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the idea shop forecast: light posting, chance of summer hiatus

By Andrew David Chamberlain


[the opportunity cost of blogging]

A basic lesson from economics is that when things get more costly, people do them less.

Summer’s here, and the beach is calling. Also, I’ve got a new job working on tax issues that’s keeping me busy. Translation: the opportunity cost of running the Idea Shop has jumped sharply.

As a result, I’ll be spending a lot less time here—at least until the clouds return in September.

Until then, thanks for stopping in—now go outside and play!

Posted Jun 3rd | miscellaneous | Permalink | Feedback?



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thinking about prostitution

By Andrew David Chamberlain


You won’t find a chapter on prostitution in most economics textbooks. But if economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn have their way, that may change.

Prostitution as an industry is full of economic puzzles: Prostitutes are low-skilled, but highly paid. Both women and men supply prostitution, but demand is almost uniformly men. Prostitutes are well-paid, but occupy a low rung on the social ladder. And so on.

In a recent paper in the Journal of Political Economy, economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn build a model of prostitution that demystifies much of the economics of the world’s oldest profession. [Download paper here (PDF)]

The authors nail some interesting questions. One is, Why is prostitution more common in poor countries? One obvious explanation is that prostitution falls as women’s income and opportunity costs rise. What’s less obvious is that prostitution falls as men’s income rises, too.

Why does that happen? Because to some extent—here come the nasty emails—wives and prostitutes are substitutes, with prostitutes being what economists call an inferior good. As income rises men prefer stable marriages over occasional hookers. And this has policy implications: the best way to reduce prostitution may be making both women and men richer, rather than legal penalties and informational campaigns.

Another question is, Why is prostitution more common in areas with high migration? The authors’ note that one cost of being a prostitute is reduced value in the marriage market. Most guys won’t marry ex-hookers. Prostitutes can avoid this cost by hiding the fact that they’re prostitutes. Frequent migration helps do that, by avoiding a social reputation. And that’s exactly what we see.

More interestingly it explains why, ceteris paribus, foreign prostitutes are cheaper in places where both exist—they’re the low-cost producers of prostitution.

Of course, the big question the authors don’t address is whether prostitution’s spillover effects—spread of disease, impact on the stability of marriage and the likelihood of out-of-wedlock children, etc.—justify the widespread bans we see today.

Food for thought on your next trip to Vegas.

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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at what price taxis?

By Andrew David Chamberlain


How much would you pay for a monopoly?

Last week, New York City auctioned off 126 taxi medallions, which grant the monopoly right to operate cabs in the city. Among 270 bidders, medallion prices reached $300,000, prompting outrage from some onlookers.

$300,000 sounds like a lot. But is it really? Sure, medallions cost money—but they also earn income. On net, how much is a taxi medalion really worth?

If you ask an economist, he’ll tell you to calculate the present value of the expected future revenue from a medallion, and compare that to the cost.

So let’s do the math. Given a medallion cost of $300,000, how much does a cabbie have to make to justify buying one? Assuming he’ll use it for 20 years, and assuming, say, a 7 percent discount rate—the forgone return he could’ve earned on a similar investment—he’d need to earn about … $28,300 a year.

That’s not much. So how much do taxi drivers actually earn? According to the New York Times here and here, most drivers pull in about … $30,000 a year.

So it turns out those medallions may not be so expensive after all, and a little simple economics helps us see that.

Of course, this doesn’t answer the important question: whether taxis should be a monopoly in NYC, or whether medallions should be made cheaper by allowing more of them. But it does help us resist the temptation to hastily denounce medallion prices as “unfair” just because their price looks large in absolute terms.

Still not convinced? Go do the numbers—download the Idea Shop’s “Should I Buy that Taxi Medallion?” decision-model here [MS Excel spreadsheet].

Fun for the whole family.

[Update: Jim Henley adds a some complexity to this back-of-the-envelope calculation here.]

[Update 2: Tim Lee adds more on taxi driver’s opportunity cost of time here—though in the model above this can be accounted for by simply adjusting expected future income streams downward…]

[Update 3: Tyler Cowen has more on the economics of optimal taxi regulation here.]

