CNN reports that Homeland Security Secretary Kelly is not sanguine on DACA. Kelly was said to have discussed DACA with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was noncommittal on defending it in court. Presumably because the related DAPA program has been officially wound down, there are pending court cases to which states might add complaints about DACA, the article states.
The article also mentioned bipartisan legislation such as the BRIDGE Act, announced in December 2016 but currently in limbo, about which Secretary Kelly was apparently unaware.
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Fracking boom, kids, but no marriage
Melissa Kearney and Riley Wilson report the fracking boom raised the wages of less educated males and raised fertility, but marriage rates did not rise. Standard economic models of marriage and childbearing suggests that a permanent increase in male wages should raise both.
Kearney and Wilson also find that wages of less educated females rose, but not as fast as male wages. Another interesting but more implicit point is revealed by their comparison of these results, set in the modern-day economy, with those of Black et. al (2013) who examined fertility responses to the Appalachian coal boom of the 70s and 80s. Those authors looked at marital fertility only, and the results were similar to what Kearney and Wilson find.
But this juxtaposition may also be revealing for the following reason. On the one hand, a decade or two of boom might be long enough to influence long-term decision making, like having a child or marrying. But it is hard to forget how coal mining has long been mired in decline. Do young people in the booming fracking industry think the good times will last? Do they care? Anecdotally, it appears that many choose to delay marriage rather than formally forego it entirely. Is this a rational response to a temporary income shock? If it is, why does fertility respond? Do people find biological constraints more compelling?
Kearney and Wilson also find that wages of less educated females rose, but not as fast as male wages. Another interesting but more implicit point is revealed by their comparison of these results, set in the modern-day economy, with those of Black et. al (2013) who examined fertility responses to the Appalachian coal boom of the 70s and 80s. Those authors looked at marital fertility only, and the results were similar to what Kearney and Wilson find.
But this juxtaposition may also be revealing for the following reason. On the one hand, a decade or two of boom might be long enough to influence long-term decision making, like having a child or marrying. But it is hard to forget how coal mining has long been mired in decline. Do young people in the booming fracking industry think the good times will last? Do they care? Anecdotally, it appears that many choose to delay marriage rather than formally forego it entirely. Is this a rational response to a temporary income shock? If it is, why does fertility respond? Do people find biological constraints more compelling?
Mills College and cost disease in higher ed
Mills has fired 5 tenured professors in a bid to reduce costs and close its deficit, and UC Berkeley faculty registered their concerns, as part of the broader response by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
As the first article describes, one angle here is whether consumer demand, and thus revenue, can be sufficient at women's colleges or other sites that restrict their focus to a subset of the market. Those more knowledgeable than I about higher education may have some insight about the minimum sustainable enrollment at a college. Presumably every institution faces some fixed costs whose burden shrinks as enrollments rise. Things like structures and the array of extra-curricular activities and events seem like obvious candidates.
But it is hard to see why instruction, a college's primary mission, should not easily scale with enrollments. If a college is small, its ranks of faculty could also be small, with similar outcomes. That Mills is in the Bay Area, a densely populated zone rife with other academics at neighboring institutions, suggests that a small faculty at Mills could function successfully in a low enrollment environment. To me, the argument that a women's college cannot be profitable because it is too small seems suspect, unless there are large fixed costs in higher education.
A more worrisome angle is that higher education, and education in general, is probably subject to Baumol's cost disease, the classic case of which is the rising relative price of attending a concert by a string quartet. Industries like classical music and education, which are probably less able to enhance their productivity with new technologies, are doomed to experience rising costs and prices without some other offsetting change.
Shifting to cheaper part-time labor devoted to instruction is one such change, of course. I suspect that is the real motive behind the moves by Mills College, and they are far from alone in this, although perhaps trailblazing in their replacing through layoffs. Across the industry, there is a monotonic shift toward instruction by adjunct faculty and away from hiring tenure-track professors. One of the big questions is how instruction by part-time, adjunct faculty compares to instruction by full-time, tenure-track faculty.
Declining enrollments would be problematic, and as with the patterns in financial aid at Mills, it is hard to get a clear picture about what is happening. If enrollments were down at Mills, it cannot be because there are fewer women or students who identify as female. (Mills has a fairly open door to students across the identity spectrum except for those who self-identify as male upon admission.) It could be because other suppliers of education are undercutting Mills, or the nature or quality of the Mills experience is changing in such a way as to appeal to fewer demanders. If the latter is true, it is very hard to see how giving pink slips to popular faculty members reverses the situation.
