Economics

Do Bumps in the Minimum Wage Increase the Number of Job Seekers?

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Some argue that increasing the minimum wage will increase the number of job seekers and, consequently, employment. From a new NBER paper:

Do minimum wage increases affect search effort by job seekers?

…We investigate the effect of minimum wage increases on job search effort utilizing data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). We exploit the staggered nature of CPS and ATUS interviews and use an event-study approach, leveraging within-state variation in the adoption of minimum wage changes. We account for shocks affecting a particular state in a given year as well as month effects to control for seasonality, and individual demographic characteristics. Intuitively, we compare the outcomes in each month near the treatment date to the outcomes for otherwise-identical individuals in the same state and year whose survey period was not near a treatment date.

We find no evidence that the minimum wage has persistent effects on search effort; the likelihood of searching does not increase in the aftermath of minimum wage increases. However, there is a large yet transitory increase in the intensive margin of search effort, concentrated in the month of the minimum wage increase, that fades almost immediately. There is no short-run increase in the employment rate nor changes in observable characteristics of searchers, suggesting that our results are not driven by changes in the composition of job seekers. These findings are robust to the inclusion of demographic controls, the duration of unemployment benefits, and month-by-year fixed effects that account for any idiosyncratic national-level variation in a given month. We also conduct a permutation test for our search duration results in which we randomly assign minimum wage increases across time periods and show that these results do not appear to be due to chance.

Our results call into question the assumption underpinning search-and-matching models as applied to analysis of the minimum wage – namely, that more workers will enter the labor market and each worker will search harder, increasing the returns to firm vacancy postings. Importantly, we find minimum wage increases do not induce individuals to begin searching. While we find that minimum wage increases yield significant increases in worker search effort on the intensive margin, they are transitory (pg. 2-3).

 

The Effects of Corporate Taxes on Innovation

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I’ve looked at some of the negative effects of corporate taxes in previous posts. These largely had to do with wages and employment. But a new study based on Chinese data finds that they can have negative effects on innovation:

Theoretically, taxes can have either positive or negative impacts on firm innovation. On the one hand, lower taxes can increase the after-tax profit of firms, so that they have better capacity to invest in new technologies or products. Moreover, lower taxes may reduce the resources that firms spend on tax evasion, such as the costs of bribing tax officers, which can be instead used on innovation activities. On the other hand, lower taxes may also have a negative impact on innovation because they decrease government revenue, and in turn may reduce government spending on public goods such as research, education, and infrastructure. As a result, whether providing tax incentives can improve firm innovation is ambiguous. 

In a new study, we investigate the impact of taxes on firm innovation using a natural experiment in China (Cai et al. 2018). In November 2001, China implemented a tax collection reform on all manufacturing firms established on or after January 2002, which switched the collection of corporate income taxes from the local tax bureau to the state tax bureau. After the reform, similar firms established before or after 2002 could pay very different effective tax rates because of the differences in the management and incentives of those two types of tax bureaus…[T]he reform changed the enforcement of tax collection, resulting in a reduction of effective corporate income tax rates by almost 10% among newly established firms.

…To test the impact of taxes on innovation, we combine a comprehensive dataset of all medium and large enterprises in China between 1998 and 2007 with patent data from the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), including all patents applied in China by the year 2014. We use the data to measure three dimensions of innovation activities – input (R&D expenditure and skilled labour ratio), output (number of patent application), and quality (type and characteristics of patent application). 

Our analysis yields several interesting results. First, we show a strong and robust causal relationship between tax rate and firm innovation. Decreasing the effective tax rate by one standard deviation (0.01) increases the average number of patent application by a significant 5.7% (see Figure 2 for the graphical evidence). The reform also stimulated R&D expenditures and increased the skilled-labour ratio by 14%. Second, a lower tax rate also improves the quality of patents. The impact of tax reform on patent applications mainly comes from its effect on invention and utility patents – decreasing the effective tax rate by one standard deviation improves the probability of having an invention patent application by 4.4% and increases the number of utility patent applications by 4.7%. This suggests that the improvement in innovation outcomes is not merely driven by the low-quality design patents. We also use the detailed information on patent applications as proxies for the patent quality, including number of claims, number of independent claims, and the amount of effort that was spent on the patent application (length of the application document, number of figures, and length of abstract). In our patent data, only invention and utility patents have the above information, and results suggest that a reduction in the tax rate significantly improved patent quality, and the effect is significant for both invention and utility patents. 