[Update 4: Will Baude has more on intertemporal problems with stable taxi quotas here.]

[Update 5: Via email, a reader suggests three things to make the above calculation more realistic: ”(1) The $30,000 annual income often reported is net income—net of a leasing fees paid to the medallion owner. (2) Cabs run around the clock, a single cabdriver does not. A medallion owner can use the medallion himself for 8 to 12 hours per day, and then lease the medallion to someone else for the rest of the hours—the medallion stays with the cab, not the owner. (3) A medallion can be sold, so it has more than a twenty year useful life.”]

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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the baby factory

By Andrew David Chamberlain


Remember when overpopulation was making headlines? So much for that. The new demographic crisis du jour is underpopulation caused by falling birthrates worldwide.

In the last 30 years, birthrates have plummeted in rich countries, and poor countries are beginning to follow suit. By 2045 world fertility rates will have fallen below replacement levels. By 2070 demographers predict world population will peak at 9 billion, and begin slowly contracting thereafter.

So what? Well, there’s a growing consensus that falling birthrates are a social problem with bad economic consequences. A recent article from Phillip Longman in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is representative.

In it, Longman argues rising average ages means fewer young productive workers and more dependent elders, and this threatens to bankrupt pay-as-you-go social insurance programs. Declining population also means lower total GDP growth potential, and lower total tax revenue. Population aging may also slow technological innovation and entrepreneurship, which tend to flourish among the youth. And so on. His conclusion? States need a policy solution to correct this, and boost birthrates.

In econ-speak, this is an argument about externalities. Saying “childbearing has social consequences”—rather than individual—is really saying “babies cause positive externalities” for the rest of society.

So do they? In one sense, of course. By giving birth to Thomas Edison, Mrs. Edison generated lots of social benefits she didn’t take into account before getting pregnant. But what about Ted Bundy’s mother? If we count benefits, we have to count costs, too. Back when overpopulation was making headlines, it was argued that babies give off negative externalities, in the form of strain on urban infrastructure, environmental destruction, etc.

Which claim is true? That’s an empirical question. Unfortunately, it’s one that’s probably unanswerable even conceptually. That’s why—when deciding if falling birthrates are a social problem—we should probably look at more than aggregate consequences. We should also look at causes, at the level of individual mothers.

From Longman:

... the changing economics of family life is the prime factor in discouraging childbearing … [A]s more and more of the world’s population moves to urban areas in which children offer little or no economic reward to their parents, and as women acquire economics opportunities and reproductive control, the social and financial costs of childbearing continue to rise.

So the main causes of falling birthrates are urbanization, rising wealth, and the improved status of women. As I’ve written before, all these are good things (see here). And if these factors are the cause, the only long-term way to boost birthrates is to reverse these positive trends.

If there ever was a cure worse than the disease, a policy that encouraged more babies at the expense of making women less equal—and all of us poorer—is definitely it.

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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guest post: galton's fallacy

By Michael Stastny


Imagine you want to conduct a study on the effectiveness of punishment and reward on flight training. You praise trainees for good landings and reprimand them for near crashes, and observe whether this has any effects.

After spending some time on the airfield your data indicate trainees did worse on their next flight if they had just been praised, and fly better just after being yelled at.

Then you have a conversation with the flight instructor who does the written examinations. He tells you that experience shows students who do well on midterms slack off on their final exam, while students who do badly generally get better.

What does this mean? Do students’ test scores tend to revert to some mean?

If you answered yes, you’ve just committed the famous “Galton’s fallacy”.

What did the 19th century statistician and geneticist Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, do wrong?

Well, he plotted the height of fathers against the height of their sons and discovered sons of tall fathers tended to be tall, but on average not as tall as their fathers. Similarly, sons of short fathers tended to be short, but on average not as short as their fathers. He—and this was his mistake—was immediately concerned that the sons of tall fathers are regressing into a pool of mediocrity along with the sons of everybody else.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, height tends to be normally distributed—i.e., the distribution takes a bell-shaped form—and sons’ heights are, due to heredity, correlated with the father’s height. So there is a linear dependence between fathers’ and the sons’ heights.

