Philosopher, and Adam Smith scholar, James Otteson appeared on the Wall Street Journal's "OpinionLive" on the 13th of June to discuss his objections to the recently revealed activities of the NSA with regard to their surveillance of American Citizens.
Economist Phil Miller from the Market Power blog took this picture at a Nashville Sounds game on 13/6 "sometime during the 3rd - 4th innings +/-0.5 of an inning". He goes on to say,
Other than this section which is in section HH, the ballpark was about half full on a beautiful night for a ballgame.
Imagine the difference in attendance in this section if the words "alcohol" and "free" were switched around.
This question is asked by Sinclair Davidson over at The New Zealand Institute. Davidson writes,
Privatisation provides an interesting case study for free-marketeers. Almost everyone is opposed to the notion, yet those same people often buy the stock. So what is it about privatisation that everyone hates?Ok up to this point. What I don't get is why he says that the theoretical base for privatisation is weak when there is a, albeit, relatively recent - post-1990 - literature that provides a solid theoretical base for privatisation. See below. Now I admit its not the kind of material that your average bloke in street is going to read sitting up in bed of a Sunday morning, but the job of the economist then is to make this bloke sit up and take notice.
There are at least three arguments why voters may dislike privatisation. First, there is Bryan Caplan’s voter bias argument. Caplan has argued that voters suffer from four sources of bias – an anti-market bias, an anti-foreign bias, a make work bias, and a pessimism bias. Privatisation as a policy hits all them. Government using markets to sell assets to foreigners who will lay off workers? That couldn’t possibly work.
Then there is Thomas Sowell’s conflict of visions. Privatisation as a policy goes to the very core of the political debate. What is the appropriate role and function of the state in civil society and in the economy?
For those of us who suspect the answer to that question is ‘minimal, at best’, privatisation is an uncontroversial policy. For others not so much.
The thing to remember is that elite opinion holds that the state can and should do more, not less. This remains the case 30 years on from the Thatcher, Reagan, Douglas, and Hawke-Keating eras.
State ownership has many plausible theoretical arguments to support it. The theoretical arguments for privatisation seems weak. It is the empirical evidence that supports the principle of privatisation for many people. But without a clear theoretical basis for the policy, we run into the third problem that privatisation policy faces.
"Let me begin by discussing the very close parallel between the theory of the firm and the theory of privatisation. In the vertical integration literature one considers two firms, A and B. A might be a car manufacturer and B might supply car-body parts. Suppose that there is some reason for A and B to have a long-term relationship (e.g., A or B must make a relationship-specific investment). Then there are two principal ways in which this relationship can be conducted. A and B can have an arms-length contract, but remain as independent firms; or A and B can merge and carry out the transaction within a single firm. The analogous question in the privatisation literature is the following. Suppose A represents the government and B represents a firm supplying the government or society with some service. B could be an electricity company (supplying consumers) or a prison (incarcerating criminals). Then again, there are two principal ways in which this relationship can be conducted. A and B can have a contract, with B remaining as a private firm, or the government can buy (nationalise) B".and
"[ ... ] the issues of vertical integration and privatisation have much more in common than not. Both are concerned with whether it is better to regulate a relationship via an arms-length contract or via a transfer of ownership". Hart (2003: C70)The incomplete contracting framework gives an approach which can be utilised to study the difference between public and private ownership. In fact incomplete contracts are a necessary condition to explain the differences between the two forms of ownership. In a world of complete or comprehensive contracts there is no difference between private and state owned firms. In both cases the government can write a contract with the firm that will anticipate all future contingencies - it will detail the managers' compensation, the pricing policy of the firm, how changes in technology will the change the firm's products etc - and thus the outcome under both forms of ownership will be the same.