As the first article describes, one angle here is whether consumer demand, and thus revenue, can be sufficient at women's colleges or other sites that restrict their focus to a subset of the market. Those more knowledgeable than I about higher education may have some insight about the minimum sustainable enrollment at a college. Presumably every institution faces some fixed costs whose burden shrinks as enrollments rise. Things like structures and the array of extra-curricular activities and events seem like obvious candidates.
But it is hard to see why instruction, a college's primary mission, should not easily scale with enrollments. If a college is small, its ranks of faculty could also be small, with similar outcomes. That Mills is in the Bay Area, a densely populated zone rife with other academics at neighboring institutions, suggests that a small faculty at Mills could function successfully in a low enrollment environment. To me, the argument that a women's college cannot be profitable because it is too small seems suspect, unless there are large fixed costs in higher education.
A more worrisome angle is that higher education, and education in general, is probably subject to Baumol's cost disease, the classic case of which is the rising relative price of attending a concert by a string quartet. Industries like classical music and education, which are probably less able to enhance their productivity with new technologies, are doomed to experience rising costs and prices without some other offsetting change.
Shifting to cheaper part-time labor devoted to instruction is one such change, of course. I suspect that is the real motive behind the moves by Mills College, and they are far from alone in this, although perhaps trailblazing in their replacing through layoffs. Across the industry, there is a monotonic shift toward instruction by adjunct faculty and away from hiring tenure-track professors. One of the big questions is how instruction by part-time, adjunct faculty compares to instruction by full-time, tenure-track faculty.
Declining enrollments would be problematic, and as with the patterns in financial aid at Mills, it is hard to get a clear picture about what is happening. If enrollments were down at Mills, it cannot be because there are fewer women or students who identify as female. (Mills has a fairly open door to students across the identity spectrum except for those who self-identify as male upon admission.) It could be because other suppliers of education are undercutting Mills, or the nature or quality of the Mills experience is changing in such a way as to appeal to fewer demanders. If the latter is true, it is very hard to see how giving pink slips to popular faculty members reverses the situation.
Monday, July 3, 2017
Video games and male work
NBER working paper 23552 posits that innovation in video games since 2004 might explain half the increase in leisure time for men aged 21-30, among whom work hours fell 12% by 2015. A lot of the change was coincident with the tech bubble contraction of 2001 and the Great Recession, but Aguiar et al. show in this paper that young male labor supply fell by more than other groups. They argue that video games, which appear to uniquely absorb leisure time of young males, were the reason.
Here's a related article from June by Peter Suderman on video games that posit that they "offer a sort of universal basic income for the soul."
And here's an article by Robert VerBruggen laying out this topic alongside a discussion of the effect of competing immigrant labor on this age group. VerBruggen mentions the point that TV watching is still a much larger share of leisure time than video games even for young men.
One could presumably test these competing hypotheses, maybe by looking at geographic variation. Patterns in competing labor surely vary across space, and for that matter, the depth and duration of the Great Recession also varied across space, but prices and quality of video gaming probably only vary across time. It would also be possible although maybe a little dicey to look at classes of labor by education. It is well known that if U.S. immigration has an economic impact, it tends to be felt by less educated natives.
Friday, June 16, 2017
DACA program gets temporary amnesty
DHS announced yesterday that DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — "will remain in effect" for the time being. That brief announcement appeared at the bottom of a statement clarifying the end to the proposed but never implemented DAPA program for certain unauthorized parents of citizens or permanent residents.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Blast from football past
I stumbled across this NYT article from 2010 about the great David Romer's sweet paper on NFL teams punting too much on fourth down. Good times. I was an RA on that original paper along with several others.
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Trump voters & excess mortality
A year ago, Jeff Guo ran a nice study for WaPo's Wonkblog where he looked at county-level data on primary vote shares for Donald Trump (Y) partially explained by the mortality rate among white non-Hispanics aged 40-64 (X). His Stata output was included in this tweet.
Although he didn't look at opioid mortality specifically, that's been the undercurrent since Case and Deaton's study hit in Fall 2015. On a wry note, make sure to read Ellen Meara and Jon Skinner in the same issue, who discuss the eery parallel (which isn't a perfect one) to Russia.
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