Another study drawing on datasets from the 20th century had similar results:

We use new data from the 20th century to show a negative effect of high taxes on innovation. We use three newly constructed datasets consisting of: (1) the universe of corporate and non-corporate inventors who patented since 1920, as well as the citations to their patents; (2) the patents, research employment, and location of laboratory facilities of firms active in R&D; and (3) an historical state-level database of corporate income taxes linked to personal income tax rates from Bakija (2017).

…At the macro level, we find that the effects of taxes are strongly negative and quantitatively important. For example, a one percentage point increase in either the median or top marginal tax rate is associated with an approximately 4% decline in patents, citations, and inventors, and a close to 5% decline in the number of superstar inventors in the state. A one percentage point higher top corporate tax rate leads to around 6-6.3% fewer patents, 5.5-6% fewer citations, 4.6-5% fewer inventors, and 8.5-9.3% fewer superstar inventors.

Furthermore, we find that the share of patentsassigned to corporations appears to be extremely sensitive to the corporate tax rate. A one percentage point increase in the top corporate tax rate is associated with close to 1.2 percentage points fewer patents assigned to companies.      

Individual case studies of tax regime changes underscore how important the effect of taxation could be. As one example, Figure 4 shows the depressing impact on innovation of Michigan’s 1967 and 1968 tax reform bills. In 1967, Michigan introduced its personal income tax, at a rate of 2.6%. In 1968, it then introduced its corporate income tax, at a rate of 5.6%. In the subsequent years, the state experienced a substantial decline in innovative output relative to its peer states.

…At the micro level, we similarly find that taxation negatively affects innovation. To estimate the effect, we assign inventors to their tax brackets based on their productivity, which we observe in the patent data. A one percentage point higher tax rate at the individual level decreases the likelihood of having a patent in the next three years by 0.63 percentage points, even controlling for inventor quality and all other state-level policy changes. The likelihood of having high-qualitypatents with more than ten citations decreases by 0.6 percentage points for every percentage point increase in the personal tax rate. We also show that corporate inventors — inventors who appear on at least one patent assigned to a company — are much more responsive to personal and corporate income taxes than non-corporate inventors, consistent with the profit-sharing narrative posited above, as well as with different motives for innovation. 

Inventors prefer to locate in places where other inventors are active in their particular technology area. This suggests there are particular characteristics which may matter to inventors, and which can ultimately dampen their responses to taxation. Silicon Valley, for example, still attracts an abundance of tech inventors due to its rich network of capital and labour resources for innovation, despite California being a high tax state.          

At the firm level, we find consistently negative effects of taxation on patents and citations. We also find that the top corporate tax rate has a significantly negative effect on the decision of a firm to locate its R&D laboratory in a given state.

Innovation is critical to improvements in human well-being. Something for policymakers to consider.

The Benefits of Walmart

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Walmart catches a lot of grief. For example, as reported by CNN, Bernie Sanders recently “introduced a bill, titled the Stop Walmart Act, that would prevent large companies from buying back stock unless they pay all employees at least $15 an hour, allow workers to earn up to seven days of paid sick leave and limit CEO compensation to no more than 150 times the median pay of all staffers.” Yet, many don’t consider the massive benefits produced by Walmart: 

A 2005 Global Insight study commissioned by Wal-Mart and overseen by an independent panel suggested that a new Wal-Mart would create, on net, 137 jobs in the short term and 97 jobs in the long term (Global Insight 2005: 2). Studying Pennsylvania counties, Hicks (2005, discussed by Vedder and Cox 2006: 110) found that the company led to a net increase of fifty new jobs with a 40% reduction in job turnover. Hicks (2007: 93-94) uses data from Indiana to estimate that Wal-Mart increases rural retail employment from 3.4% to 4.8% after correcting for endogeneity. After correcting for endogeneity of urban Wal-Mart entry, Hicks argues that Wal-Mart leads to a 1.2% increase in employment but points out that this estimate is statistically insignificant.

…Wal-Mart’s most obvious effect on the retail sector comes through its policy of Every Day Low Prices. Basker (2005b) and Basker and Noel (2009) estimate that WalMart has a substantial price advantage over competitors with the effect being that prices among incumbent competitors fall after Wal-Mart entry. Hausman and Leibtag (2007: 1147) argue that the compensating variation from Big Box retailers’ effect on prices leads to welfare increases of some 25% of total food expenditure for people who enjoy the direct and indirect effects of Big Box stores. Further, they argue (Hausman and Leibtag 2009) that the Consumer Price Index is over-estimated because it fails to account properly for price effects of supercenters, mass merchandisers, and club stores. Evaluating estimates of the price effects of Big Box retailers and adjusting for foreign sales, Vedder and Cox (2006: 18-19) argue that “the annual American-derived welfare gains are probably still in excess of $65 billion, or about $225 for every American, or $900 for a typical family of four.”