"[ ... ] if the only imperfections in are those arising from moral hazard or asymmetric information, organisational form - including ownership and firm boundaries - does not matter: an owner has no special power or rights since everything is specified in an initial contract (at least among the things that can ever be specified). In contrast, ownership does matter when contracts are incomplete: the owner of an asset or firm can then make all decisions concerning the asset or firm that are not included in an initial contract (the owner has 'residual control rights').
Applying this insight to the privatisation context yields the conclusion that in a complete contracting world the government does not need to own a firm to control its behaviour: any goals - economic or otherwise - can be achieved via a detailed initial contract. However, if contracts are incomplete, as they are in practice, there is a case for the government to own an electricity company or prison since ownership gives the government special powers in the form of residual control rights".
The promoter’s problem suggests that you can’t always trust the person trying to sell you something. Given that voters have such poor opinions of politicians, this might be especially true for a privatisation policy. It is easy to believe that past privatisations may have been successful, but that is no guarantee that future privatisations will be.For an example of a not so successful privatisations one only has to look at the first large scale privatisation programme in Chile in the mid-1970s. Luder (1991) writes in his abstract,
To be sure, not all privatisations are successful and some can be described as having failed after the fact. But the rate of failure is lower for all firms.
Between 1974 and 1989, the Chilean government privatized 550 state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Before 1974, all but a handful of major corporations were SOEs. About 50 of the largest enterprises privatized during the 1970s fell into government hands again, only to be re-privatized later. This was due partly to the economic and financial crisis affecting most Latin American countries during the early 1980s but also was a consequence of the privatization modes used. This paper analyzes that unique privatization experience so as to extract policy lessons. The analysis focuses on economic conditions, objectives of government policy, privatization modes, and the divestiture effects on employment, fiscal revenues, public sector wealth, spread of own- ership, and capital market development. (Emphasis added)In the text Luders writes,
Between 1974 and 1990, the Chilean government privatized about 550 enterprises under public sector control. These included all but a handful of the country's largest corporations. Moreover, the reversal during the early 1980s of the most important divestitures carried out during the first round of privatizations (1974-1978) allowed the government to apply different modes of divestiture during the second round (1985-1989).and
Consequently, the government intervened in 16 financial institutions. It liquidated a few of them and put in a sound position and re-privatized the remainder. That is, the government, which did not legally own the financial institutions, assumed complete control of a high proportion of the assets it had privatized during the 1970s. These financial institutions included the main commercial banks, whose owners controlled the major pension fund administrators (AFP) and large commercial and industrial enterprises. Because intervention blurred the ownership relationship of these enterprises—i.e., they neither belonged to the public sector nor were owned by the private sector—this group of enterprises was called the "odd sector." Re-privatizing these enterprises as well as other traditional SOEs constituted the second large privatization effort that the military regime carried out.In short, when privatisation goes wrong, it really can go wrong! Much of the 1970s privatisations had to be redone in the 1980s because they didn't get it right the first time.
To my mind, privatisation is always a good thing. But there is a sting in the tail. Very often the proceeds of privatisation are used to buy down debt – in other words, validate past irresponsible government spending. The capacity for debt and deficit is unlimited while the stock of government assets that can be sold off is limited.He is right here, a consistent well thought out reform package is needed. In particular sound market regulation must be in place so that the markets that the SOEs are privatised into are as competitive as possible. Markets have to be opened to competitors before the SOEs are privatised so that the (former)SOE has no incentive to lobby for slow and cautious market liberalisation or better still no liberalisation at all.
The challenge is to embed privatisation schemes into a broader reform agenda.