To see why this leads to a fallacy, let’s do a simulation where we generate, loosely speaking, 2*250 standard normally distributed random variables with a correlation coefficient of 0.5 and plot them against each other.

The resulting scatterplot is similar to what Francis Galton was looking at about 120 years ago. In this case, just imagine the average height was rescaled to zero in the plot:

The blue line is the regression line and the red line is the 45 degree line (standard deviation line). Galton expected the regression line to be the 45 degree line—that is, he expected a father with a height of 2 on the x-axis should, on average, have a son with a height of 2 on the y-axis. But because of the correlation between x and y, the regression line shows that a father with a height of 2 is expected to have a son of height 1.

The technical explanation is that the slope you get from regressing two normally distributed random variables with equal variances against each other is the correlation coefficient, and therefore a father with height 2 would give us:

1 = 0.5*2,

since the regression equation is y = 0.5*x.

So this appearance of “regressing to the mean” is a statistical mirage due to regressing two random but correlated variables upon each other. Mistakenly attaching some special meaning to this phenomenon is the technical explanation of Galton’s fallacy.

The non-technical explanation is a little more tricky. Let’s go back to our first two test-taking examples at the flight school.

First, set up the following model:

Y = T + e.

“Y” is the test score you actually receive on a certain exam. “T” is the “true” test score—the score you actually deserve—and “e” is a chance error due to, say, being sick before the test or lucky guessing on exam day.

Now assume that the distribution of true scores follows a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Suppose further that the standard error, “e”, is either -5 or 5 with equal probability.

Now, if someone scores Y = 140 on his test, there are two possible explanations: either his true score is 135 (= 140 – 5) or 145 (= 140 + 5). The first outcome is, of course, more likely than the second, since “T” is assumed to be normally distributed and the more an outcome deviates from the mean, the more unlikely it is to occur. If you plot the test scores of the first exam against the test scores of the second exam, you will notice that those with very low scores on the first exam will see their average move up toward the overall mean (some of those who had a negative chance error will have a positive chance error this time) while those with high scores on their first exam will see their scores move down.

That’s what gives the appearance of a “regression to the mean.” And the same explanation applies to the father-son sample: a father with a height of 2 (which is 2 standard deviations taller than the average father) does not have on average a son with an equally extreme height.

For more on Galton’s fallacy, I highly recommend reading “Galton’s Fallacy and Tests of the Convergence Hypothesis” by Danny Quah—a well-known paper among economists, especially growth theorists.

[Read more from guest blogger Michael Stastny at Mahalanobis.]

Posted May 27th | math & stats | Permalink | Feedback?



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no such thing as a free-market economist?

By Andrew David Chamberlain


What is free-market economics? Is it different from regular economics?

Seems like a silly question. After all, the term is ubiquitous in media and politics. But on closer inspection, it’s a surprisingly nebulous concept.

A reasonable start might be a definition. But good luck finding one. Google returns more than 22,000 search results, none of which—as far as I can tell—offers a clear and defensible definition.

A search on onelook.com—which scans 970 dictionaries—turns up 96 common modifiers to “economics”, and free-market isn’t one of them (thanks to Andrew Walsh for the pointer). Not even Liberty Fund’s Concise Encyclopedia of Economics—with entries from a range of self-described free-market economists—has an entry for free-market economics.

How about the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics? Nope. How about A Primer on Modern Themes in Free Market Economics and Policy? Though it includes lots of policy prescriptions for moving toward a free market, there’s no actual definition.

So much for that. Let’s try an indirect approach.

Wikipedia—though it has no entry for free-market economics either—defines “free market” as follows:

A free market (or free-trade) economy is an idealized form of a market economy in which buyers and sellers are permitted to carry out transactions based on mutual agreement on price without government intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies, regulation, or government ownership of goods or services.

Now, one might conclude that free-market economics is simply the study of the free market. And from that, it might seem reasonable to conclude that free-market economics is therefore another branch of economics—one that studies markets without state intervention.

But you’d be wrong. That’s simply not what people mean when they use the term free-market economics.