…Jason Furman (2005) called Wal-Mart a “progressive success story” because of its impact on prices. He notes that if the 2005 Global Insight estimate of annual average household savings of $2,329 is accurate, the annual Wal-Mart related consumer savings of $263 billion dwarfs Wal-Mart-generated reductions in retail wages of $4.7 billion estimated by Dube et al. (2005). Hicks (2007: 82) notes that reductions in nominal retail wages are likely offset by larger price reductions, which translates into higher real wages. Courtemanche and Carden’s (2011a) estimate of $177 per household in savings attributable to the effects of Wal-Mart Supercenters in 2002 multiplied by the 105,401,101 households in the 2000 census yields household savings of $18.7 billion, which is still substantially higher than Dube et al.’s estimate of lost wages. 

Hausman and Leibtag (2007: 25) argue that the compensating variation—i.e., welfare increase—attributable to supercenters, mass merchandisers, and club stores is some 25% of food expenditures. Since poorer households spend more of their income on food, the effect (as a percentage of income) is higher toward the bottom of the income distribution (Furman 2005: 2-3). Hausman and Leibtag (2007: 1172, 1174) further argue that compensating variation from access to non-traditional retailers is higher at lower income levels, which would make the effect even more progressive (pgs. 8-9).[ref]This doesn’t even address the overseas benefits.[/ref]

A brand new study demonstrates even more benefits provided by Walmart:

We estimate the effects that Walmart Supercenters have on food security using data from the 2001–2012 waves of the December Current Population Study Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS). Narrow geographic identifiers available in the restricted version of these data enable us to compute the distance from each household’s census tract to the nearest Walmart Supercenter. Our outcomes are counts of the number of affirmative responses on the household and child-specific portions of the food insecurity questionnaire, along with binary variables for household food insecurity, household very low food security, child food insecurity, and child very low food security. We estimate instrumental variables (IV) models that leverage the predictable geographic expansion patterns of Walmart Supercenters outward from corporate headquarters. Specifically, we instrument for Walmart Supercenters with the interaction of distance from Bentonville, Arkansas (Walmart’s headquarters), with time. For both households in general and children specifically, the results show that a closer proximity to the nearest Walmart Supercenter leads to sizeable and statistically significant improvements in all food security measures except the indicator for very low food security. Subsample analyses reveal that the effects are especially large for low-income households and children, though they are also sizeable for middle-income children.

As journalist John Tierney asked, “How could any progressive with a conscience oppose an organization that confers such benefits?”

Economic Growth and Corruption

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In my latest paper in Economic Affairs, I wrote,

Drawing on the EFW Index, Brennan (2016a)…points to a strong positive correlation between a country’s degree of economic freedom and its lack of public sector corruption. Granted, a lack of corruption could very well give rise to market reforms and increased economic freedom instead of the other way around. However, recent research on China’s anti-corruption reforms (Ding et al. 2017; Li et al. 2017) suggests that markets may actually pave the way for anti-corruption reforms (pg. 425).

Furthermore,

Market liberalisation can also have indirect effects on war and violence. For example, Neudorfer and Theuerkauf (2014) explore the effects of public sector corruption on ethnic violence by analysing 81 to 121 countries between 1984 and 2007. They find that corruption has a robust positive effect…on the risk of ethnic civil war. When the evidence provided in the previous sections by Brennan (2016a) and Lin et al. (2017) is considered, we find that market liberalisation deters corruption and, consequently, ethnic violence (pg. 429).

Research suggests that economic growth may reduce corruption:

The traditional explanation for this relationship has been the theory articulated by Wolfenson above – corruption increases the cost and risk of business activity, thereby deterring investment and depressing growth that could have lifted citizens out of poverty (Mauro 1995, Wei 1999).