Using a panel data analysis of Spanish privatised firms, we study how different factors influence the operating performance of divested companies. The results show that it is not privatisation per se but other factors that matter. After controlling for possible sample selection bias related to government timing of divestments, we find that the greater the relinquishment of State control and the smaller the percentage of ownership held by managers and/or employees, the better the firms’ post-privatisation performance. Moreover, privatisations that are accompanied by liberalisation programmes and occur during buoyant economic cycles turn out to be more successful. (Emphasis added)When you look at the performance of mixed ownership firms they don't do as well as fully privately owned firms. For example, Aidan Vinning and Anthony Boardman in "Ownership and Performance in Competitive Environments: A Comparison of the Performance of Private, Mixed, and State-Owned Enterprises", Journal of Law and Economics vol. XXXII (April 1989) conclude
'The results provide evidence that after controlling for a wide variety of factors, large industrial MEs [mixed enterprises] and SOEs perform substantially worse than similar PCs [private corporations].'So fully private firms out-perform mixed ownership firms.
In an interview with Thomas Schelling, the CTBTO Faces interview series presents one of the most influential thinkers of nuclear weapons strategy, nuclear deterrence and game theory during the Cold War. Schelling, aged 92, is a U.S. economist and professor of foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy and arms control at the University of Maryland, United States. From 1948 to 1953, Schelling served with the Marshall Plan in Europe, then the White House, and the Executive Office of the President. Later Schelling joined the Department of Economics at Yale University before being appointed Professor of Economics at Harvard and then at Maryland. In 1993, Schelling received the Award for Behavior Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Schelling also received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005 for his research on game theory.
Schelling was interviewed by CTBTO Spokesperson Annika Thunborg in Vienna in November 2012. An advocate of nuclear deterrence, Schelling explains how nuclear weapons policies developed in the first decades of the Cold War. He shares his impressions of the impact of nuclear bombings at the end of World War II and how memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a role during the Korean War. He also stresses the importance of game theory when promoting cooperation in disarmament.
Thanks to an email from Eric Crampton I have been alerted to a paper, with the title given above, by Wolfgang Keller and Stephen Ross Yeaple on the transfer of knowledge between countries. More precisely the transfer of knowledge between countries but within multinational companies. The paper appears in the American Economic Review, 2013, 103(4): 1414–1444, and the abstract reads,
We analyze the international operations of multinational firms to measure the spatial barriers to transferring knowledge. We model firms that can transfer bits of knowledge to their foreign affiliates in either embodied (traded intermediates) or disembodied form (direct communication). The model shows how knowledge transfer costs can be inferred from multinationals’ operations. We use firm-level data on the trade and sales of US multinationals to confirm the model’s predictions. Disembodied knowledge transfer costs not only make the standard multinational firm model consistent with the fact that affiliate sales fall in distance but quantitatively accounts for much of the gravity in multinational activity.If I'm getting this right the paper assumes that knowledge can move over geographic space in one of two forms: embodied or disembodied. When knowledge moves in an embodied form the costs of moving it can be measured as the cost of goods trade. For disembodied knowledge it is harder to see movements of it and harder to calculate the costs of moving this type of knowledge. The paper claims to shed new light on this issue by casting the question in terms of the operations of multinational firms.
