Link.
    • In the EPI Macroeconomics Newsletter, Josh Bivens considers the “changing significance of the unemployment rate” in different historical contexts. Link.
    • A data visualization of the relationship between life expectancy and quality of housing in more than 300 NYCHA properties. Link. h/t Halah
    • More notable data viz: an incredible “Map of Mathematics,” connecting number theory to geometry, symmetry, and infinity. Link. h/t Francis
    • “How can we widen the scope of our thinking beyond the idea that money bail is unfair to poor people, to a deeper understanding of the harms of pretrial detention and even criminal adjudication itself?” Jocelyn Simonson introduces an LPE roundtable on cash bail. Link.
    • A new Cleveland Fed paper collects data on advance layoff notices filed under the WARN Act, which requires firms to notify workers 60 days in advance of layoffs, and finds “the number of workers affected by WARN notices leads to state-level initial unemployment insurance claims, changes in the unemployment rate, and changes in private employment.” Link.
    • From 2018, Zachary Davis Cuyler on the distributional politics of Lebanon’s Trans-Arabian pipeline between 1950-1964. Link.
    • Janet Currie, Henrik Kleven, and Esmée Zwiers use text mining to map changes in economics methodology: “Trends towards demanding greater credibility and transparency from researchers in applied economics and a ‘collage’ approach to assembling evidence will likely continue.” Link.
    • “This article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of ‘enemies’ and ‘aliens’. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from ‘evacuees’ and ‘absentees’. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context, and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the ‘age of extremes’ was also in part an ‘age of expropriation’.” By Nicholas Mulder. Link.