However, there is an alternative possibility that has received less attention among development practitioners and academics. The strong relationship between income and growth may result from exactly the opposite causal relationship – countries may be growing out of corruption (Tresiman 2002). Over time, economic growth reduces both the incentives for government officials to extract bribes and firms’ willingness to pay them. Some scholars of developed countries have discussed this possibility in terms of a ‘life cycle’ theory with corruption peaking at early stages of development and declining as countries industrialise (Huntington 1968, Theobald 1990, Ramirez 2013). However, there has been little work either testing for this empirical link from growth to corruption, or laying out the specific mechanisms that could generate the link.

The authors continue:

The key theoretical insight of our argument is that the share of bribes that officials will choose to extract as rents depends on a firm’s ability to move and set up business in a different location. Ask for too much, and firms that have the ability to do so, will simply pull up anchor and head to safer harbours. Because officials know this, they are likely to set a bribe amount that is just below the cost of moving.

Building on that insight, we show that as firms grow the cost of moving should decline relative to firm size. The fixed cost of moving becomes less expensive relative to revenue, and more and more firms have the opportunity to escape the bribe requests of officials in their locality. Corrupt officials faced with a sudden growth surge must lower their bribe rates, or face losing their key providers of employment and tax payers to competitors.

…The theory we propose has important policy implications. To the extent this theoretical mechanism is important, rather than focusing on politically difficult institutional changes to combat corruption, resources might be better spent on policies that facilitate capital mobility across subnational jurisdictions. Providing clear titles to business premises, for instance, enables entrepreneurs to sell and recoup the full market value of land. Such businesses are more mobile than renters or owners with insecure titles, who risk significant losses if they try to escape corruption by fleeing across the border.

Drawing on “an annual survey funded by USAID and administered by the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and Industry,” the researchers find “that the average bribe rate decreases as GDP per capita increases” and “that large firms actually pay lower bribe rates, which is what our theory predicts. Firms with higher revenues are more put out by a high bribe rate, since it increases the amount of bribes they must pay dramatically. To retain them then, officials must push their bribe rate lower.” 

Then, using “a census of firms conducted by Vietnam’s General Statistical Office (GSO) [to] calculate aggregate employment at the province-industry-year level,” the authors

show that exogenous industry-wide performance is indeed a strong predictor of a firm’s performance. A doubling of total employment in the industry is associated with a 1.6 percentage point reduction in the bribe rate, or about 42% of the mean level. Moreover, the effect is more pronounced for highly mobile firms. The magnitude of the effect of growth on bribe reductions is 17% larger for firms in possession of a Land Use Rights Certificate, which facilitates the sale of their business premises. Similarly, the effect is 20% greater for firms that already have branch operations in other provinces, and therefore possess knowledge and experience that could facilitate movement.

These effects survive a battery of robustness tests and alternative specifications, providing compelling evidence that growth can directly reduce corruption.

In short, economic growth can decrease corruption by undermining the power of officials to extract bribes. But this is likely part of a virtuous feedback loop. For example, a 2017 paper 

exploit[s] spatial variation in randomized anti-corruption audits related to government procurement contracts in Brazil to assess how corruption affects resource allocation, firm performance, and the local economy. After an anti-corruption crackdown, regions experience more entrepreneurship, improved access to finance, and higher levels of economic activity. Using firms involved in corrupt business with the municipality, we find that two channels explain these facts: allocation of resources to less efficient firms, and distortions in government dependent firms. The second channel dominates, as after the audits government dependent firms grow and reallocate resources within the organization (pg. 31). 

As I state in the beginning of my paper,

Of course, it is far easier to demonstrate correlation than causation, and while some studies do find markets playing a causal role in moral development, most simply establish a positive relationship. However, findings that ‘merely’ demonstrate positive correlations should be interpreted in light of the feedback loops: even if moral behaviours are foundational and give rise to market systems (instead of vice versa), market systems in turn reinforce these virtues by imbuing them with value. As Paul Zak (2011, p. 230) explains, ‘Markets are moral in two senses. Moral behavior is necessary for exchange in moderately regulated markets, for example, to reduce cheating without exorbitant transaction costs. In addition, market exchange itself can lead to greater expression of morals in nonmarket settings’ (pg. 423).

The Gender Wage Gap: Union Edition

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Similar to previous research, a new working paper shows that the gender wage gap is driven largely by the amount of hours men and women choose to work. The authors draw on data from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), explaining that the “bus and train operators are all represented by the same union, Carmen’s Local 589, and are all covered by the same bargaining agreement. The agreement specifies that seniority in one’s garage is the sole determinant of one’s work opportunities. Conditional on seniority, men and women face the same choice sets of schedules, routes, vacation days, and overtime hours, among other amenities” (pg. 2).