In the model, multinational firms produce final goods from individual intermediate inputs that vary in the extent that their production requires non-codified knowledge. Inputs highly dependent on noncodified knowledge are called knowledge intensive. Because not all knowledge can be codified, offshore production calls for communication between home country CEOs and affiliate managers. We assume that communication is more costly the more knowledge-intensive inputs are, but these costs are invariant to physical distance. Alternatively, the multinational can transfer knowledge by shipping ready-to-go inputs embodying the knowledge. This entails no communication costs since the input is produced near the expert at home, however shipping incurs trade costs that rise in geographic distance. The reason why multinational sales in knowledge-intensive industries suffer most strongly from gravity is that here disembodied knowledge transfer costs are highest, and to avoid them means embodied knowledge transfer whose costs rise in distance.Two predictions follow from the model,
First, the knowledge intensity of production affects the level of affiliate sales around the world. The competitiveness of affiliates, measured in terms of their sales, falls as trade costs rise, and the effect of trade costs is strongest for knowledge-intensive goods, precisely because it is here that the scope for offshoring is most limited by costly disembodied knowledge transfer. Second, the knowledge intensity of production affects the composition of knowledge transfers that the multinational will employ. The affiliate’s cost share of imports gives the relative importance of embodied knowledge transfer. It falls more slowly with distance in knowledge-intensive industries than in less knowledge-intensive industries. As trade costs increase, multinational affiliates substitute away from importing inputs, but their ability to do so is constrained by how high disembodied knowledge transfer costs are. Therefore, trade costs have the weakest influence on affiliate imports in relatively knowledge-intensive industries.The authors have a data set, from United States’ Bureau of Economic Analysis, involving information information on the sales and intermediate goods trade of individual multinationals. Testing the model the authors find
[ ... ] strong support for both predictions using variation in multinational activity across industries and countries. Consistent with the model, there is evidence that both the level of the affiliate’s sales and its imports are affected by the ease to which knowledge can be transferred across space. A quantitative analysis based on these micro estimates shows that both market size and geography are central determinants of aggregateOne interesting implication of this work is to do with vertical integration. An observation in industrial organisation is that firms that are part of a domestic production chain do not transfer as many goods within the chain as theories of vertical integration would suggest they should. This outcome could be because knowledge inputs are the key inputs determining the firm's organisational structure. Given this, it follows that the spatial organisation of a firm will depend on the spatial barriers to disembodied knowledge transfer. As such barriers fall the vertical links between firms will become increasingly invisible as there is less embodied knowledge transfer and more disembodied transfer.
foreign direct investment (FDI). This is in contrast to the benchmark model which largely ignores the geography dimension.
Moreover, the model predicts that as trade costs change relative to communication costs, the nature of trade in terms of its knowledge intensity changes systematically. Specifically, an increase in trade costs makes disembodied knowledge transfer more attractive so that the average knowledge intensity of inputs that continue to be traded increases. Despite the large body of work on the factor service content of trade, this is one of the few results on the knowledge content of trade of which we are aware. We find strong supportive evidence for this prediction from the international trade of US multinational firms.
Peter Klein writing at the Organisations and Markets blog explains,
Speaking of pet peeves, here’s another of mine: the regular misuse of the word “methodology” in academic papers. Methodology is the study of scientific methods, a branch of epistemology. Econometric techniques, strategies for gathering data, means of testing hypotheses, etc. are methods, not methodologies. Yet how many empirical papers include a section titled “Methodology” or “Data and Methodology”? It makes me cringe. “We use an instrumental-variables methodology,” or “our methodology employs case studies and structured interviews.” No, those are your methods. Unless you’re citing Popper or Kuhn or Lakatos or Feyerabend or Blaug or Mäki you probably don’t have a methodology section.If only econometricians could speak English as well as Greek.
On the front of this new Elsby, Shin, and Solon paper (pdf) it reads “Preliminary and incomplete,” but if anything that is a better description of the pieces which have come before theirs. They have what I consider to be the holy grail of macroeconomics, namely a worker-by-worker micro database of nominal wage stickiness under adverse economic conditions, including the great recession and with over 40,000 workers, drawn from the Current Population Survey.
Commentators increasingly talk about the steady rise of protectionism. This column presents evidence from the newest Global Trade Alert report to suggest that they’re right: the past twelve months have seen a quiet, artful, wide-ranging assault on free trade. Little of this has showed up in traditional monitoring. Protectionism in Q4 2012 and Q1 2013 far exceeds anything seen since the onset of the global financial crisis.
What has been the impact of high-speed internet on political participation? This column reports new evidence from Italy and the formation of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. Largely through social media, broadband internet has enabled a fledgling political movement to reach a large number of people, overcoming the costly barriers to entry usually associated with new political parties. And it is this reach that has encouraged some disillusioned voters back to the ballot box.
When looking at contemporary liberal political thought, philosophers like Samuel Freeman and John Tomasi like to play up the difference between classical liberals, like Hayek and Friedman, and high liberals, like Rawls and Nagel. I happen to think there’s more common ground between the two groups than is commonly perceived.
