Search effort under mass unemployment

As discussed previously here, one good reason for prolonging the duration of unemployment insurance insurance coverage in a deep recession like the last one is that it would be unfair to expect from the unemployed workers to find as easily a job as in normal circumstances. Or, in other words, even if they apply the same work effort, they have a smaller chance of finding a job given the labor market tension and should be allowed to be protected for a longer time.

Alan Krueger and Andreas Mueller study what happens to search effort when there is a smaller change of finding a job. Specifically, they interviewed several thousand unemployed weekly during the last recession about their reservation wage and their search effort. They find that the reservation wage is essentially constant, expect for older workers with sufficient cash reserves, but workers are willing to go below that reservation wage for part-time work. The time devoted to search, however, dips quickly over the unemployment spell. That should not be surprising given how little time people spend looking for a job (from a study by the same authors). What is more interesting is how all this compares to a normal recession. Unfortunately, Krueger and Mueller offer no discussion in this regard.

Why American politicians lie

Many advertisements are misleading, with the intend of making people buy goods they would not buy had they known the truth. This overconsumption leads to welfare losses, which is why you would want to regulate truth in advertising. But, in a market that is not competitive, households tend to consume less than optimal. Does this mean we should then avoid regulating ads, or regulate them less, in order to get to the optimal quantity of consumption?

This is the question Keisuke Hattori and Keisaku Higashida ask with a model of false advertising in a duopoly. They suppose that consumers are easily fooled and ads of one firm also increase demand for the other firm's good. They show that prohibiting truth in advertising (or educating consumers) may have negative welfare consequences if the goods are close to homogeneous because of the resulting under-provision of goods. But taxing misleading or joint advertising is welfare improving. In an interesting extension where there are smart and naive consumers, smart consumers suffer because the naive ones induce more misleading ads and higher prices.

Now think about politicians. There are only two parties who offer goods that are after all little different from each other. Voters are easily fooled. The model above implies that politicians will lie extensively and deliver very few goods. Draw your conclusions.

Paying farmers for landscaping

Switzerland has had for centuries a rather unique system of communal land tenure for the alpine areas. Indeed, cattle owners send their livestock up from the villages for the Summer season, and these grazing areas are commonly owned and rights to them are inherited. The returns of agriculture in the mountainous areas are, however, far from competitive in this era of globalization, and Switzerland has resorted to compensating farmers for keeping the cows up there. The reason is that cows and some other farming bring landscaping benefits, for example keeping the grass short improves snow management for avalanche prevention and skiing, or preserves biodiversity and prevents invasive plants to take foothold. These direct payments are very close to making farmers civil servants. Note that payments depend on the size of the farm, its location, the treatment of animals and the general ecological friendliness of the business.

A pair of recent papers analyze the new situation for farmers in the Swiss Alps. Chiara Calabrese and Gabriele Mack used an agent-based model to study how incomes of a large number of heterogeneous livestock farmer families would evolve until 2020. Different scenarios are explored (a not described status quo, more subsidy for summered livestock and lump sum subsidy to all alpine farmers proportional to farmed area). Results are not unexpected (no change, more summered livestock and income, less of both). Prices are assumed to grow at a steady rate unknown to reader. Give the recent wide fluctuations for food, that needs to be made more explicit and additional scenarios are needed. Also, this study basically assumes that the government does not face a budget constraint and will always be willing whatever it takes to maintain a policy. At least the costs of the program should be reported.

The other study by Nadja El Benni, Stefan Mann and Bernard Lehmann looks at how these direct payments to farmers influence the distribution of incomes. Due to the terrain, farms are small almost everywhere in the country, and Gini coefficients for farmer income have been rather low compared to other countries. The new policy increased the Gini coefficients even though the payments were implemented in part to redistribute income and they constitute now 79% of a farmers income. The reason is that the disparities in market income have increased tremendously and direct payments are tied to farm size after all.

The curse of the more trustworthy gender

It sucks to be a female entrepreneur. You are more likely to repay your loan, but you still keep getting smaller loans. As a consequence, your business is smaller than that of your male counterparts. Of course, all this could be due to some common correlates that cause women to be more trustworthy and yet get smaller loans. Or it could be just plain and simple discrimination.