What do they find?

We show that a gender earnings gap can exist even in a controlled environment where work tasks are similar, wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions. The gap of $0.89 in our setting, which is 60% of the earnings gap across the United States, can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices. Women use the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to take more unpaid time off than men and they work fewer overtime hours at 1.5 times the wage rate. At the root of these different choices is the fact that women value time and flexibility more than men. Men and women choose to work similar hours of overtime when it is scheduled a quarter in advance, but men work nearly twice as many overtime hours than women when they are scheduled the day before. Using W-4 filings to ascertain marital status and the presence of dependents, we show that women with dependents – especially single women – value time away from work more than men with dependents.

When selecting their work schedule for the following quarter, women try to avoid inconvenient days, like weekends, and shifts, like split-shifts, more than men. Prioritizing schedule related amenities over route quality-related amenities, women select routes with higher probabilities of assaults and collisions in order to avoid unfavorable schedules. When faced with having to work an unfavorable schedule, like a weekend, holiday, or split shift, women take more unpaid time off. Men also take more unpaid time off in those circumstances, but they more than make up for lost earnings with overtime. While constrained schedules lead to lower earnings for women, they result in higher earnings for men. In an effort to reduce absenteeism and overtime expenditures, the MBTA oversaw two policy changes: one that made it harder to take unpaid time off with FMLA and another that made it harder to be paid at the overtime rate. While the policy changes reduced the gender earnings gap from $0.89 to $0.94 and made it harder for operators to trade off regular hours for overtime, they also decreased women’swell-being by further constraining the work environment (pg. 34-35).

Texico: The Texas-Mexico Economy

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Michael Cox and Richard Alm of SMU’s O’Neil Center have an essay in D Magazine based on the latest report from the Center. The two

imagine Texas and Mexico as one economy, connected by exports, imports, migration, cross-border business investments, transport infrastructure, tourism, and knowledge transfers. As a combined economy, Texas and Mexico churn out an annual GDP of more than $4 trillion, enough to rank as the world’s sixth-largest economy, just behind Germany and ahead of Russia.

We denote this sprawling and diverse economy by the portmanteau word: Texico. The name captures the reality that over the past quarter-century the Texas and Mexico economies have emerged as highly integrated, making an often-unsung contribution to Texas’ reign as America’s top-performing state economy.

The explain how trade has deeply integrated the two countries: 

An often-cited gauge of integration is trade—exports moving south, imports moving north. They totaled $188 billion last year, or more than 11 percent of gross state product, separating Texas from all other states in doing business with Mexico.

Texas companies are finding business opportunities in Mexico—among them, cosmetics-maker Mary Kay Inc. and telecommunications giant AT&T Inc., both based in Dallas-Fort Worth. At the same time, Mexican companies are heading northward and expanding their businesses, including Mission Foods in Irving and the movie theater chain Cinépolis in Addison.

The Texas and Mexico economies are more formidable combined rather than separate. Binational supply chains, for example, take advantage of low production costs in Mexico and highly skilled professional labor in Texas. The companies emerge more competitive in the global marketplace, able to sell their wares at a better price.

Automobile production comes to mind—for good reason. Plants in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are on the northern edge of the Texas-Mexico Automotive SuperCluster region, which includes close to 30 assembly plants and more than 230 parts suppliers in Texas and Mexico’s northern states.

Texas and Mexico have already profited a great deal from their binational economy, even though work began in earnest only recently. Mexico didn’t open its energy and telecom markets until just a few years ago. During negotiations that led to the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico clung to its monopolies in these industries. With its oil output falling, Mexico finally lifted its ban on foreign oil and gas companies three years ago. If all goes well, this should be a bonanza for Texas, with its deep roster of oilfield services and exploration companies. The telecom monopoly expired about the same time—and AT&T rushed in with its wireless service.

The annual report provides a few more interesting insights:

The report explains the slow convergence above: “Other factors like low levels of education shouldn’t be ignored, but the ongoing plague of corruption, cronyism and rising violence go a long way toward explaining why Mexican growth and income haven’t converged with the United States or kept pace with the likes of Chile, South Korea and China” (pg. 13). 

Cox and Alm conclude,

Texans are well aware of Mexico’s shortcomings, including corruption and drug-cartel violence. None of these problems will get any better by enacting policies that build barriers against Mexico and harm the Texas and Mexico economies. Perhaps Trump and Obrador will decide that the best course lies in expedient practicality—recognizing the fact that Texico has been working and building a large constituency. If these two leaders don’t make a mess of things, the businesses of Texas and Mexico can take it from there.