Over at an article highlighting the Twitter spat between Rod Drury and Russel Norman, NZ Inc is used in the comments. I almost spat out my midday coffee.
Paul Krugman’s reply to my post on Allan Meltzer’s and Paul Volcker’s critiques of monetary policy failed to mention what Paul Volcker has been saying. Yet Volcker’s views are important, especially since, as Krugman points out, he “deserves immense respect for past achievements.”
It is brave for a lobby group that has a long track record of using dodgy surveys, junk science and misleading press releases to release a report entitled Stick To The Facts, but that is what state-funded 'sock puppet' charity Alcohol Concern have just done.
If you’re frustrated by how vicious and pointless politics is, a brief Kindle single by Arnold Kling may offer some insight. “The Three Languages of Politics” (£1.34, US link) dissects one of the main problems with politics: that progressives, conservatives and libertarians are all speaking different languages that rarely overlap and cause us to misunderstand and vilify our opponents.
Daron’s piece in the New York Times argued that the ongoing protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square and several other cities may be a coming-of-age moment for a more participatory democracy in Turkey, but also that things are likely to get worse before they get better.
you need a smartphone app to find toilet paper. Tim Worstall writes at the Forbes.com website that
There are often little signs that all is not well in an economy. Large numbers of young men hanging around moodily on street corners might indicate that the unemployment rate is rather high just as one example. Another might be that the simple basics of a modern life are not available in the shops. So it is in Venezuela at present, so much so that someone’s written a smartphone app to provide crowd sourced information of where those basics are:Matt Roper at The Telegraph writes,
Toilet roll has been in short supply in the South American country in recent months, with economists blaming price controls imposed by the government.
The new programme, launched last week, uses crowdsourcing technology to enable users to let each other know which supermarkets still have stocks of the tissue.
Called Abasteceme – “Supply Me” in English – the free Android app has already been downloaded more than 12,000 times.
Creator Jose Augusto Montiel said most downloads have been made by residents from the capital Caracas.Government destabilisation via toilet paper, now there's an idea for the CIA to consider!
He said: "Lots of things are in short supply, but what people are most worried about is finding toilet paper. People never knew how much they needed it until it started running out."
Nicolas Maduro, who became Venezuelan president earlier this year, claims anti-government forces are deliberately buying up basics like toilet paper to destabilise the country.
Bloomberg.com is reporting the death of the economic historian Robert Fogel. Laurence Arnold writes,
Robert Fogel, the University of Chicago economic historian awarded a Nobel Prize for his data-driven reconsiderations of how railways and slavery influenced U.S. economic history, has died. He was 86.and
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Fogel and Douglass North of Washington University in St. Louis the 1993 Nobel in economics “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.” Both men were pioneers in applying modern mathematics to the study of history, a field known as cliometrics, after Clio, the muse of history in Greek mythology.The most controversial part of Fogel's work was that on American slavery.
As founding director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Population Economics, Fogel oversaw creation of large sets of data on American life that help economists, medical researchers and other experts forecast health-care costs, the size of the labor force and the demands on pension programs.
He made a similar splash in 1974 with “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” co-written with Stanley Engerman, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester.
Approaching the subject as economists, without making moral judgments, Fogel and Engerman wrote that Southern slavery was an economically rational and efficient system that, by and large, kept slaves well-fed, taught them to farm and collapsed for political rather than economic reasons.The New York Times writes,
“Our emphasis was not to deny that slavery was an oppressive system,” Fogel said, “but that it was within the system for the development of black culture.”
Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Columbia University economist Peter Passell wrote: “Fogel and Engerman have with one stroke turned around a whole field of interpretation and exposed the frailty of history done without science. They force us to confront contemporary social failings instead of pushing them into the past.”