Isabelle Agier and Ariane Szafarz test the latter hypothesis using rich data from microfinance in Brazil. The idea is to verify whether women are discriminated against in the loan application process. Testing for discrimination is not easy as apparent inequities may make economic sense. But if across to populations a lower or equal loan default rate is associated to a higher or equal loan denial rate, then we have an ethical issue. This what Agier and Szafarz test. Sadly, the news are not good. There is significant discrimination and despite being better creditors, they get smaller loans. Even worse, repeat applicants who could thus prove their trustworthiness get even more discriminated. Of course, there could still be some unobserved variable explaining all this, but I cannot imagine what that could be.

Why are Europe and the US so different in terms of regulation?

Europe and the United States have a different attitude towards many things, and one in particular is regulation. Think, for example, how Europe is adverse to genetically modified agricultural goods, while nobody really cares about that in the United States. Other examples abound, like the little checks there are in the American meat industry or the fact that helmets are not required for motorcycles in most US states. How can such drastic differences arise in countries that after all have a similar standard of living?

Johan F.M. Swinnen and Thijs Vandemoortele show that tiny differences in preferences can lead to large differences in regulation. To prove this, they develop a dynamic model with households, producers and political decisions on whether to allow a potentially objectionable technology. It implies that no regulation is imposed below some threshold level of preferences, and the technology is not allowed above that. This results is, I believe, mostly the consequence of the discrete nature of regulation here: either you allow or you do not. With intermediate levels of regulation, the story may be different. More interesting is the result that there is substantial hysteresis: once a decision is taken one way, it is very difficult to revert it even if preferences or the negative consequences of the technology change. This result is reinforced by the discreteness of regulation, but would most likely be present even without it. In other words, it is possible that tiny initial differences in preferences between countries can lead to large regulatory differences that cannot be overturned.

PS: As in much of this kind of literature, quadratic costs are imposed. I always wonder whether this functional form has implications on results, but nobody seems to care.

Waiting for the perfect job does not work

We usually think that one advantage of unemployment insurance is that it allows unemployed workers to take more time to find an appropriate job and not rush to the first available job for which they may not be qualified. As Acemoglu and Shimer have forcefully argued, the absence of unemployment insurance could lead to important mis-allocations for this reason, and thus losses of efficiency in the economy. This argument implies that workers with longer unemployment durations, after controlling for other characteristics, should be getting better jobs. Is this true?

Miki Kohara, Masaru Sasaki and Tomohiro Machikita test this for Japan using job tenure as a signal of job quality. It turns out the hypothesis above is easily rejected. Indeed, the longer the unemployment duration, the shorterthe subsequent employment duration. So it appears that other factors, like loss of skills and human capital during unemployment and stigma matter more than the search for the perfect job. Of course, it could also be due to some missing control variables, but the effect is so strong I doubt it can be overturned.

The impact of the extension of unemployment insurance benefits in the US

Given the depth of the last recession and the obvious difficulties unemployed workers have to find new jobs, the US government has successively and temporarily extended the usual 26 week period during which unemployment insurance benefits are given, up to 99 weeks for some workers. On consequence that has been worrying some is that this will leads job seekers to seek less jobs, as there is less urgency to be employed. But pointing to the longer duration of unemployment is not appropriate, as this depends to a (very large?) extent on the general business climate. Just looking at data is not sufficient, you need to put in some structure in the form of a theory.

Makoto Nakajima builds an elaborate model that features job search à la Mortensen-Pissarides with variable search effort, consumption-saving decisions, borrowing constraints, skill depreciation in unemployment and appreciation in employment. This complex model is then calibrated to the average state of the US economy, and set to start in a state as close as possible to the one in 2007. Then the transition paths are computed as the economy is hit by shocks, with and without benefit extensions, assuming economic agents did not expect the extensions. All in all an impressive exercise. The conclusion: about a quarter of the 4.8 point increase in the unemployment rate is due to the longer duration of benefits. This is not insignificant, but it could be an acceptable price to pay for the exceptional circumstances.