2026-07-15 04:09:02
Generative Book – GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?
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2026-07-15 00:09:08
1. Were the 1980s so great for kids?
2. Elasticity Institute, new for the economics of AI.
3. Can you get a job at Bending Spoons? (WSJ)
4. How are AI agents changing basketball analytics?
5. Terminal lucidity for dementia patients? (NYT)
6. Why are Australian real wages collapsing?
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-07-14 19:17:07
Hartley and Kleiner have a new Fed Minneapolis working paper surveying workers around the world to measure occupational licensing by country. In the United States, occupational licensing has increased substantially over time, so one might expect licensing to rise with income. Their headline result is the opposite: occupational licensing is negatively correlated with GDP per capita. Many developing countries such as India, South Africa, and the Philippines have a lot of occupational licensing while Denmark, Sweden and France have relatively little. Similarly, countries which rate poorly in measures of government quality, such as regulatory quality, political stability, the rule of law, and corruption have more occupational licensing.
I do have some concerns, however. The figure for India of 42% of workers requiring a government license seems too high. Admittedly this is the home of the License Raj but I worry about the survey results. In order to mark a surveyed worker as requiring an occupational license HK require that the worker say that a) they have a license and b) a license is required to work in their profession. But in India there are many workers who do not have a license and a license is required to work in their profession–HK, however, consider these workers confused and drop them from the analysis. That is appropriate for a developed country where there aren’t many illegal unlicensed workers but, as the authors later discuss, informality is very high in India so working illegally is not uncommon.
Including these workers would make the true India figure even higher than HK report but I think with such a high degree of informality we also have to wonder whether survey responders in India really are responding the same way as in Germany. Perhaps they are reporting a license isn’t really required since very few workers have one. In India, for example, some 60% of “licensed” drivers have an fake or invalid license and many have no license at all so maybe workers are just reporting the facts on the ground.
Within the United States, professions are regulated in some states but not others—Louisiana, for instance, requires florists to be licensed. (Do license-holding Louisiana florists produce better, safer arrangements? I don’t think so.) Given this variation even within a single country, we’d expect considerable variation across countries too. Multiple independent surveys—not just HK—confirm that Denmark, Sweden, and even France have less occupational licensing than the United States. Since these countries have high state capacity, we can rule out the hypothesis that licensing exists for safety or quality. The implication is clear: occupational licensing is often about rent-seeking, not quality assurance.
Addendum: See also my review of Allensworth’s The Licensing Racket which finds that licensing board spend most of their time and effort on regulating entry rather than quality and my paper on the surprise delicensing of occupational licensing in the funeral industry in Colorado.
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2026-07-14 14:27:18
I had long wondered about this:
Performance metrics can misalign individual and organizational incentives. We study a clean case: an NBA player holding the ball as a quarter expires must choose between a low-probability “heave” that can only help his team and protecting his shooting statistics. We model this decision as a metric-driven principal-agent problem and test it using play-by-play data from 2015-16 through 2025-26, exploiting the 2025-26 Heave Rule, which removed the individual statistical penalty for end-of-quarter heaves. Before the reform, players heaved on 58 percent of opportunities; reluctance was concentrated among efficient shooters and players in contract years, as the model predicts. After the reform, the heave rate jumped to 94 percent, the efficiency gradient collapsed, and difference-indifferences estimates using the untreated fourth quarter confirm the effect is sharp, immediate, and smallest among the players with the least efficiency to protect. Removing a metric distortion realigned individual behavior with team objectives almost completely.
That is from a recent paper by James W. Kemper and Noah Liptack,titled “Overcoming Misaligned Incentives: Evidence from the NBA Heave Rule.” Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post Incentives matter, installment #1637 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-07-14 12:32:21
Religious life, I think one thing we’ll see, and this is, again, pretty soon, it won’t be hard to create your own religion. I’m not sure many people will do this. I don’t think most people will. But they’ll be like accretions to the religions we have now. And I think with Fable 5, you could even do this already. Like, you ever actually try to read through the Hindu sacred texts? They’re pretty naughty, pretty detailed, quite long. Many parts are great and dramatic. I wouldn’t say they’re smoothly or evenly written. Not all of it is well written. They have significant meaning. For some people, a lot of people consume them through stories they’re told with their children. It’s not that every Hindu is like reading through the whole Ramayana. That’s all fine. But if you can sit down with, you know, the latest quad, whatever, and create your own set of sacred books. Again, I think like 2% of people are going to do this. Not most people. People have other interests, other hobbies. A lot of people aren’t religious. But if 2% of people do this, you end up with a lot of new religious accretions. Some of them will be totally new religions. But I think a lot will just be like, here are my sacred books of Christianity, or my add-ons to the Book of Mormon, or my whatever’s. There’ll be this extreme religious diversity. I don’t know, too much, too little. I think it will be quite different.
Again, that is from my recent DeepMind talk. Perhaps two percent is too high, and only a fraction of one percent of the population will do this, with agents. You still end up with a great deal of religious accretion and innovation.
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2026-07-14 03:30:13
This paper documents new facts about concentration in publishing in economics. First, the profession grows downward . The number of economists grew almost sixfold since 1990, but new entrants publish in lower-tier journals while incumbents hold the top. Second, there is high and persistent concentration at the top. Along with the downward growth, the top-1% authors accounted for 38.4% of top-5 publication credit in 1990 and for 78.3% in 2025. Third, the persistence is widespread within cohorts, within subfields, and within gender. Fourth, new journals only slightly dilute concentration. Fifth, elite authors diversify on topics faster than the rest of the profession. We interpret the findings with a screening model of attention under information overload. The evidence is consistent with the model: as the field grows, citations concentrate on established work and the conditional citation premium of top-author papers narrows.
By Ricardo Dahis, via the excellent Samir Varma.
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