Inclusive Institutions and the Church

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A few months ago, I posted about a new working paper exploring the origins of WEIRD psychology. A brand new job market paper builds on this research:

Political institutions, ranging from autocratic regimes to inclusive, democratic ones, are widely acknowledged as a critical determinant of economic prosperity (e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009). They create incentives that foster or inhibit economic growth. Yet, the emergence and global variation of growth-enhancing, inclusive political institutions in which people broadly participate in the governing process and the power of the elite is constrained, are not well understood. Initially, inclusive institutions were largely confined to the West. How and why did those institutions emerge in Europe?

This article contributes to the debate on the formation and global variation of inclusive institutions by combining and empirically testing two long-standing hypotheses. First, anthropologist Jack Goody (1983) hypothesized that, motivated by financial gains, the medieval Catholic Church implemented marriage policies—most prominently, prohibitions on cousin marriage—that destroyed the existing European clan-based kin networks. This created an almost unique European family system where, still today, the nuclear family dominates and marriage among blood relatives is virtually absent. This contrasts with many parts of the world, where first- and second-cousin marriages are common (Bittles and Black 2010). Second, several scholars have hypothesized that strong extended kin networks are detrimental to the formation of social cohesion and affect institutional outcomes (Weber, 1958; Todd, 1987; Augustine, 1998). Theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430) pointed out that marrying outside the kin group enlarges the range of social relations and “should thereby bind social life more effectively by involving a greater number of people in them” (Augustine of Hippo, 354-430 / 1998, p. 665). More recently, Greif (2005), Greif and Tabellini (2017), Mitterauer (2010), and Henrich (forthcoming) combined these two hypotheses and emphasized the critical role of the Church’s marriage prohibitions for Europe’s institutional development (pg. 2).

His findings?:

The analysis demonstrates that already before the year 1500 AD, Church exposure and its marriage regulations are predictive of the formation of communes—self-governed cities that put constraints on the executive. The difference-in-difference analysis does not reveal pre-trends and results are robust to many specifications. They hold within historic political entities addressing concerns that the relation is driven by other institutional factors and when exploiting quasi-natural experiments where Church exposure was determined by the random outcomes of medieval warfare. Moreover, exploiting regional and temporal variation in marriage regulations suggests that the dissolution of kin networks was decisive for the formation of communes.

The study also empirically establishes a robust link between Church exposure and dissolution of extended kin networks at the country, ethnicity and European regional level. A language-based proxy for cousin marriage—cousin terms—offers a window into the past and rules out that the dissolution was driven by more recent events like the Industrial Revolution or modernization. Moreover, the study reports a robust link between kin networks, civicness and inclusive institutions. The link between kin networks and civicness holds within countries and—getting closer to causality—among children of immigrants, who grew up in the same country but vary in their vertically transmitted preference for cousin marriage. Kin networks predict regional institutional failure within Italy, ethnicities’ local-level democratic traditions and modern-day democratic institutions at the country level. Measures for the strength of pre-industrial kin networks rule out contemporary reverse causality or the possibility that the estimates are driven by contemporary omitted variables. The analysis also demonstrates that the association between kin networks and the formation of inclusive institutions holds universally—both within Europe and when excluding Europe and countries with a large European ancestry. This universal link strengthens the hypothesis that the Church’s marriage regulations, and not some other Church-related factor, were decisive for European development.

Underlying these early institutional developments was most likely a psychology that, as a consequence of dissolved kin networks, reflects greater individualism and a more generalized, impartial morality (Schulz et al. 2018). This is a building block not only for inclusive institutions but also for economic development more generally. For example, transmission of knowledge across kin networks and the shift away from a collectivistic culture toward an individualistic one, a culture of growth, may have further contributed to Europe’s economic development (Mokyr, 2016; de la Croix, 2018).

…To build strong, functional, inclusive institutions and to foster democracy, the potentially deleterious effect of dense kin networks must be considered. Also, simply exporting established formal institutions to other societies without considering existing kin networks will likely fail. Policies that foster cooperation beyond the boundaries of one’s kin group, however, have a strong potential to successfully diminish the fractionalization of societies. These can be policies that encouraging marriages across kin groups. More generally, policies that foster interactions that go beyond the boundaries of in-groups such as family, close friends, social class, political affiliation or ethnicity are likely to increase social cohesion (pg. 41-42).