In a 1989 book, “Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery,” Fogel presented the moral case against slavery that many other critics saw as conspicuously missing from his work of 15 years earlier.
Professor Fogel, a rumpled former New Yorker by turns amiable and combative, was widely known for work that aroused objections if not open hostility in academic circles, chiefly through his pioneering use of cliometrics, which applies economic theory and statistical methods to the study of history. (Clio was history’s muse in Greek mythology.)and
But it was the publication 10 years later of “Time on the Cross,” a two-volume study of slavery, written with Stanley L. Engerman, that propelled Professor Fogel into the critical spotlight and instant celebrity.
They contended that slavery had not been, as widely portrayed, an inefficient system destined for collapse, with slaves living in virtual concentration camps and worked to death.
Rather, after studying medical records, cotton yields and other data, the authors argued that slavery had been highly efficient in utilizing economies of scale and that plantation owners had regarded workers as economic assets whom they were inclined to treat at least as well as livestock. This tended to limit exploitation, Professor Fogel and his colleague found, declaring, in fact, that slave life in the South was generally better than that of industrial workers in the North.
An intellectual firestorm resulted. Some critics accused Professor Fogel, who was married to an African-American woman, of being an apologist for slavery, though he and Professor Engerman had been explicit in acknowledging that slaves had been exploited in ways not captured by statistical data.
Despite the attacks, the authors did not budge from their findings and their main point — that slavery would not have ended without the Civil War.
From the Adam Smith Institute comes this video of a talk given by Professor George Selgin on the possibility that some deflation—that coming from improvements in the supply side, productivity improvements—is not harmful to the economy, but good. He makes the case that the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896 was actually the site of a vast improvements in living standards and social welfare. And he points out that the problems attendant with deflation, that economists are fond of pointing out, only obtain when that deflation comes from a demand shock, not a change in supply.
In a way this statement is obvious and yet as Brennan McDonald points out many people still seem to think that a country is in fact like a corporation. McDonald asks MFAT Please Kill The Phrase NZ Inc. He writes
The phrase NZ Inc is so nauseating. Please stop using it. New Zealand is a collection of individuals, firms, government agencies, councils, charities, families, iwi and a whole lot of other fluid groups that change their composition and goals frequently.And he is right, a country is not a corporation. Hayek made the distinction between the "economies" of the small-scale entities such as firms, farms or family units and the "economy" of a nation state, that is the "economy" of a corporation and the "economy" of country. In the case of a firm's (or household's) economy, Hayek argued, the ends around which decisions are made are generally known in advance and decisions about resource allocation are therefore relatively uncomplicated. In this sense then the economy of a household or firm or farm, is the economy of an organisation, or "taxis". But, Hayek goes on to say, the same does not hold for the economy of a large-scale complex society. Society is not an organisation. Owing to its size and the indirect nature of the social relationships within it, Hayek contends that the Knowledge Problem that the economy of such a society consequently faces means that it is not immediately apparent to what use resources should be put. For this reason, Hayek employs the term "catallaxy" to describe the economic aspect of the complex spontaneous order, or cosmos, of a large-scale society.
A country is not a corporate. New Zealand is not some sort of business enterprise that can be called “NZ Inc”.
Bruce Schneier, author and security guru, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about power and the internet. Schneier argues that the internet enhances the power of the powerless but it also enhances the power of the powerful. He argues that we should be worried about both corporate and government uses of the internet to enhance their power. Recorded before news of the PRISM system and the use of Verizon's customer information by the NSA (National Security Agency), Schneier presciently worries about government surveillance that we are not aware of and explains how governments--democratic and totalitarian--can use the internet to oppress their citizens. The conversation closes with a discussion of terrorism and the costs of the current system for reducing the probability of a terrorist attack.
Here’s a video of the six-minute talk that was given by Don Boudreaux last month at the Oslo Freedom Forum - a talk that preceded a longer panel discussion – on the inseparability of economic and non-economic freedoms.