Much like suppy-side economics, in practice the term is used to describe a political viewpoint about economic policy, not a field within economics. Free-market economics isn’t so much economics as it is an ideological predisposition for a particular set of social arrangements favoring markets over government.

Now, being sympathetic with laissez-faire is one thing. But calling it a branch of social science is another. It seems pretty clear that explicit ideological predispositions like those embodied in the term free-market economics have no place in the social sciences.

The goal of economics is to provide a true account of social phenomena. To some extent, that requires economists to accept a scholarly responsibility to pursue truth in as unbiased a fashion as possible. Labeling one’s self a free-market economist seems to be an explicit rejection of that scholarly responsibility.

If free-market economics means anything, it means some questions and answers about social phenomena—especially those involving government action—are simply off the table, for ideological reasons. I think everyone can agree that’s an unscientific approach. It’s pretty clear that “free-market” economics is a case of a mislabled political program, and isn’t technically economic science at all.

Of course, one might object that since no science is completely free of ideology, denouncing free-market economics for having explicit ideological biases misses the mark. And on some level that’s true—ideological predispositions do guide the types of questions all scientists find interesting, and they undoubtedly temper everyone’s research instincts.

But whatever the subconscious influence of ideology, economists—and academics more generally—have a professional responsibility to actively steer clear of their own ideological biases, insofar as they interfere with the truth-seeking enterprise of science.

As people who study markets and have a rich understanding of the failings of government intervention in the economy, it seems natural that some economists will aesthetically favor free markets. I’m usually one of them. And in our capacities as citizens in a representative democracy, or as policymakers formulating economic policy, those views are appropriate and necessary.

But as social scientists, there is an ethical responsibility to at least keep them in the closet. Importing ideological predispositions into our work in an attempt to cloak them in a veneer of scientific validity is bad methodology. And it works to discredit the entire intellectual program.

Economics has already got a bad rap. Critics of economics have long questioned the status of economics as a science—accusing it of being mere “politics in disguise” in the words of iconic author Hazel Henderson.

Unfortunately, the day economics devolves into ideological advocacy of a political program—even if that program is the best among alternatives—they will be right, and that will be a shame.

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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the price of deregulation: subsidies

By Andrew David Chamberlain


One good thing about deregulation is that it clears out economic dead wood. When regulations are lifted, companies start competing and either get efficient or lose their shirts. Over time, economic losers go away and low-cost producers thrive. And society gets things done better.

At least that’s the theory.

In practice, economic losers don’t go away so easily. Once deregulation frees-up markets, politicians often rush in with heavy subsidies to losing companies. People like stability, and subsidies promote that.

These subsidies can be huge, and they’re an often-overlooked “cost” of deregulation. After accounting for the cost of subsidies to taxpayers, actual gains from deregulation can be dramatically lower.

A common example is airlines. Even after deregulation in the 1970s, airlines continued to enjoy a seat at the federal trough during rough times. According the Congressional Research Service, between 1918 and 1998 the feds spent about $155 billion on commercial airline subsidies—guaranteed loans, airport subsidies, direct hand-outs, you name it. And the trend isn’t slowing. By some estimates, they’ve tacked on another $15 billion just since September 11, 2001. (Download the study in PDF here).

That’s a lot of cash down the drain. Historically, these subsidies have gone hand-in-hand with deregulation, leading some to argue they’re simply a “price” we pay to enjoy deregulation’s gains.

If that’s the case, is the price worth it? Well, even if we assume losses from subsidies always go along with deregulation—what I call the “post-deregulation welfare” effect—compared to the benefits, they’re peanuts.

Take the case of airlines. Just between 1976 and 1990 the estimated savings from deregulation were $5 billion to $10 billion per year. Taking the low estimate, that’s $70 billion in savings over just 14 years—and that’s just lower ticket prices. Add in better routes, safety, customer service, innovation, and 14 more years of low prices to the present, and that total’s much larger.

So, is “post-deregulation welfare” inevitable? That’s debatable. But one thing isn’t: even with wasteful subsidies to laggard companies, the cost/benefit balance still tips in favor of deregulated markets.

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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who cares about regulation?

By Andrew David Chamberlain


The big problem with regulation isn’t that it’s inefficient. It’s that it’s boring.