Is Assortative Mating to Blame for Income Inequality?

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A brand new job market paper has some interesting data on assortative mating and its impact on income inequality. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the paper 

investigates the evolution of assortative mating based on permanent wage in the U.S. since the late 1960s; quantifies its impact on rising family-wage inequality; and, finally, tries to understand the factors behind this evolution. It documents a significant increase in assortative mating, as measured by couple’s permanent-wage correlation, between families formed in the late 1960s and in the late 1980s. I then show that changes in the degree of assortative mating accounts for a sizable amount of the increase in family wage inequality across these family cohorts. This finding shows focusing on the time trends in permanent-wage inequality is not enough to understand the mechanics of increasing family wage inequality. Note, this finding does not rule out a feedback mechanism. It might be that increasing family wage inequality incentivized individuals to care more about their spouse’s wages, causing a higher degree of marital sorting along permanent wage, which in turn mechanically increased family wage inequality (pg. 23).

What is “a sizable amount”? The data show that “the trend in assortative mating explains more than one-third of the increase in family wage inequality” (pg. 11; emphasis mine). He explains,

I use the Gini coefficient in the left panel, as the measure of inequality, whereas the variance of logarithm is used in the right panel. Solid lines show the actual evolution of family wage inequality with these measures. In the dashed lines, however, I construct the counterfactual family wage inequality by holding the empirical copula distribution fixed at its initial form while letting the permanent-wage distribution vary. The dashed lines thus show the counterfactual evolution of family wage inequality if no change occurred in assortative mating. The left panel shows the rise in the Gini coefficient would be 40% lower, and the right panel shows that the rise in the variance of (log) family wage would be around 35% lower under the counterfactual scenario. The increase in assortative mating thus accounts for a significant amount of the increase in family wage inequality (pg. 11).

As previous research shows, this shouldn’t come as a shock.

Economic Growth Begins in the Home

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Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and economist Joseph Price have an important chapter in a recent Cambridge-published book on the link between family structure and economic growth. They write,

A stable marriage matters in part because it allows couples to make decisions over time that maximize the economic prosperity of their family unit. Stably married persons have incentives to invest in their marriage and benefit from specialization and economies of scale; their households also tend to earn and save more than their peers who are unmarried or divorced (Stevenson and Wolfers 2007; Lerman and Wilcox 2014). Marriage also has a transformative effect on individuals, especially men. It seems to increase men’s productivity at and attachment toward work, and reduces men’s willingness to engage in risky behaviors, including criminal activity (Akerlof 1998; Nock 1998; Sampson, Laub, and Wimer 2006). What is more, it looks like married parenthood may be especially influential in encouraging men’s engagement in the labor force (Killewald 2012). In the aggregate, then, higher levels of marriage, and probably two-parent families, should boost men’s labor force participation and reduce criminal violence, both to the benefit of national economies. At the same time, insofar as motherhood tends to reduce women’s participation in the labor force (Budig and England 2001), we also explore the possibility that higher rates of marriage and two-parent families reduce growth. Finally, higher rates of intact marriage foster stable two-parent families, which are more likely than single parents to supply children with the human capital they need to thrive first in school and later in the labor force (Lerman and Wilcox 2014; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994). Accordingly, the more children are born and raised in stable, two-parent families, the more a society should experience economic growth (pg. 179-180).

Wilcox and Price continue to lay out the evidence that married, two-parents households:

  1. Have more income and savings.
  2. Lower crime rates.
  3. Higher educational achievements for children.

They conclude,

[W]e find that a significant association between family structure and
economic growth. Every 13 percentage point increase in the proportion of adults who are married is associated with an 8 percent increase in per capita GDP, net of controls for a range of sociodemographic factors. Likewise, every 13 percentage point increase in the proportion of children living in two-parent families is associated with a 16 percent increase in per capita GDP, controlling for education, urbanization, age, population size, and other factors. There is clearly a link between family structure and economic growth. 

…[W]e also note that the cross-national relationship between family structure, household savings, and crime are generally consistent with
our expectations about how marriage and two-parent families foster a social environment more conducive to economic growth in countries around the world. It is striking that more two-parent families are linked to less crime and more savings. If nothing else, the patterns documented in this paper suggest that stronger families, higher household savings rates, less crime, and higher economic growth may cluster together in mutually reinforcing ways.