Most regular people don’t notice—or care about—how regulations impact daily life.

Partly, this is economists’ fault. Many of us have forgotten that ideas—just like goods in the marketplace—need marketing. With just a little improved story-telling, economists can make a big difference in helping people see why regulation matters in practical, concrete terms.

To pick an easy one: Once upon a time, air travel was an expensive luxury. Then in 1978, airlines got deregulated and everything changed. Ticket prices fell 40 percent. Suddenly, we witnessed something incredible: for the first time, low- and middle-income Americans could afford to see the world—something historically only available to the rich.

Sure it leaves out a lot. But that’s what make it a powerful story. It contains no math. It doesn’t use the word “efficiency”. And it helps people who don’t care about economics see why regulation matters.

There are lots of economists who tell these stories well. Within the field of regulatory economics, three of the best are Randall Kroszner, Alfred Khan, and Bruce Yandle.

What makes them good? Understanding regulation, like most hard problems in economics, takes experience as well as theory. The world of regulation is a tangled thicket of bureaucrats, lobbyists, and public-interest moralizers. These economists did time in Washington, working in senior policy positions next to the actual people who write regulations, and came back alive—tempered by the experience and full of insights.

Some samples:

From Bruce Yandle—formerly of the President’s Council on Wage and Price Stability in the 1970s—see his famous essay “Bootleggers and Baptists” (PDF) from the May 1983 issue of Regulation magazine.

From Alfred Kahn—the so-called “father of airline deregulation” during the Carter administration—see his entry on “airline deregulation” from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

And from Randall Kroszner—formerly of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors—check out this 2003 interview with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s Region Focus magazine.

From Kroszner on the incentive to regulate:

When you spend much of your career working in a certain industry, you begin to see more nuances … That may be why you find so many people who, in general, are free-market advocates but when it comes to their industry, they are willing to say we need this regulation or barrier.

In some cases they may be right—there may, in fact, be a market failure. But the real question is: Should the government take action? I don’t believe that markets work perfectly all the time. Virtually all markets are imperfect in some way. But what is the relevant alternative? The alternative can be much, much worse.

I am a great believer in the power and importance of free markets for advancing human good. But it’s not because those markets work perfectly—it’s because I can’t think of a better alternative.

Sure, deregulation makes markets more efficient. But is that something that resonates with most people? Probably not.

The far more interesting story is that better markets mean life’s basics get done cheaply. And that means more time for the good stuff in life, like leisure, self-development, creativity and—of course—fun.

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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why do gas prices rise quickly, but fall slowly?

By Andrew David Chamberlain


The first lesson in economics is that prices move based on supply and demand. But the second lesson is that they don’t always do it well.

Sometimes prices are “sticky,” and don’t quickly respond to changing market conditions.

A common example is gas prices. From the The Economist’s online econ glossary:

Petrol-pump prices do not change every time the oil price changes… Sticky prices are slow to change in response to changes in supply or demand. As a result there is, at least temporarily, disequilibrium in the market.

Stickiness is easy to see in the data. Below is a chart of California gas prices from 1996-2000. The pink line is wholesale prices, and the blue is retail. Note how quickly retail prices rise when wholesale prices jump, and how slowly they come down when they fall—a classic case of asymmetric price adjustment.

There are many reasons for stickiness—“menu costs”, contracts that lock-in prices, firms’ unwillingness to irritate customers with constant price changes, etc. But a common one that’s false is that price stickiness like in the above chart is evidence of monopoly pricing power by firms.

It’s an easy mistake to make. From the chart, it’s clear that when wholesale prices rise, gas stations jack up retail prices immediately. But when they fall, retail prices don’t drop as fast. Firms keep prices high, and profit margins fatten. Looks a lot like a case of monopoly pricing to gouge consumers. Right?

Not so fast. A new job-market paper from Matt Lewis, a Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Berkeley, shows that this asymmetrical price adjustment has nothing to do with market power. Instead, it’s caused by consumers, and the way they act differently when prices are rising vs. falling. [Download the paper here (PDF)]

The paper builds a “reference price search model”, in which consumers don’t search much for better prices when they’re falling, but search a lot when they’re rising. When consumers search, markets are more efficient. And when they don’t, markets are less efficient. So when wholesale gas prices fall, gas stations drop prices just enough to keep people from searching much. That makes markets sloppy, and retail prices get pushed down more slowly than up.