...In conclusion, this chapter indicates that strong and stable families are
linked to higher levels of economic growth in nations across the globe, despite the fact that marriage and two-parent families are in decline across much of the globe. Given the potential economic importance of marriage and family stability to a nation’s economic life, policymakers, business leaders, and civic leaders should pursue a range of public and private policies to encourage and strengthen marriage and stable families. That is because what happens in the family may not affect only the welfare of private families but also the wealth of nations (pg. 194-195).

Economic institutions at the macro-level matter. But so do the ones at the micro-level. Probably more so. 

The Latest in Development Economics

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There’s a post over at the World Bank’s blog providing brief summaries of the papers presented at the North East Universities Development Consortium last weekend. If you want to see some of the latest research in development economics, check it out. Here are a few that peaked my interest:

  • How does a massive refugee influx affect the receiving economy’s agricultural productivity? In Tanzania, receiving refugees from Burundi and Rwanda in the 1990s resulted in some pluses, some minuses, but ultimately an insignificant change. (Tsuda)
  • In South Africa, income affects psychological well-being AND psychological well-being affects income. The former effect is particularly strong among the poor. (Alloush)
  • Psychology and economics affect each other! An intervention to increase women’s beliefs in their own ability to attain their goals “produces large and persistent increases in employment” in India. And “women who received a job offer have significantly higher [beliefs in their own ability] several months later.” (McKelway)
  • Ukrainian firms from counties with fewer ethnic Russians experienced a deeper decline in trade with Russia because of increased inter-ethnic tensions and a differential rise in negative attitudes toward Russia. (Makarin and Korovkin)
  • Poorly managed schools have poorer teacher practices and poor student outcomes. (Lemos, Muralidharan, & Scur)
  • School disruptions caused by teacher strikes leads to adverse labor market outcomes in Argentina: unemployment is higher, skill levels of the occupations are lower and earnings drop by 3.2 for men and 1.9 percent for women. “This amounts to an aggregate annual earnings loss of $2.34 billion, equivalent to the cost of raising the employment income of all Argentinian primary school teachers by 62.4 percent”. (Jaume and Willén)
  • Getting married one year later in India results in “a significant decline in physical violence, although it has no impact on sexual or emotional violence.” (Dhamija & Roychowdhury)
  • Cash transfers in Kenya reduced physical violence against wives regardless of whether the husband or wife received them, but they reduced sexual violence against wives only when the wives received them. (Haushofer et al.)
  • A multi-year intervention that “engaged adolescents in classroom discussions about gender equality” improved gender attitudes and reported gender-equitable behavior (e.g., “boys report helping out more with household chores”). (Dhar, Jain, & Jayachandran) #RCT
  • A soda tax in Mexico increased gastrointestinal disease because of low-quality drinking water. (Gutierrez & Rubli)
  • Games in Kenya show that spouses don’t totally trust each other. Letting them communicate increase trust a bit. (Castilla, Masuda, & Zhang) #LabInField
  • Christian missionaries settled in healthier, safer and more developed locations in 43 sub-Saharan African countries (early 20th century) and in Ghana (18th-20th century) – this endogeneity led to an overly optimistic account of the importance of colonial missions for long-term development. (Jedwab, Meier zu Selhausen, and Moradi) #RDD
  • A novel index of ethnic segregation – taking into account both ethnic and spatial distances between individuals and computed for 159 countries – reveals that countries where ethnically diverse individuals lived far apart, have higher-quality government, higher incomes and higher levels of trust. (Hodler, Valsecchi, and Vesperoni)
  • An alcohol ban led to an increase in crime in the Indian State of Bihar. Since state capacity and supply of police is fixed, diverting law enforcement resources towards implementing the alcohol ban effectively reduces capacity to prevent crimes. (Dar and Sahay)
  • Workers will privately accept jobs at a wage below the prevailing norm in India, but not when other workers can observe them making the choice. “Workers give up 38% of average weekly earnings in order to avoid being seen as breaking the social norm.” (Breza, Kaur, & Krishnaswamy)
  • Fear of sexual assault reduces women’s labor market participation in India: a one standard deviation increase in sexual assault reports within one’s own district reduced women’s employment probability by 0.36 percentage points, especially among highly educated married urban women. There is no effect of lagged physical assault reports on employment outside home. (Siddique)
  • Cash transfers in Indonesia decreased suicides by 18%. (Christian, Hensel, & Roth)
  • In Brazil, trade with China reduced unemployment for areas exporting stuff and increased unemployment for areas importing stuff. (Brummond & Connolly)