It’s a great paper, and it makes intuitive sense—as one professor quipped in a recent listserv discussion, “This phenomenon is no more surprising than the fact that no one ever gets a second opinion when a doctor delivers good news.”

This pricing phenomenon is very widespread, and the paper is one of the first attempts to model it at a micro level. Lewis finds pretty good empirical support for it, too. Email him here.

So, gas prices are on the rise now… if you’re in the Washington, D.C. area, try this tool to make your own search for cheap gas more efficient.

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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advertising as antitrust defense

By Andrew David Chamberlain


Times sure have changed.

The above image is a two-page spread from the July 1976 National Geographic, featuring Union Oil’s infamous “What a way to run a monopoly!” ad.

The ad copy’s the best part. Reading it today, it’s shockingly gruff and confrontational—an anachronism pre-dating the rise of the “social responsibility of business” doctrine that dominates today’s business schools.

Here’s the copy:

You’re looking at some of the brands and names of companies that sell gasoline. Some people say oil companies are a monopoly. If so, it’s the world’s most inept “monopoly.”

This “monopoly” is so inept that it offers the world’s richest country some of the world’s most inexpensive gasoline.

This “monopoly” is so inept that it lets everybody and his brother horn in on the action. Did you know that of the thousands of American oil companies, none has larger than an 8.5% share of the national gasoline market?

In fact, this “monopoly” is so inept that you probably wouldn’t recognize that it is a monopoly because it looks so much like a competitive marketing system.

People who call us a monopoly obviously don’t know what they’re talking about.

For all its awkwardness, it’s sure got a high truth-to-word ratio.

Almost enough to make you nostalgic—well, maybe not.

Posted May 27th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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commerce and capitalism

By Andrew David Chamberlain


Do art and commerce mix?

Conventional wisdom says they don’t. Art and commerce are seen as polar opposites—commerce aims at profit, while art aims at beauty. As a result, commercial practices are viewed suspiciously in the arts world, and are assumed to have a corrupting effect on artistic integrity.

As usual, conventional wisdom is wrong. The St. Petersburg Times has just run an excellent two-part story exploring the intimate—and symbiotic—relationship between commerce and art in, of all places, 19th century Russia:

From the Times:

The piece is based on Ph.D. work by Andrei Shabanov, who’s associated with the art history program at the European University at St. Petersburg.

Read part one here. Read part two here.

More on GMU economist Tyler Cowen’s well-known work on commerce and art here. Read a sample chapter of his In Praise of Commercial Culture—a good introduction to the way economists think about art and commerce—here.

Posted May 27th | culture & institutions | Permalink | Feedback?



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manufacturing decline as self-fulfillment

By Andrew David Chamberlain


Is the U.S. economy’s shift toward services—and away from manufacturing—a move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

A a recently-published paper from psychologists Leaf van Boven and Thomas Gilovich at least suggests that. (read a summary here).

The study finds people are happier when they buy services—or “experiences”—rather than goods. That may mean shifts toward services are predictable in rich countries, as consumers easily satisfy basic needs and start aiming at self-actualization instead.

From the authors:

“We have shown that, for a variety of reasons, experiential purchases make people happier than material purchases . . . Our research suggests that individuals will live happier lives if they invest in experiences more than material possessions.

So why do services beat goods? The authors give three reasons:

1. Experiences are more open to positive reinterpretation later than goods—we tend to be nostalgic for even our worst vacations, for example;

2. Experiences are more central to our identities—life is literally the sum of past experiences, not past purchases; and

3. Experiences have greater “social value.” Sharing them helps us form more satisfying relationships that lead to happiness—think of the difference between a bar-room story about about your European backpacking adventure vs. your new Sony flat-screen.

Keep that in mind next time you hear complaints that our shift toward services represents a “hollowing out” of the U.S. economy.

[Link via Mahalanobis.]

Posted Mar 29th | economics | Permalink | Feedback?



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